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I have mentioned several times my unnatural love of Auto-Tune. Here’s Know Your Meme explaining the history of Auto-Tune with Professor Al Yankovic. Adam Fritz, a blogger at Tampa’s Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) points to this video about seedbombing. via Wikipedia -
Florida Gardener offers this recipe for a seed bomb. Basic Ingredients: 5 Cups Dry Terracotta clay 3 Cups Dry Gardening Soil or Organic Compost 1 Cup of seeds* 1 – 2 Cups of water (preferably not tap) in a Spray Mister Step 1: Sift Dry Terracotta clay through a strainer to remove large chunks Step 2: Mix in Dry Soil or Compost Step 3: Add seeds* Step 4: Blend everything together well Step 5: Mist water onto the mixture while stirring. Spray enough water to allow the mixture to stick/bind together. Step 5: Take a healthy tablespoon of the finished mixture and roll (in the palm of your hand) into round balls. Step 6: Put seed balls in the sun to dry completely for a day or two. Step 7: Toss seed balls onto chosen area. Step 8: Wait for rain to allow seeds to germinate. Makes approximately 30 – 40 Seed Balls Here’s a short doc on Florida wildflowers. And check out Florida Wildflowers and Butterflies for some ideas on what kind of seeds you might include in your seedbomb. If the Alaska Permanent Fund is good enough for Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters and Alaska’s libertarian population, why isn’t it good for the rest of America? If we take Republican leaders at their word, the states are supposed to be laboratories of liberty, each trying their own strategies of improving the general welfare, with the most successful being adopted by the Federal government. Obama has urged Democratic leaders to adopt this Republican philosophy into the Health Care Reform bill. For those unfamiliar with Alaska’s successful experiment with socialism, the Alaska Permanent Fund is rooted in the Alaska Constitution’s assertion that the natural resources of Alaska belong to all Alaskans, and it is the legislature’s responsibility to develop these resources for the “maximum benefit of its people.”
In 1976 Alaskans amended their constitution so that –
The money collected through the rentals, etc., is then managed and invested by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation and every year the earnings are split among the citizens of Alaska, providing just over $1,300 to each Alaskan last year. Given that this policy is embraced by Republicans and Libertarians alike it should be easy to adopt something similar on a national scale. (I’m joking, of course. If Obama adopted the GOP platform wholesale, Republican leadership would continue to accuse him of being a craven Marxist.) In addition to the 30+ years of experience we have to draw on in Alaska, we also have an endorsement from F. A. Hayek, a Nobel Prize winning economist and favorite among the Libertarian crowd. In The Road to Serfdom, at the beginning of the Security and Freedom chapter, he writes –
Similarly, Nobel Prize winner and conservative favorite Milton Friedman argued for a negative income tax, where people whose annual salaries fall below a set minimum receive money from the government to bring their annual salary up to a minimum set by the legislature. While this system might allow the more bohemian or lazy among us to lounge around all day watching television or blowing their government funds on cheap weed, it brings a lot more positives than negatives. People in abusive relationships would find it easier to move out on their own if they knew they’d be able to pay rent. If it’s applied to everyone, the stigma of being on the dole is removed. If the fund is sufficient then unemployment insurance becomes an issue of the past. In fact, a program like this could conceivably reduce taxes since many of the programs funded by tax dollars would be less necessary if everyone received a sufficiently large enough stipend. But, where would this money come from? It would be drawn from multiple sources; revenue from the spectrum auction, and from government-owned utilities; inheritance tax and partial repayment of the funding upon death; sin taxes and consumption taxes; as well as resource sharing from the 44 million acres of US public land currently leased for a pittance to oil and gas companies. We know that there are some drawbacks. This is a disincentive to work. But, the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. Research shows that improving income inequality reduces crime, improves health, increases access to education, reduces some taxes, reduces poverty, improves children’s health, and improves the general welfare. So, if it’s good enough for Sarah Palin, Alaskan Republicans, and Libertarian economic philosophers, why isn’t it good enough for all Americans? The Official Unofficial Seminole Heights blog notes that Smokin A’s BBQ recently opened at the corner of Florida and Hanna. Yum. *** Speaking of new restaurants, it’s now official. The Refinery has replaced the Bungalow Bistro. The new owners kept the name and menu for a couple of weeks while they planned their renovation, ordered signage, and created a new menu. If you use Facebook, be-fan The Refinery and get updates on specials. Or follow them on Twitter at TampaRefinery. Tonight is “cheap date night.”
And, here is the dinner menu until March 7. Menus change regularly so they can serve seasonal vegetables they get from Urban Oasis Hydroponic Farm. For the less adventurous palates there will always be “Craig’s List” which this week includes steak and a hamburger.
*** The new issue of UC Tampa is up. This issue has some great articles, but of special interest to me is the post on Urban Core 2.0, about some ingenious ideas for continuing the renovation downtown. Reading all the way through to the end I see that it’s actually a reprint of an article written by B. C. Manion for 83 Degrees.
*** Laura Reiley writes about Paci’s Pizza, currently my favorite pizza in Tampa. *** Roblimo let’s us know that the Freethought Film Festival will be coming to Tampa. Here’s executive director Andrea Steele explaining the origins of the Freethought Film Festival. Go Andrea! The Freethought Film Festival is Coming to Tampa from roblimo on Vimeo. Deadline for submissions is April 30. *** If you are a Go enthusiast, or would like to learn how to play, drop by one of the Tampa Go Club meetings 3 – 6 pm on Sundays at the International Boba House (between USF & University Mall) 2764 University Square Drive.
*** Joran attended Social Fresh Tampa, a social media conference, and provides a wrap-up. Here’s another round-up at the official site. *** Creative Loafing throws the Roosevelt Art Gallery some love, and explains a little bit about Project 3.0 episodes.
I also deeply heart the Roosevelt guys, and am delighted that we’re surfing the same neuro-space. Their first show was Re:Create, the Art of the Upcycle, and they expect to continue the theme of re:creation.
Three cheers for recreation! I’m really digging these corkscrew benches at the Una Hotel Vittoria in Florence. They sure would look cool at bus stops around Tampa.  via Tripadvisor  Elinor Ostrom is one of my intellectual heroes. She recently won the Nobel Prize in economics for her research on common property and cooperation. She’s interviewed at Yes! Magazine.
100,000 Garages is an effort to create a network of fabbers. Check out their “Our Big Idea!” page for an explanation. During the presidential debates Tom Brokaw asked the candidates if they thought “economic, environmental, and energy challenges” would best be solved by a Manhattan Project-style effort, or 100,000 garages across America independently generating ideas and solutions. Picking up on this idea of 100,000 garages the creators of the site are working to connect designers and makers from around the world.
Buzz Aldrin hooks up with Snoop. All I really want to share is the title of this post and the image below, but I suppose I should put it into some context. The folks at Fast Company learned that hot dogs are the “perfect plug for a child’s airway,” and decided to design a new hot dog delivery system.  Fast Company's Hot Dog Redesign They used Play-doh to model future hot dog designs. I think Maggie at Boing Boing is the one who termed it “a less-deadly processed meat paste sausage.” JB’s favorite Mighty Boosh song. (I have too many to count.) Cheese is a kind of meat We are in the middle of a manufacturing revolution. For those involved in this revolution, and those who watch culture along the fringes, this is old news. Mainstream America and policy makers, however, seem to be completely unaware of the revolution taking place.  Logo created by Conal for the Ryerson and Western Online Journalism students 11-part series on maker culture As long as this manufacturing revolution stays on the fringes it will have little economic impact. If we can harness it, support it, incubate it, we have the possibility of generating an economic boom akin to the Internet economy of the 1990s. But, just as it was difficult to determine the future of the “information superhighway” in 1993, it’s difficult to see where this manufacturing revolution might lead us. CompuServe and AOL still looked like pretty good ideas in the early Internet years. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia were unimaginable (or at least unimagined). If the desktop computer drove the rise of the Internet, what will drive the rise of independent/boutique/small batch manufacturing? The 3D printer is as good a place to start as any. 3D PRINTING At this early stage it’s difficult to tell if the 3D printer is the virtual reality gloves or the cell phone of this dawning age.  3D printer from the Evil Mad Scientist 3D Printer Project To hear the technophiles tell the story we’ll soon be using 3D printers to print out everything from dinner to human organs. It’s the first step to realizing Star Trek’s replicator. While there are lots of options for hobbyists, from Fab@Home to RepRap, 3D printers are still too hinky for the Wal-Mart crowd, and it won’t really be mainstream until middle-class families can pick up an inexpensive model at their favorite big box store. Regardless, the desktop 3D printer is in some ways the holy grail of the current maker culture. If everyone has a desktop manufacturing contraption, then we will see an economic boon that parallels the desktop computing revolution. Companies will pop up to provide materials, support, software, and to fill the hundreds of little nooks and crannies that have yet to be considered.  A Fab@Home fabber So, who are these people so eager for a homebrew manufacturing revolution? Before I can answer that I think it might help to provide a little history about the United States and its manufacturing enthusiasts. MAKER PAST The United States has a long history of gadget enthusiasm. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, and well into the nineteenth century, the mechanical arts, aka the useful arts, played an important role in the psychic geography of the nation. The useful arts were so salient to the founding generation that they included them in the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8. Among the many responsibilities of Congress is -
The useful arts in this context specifically meant invention; think Benjamin Franklin and his bifocals or Franklin stove, or Whitney and his cotton gin. Invention at the time was largely an individual endeavor. Annual agricultural fairs devoted a lot of time and space to the mechanical arts, showing off improvements and inventions to improve the farmer’s lot. In 1812 Harvard established a chair for the Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts, where Jacob Bigelow re-introduced the word “technology” to the English language to describe this new area of research. By the end of the nineteenth century some of the most famous men in America were gadgeteers. Howe and Singer and their sewing machines, Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, and especially Edison and his hundreds of inventions, captured the popular imagination. The independent gadgeteer as a heroic icon started to vanish after Ford and the Wright brothers. The first World War revolutionized technological development, and Ford’s factory system pushed corporate interest away from the private inventor to in-house inventions that could fit neatly into new manufacturing systems. By the 1930s the independent inventor was seen as sort of a crank. At best, inventions were something to occupy engineers during time off from their real jobs. The homebrew creator received gentle ribbing from Rube Goldberg, and the stereotype of the eccentric basement inventor was born; a man too attached to the romantic era of invention past, working in his basement creating flubber, intermittent windshield wipers, or perpetual motion machines that never quite worked.  After WWII invention became firmly locked into the labs of the military-industrial complex. The mechanical arts became a quaint part of history, and the maker culture was diminished to the world of hobbyists with their clubs, magazines, conventions, and the rest of the accoutrements of geekdom. The residue of this 19th century culture of the useful and mechanical art persisted through the 20th century in science fairs and shop class. But even the venerable shop class has come under fire over the last quarter century, and been dropped by more and more schools. (See Shop Class as Soulcraft for a terrific meditation on the importance of learning to work with your hands.) MAKER PRESENT The origins of the current maker culture can be traced back to the computer homebrew clubs of the 1970s that built their own computers, their sibling activities of building robots and rockets, as well as the do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality of Whole Earth Catalog and punk rock. It was this DIY culture that spawned Jobs and Wozniak and their revolutionary Apple computer. But the subsequent innovation and creation wasn’t in making new objects, it was in creating new software, a sort of new literature for the engineering set. The return of garage inventors became instead the rise of garage software programmers. Maker enthusiasts remained, but they remained on the fringes. Survival Research Laboratories, formed by Mark Pauline in the late 1970s, made wild, dangerous robots, but was always seen as a type of outsider kinesthetic art. Rocket-building enthusiasts finally saw their time arrive in the mid-1990s with the implementation of the X Prize, which offered big money to someone who could homebrew a rocket that reached orbit. And, building your own computer became a rite of passage for a special brand of teenage computer nerds.  Survival Research Laboratories robot Now, a decade into the 21st century, we’re starting to see a new interest in invention and the useful arts. Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media launched Make magazine (and its sibling Craft magazine) in 2005 to cater to what they saw as a growing interest in the useful arts. Cory Doctorow elaborated on this maker culture in his recent novel Makers (2009). (My review of Makers can be found here.) Tech conferences are an important part in spreading tech culture, and O’Reilly has drawn from this culture to create the Maker Faires.
Maker Faires have been held in San Francisco, Austin, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Rhode Island. Upcoming Faires are scheduled to take place in San Francisco, Detroit, Queens, and Nairobi, Kenya. Wikipedia reports that the first Faire in San Francisco in 2008 –
Etsy allows independent artists and craftspeople to sell their wares to interested buyers. Like Make magazine it was also launched in 2005. By now Etsy is approaching $20 million in sales each month, solely on tens of thousands of craftspeople selling to hundreds of thousands of buyers. MAKER FUTURE So, what is the future of this nascent popular culture? One interesting possibility is the rise of the Arduino circuit board (coincidentally, the Arduino circuit board, like Make and Etsy, also launched in 2005). In Wired Clive Thompson describes the Arduino.
This open source circuit board can be used to cheaply install “brains” into art and craft objects, potentially upping the possibility for creating truly novel and desirable objects.  And, that’s what this movement is still waiting for; the maker culture version of the killer app. $20 million a month generated by Etsy is a lot of money, but it’s peanuts compared to Microsoft, or Apple, or Ebay, or Google. Will there be a killer object that compels everyone to want to participate in the current maker culture? Will the suite of designs become so obviously desirable that non-hobbyists will start buying 3D printers? Desktop 3D printers currently sell for around $5,000 to $15,000. High demand can drive the price down, but it’s still not clear what the quality of the built objects might be. If you’re Jay Leno, and you have the money to spend, you can buy a high-end 3D printer that produces parts for your rare car collection. A popular home appliance 3D printer will need be able to work with a cheap, easy-to-use goop. (Perhaps we’ll see a new domain for the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup industry to launch themselves into.) It didn’t take much for American consumers to accept planned obsolescence or a culture of fashion that made it necessary to purchase new items annually, so cheap knock-offs from your home printer might not be that much of a problem. Another possibility is that this might be a boon to the plastics industry. However, a petroleum-based goop that serves as the three-dimensional ink might make high-quality, solid objects, but might not appeal to an audience that is primed to lean to the green. If home appliance 3D printers never take off perhaps start-ups like Shapeways, which allows you to use their printers for your design, will find their niche. Manufacturing plants in China are already ready to embrace the small-batch manufacturing culture, a sort of larger-scale version of the Shapeways manufacturing for the independent designer. This why you can get your own face on a bobble-head, or get action figures made of all your co-workers. On a larger scale, start-ups like Local Motors are using factories in China to do their small-batch manufacturing. Local Motors designs and manufactures limited editions of automobiles. (Here’s an earlier post on Local Motors. Picture below is the forthcoming Miami model.)  MAKER CULTURE IN TAMPA? Which raises the question, where’s the maker culture in Tampa? There are “17,000 manufacturers in the state with a 400,000 workforce,” according to this report at Bradenton.com last summer. And places like the Florida Advanced Technological Education Center at Hillsborough Community College are working to train workers for those manufacturers, but that’s not really in the spirit of the creative independence of the maker culture. We hear over and over that we are an information economy, we are a service economy. Our era of manufacturing has passed on to China, India, the maquiladoras, and anywhere else where labor can be had for a pittance. But, the future of manufacturing is not engraved in stone. With the right sort of support, incubation, and creative energy, we can bring manufacturing back home, recreated in profound and unexpected ways. RECOMMENDED READING Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and On-Line Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World MakerCulture: Taking Things into Our Own Hands  Hmmm, independent research consistently shows that cell phones increase the risk of tumors and cancer. Fortunately, research by the cell phone industry shows there is no risk! Whew, that was close. Christopher Ketcham has a great article in GQ about the controversy surrounding cell phones. Increasingly, the evidence is confirming that cell phones are a real health hazard.
I’m not much of a cell phone user, but I dream of a world saturated in Wi-Fi (which is also implicated in the article). Usually when I dream of annihilating the human race it’s a lot less subtle.
Ketcham closes with this awesome quote from George Orwell.
*** UPDATE – Research at the University of South Florida suggests that cell phones can improve memory and reverse dementia. Yay! My wi-fi is making me stronger! Tampa ranks dead last in Forbes’s ranking of cities for commuting. Miami is sixth worst and Orlando comes in at fourth worst.
Here’s an idea. Let’s start focusing on connecting different parts of the city with green spaces, parks, bike paths, and walkways (and lots of trees and benches) instead of connecting different parts of the city with roads and highways. It may sound counter-intuitive, but the more walkable we make our city the more cars we remove from the roads and highways. A “deep geologic repository” is a place to store high-level nuclear waste. There are a lot of plans for such repositories around the world, but currently none exist. While there are places that collect nuclear waste, none of them are considered permanent storage spaces. 10,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste are generated around the globe each year. Friends of the Pleistocene has a great article on the efforts to create deep geologic repositories – Containing Uncertainty: Design for Infinite Quarantine. I have a deep, unnatural love for auto-tuning. Here’s a clip of various scientists, explaining science, auto-tuned. As Richard Dawkins says “There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.”
I think it’s much more interesting.” –Richard Feynman What if your business or organization is already on Facebook and you didn’t put it there? Visual Alliance Media has some great tips on how to handle fake Facebook pages. First, don’t panic. Second, don’t assume the worst. They may be fans and happy to turn over the reins.
*** Tom Dye, the Safety Guy thinks Michele Bachmann’s life would be great fodder for a sit-com.
*** Hali’s goal is to lose 75 pounds this year, and she’s blogging about it at the Hali Daily. Go Hali!
*** Jo-Anne at Brand Tampa alerts us that Ybor City is in the Spring issue of American Bungalow magazine. *** GNATV heads up to Land o’ Lakes to eat at Larry’s Deli. (Click through to their page for a larger video embed.) Be sure to watch this very special episode to see how the “that’s-what-she-said” syndrome nearly destroyed Alex’s life. (And how Larry’s Deli made him better.) I caught The Odd Couple (1968) the other night and it reminded me of a pet peeve. During the opening sequence, Felix (Jack Lemmon) is wandering the streets of New York, depressed, lonely, and contemplating suicide. At one point he goes into a bar to order a drink. The bar has nearly naked go-go dancers dancing on stage, a live band, and a raucous audience. Felix orders his drink at the bar. We can’t hear what he says, the music is too loud. The bartender also doesn’t hear what he says and we can see by reading his lips that he responds “What?” as he cups his ear to indicate he hasn’t heard. Felix shouts (which we also don’t hear, but can figure out by reading his lips) “Scotch!” The bartender nods, gives a thumbs up and comes back with a scotch. “Finally!” I scream at the TV. “A noisy bar in a movie.” Watching characters chit-chat in a bar in a normal tone of voice, with the band only a dozen feet away, drives me crazy. Have these people (writers/directors/producers) never been to a bar? Even in bars without a live band, the music is often so loud that you can only have a conversation by shouting, or leaving the building. It’s true, now that I’m older, I sometimes see bands that are a little more mellow, or I sit farther away, and some conversing is possible. But, in movies and television, it’s rarely middle-aged folk at some alt-country outdoor shindig. It’s always youth at some late night blow out. And, unless things have drastically changed since my own wasted youth, it’s too damn loud inside a bar to analyze your failing romance, or plot a bank robbery. So, writers/directors/producers, please, enough with the quiet bars. Mark Menjivar traveled the US for three years taking photographs of the insides of people’s refrigerators. This refrigerator study is a fascinating glimpse into the American diet.
Here’s Good Magazine’s article about Menjivar from last year.  Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily. | 2008 All of this prompted me to wonder – What would life be like without a refrigerator? I should write a book, My Year Without a Fridge. Of course, that would mean living without a fridge, which I’m not inclined to do. I started to take a picture of the inside of my refrigerator for this post, but it seemed to be an oddly intimate and revealing image. I’ll just say that it’s mostly bare, and I currently have neither takeout boxes nor US flags in my refrigerator. Terry Pratchett, best-selling author of the Discworld series, has posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the brain for which there is no cure. He knows that he is going to die, and he has come to terms with that. What he has not come to terms with is that he will be forced to live a life of dementia, of forgetting all the people in his life, of hallucination, before the disease finally kills him. All because he is expected to avoid ending his own life. Pratchett makes his argument for a common-sense approach to euthanasia.
 I totally spaced and forgot to mention that the Food Network’s Adam Gertler visited Tank’s Tap Room on February 1 to sample the “W.T.F burger, The Tankinator, and Tankenstein, The S’Moreger” and to take on the “3rd Circle of Hell Challenge.” I meant to put up a post a few days before the visit to alert those who might be interested in hanging out and watching the Food Network tape, and seeing if Gertler was up to the challenge. Sorry, Tank, my apologies for spacing. Anyway, I can say that Tank’s Tap Room is a GREAT bar and comes highly recommended by R/CT.  13150 North Dale Mabry Highway
Check out the rest of their menu here, and their website here. (Watch your volume at work. Website starts playing music automatically.) Or, become their Facebook fan here. The National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards affair with Rielle Hunter. Because of their reporting Edwards is being investigated for misusing campaign funds and may be indicted within the next couple of months. The Pulitzer Award committee has agreed to consider this bit of journalism for two of the most prestigious awards it offers. Frankly, I hope they win.
It’s been awhile since I posted any benches. I really like cool public benches. Tampa needs a LOT more sitting space. Below is a cool swinging bench I found at 11 Creative Public Bench Designs.  Sang-Hoon Lee designed this bench. You can find more here. Some more cool street furniture here, including this red wave bench.  The presentations from TEDxTampaBay are now up on YouTube. There were a lot of good topics, but I was most impressed with this remarkable talk by Elizabeth Davis of the Akilah Institute. I recommend it.
I’m not fat, I’m just big-bellied. All the more room to provide a home for these delicious bacon cheeseburger hotdog turtles.  Lots more images of deliciousness at This is why you’re fat. For those of you in Florida House District 58, don’t forget that tomorrow, February 23, is a special election to replace Michael Scionti.
Hunter Chamberlin is the Republican candidate and Janet R. Cruz is the Democratic candidate. *** Obama has posted his plan for health care reform in preparation for the HCR meeting on Thursday.
Here is the GOP bill for health care reform. *** Lieberman will take the lead in repealing DADT. *** Kucinich wants to offer a 6-month window for early retirement, predicts it will help create 1 million jobs.
*** After the break I offer abundant commentary on the Mt. Vernon Statement. Perhaps the greatest web comic ever, Brendan Jones’s 3-volume series Breakfast of the Gods is now complete.  This Matt Jones talk at TechnoArk introduces the idea of Mujicomp, the widespread use of simple, interactive, and social gadgets. It’s a speculation about where the future of hand-held devices might be heading. Jones offers some examples of items that are almost there, but doesn’t really offer a good idea of what the object might be that would really be mujicomp. Fon is close, but not quite what I think he has in mind. (Muji is a popular Japanese retail store that is now global. They sell inexpensive, popular consumer goods and stuff for your house). While tracing the history of ideas that led him to mujicomp, Jones touches on the 60s-era architectural group archigram, Guy Debord’s theory of psychogeography, smart cities, and how people moving through the urban space create their own information architecture (we just don’t capture that information very well). An example of the latter is the Open Street Map project. It’s an interesting talk, full of nifty ideas, and one of his examples of a social artifact prompted a speculative social object of my own. Jones talks about his company’s Availabot, which seems destined to never make it to market, but is a nice representation of what he means by social object. The availabot is a little toy avatar that plugs into your USB port. It represents your friend, and when your friend is available to chat, the availabot stands up, and when your friend is not available to chat the availabot lies down. Simple, clever, a physical manifestation of your online world in real life.  Of course, who wants just one availabot for one friend? I want dozens, maybe scores, and I want them to look like cartoon versions of my friends and I want them to be wireless. I don’t have enough USB ports for all my friends. And then, since 3D printing has been floating around in the back of my brain, wondering how it can be useful, I realized that this might be a perfect object for 3D printing. I want a 3D printer that prints toy avatars of my friends, that are then animated by the open source hardware arduino chip and connect wirelessly with my computer. I want a homebrew version of the availabot. I can see them now, all standing on my desk, scores of little animated cartoon avatars of my Facebook friends, rising and falling as friends log on and log off. For the next generation of these social network avatars (social information appliances?) each availabot would have a unique pattern that interacted with my augmented reality spectacles and produced a cloud of information above the avatar, perhaps a speech bubble representing their status update and our chats. A terrific bit of surreal, hand-drawn animation, The Head by parquerama. Click through for the larger version at Vimeo. TheHead / hand-drawn animated short from parquerama on Vimeo. I found this at Neatorama (who found it at Urlesque). It’s a picture of a real person made up to look like a painting.  Photo ©Copyright 2009 by Peter Kun Frary
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