Wednesday Cool Links: The Flying Stuff, ...

Solar botics
March 20, 2013

Solarbotics and the Useless Box have been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article "Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don't Try This"! It is dedicated to the historical overview of the uselessness starting with its invention in the 1950s to nowadays. The useless box can take many guises, names and materials to be made of, but the initial impulse for pure purposelessness keeps on fascinating " tinkerers and thinkers alike". It's an interesting read, check it out if you haven't already. And now to our traditional portion of links:

"Wings" by Dukno Yoon
Not sure whether these would qualify as jewellery, mobile or art piece, I think - a little bit of everything, but definitely these look cool. By using this mechanical structure jeweler and metalsmith Dukno Yoon explores the nature of movement of the wing, and the interactive relationship with the body.
This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave
First it might seem that the water stream is vibrating only because the hose is doing the same, but when you get to about 1:43 in the video, it gets almost eerie, as if the water is running upwards.
A Hovering Magnetic Cloud and Other Kinetic Sculptures by Laurent Debraux
Kinetic sculptures by artist Laurent Debraux using primarily magnets, ferrofluid and metal objects with a touch of vintage. More stuff on his youtube channel.
A million times (Time Dubai) by Humans since 1982
What happens if you orchestrate 288 clocks to wave their hands in a specific fashion? Pretty mesmerizing, I say...
Retrotechtacular: flying foot-soldiers are coming for you (sixty years ago)
Here's a remarkable piece of the 1950s experimental military technology- a single-rider flying platform. Two rotors are mounted underneath and provide enough lifting power to hover the platform above the ground.

Also, according to the Wall Street Journal Useless Box  has also been called a "green machine" as one of its inherent attributes is energy efficiency. Our links are also very… green! They last only until you click them, leave minimal environmental footprint, with the exception of, maybe, brain. But, you know, that regenerates, so grow some more neurons by the next time we'll see you here!

MORE POSTS

August 4, 2006
Heritage Day Monday

Monday is Heritage Day here in Alberta, Canada, so we will all be out Heritage-ing it up, and enjoying our all too short summer. So if you want to go all Heritage on BEAM, and buy a SolarRoller kit, we'll ship it to you when we are back in the office Tuesday!

July 12, 2007
Circuit: Lightstorm

Some of you may have found the LightStorm Pummers that Mark Tilden has made using some neat looking plastics. We've built our own variation of the circuit, which is a dark-activated, quad-bicore pseudo-random chaos generated, dual pummer circuit.

March 24, 2014
Motors Are Back!

Just a quick note to announce that we have GM3 and GM9 motors back in stock, which means that Yellow Drum Machine Bundle and Let's Make Robots Start Here Kit are both available again.

May 9, 2011
So ya think you can buy stuff, huh?

When it rains, it pours! We're addition to the IT position search (some good candidates BTW, thanks very much), we're now also looking for somebody to slide in behind the purchaser desk. Here's what the job entails: Watch stock levels (physical and in Quickbooks, because bits can't always be trusted over bytes), and reorder necessary […]

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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.

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