Archive for the ‘science’ Category
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
So it seems like Kurzweil’s dreams/predictions are getting a few steps closer to being fulfilled. Wired has news of scientists at Columbia University, designed “Adam” a ‘robot scientist’, capable of “carry[ing] out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.”. At pretty much the same time, a computer program developed by researchers at Cornell, managed to ‘discover’ the laws of physics in 1 day without any previous input (or knowledge?).
Mate these two and you’ll get a pretty smart cookie.
Read the Wired articles here and here.
Tags: science, technology
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
[flv:ferrofluid1.flv ferrofluid1.jpg 500 375]
I recently got my hands on some ferrofluid to play with, and man isn’t it just amazing. I’m going to try to setup something a bit more structured and experiment with it. For now, check out the short clip and a bad image below.
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Tags: cool
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Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
Smart Cities vehicle prototype.
We just got back from Boston after being invited by MIT to give a lunchtime lecture. My good friend Daniel Cardoso, a PhD candidate there was kind enough to show us around the media lab, where a few -very generous- people showed us some of their work. We had a chance to see the fabrication labs and some of the robotic work being currently done there, and it was absolutely mesmerizing. Dimitris Papanikolaou gave us a full presentation on his Mobility on Demand (MOD) project for the Smart Cities group, not only was that incredibly generous, but an amazingly interesting solution to urban mobility. What I think was among the most interesting thing -not only of his project but of the lab in general- is the reality of it all. A lot of the research being conducted there is for real applications / products / solutions, which is very refreshing to see after having been involved in architecture school for some time now, where a very small percentage of what is produced has real-world implications. We had as well the opportunity to meet up with our friends Carlos Rocha (ex-Media Lab and current Honda scientist) and Skylar Tibbits.
View a few more images after the jump below.
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Tags: architecture, cool, experimental, research
Posted in architecture, design, experimental, general, manufacturing, mapping, science, technology | Comments Off
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Buckminster Fuller’s exhibition at the Whitney is fantastic. On the first floor is the Dymaxion car, which, cool as it is, is surpassed by the beautiful technical drawings for it.
The fourth floor is where the main exhibit is, and there are some incredible drawings and models of experiments and projects of ranging scales. There were quite a few projects and many drawings, sketches as well as footage of Fuller that I had never seen before, and it was truly a treat.
I left the exhibition feeling a bit uneasy though: there has to be some level of insanity in someone that has such faith in technology as the savior. His completely ‘technocratic-utopian’ view seems in a sense harmless (even naive), yet it displaces man so swiftly.
Don’t miss the fantastic model and drawings of the floating city, the incredible sketch for the World Fair and his geometric models.
Tags: architecture, cool, drawing, exhibition, technology
Posted in architecture, design, experimental, science, technology | Comments Off
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
A passage from Manuel DeLanda’s book “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” (1991), which I’m almost done with.
Almost without exception, secret service organizations have thrived in times of turbulence and, conversely, have seen their power vanish as turmoil slows. For this reason, they survive by inciting social turbulence, spreading rumors and inventing imaginary enemies, fifth columns, and bomber and missile gaps. They need to keep society in constant alert, in a generalized state of fear and paranoia, in order to sustain themselves. This has led to the development of a gigantic “espionage industry, ” whose entire existence is based on a bluff few governments dare to call:
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Tags: books, politics, power, war
Posted in politics, science, technology, theory, war | Comments Off
Friday, April 18th, 2008
Charles Darwin’s complete works, as well as thousands of illustrations, letters and documents never published before, have been made available online. The collection is by far the greatest ever compiled on Darwin’s works and will be of course an invaluable resource, and not only for scholars.
Check out the Illustrations page for some incredibly beautiful drawings and diagrams.
Visit Darwin Online here.
Via [Wired]
Tags: drawing, science
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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Funded by NASA and Department of Energy, The Vulcan Project is an effort to quantify the emissions of CO2 within North America at a scale never seen before, up to individual power plants…
Check out their YouTube video here to see some other fantastic visualizations.
via [wired ]
Tags: science, visualization
Posted in mapping, science, urban | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Heat produced by computers has long been one of those byproducts that are, more often than not, vented to the exterior and therefore wasted. A computer center in Switzerland is reusing the heat produced by its equipment to warm up a town pool. The town payed for part of the system to reroute the heat but it’ll continue to use it or free. A cool symbiotic relationship that will probably become a model.
Read the Wired article here.
Tags: architecture, science
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Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
A gigantic piece of ice in the Antarctic shelf has collapsed…
If you’re in the northern or southern hemisphere, go buy a raft. If in the tropics, start buying gallons of water and a raft. Global warming has come to town.
Read the CNN news here.
Visit the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website here.
Tags: global
Posted in general, science | Comments Off
