Happy Halloween, Gangnam Style! Psy is out there, and so are many of the folks who have reacted to this song. Next year you should pick a hot song and program your local electrical grid to do this kind of thing to it.
Tomorrow is the day that MetroCAF 2012 takes place: the annual SIGGRAPH event honoring the best animation talents that NYC-area schools can muster. This year’s jury has selected four outstanding achievement pieces to be honored at MetroCAF, but even the least of these entries are amazing bits of work. If you have ever built computer animations yourself, you know how much work goes into these kinds of projects, and how much time even the simplest of steps can actually take. Watch the trailer, and prepare to be amazed. And even if you don’t know how to do this stuff, you should be able to appreciate the results.
A Tesla Coil is a transformer that is able to generating extremely large voltages, which allows it to throw huge but extremely short-live sparks. So what looks like one long spark is actually a bunch of sparks each second. As any musician with a scientific background will tell you, a given tone is a given frequency of vibration, producing each unique note. So by adjusting the sparks per second from the coil, different notes can be played. And that is exactly what they did in this video; enjoy!
The coil was invented by Nikola Tesla, who also invented AC power, the electric motor, the alternator, the generator, the audio speaker, radio (they took the patent away from Marconi when it turned out it was based on 17 of Tesla’s patents), the florescent light four years before Edison used brute force slave labor to invent the light bulb, and ever so much more which he patented. He also invented some stuff the patent office couldn’t figure out how to process, like broadcast energy and the related wireless charging of batteries (a company finally figured out how to make a profit on that one a decade or so ago for all our portable electronics), Ball Lightning, Radar (it was WWII before anyone decided building that could be useful), and oh, yeah, that earthquake machine he almost sank Long Island with. Tesla has been one of my personal heroes since I was a kid, and if you don’t know about him it is time you learned.
I wanted to break from my usual kind of entry for a moment and cheer on the MOD production process, meaning Manufacture On Demand. Warner Brothers, Shout Factory, MGM, and several others have done this with a lot of titles which have not been available for a while, and it is a great business model for the digital age. You pick one of the titles in their MOD catalog and put in your order, at which point they burn you a copy of the CD or DVD on their industrial grade reproduction gear, print out a label, and send it your way. For the customer, thousands of titles you could not previously get your hands on except possibly in very low quality bootleg format are now accessible. For the manufacturer, titles they own but were not previously making any money on can now turn a small but steady profit for them, without the loss incurred by going to a full press run when the demand for the product is not there. If it turns out the demand is there as evinced by the number of folks putting in orders for an MOD title, they can then release the disk or box set as a full press run (“press” being a leftover term from pressing vynal records, the original media distribution format).
Obviously this process is good for both music CDs and video DVDs, but it doesn’t stop there. With the advent of 3D printing, objects of all kinds can be put through the manufacture on demand process. Even better, they might be designed anywhere in the world, but you could have them printed locally and avoid the shipping costs, downloading the printing template across the web. Did you know this is the same technology Jay Leno uses to produce mil spec perfect replacement parts for his vintage automobile collection? This stuff is available today, and although it can be a bit pricy, there are also open source 3D Printing options worth looking into, such as the ongoing MIT research.
While I may be all about everything Sci-Fi and Otaku, I am wearing one of these human bodies and do have to fuel it like everyone else. But there is no reason that shouldn’t be fun, creative, and sometimes silly, and for that I find Bento and Sushi are the best ways to go. The first example here is the simplest I could find that totally gets the concept across; how to use those tiny sausages to make cute stuff for your bento box, including octopi. The second gives you a simple way to create Panda Themed Rice Balls, and when combined with the first video gives you a great introduction to bento box basics. The third looks at the use of egg molds to add that kaiwaii touch to lunch. The fourth is an example of creating a cute bear from fish patties and other stuff, although since I don’t like fish I make mine from potato pancake fixings.
The fifth is rather more ambitious; making a Sushi Panda Roll. Please note that even though the execution of this last entry takes a lot more time to get right, all of these are ways to bring a bit of extra enjoyment and entertainment to a meal. There are tons more ways to create good bento, and the overall balance of the box isn’t even mentioned here, but once you start down this path you will want to share your lunches just to watch others reactions to your creations. If you have kids this is also a great way to get Parent of the Year nominations from their friends, as they gain all kinds of recognition on the school grounds. The final video is just to give you a hint of what is possible, and inspire you to create your own; there are no limits! And for those worried about non edible items in a lunch, I promise food coloring on rice paper is both edible and non-toxic.
Becky Stern bills herself as a DIY Guru and head of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries, itself a company founded by a former MIT student known as Lady Ada. I got one of those ear to ear grins when I saw this one, and as I know some geeks that do cross stitching, I had to post this for them. If you would like to create one of these for your own, you can download the instructions in PDF format and check out their instructions page for additional background and support. Of course, you can also pick up the kit if you don’t already have the materials available. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.