I first heard of Kogoro Kurata through his steampunk laptop. Now the guy is making massive armed robots and this giant hand you see here. If his scale continues to grow at this rate, plan on Godzilla’s new nemesis by next summer.
All links through the venerable Engadget
Ambient devices like the Beacon to the left deliver information in a soft, subtle way. Think about a wall clock or speedometer – you don’t concentrate on it, but merely glance at it occasionally. Ambient Orbs do the same thing: relay information from your periphereal vision. They were originally designed to follow your stock portfolio (red = bad, green = good), but as Clive Thompson points out in Wired, they can be programmed to follow the weather, pollen count, sailing conditions in your area, or more interestingly, monitor your energy consumption.
Or you could just rock out to the Eagles:
Sunday’s Japan Times had a feature on the awesome rice field paintings we wrote about a few months ago.
Apparently, time is running out to see them in full detail because:
…now in August, the lengths of each kind of rice are different due to their different growth rates. Now, we cannot clearly see the drops falling off the waves, as the yellow rice for the drops is shorter than Tsugaru Roman. So by now the drops have begun sinking into the green background of the Tsugaru Roman.”
I just saw Joelle Bitton’s “Abstract” installation at Gallery Ef in Asakusa. Pretty cool stuff. The gallery itself is in a 140-year old warehouse that’s been converted into a cafe/bar up front with a small gallery in back. You walk through the cafe and then down a step, then crouch through an Edo-era doorway (maybe comes up to my waist. There in this old, darkened room is a white carpet on the floor and a digital recorder directed at…you.
I don’t know the details, but somehow it films you and then projects your form onto the carpet, with a constantly-changing palette of nature scenes, squiggly lines, and the like. I forgot my camera, so these pics come from Gallery Ef’s site. It’s quite cool, and I LOVE the building itself, but it’s hard for me to say “Drop everything and go” because this is it: one very cool interactive piece int the back of a cool cafe. If you are in Asakusa, tho, this is a must.
So communications minister, Yoshihide Suga plans to replace the internet by 2020, huh? Good luck selling that idea to the Chinese.
Accidents can happen just about anywhere. Have you broken your arm at the arcade? Or maybe chipped your jawbone when controlling your iPod? Not to worry: Tokyo scientists can now make bones with a souped-up inkjet printer.
Spoon, are about the most consistently great band in indie rock. Little Keepon thinks so, too apparently, as you’ll see below. They had him and his scientist buddy walking all over Tokyo. How many places can you identify?
Decent Spoon profile in the New Yorker here. Stay tuned for Spoon and Keepon to reunite for a benefit in San Francisco for Creative Commons. All part of WIRED Magazine’s Nextfest.
Cory Doctorow, of the badass Boing Boing team, will be in Japan at WorldCon, a Sci-fi convention held this year in Yokohama. Some of the events sound pretty cool. Just look at the very first one on the program guide: Exomusicology - The Study of Alien Music.
Science fiction has been creating alien cultures for decades, but we rarely think about alien music. Where are there descriptions of alien music in the genre? What might truly alien music sound like? Would we like it? Would we even recognize it?
And would it have a good beat? Could you dance to it?
Cory has posted his schedule on his personal blog
I can’t say enough about the amazingly fun and interesting Radiolab podcast. Imagine the best Discovery Channel-type show you’ve ever seen and then convert it to a radio program that you can stop and start at your leisure (or rewind a bit when a train arrival drowns it out). The latest installment is about emergence, which is basically the theory of how large, complex systems happen almost by accident via thousands or millions of unwitting players. For example, ants: individually, they are incompetent scavengers, but collectively, they are responsible for incredible feats of engineering.
The same ideas can be applied to weather systems, thought processes, google searches and the shape of cities, which made me think of Tokyo: How did it get it’s shape? Why did it spread where and when it did? Most of it was not planned,really, but formed through a series of happy accidents. For example, one guy opens a pizza parlor. It becomes popular, so some other guys opens a shop nearby to get into the action, then another and another and then TA DA! Roppongi is born. No one planned it – it just happened.
Really interesting authors like Steven Johnson (this book is great) and James Surowieki (I’ve mentioned him before) add fascinating examples about how a million small unplanned things can add up to massively amazing accomplishments.
Back near the beginning of the year, the good folks at Information Architects created a super-cool web trends mashup with the Tokyo subway map.
Well, now they’ve improved it even further.
IA’s Oliver Reichenstein will talk about the future of news next Tuesday as part of the Tokyo2point0 series. More info here.