Back when people were first introduced to the Segway personal transport, the web seemed to light up with criticism. No, it didn’t live up to the hype which was, probably more than anything, its biggest flaw; schadenfreude being enthusiastically and expertly practiced by those with expertise in nothing else. It was, however, a marvel of engineering.
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Just a quick note to call out some intriguing work I’ve very recently been following on the Funkencode website where an effort is underway to… well… I’ll just post a piece from the site (Link):

FUNK is designed to meet the needs of both humans and machine programs with a greater emphasis on the former. … Ultimately the purpose of FUNK is to serve as a sort of distributed very high level virtual machine for the meshverse which enables deep interoperability while fulfilling the ideas of Rhythmeering and GriotVision.

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Over the weekend I caught the story of the home-made fusion device and that got me thinking of the Fab@Home project I’d previously mentioned (reLink). I’d not surfed through the site and decided to see if there were any new developments. There was. About a month ago Fab@Home kits were being offered for sale by an outfit called Koba Industries (Link). If I’m not mistaken, this is the same impressive little New Mexico-based business listed elsewhere (Link). Interesting.

It definitely feels like the late 70’s, only instead of seeing ads for computer kits in magazines like Popular Mechanics, it’s fabbers being offered through eBay storefronts. That’s gotta accelerate things.

{P.S. For the jit-research.projectpath.com people visiting this entry, you might find an earlier post on a “just-in-time” system worth reading: “Smiley Face Savvy“.}

So yesterday I spent a little time on the design:related site updating my profile and adding some pictures. I’d not realized until a couple of days ago that I could make “projects” (limited to three pictures, unfortunately). So I decided to give it a try by adding additional images to the RadTag concept, and while looking at the images again it occurred to me that there might be some new technology sprouting up that would make the concept more feasible; that there may be a nice way to eliminate the need for the GPS satellites altogether. If not, then at the very least I could remove the control center bottleneck I’d inadvertently stuck into the feedback loop. After all, why centralize the information flow instead of distributing it across the whole Net? A kind of Mechanical Turk employing RadTags, or something along those lines.
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Back in art school, my first car class assignment involved looking at alternatives to present day (1991) vehicles. It was a Chrysler-taught class. Only being a design class at an art school, the focus wasn’t on technology and engineering, it was on some different sketching and idea generation techniques they were teaching us. And while fun, I didn’t find doing only those things especially challenging.
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