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Archive for January, 2008
If you’ve ever wanted to be the Bionic Woman or a Terminator, new research may at least let you see with their eyes.
Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts.
For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.
The prototype they created does not actually light up or display information. But it proves that it is possible to build an electronic lens that is safe to wear and doesn’t obstruct vision.
"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington who worked on the project. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising."
The project was led by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., who presented the results this week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems in Tucson, AZ.
It was difficult for the researchers to graft the tiny electrical circuits, built from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick (for comparison, the width of a typical human hair is about 80,000 nanometers), onto the contact lenses, which are made of organic materials that are safe for the body.
The engineers tested the finished lenses on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no problems.
Eventually, the technique could yield a plethora of gadgets.
Perhaps drivers and pilots could see their direction and speed projected across their view, or people could surf the Web without looking at an external device’s screen.
Video gamers could immerse themselves in game landscapes directly in front of their eyes.
Maybe the technique could even create sight aids for visually impaired people
"People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about," Parviz said. "Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe."
Clara Moskowitz
New York Times, printed day of posting.
desc + Noticing your gaze upon him, this young man gathers himself up
desc + into an erect posture and flourishes his cloak with punctilio,
desc + a frosty grin upturning one corner of his wide mouth. Wide-set
desc + black eyes peer back at you from behind a curtain of black curls
desc + which fall carelessly around his pale face. He wears a carefully
desc + selected costume with it’s arrangement well-kept and exact, each
desc + article of his adornments fitting tightly and purposefully on
desc + his spare frame. A bizarre reticulation of oddments and curious
desc + are strapped across his torso, but before you can get a closer
desc + look he draws his cloak about him and turns his attention away.
Excerpts from Te Maori-Maori Art from New Zealand,
edited by Sysney Moko Mead, New York, 1984.
He toi whakairo
He mana tangata
Where there is art
There is human dignity
The mountain that stands day after day in all kinds of weather is a work of nature
that has been given special significance by us. We have added words to it, or in
the Maori sense, clothed it, and covered it with words.
The human imagination is capable of adding thousands of words to something,
not all at once but over a period of time, and perhaps more at one time or
another.
In the case of art, a substance of nature is modified by the hand of man and
shaped to convey an idea in the mind through established ways of expressing
things in wood, bone, ivory , or stone. We then proceed to clothe it with words
to animate it, to transform it into a cultural object.
The art object touches the lives of several people, and it, in turn, is touched by
them and later by a succession of persons who may know nothing of its origins.
Over time an object becomes invested with interesting talk. A lump of wood of
little or no great significance is transformed throught the art process, by building
words (korero), into it by contact with people.
Whakairo (aesthetic essence of art object), is uplifting, taking the human spirit
close to the rarified and beautiful world of the gods and rising above the
mundane affairs of existence and mere survival. Whakairo represents the
triumph of mana Maori (power), over the environment and represents a gift from
the ancestors to their decendants born and yet unborn.
A work of art is not beautiful because it has a pleasing quality associated with
harmony of form and color, excellence of craftsmanship, originality or other
unspecifiable property. Rather it is beautiful because it has power (ihi), that is,
power to move the viewer to react spontaneously and in a physical way to the
work of art.
I took a few videos with my nokia N95 camera and pumped them over to the pooter. Problem is that many of them were ’sideways’ so I had to work out how to rotate a video like you can with photo’s. I have QuickTime Pro 7.4 on my wac mac so here’s how i did it without having to worry about expensive video editing software,
1) Open the video in QT
2) Go to MOVIE > Get Properties (Command J)
3) In the left box choose Video Track
4) In the right box choose Size
5) You’ll see icons for Rotate clockwise and Rotate Anti-clockwise.
6) click on the appropriate one and there you have it.
7) Save movie as self-contained .mov or Export to another format. The sound stays in place too 
Hope this is useful to one and all!
MD
x
By the way. Acid will never die so long as I’m alive.
Suzanne showed me this brilliant Chinese conceptual artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
