SUPERMECHANICAL.BLOG: A graduation of sorts: assembly, beta, schedule∞
Hello, supporters —
We’ve got another action-packed update for you. But first, let’s talk about the schedule.
We’ve come a long way in mere months. We’ve got what we think is final hardware, but it needs to be tested in a small batch before we spend all the money to produce thousands of…
Video: New condiment lubricant makes your sauce flow!
A PhD candidate at MIT created ‘LiquiGlide’, a non-stick coating made only from food safe FDA approved materials, which keeps ketchup and mayonnaise flowing out of the packaging.
Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles—just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”
Be sure to check out the source link here to see the mayo video as well.
This Robot Makes Its Own Custom Tools Out of Glue
Humans are generalists. We’re adaptable. If there’s a task we can’t do on our own, we find ourselves a tool to help us. Robots aren’t usually like this, because it’s very hard to design a robot that implements all the different tools that might conceivably be useful to it. Roboticists at ETH Zurich are trying to get around this problem by designing a robot with just one tool, but the tool they’ve chosen is a hot glue gun that their robot can use to manufacture any other tools that it needs to. […]
Stowe Boyd: Big Data and Data Inequality: Research Is Just The Beginning∞
There was a recent hoo-ha at a scientific conference in France, when Bernardo Huberman was furious when researchers from Google and a contributing university presenting results of social data analysis declined to share the data.
John Markoff, Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social…
This is really an extremely important issue for the future!!
Google Docs - Pressing ⌘+s (ctrl + s) the first time will save the document in the interface, while pressing it again will open the default browser dialog to save the page to your hard drive.
/via Gregory Koberger
Future Work Skills 2020
The Institute for the Future released a report on future work skills that will be needed by 2020. They are:
- Sense-making.
- Social intelligence.
- Novel and adaptive thinking.
- Cross-cultural competency.
- Computational thinking.
- New-media literacy.
- Transdisciplinarity.
- Design mind-set.
- Cognitive load management.
- Virtual collaboration.
(Gigaom gives a quick breakdown)
The graphic below from that report highlights areas of focus:
Leap Motion gesture control technology hands-on — Engadget
Leap Motion unveiled its new gesture control technology earlier this week, along with videos showing the system tracking ten fingers with ease and a single digit slicing and dicing a grocery store’s worth of produce in Fruit Ninja. Still, doubts persisted as to the veracity of the claim that the Leap is 200 times more accurate than existing tech. So, we decided to head up to San Francisco to talk with the men behind Leap, David Holz and Michael Buckwald, and see it for ourselves. Join us after the break to learn a bit more about Leap, our impressions of the technology, and a video of the thing in action.
