A quick update on Lift09, the conference is taking shape. It's 6 weeks ahead, a good list of people registered already and the program is completed (apart from the sustainable evening event) and we are looking forward to have the whole bunch of speakers who will talk about the implications of tech...
Automatic flush
How to display automatic flush, seen in Paris Orly airport. Color and flow are explicitly described in a politically correct way. ...
Borges and maps
As described by Jorge Luis Borges in of his novel: "... In this empire the art of cartography had reached such a perfection that a map of a single county covered a whole city, and a map of the empire that of a whole county. Finally, a point was reached when these colossal maps were no longer consid...
LBS limits (again)
In his recent column at ACM interactions, Lars Erik Holmquist deals with two basic problems encountered by mobile social software: battery life and critical mass. "The first may seem trivial, and more than one startup seems to simply shake it off—isn't everything in electronics getting better all t...
Others in public transports
Reading books about urban sociology on the bus in Guadeloupe made me think about this quote by Georg Simmel: "Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without...
'Epithetized' phenomena: "e-", "m-", "u-"
A follow-up on the internet idioms and letter I dealt with the other day. As Steve Woolgar wrote back in 2002 (in Virtual Society?: Technology, Cyberbole, Reality), the "e-" prefix is part of an 'epithetized' phenomena. That is to say, the addition of this letter to almost any activity or instituti...
Art and R&D
In his presentation entitled Is "digital art" Western ? Digital art or the utopia of "world art"? Orange researcher Emmanuel Mahé deals with the relationship between R&D and Art. Some excerpts I found relevant to me: "The relationship between R&D and Art happens at two levels: LEVEL 1 : Artistic pr...
Social navigation inna jungle
Different forms of social navigation: What's more important: the yellow/blue tagging on the tree? or the fact that the passage of people left a continuous trace showing a path? Which one will you trust? ...
Internet icons and idioms
Some interesting internet icons and idioms ("hot hot spot") from Guadeloupe, France. The first one above has been taken on Marie-Galante, a small island south of Guadeloupe. The internet café seems rather old and abandoned. The "@" is highly common if you already followed past episodes. The "W.W.W...
R-O-B mobile robotic fabrication unit
Not exactly the type of self-constructed architecture described by Bruce Sterling in "Distraction" but very close: R-O-B by Gramazio and Kohler from ETH Zürich: "R-O-B extends the traditional prefabrication process of construction: the robot leaves the protected environment of the production hall ...