Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Army Testing Cooling Vests

Cooling vests or wearable cooling systems like this have been around for quite sometime. NASA developed the basics of the system for the Apollo missions and actually had worked with a private company to develop applications for sports medicine. So instead of ice packs they designed theses cooling wraps for ankles, knees, elbows, shoulders, ect. Here is an article from about a year ago on it.

The Army's vests obviously have to perform in a very different environment, so it will be interesting to see how well they perform.



"The vests are worn under body armor and a hose from each vest is plugged into the Humvee’s on-board air-conditioning system. Liquid from the vehicle’s AC system circulates through the vest, cooling its wearer."

Thursday, December 22, 2005

I still love Coke

The people over at SWAMP (Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) do some amazing projects. "Coke Is It" is one of my favorite projects, somewhat in the style of SRL although with out the monster truck rally feel.



"In this artwork, the routine destruction we do to our bodies, mitigated through corporate mass media, is comically expressed through a robot named
C3 (parodying Coca Cola's new low-carb product C2). C3 is a hex-crawler robot, outfitted with a CMUcam, enabling it with the ability to search and find puddles of Coca Cola placed on the gallery floor. When C3 finds a puddle of coke, it sucks the beverage up through an electrical pump, and then sprays it across itself."

Animated Tattoos

Ok, well its not real but it's quite a beautiful video of what an animated tattoo or digital skin might look like.



Just imagine all the possibilities, Starbucks ads fluttering down your neck as you get dressed in the morning and then no more messy makeup, just download the latest from L'Oreal straight to your face. This has been written about extensively in scifi but the video paints the picture well.

God and Golem, Inc.

The title of this blog is obviously derived from the classic God and Golem, Inc. written by Norbert Wiener published by MIT Press in 1963. The original tag line is:

"A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion"



The term cybernetics, as we know it, was coined by Wiener and although it could apply to this blog, religion will not be a main topic so it seemed fitting to change it up. Plus its just more of a nod.