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Bole Floor

Posted by _tango! on April 2, 2011
Posted in: art, design, experience, green, ideas, information, inspiration, materials, style, tech. 1 comment

These are beautiful, sustainable, optimizes entirety of wood, and very unique. I love how some of the curves follow the eyes of the wood and grain direction. Who knew you could get flooring like this!

“Bolefloor is the world’s first industrial-scale manufactured hardwood flooring with naturally curved lengths that follow a tree’s natural growth. Bolefloor takes its name from bole, the trunk of a tree.

Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.

Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.

Our process manages and tracks each board from its raw-lumber stage through final installation. And every board is cut using the finest in Homag woodworking machinery.

Several pictures from their gallery after the jump!

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Quadrocopter Ball Juggling

Posted by _tango! on March 30, 2011
Posted in: entertainment, experience, fun, ideas, information, inspiration, tech. 1 comment


Wow! This just made my jaws drop!(while thinking up 50 ideas) Autonomous flying helicopters that detect a ping pong ball and juggle it quite a few times. Watch the video to understand. Can I actually play ping pong with a robot finally? Will there be flying little robots to go fetch the hit ball back to me down the road? haha, this is awesome!

via youtube video
“Ball juggling experiments in the ETH Flying Machine Arena
By Mark Müller, Sergei Lupashin and Raffaello D’Andrea
http://www.flyingmachinearena.org
IDSC, ETH Zürich, Switzerland”

Also be sure to see the piano playing one.

Duane Keiser: Peel

Posted by _tango! on March 20, 2011
Posted in: art, entertainment, experience, fun, ideas, information, inspiration, style, tech, thoughts. Leave a Comment


Duane Keiser originated the phenomenon known as “painting a day“.
Keiser recently posted on his blog a short time-lapse video called Peel where he paints the process in peeling apart a tangerine, repainting over the the same painting where the past vanishes just like in real life. He’s also auctioning his final piece which at the moment of the post is at $225.

I’ve seen paintings repainted over, but too paint over purposefully and retain the history through video is a great  addition  and a great story! If this was done digitally, a buyer could go through each stroke forwards and backwards, but to make it something non-digital retains a history and mystery which at times can be more valuable than information.

Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …

Posted by _tango! on March 20, 2011
Posted in: conference, entertainment, experience, ideas, information, inspiration, TED. 1 comment

“If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s gonna call me Point B … ” began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis — from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. — and gives two breathtaking performances of “B” and “Hiroshima.”

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

Posted by _tango! on March 12, 2011
Posted in: art, conference, design, entertainment, experience, fun, ideas, information, inspiration, music, TED. Leave a Comment

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education

Posted by _tango! on March 10, 2011
Posted in: conference, entertainment, experience, fun, ideas, information, inspiration, style, tech, TED. Leave a Comment


Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

JR’s TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out

Posted by _tango! on March 10, 2011
Posted in: art, conference, design, entertainment, experience, fun, green, ideas, information, inspiration, materials, style, tech, TED. Leave a Comment

“JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out. Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.”

Up-Inspired Floating House

Posted by _tango! on March 6, 2011
Posted in: art, design, entertainment, experience, fun, ideas, information, inspiration, tech, wacky. Leave a Comment


Up-Inspired Floating House! Awesome.  Check out the other 14 photos here.

“Yesterday morning, March 5 at dawn, National Geographic Channel and a team of scientists, engineers, and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16′ X 16′ house 18′ tall with 300 8′ colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted. The entire experimental aircraft was more than 10 stories high, reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet, and flew for approximately one hour.

The filming of the event, from a private airstrip, will be part of a new National Geographic Channel series called How Hard Can it Be?, which will premiere in fall 2011.”

via mymodernmet

update: a making of video

TED2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder

Posted by _tango! on February 26, 2011
Posted in: art, brand, conference, design, entertainment, experience, fun, ideas, information, inspiration, materials, me, style, TED. Leave a Comment

I’m off to the TED2011 conference, which will be my 10th TED conference. I’ll be stopping by LA this weekend to meet up with some TEDsters, then in Palm Springs all of Sunday to meet with TEDx organizers, then Long Beach for a backstage peek, then back to Palm Springs the rest of the week. Let me know if your going, in LA, or follow me on twitter for updates. And yes, that is me on the back of a shared bike last year cruising around the resort during one of the session breaks with my friend Ash from Australia. Also follow the Facebook Fanpage for occasional quick updates.