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Sanguino: Arduino's Big Brother from Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken on Vimeo.

These guys have taken the Arduino thing which is an open source way of linking a computer to home-made electronic gadgets... and replicated/morphed it so it's got more capacity than the original. It's like memetic software making it's own hardware - but (for the moment) humans are part of the loop.

I love the excitement of this - hauled out of bed at 4.30 in the morning... I can just imagine those old printing-press guys back in the day going "Dude, that's awesome... check it out" and "this must be like 200 in Swatch Time" and so on.

Now this may seem like a hobbyist thing, but remember that the computer that you're using to read this has this as it's ancestor:

The machine that inspired Bill Gates to write Basic. This is how it starts.

You can buy your own from Sanguino for 25$

The subcultures behind these are actually fairly massive - describing themselves as "overunity engineers" - the example above has been copied (without the success) by a number of youtubees, but there are others - a large number of which appear (for some reason) to be Australians.

There are hundreds and hundreds of these things :

All shapes and sizes. I find them absolutely fascinating. There's enough material for an entire book of these things on their own.

Probably I suspect similar to alchemy, the value of these things is in the spin-off discoveries that happen along the way... except of course that the technologies being dabbled with here are kindof stuck in the 1900s. It's physics rather than chemistry, and I don't think any new ground is being covered here... but it's still a lot better than watching television.

Maybe that's the gold that proves the process... assuming that alchemy wasn't really to do with chemistry in the first place.

Still, I hate to say it, but sometimes these neo-alchemists appear to be slightly more sane than the detractors

Ok, so someone invents a Rubik's Cube (Rubik) and a couple of years later they're all over the planet.

Then a couple of decades pass and the internet gets invented and people start putting their Rubik's Cube solutions up on Youtube... and as this is an attention economy, things naturally mutate. Fast.

I've mentioned the subculture of cube-solving lego-robots. There's also a bunch of people who do multiple cubes blindfolded. The ones that grabbed my attention are these though:

A 20x20 simulation:

The guy provides an explanation for how he did it on another movie. That inspired (somewhere down the track) this... 100x100

Which is accompanied by a noob-attacking monologue conducted via that state-of-the-art medium, MS-Paint.

After that I saw this:

Which is a 5 dimensional version... which really is off-the-scale cool.

These might all be fakes of course. They could quite easily be filmed backwards - but the mere ability to visualise a 5 dimensional cube is a feat in itself... and it's the process I find most interesting - copy->mutate->copy->mutate.

This is a neat thing from last year... and every-inch, a solution looking for a problem

But it kindof points to a similar syndrome that Clay Shirky anecdotally highlights when he says "any 3 year old can tell you, a screen without a mouse, is broken". There is a substrata of early adopters for whom a gadget that isn't hackable, really isn't that interesting... in fact, it's kindof dead. If you can't use it to memetically replicate variations, then it's about as interesting as a computer without a web connection.

This thing is programmable... but that's not quite the same thing as hackable.

Well... maybe it is. Maybe everything's hackable. It's compact design kindof makes it difficult to add things though. Really it's less interesting than this : 

which is a wifi controlled arduino... and now you can get the http://www.ponoko.com will cut them out for you as well, for a small fee etc

From www.crookedbrains.net which is worth looking at in terms of random stuff that people have done.

There are actually quite a lot of these out there in internet land for some reason. This one's made out of noodles I think

from here

I'm not sure about including art in this actually. There's an inexhaustible supply of weirdness out there - I'm kindof more interested in stuff done by people who would ordinarily be watching TV.

There's this kid on instructibles.com who shaves with fire which is pretty bad-ass if you ask me. Genius. I sincerely hope this guy doesn't have an attack of teenage-self-awareness and take it down. What's cool is not just that he did it, but he actually made an instructable out of it so other people can do it as well.

My favourite part is step 4 Afterburn
At this point the "shaved" part of your body most likely smells like a burnt down barber shop, so it is probably in your best interest to bath, or at least cover it up with something more potent smelling. and he uses lighter fluid (staying on-message as it were) which I'm not sure that I'd advise myself.

I love people who go off-the-dial. There's a creativity-exercise that someone like Edward D Bono or Brian Eno (Bredward da Beano?) does where you think of something stupid and impossible (like a square wheel for example) to leap past the normal constraints of linear rationality. People like the Fire Shaving guy are (in my humble opinion) providing a vital part in the process of global technological evolution by thinking outside the box and passing it on. They're jumping a couple of squares ahead... with the implicit question "ok, what does this piece of impossibility make possible?". Like the square root of a negative number.

It's not just funny, it's also quite cool.

It's 2008. The future sure is getting here slow... but it is getting here.

These hexapod robots remind me of a sci-fi short-story I read when I was a kid back in the 70s - the story itself being written in 1958 - Crabs on the Island by Anatoly Dneprov. Enjoy etc.

from famous look-a-like faces

A meme-incubater of things that look like memes but actually aren't

One day this will be a quaint cultural icon