My Computer turns vegetarian

We got some angry reactions and shows of disgust and sadness to our report on carnivorous computers, which get their energy by digestion of small animals. While that brilliantly despicable idea was merely a design concept with no proof of real functionality, another designer popped up to save our soul: vegetarian lamps! Marieke Staps http://www.mariekestaps.nl/?/Design/Soil-Lamp-2/ from the netherlands developed soil-powered LED lighting that, according to her words only needs some watering every now and then, just like her chicque and totally pc eco-watch. (a little closer look reveals some copper and zink electrodes which, together with water of the right pH, are nothing but standard batteries. Nice idea though.)

Comments

Academics should be blogging? No.

"blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now" The London School of Economics and Political Science states in one of their, yes, Blogs . It is wrong. The arguments just seem so right: "faster communication of scientific results", "rapid interaction with colleagues" "responsibility to give back results to the public". All nice, all cuddly and warm, all good. But wrong. It might be true for scientoid babble. But this is not how science works. Scientists usually follow scientific methods to obtain results. They devise, for example, experiments to measure a quantity while keeping the boundary-conditions in a defined range. They do discuss their aims, problems, techniques, preliminary results with colleagues - they talk about deviations and errors, successes and failures. But they don't do that wikipedia-style by asking anybody for an opinion . Scientific discussion needs a set

Information obesity? Don't swallow it!

Great - now they call it 'information obesity'! If you can name it, you know it. My favourite source of intellectual shallowness, bighthink.com, again wraps a whiff of nothing into a lengthy video-message. As if seeing a person read a text that barely covers up it's own emptyness makes it more valuable. More expensive to produce, sure. But valuable? It is ok, that Clay Johnson does everything to sell his book. But (why) is it necessary to waste so many words, spoken or written, to debate a perceived information overflow? Is it fighting fire with fire? It is cute to pack the problem of distractions into the metaphore of 'obesity', 'diet' and so on. But the solution is the same. At the core of every diet you have 'burn more than you eat'. If you cross a street, you don't read every licence-plate, you don't talk to everybody you encounter, you don't count the number of windows of the houses across, you don't interpret the sounds an

How Does Knowledge Get Into Society? A fly-by-artist-in-residence and a Dialogue

The artist Sadie Weis was shadowing some of the scientists at Paul-Drude-Institut (a research-institute for nanomaterials) for eight weeks, observing the way they work, how scientists communicate with eachother, how they explain stuff to an outsider. The result of this dialogue is a light-installation and - maybe more important for the scientists involved - a reflection of the scientists and of the artist on the languages they use. T his project of an artist in a fly-by-residency will be wrapped up on Saturday, November 10th with a p resentation by the artist Sadie Weis and a panel discussion on differences and similarities in the way artists and scientists communicate with the outside world November 10, 2018 from 14-18 Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik Hausvogteiplatz 5–7, Berlin-Mitte Germany For the Dialogue, please register at exhibition@pdi-berlin.de . Der Dialog wird auf Deutsc

The SmartS Club

Search This Blog