– Phil Noto

Via Boing Boing.

motorcycles out of watch parts by dkart71

Someone, please, make a game where the player constructs a motorcycle made out of watch parts, and then rides to safety:

• Shrink the player until a wristwatch is the right size for motorcycle parts
• Drop the player into a magical (high-tech, alien, etc.) wristwatch factory
• – My person favorite: neo-retro Evil Nazi wristwatch factory
• Remind the player that watch parts can be assembled into motorcycles
• Sound the burglar alarm
• Start winding up the clockwork watchmen, make it loud
• Remind the player that watchmen are dangerous, and motorcycles go faster than watchmen
• Every so often, wind up more clockwork watchmen, as incentive for the player to finish that motorcycle ….

If the player doesn’t build a motorcycle in time … well, bad things probably happen … if it were my Evil Nazi Wristwatch factory, I would release the Giant Wind-Up Chattering Teeth … but you have your own kind of fun, and be sure to let me know about it, I’ll award you the Handy Vandal Medal of Supreme Coolness.

Via Boing Boing.

Obsolete (2006)

This belongs in a game somewhere. It really does.

Pawel Hynek’s 2006 image “Obsolete” depicts a homeless robot begging for electrical power; it’s striking and funny as well as a little uncomfortable-making.

– Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing

I’m reminded of William Gibson’s novel Mona Lisa Overdrive, where we encounter The Finn (a character from earlier Gibson novels) now incarnated as a back-alley machine personality construct:

“I wanna talk to him,” she said, her voice hard and careful.

“He’s dead.”

“I know that.”

A silence followed, and Kumiko heard a sound that might have been the wind, a cold, grit-laden wind scouring the curve of the geodesics far above them.

“He’s not here,” the voice said, and seemed to recede. “Round the corner, half a block, left into the alley.”

Kumiko would remember the alley always: dark brick slick with damp, hooded ventilators trailing black streamers of congealed dust, a yellow bulb in a cage of corroded alloy, the low growth of empty bottles that sprouted at the base of either wall, the man-sized nests of crumpled fax and white foam packing segments, and the sound of Sally’s bootheels.

Past the bulb’s dim glow was darkness, though a reflected gleam on wet brick showed a final wall, cul-de- sac, and Kumiko hesitated, frightened by a sudden stir of echo, a scurrying, the steady dripping of water. . . .

Sally raised her hand. A tight beam of very bright light framed a sharp circle of paint-scrawled brick, then smoothly descended.

Descended until it found the thing at the base of the wall, dull metal, an upright rounded fixture that Kumiko mistook for another ventilator. Near its base were the stubs of white candles, a flat plastic flask filled with a clear liquid, an assortment of cigarette packets, a scattering of loose cigarettes, and an elaborate, multiarmed figure drawn in what appeared to be white powdered chalk.

Sally stepped forward, the beam held steady, and Kumiko saw that the armored thing was bolted into the brickwork with massive rivets. “Finn?”

A rapid flicker of pink light from a horizontal slot.

“Hey, Finn, man . . .” An uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice . . .

“Moll.” A grating quality, as if through a broken speaker. “What’s with the flash? You still got amps in? Gettin’ old, you can’t see in the dark so good?”

“For my friend.”

Something moved behind the slot, its color the unhealthy pink of hot cigarette ash in noon sunlight, and Kumiko’s face was washed with a stutter of light.

“Yeah,” grated the voice, “so who’s she?”

“Yanaka’s daughter.”

“No shit.”

Sally lowered the light; it fell on the candles, the flask, the damp gray cigarettes, the white symbol with its feathery arms.

“Help yourself to the offerings,” said the voice. “That’s half a liter of Moskovskaya there. The hoodoo mark’s flour. Tough luck; the high rollers draw ‘em in cocaine.”

“Jesus,” Sally said, an odd distance in her voice, squatting down, “I don’t believe this.” Kumiko watched as she picked up the flask and sniffed at the contents.

“Drink it. It’s good shit. Fuckin’ better be. Nobody shortcounts the oracle, not if they know what’s good for ‘em.”

“Finn,” Sally said, then tilted the flask and swallowed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “you gotta be crazy. . . .”

“I should be so lucky. A rig like this, I’m pushing it to have a little imagination, let alone crazy.”

– Link

Who will make such a game? Someone? Anyone?

I can’t pay you, but I will award you the Handy Vandal Medal for Doing Extremely Cool Stuff.

Seriously: you’ll get your own blog post, with a picture of you and your work (maybe a picture of you ignoring the sign, and slipping on the lava — whatever you like).

Link to original @ reddit by flipswitch

Via Laughing Squid.

Test Tube Baby — T-shirt design by Patrickspens.

Via Laughing Squid.

This should be a game! Won’t someone think of the children?

It’s for real; the Chinese are building it:

The idea is to make use of the space between regular-size cars and bridges, thus saving construction costs as well as minimizing congestion impact by allowing cars to drive underneath these jumbo buses.

– Richard Lai @ Engadget.com

Awesome!

Via Slashdot.

Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em: Cigarette Black Markets In U.S. Prisons And Jails

Abstract
Since the mid-1980s, cigarette-smoking policies have become increasingly restrictive in jails and prisons across the United States. Cigarette black markets of various form and scale often emerge in jails and prisons where tobacco is prohibited or banned. Case studies of 16 jails and prisons were undertaken to understand the effects of cigarette bans versus restrictions on inmate culture and prison economies. This study describes how bans can transform largely benign cigarette “gray markets,” where cigarettes are used as a currency, into more problematic black markets, where cigarettes are a highly priced commodity. Analysis points to several structural factors that affected the development of cigarette black markets in the visited facilities: the architectural design, inmate movement inside and outside, officer involvement in smuggling cigarettes to inmates, and officer vigilance in enforcing the smoking policy. Although these factors affect the influx of other types of contraband into correctional facilities, such as illegal drugs, this study argues that the demand and availability of cigarettes creates a unique kind of black market.

– Stephen E. Lankenau

Rather like the old Lemonade Stand:

• A simplified economic model using a familiar and popular product (lemonade, cigarettes)
• In a familiar iconic setting (residential neighborhood, federal penitentiary)

Update: consider these lyrics from The Big Rock Candy Mountain …

Oh the buzzin’ of the bees
In the cigarette trees
Near the soda water fountain
At the lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
On the big rock candy mountain

Cigarette trees? Lemonade springs? Many a Hobo has spent many a night in jail. What exactly is the Hobo’s Anthem trying to tell us about the relationship between prisons and cigarettes and lemonade?

We have to gather the stuff and bring it back to Earth. But how?

I propose a space garbage scow.

My garbage scow would use a very fine net to capture the debris and hold it. The net could be built from kevlar, but this week I’m making everything from carbon nanotubes, thanks, so that’s what we’ll use. Nanotubes have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any material and would allow us to make a very large, very light weight net. Our point here is to make the net light rather than strong, since our capture speeds will be low and the lack of gravity ought to make it easy to keep the junk tethered together. The point of making it strong, then, is so it can be light enough to be big enough to maybe gather all the junk — all 18,000 pieces — into a single scow.

I imagine a seine purse-style net, if you know your commercial fishing. Launch the net into an inclined polar orbit generally higher than the space junk to be harvested. The polar orbit will ensure that eventually the scow will go over every spot on the Earth as the planet rotates below, but it also means the scow will eventually cross the path of every piece of space junk.

Here’s where we need an algorithm and a honking big computer, because this is a 3-D geometry problem with more than 18,000 variables. Our algorithm determines the most efficient path to use for gathering all 18,000 pieces of space junk.

I haven’t yet derived this algorithm, but I have some idea what it would look like. We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic.

Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris). But wait, there’s more! You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter. Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.

It won’t always be possible, of course, to gain energy from each encounter, but that’s why we start in a higher orbit, so as energy is inevitably lost it can be replenished by moving to a lower orbit.

By the same token I think we would logically start with smaller bits of space junk so the net would gain mass steadily over time, then do the same again at each lower altitude. Eventually the net would have corralled hundreds of tons of debris, carrying it down into the atmosphere where atmospheric friction would eventually burn it all up in a spectacular visual display that would create a thin ring of fire all around the Earth.

It’s a crazy idea, sure, but it could work.

– Robert X. Cringely: Tossed in Space
– Via Slashdot

Then again, it should be a game. This is exactly the kind of situation where a game programmer could step forward and contribute to the solution of a real-world problem.

Somebody should make a flight simulator for the world’s first virtual Space Garbage Scow, the S.S. Cringely.

I’ll award the Handy Vandal’s Honorary Certificate of Merit to anyone who makes such a game!

I grew up on Asteroids … driving a garbage scow through a well-mapped volume of near-Earth space should be child’s play, compared to the random hazards and hostile UFOs of Asteroids.

A friend of mine would kill one roach, and stick it on a toothpick (or a “pike” as he called it) and stood it up on a bottle-cork at the entrance to a hole — as an “example to the others!” He swore it worked.

- Follier @ SlashDot