Author: admin

Squeeze Machine

An oldish video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g]

Also:

The author initially conceived of the idea for the squeeze machine from her observations in animal science. Cattle being held in a squeeze chute, while waiting in line for veterinary attention, often appeared somewhat agitated during the waiting; some of the animals, however, seemed to relax once pressure was applied to large areas of their bodies… In working with children, we have found that 5 minutes of sustained use of the squeeze machine is the minimum typically required to obtain a readily detectable calming effect.

– Calming Effects of Deep Touch Pressure in Patients with Autistic Disorder, College Students, and Animals

Is ours a future full of relaxed autistic people encased in squeezy robotic exoskeletons?

Great Sunflower

The Great Sunflower Project is a pretty simple idea. They’ll send you some sunflower seeds if you’ll spend fifteen minutes, twice a month, watching your blooms and recording how many bees come and go.

They crunch the numbers at their site and you get some nifty flowers – sounds fair to me, and anything that helps stop colony collapse disorder seems like a good idea.

Between The Great Sunflower Project and that recent DARPA balloon spotting competition it sounds like distributed data collection is really starting to catch on, which has me thinking: there have to be some heuristics that can be applied to already existing webcams (traffic cams, monument cams, etc) to determine if that area is suffering a disaster – sort of an early warning zombie detection system.

Still awaiting the sequel, The Nakedest Prey

Speaking of coveting: Have you ever seen that movie, The Naked Prey?

It’s the one where a bunch of “Savage Africans” kill some Caucasian folks who refuse to pay them tribute, then chase the last one around the savannas while the audience shifts uncomfortably in their seats from all the racism.

There’s a school of thought these days that the film is brilliant despite the racial discomfort. There’s very little dialogue, most of the movie is just an underdeveloped white guy running through the grass in tiny underpants, and yet it remains pretty compelling.

The Naked Prey

Weirdly, the plot is supposedly based on a true story, “John Colter’s Escape”, which tells of John Colter and his partner crossing some Blackfoot Indians and having to run away. Not quite Africa, and shooting a fellow in front of his friends isn’t quite the same thing as refusing to give a gift, but still very “The Most Dangerous Game”.

To bring it back to my coveting: the thing that’s really always stuck with me about the movie is the design of the weird person-poker they gave the tribesmen. It’s tough to find a clear picture, but it looks like they got a discount on used swords from an old BBC production, then replaced all of the hilts with two foot poles to make them pass as ‘spears’.

I’ve always found this weird mutant weapon to be awesome – it’s exactly the kind of thing I want my Japanese-RPG character to be carrying, or to have hanging on my office wall in case of zombie attack.

The Venerable Visible V8

The Visible V8

I was digging through picasa the other day and came across this image I shot in the wood paneled basement of an extended family member.

Sweetest Kit Ever.

As a kid I would have gotten about half way through assembly and lost interest, but now that I’m an old man I know how to covet a toy properly.

(By assembling it once, then leaving it somewhere to safely gather dust.)

Maybe for my next ebay-birthday.

Country Life

Living in the country can be weird.

When I came home last night I noticed our mailbox had been vandalized, the door was off and a corner of the body shattered. My first assumption was that it had fallen victim to some mailbox baseball, but then I took a closer look:

Trashed Mailbox

Apparently someone knocked it clean from its post, but decided to correct the situation by re-attaching it with a generous helping of electrical tape. I have to wonder how long someone was standing at the end of my driveway frantically winding the black roll round and round, just trying to get the thing relatively sturdy.

Frankly, I would have preferred a note of apology – or maybe a  twenty.

Functional Friday

Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting things done.

My major focus, Lukas & Nan, is currently at 8.5% for the first draft. I’m pretty pleased with that. Serial 2.0 is currently in the most gooey of embryonic phases, but the broad creative work at the beginning of a project can be the most exciting. The gag comic has sort of stalled, mostly due to a series of funerals which really shook out the funny around here. Hopefully we should be able to get back to work on that in the next week.