“makedo is a connector system that enables materials including cardboard, plastic and fabric to easily join together to form new objects or structures.”
Fun, I wish I had a set to build a big monster from all those cardboard boxes I have.
tech
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, 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! 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.”
Ha. Your fingerprint trails show what you were last doing on your iPad or any touch phone to some degree. I can usually tell what someone is doing just by their finger movements standing in front of them, especially for Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and chatting.
via design language
(thanks ray)
This reminds me of the NounProject. Both look great:
“Icotrip.com is like a road movie in the world of icons. Every day, you will discover a new (ico)trip experience! Don’t wait for a conventional icon because you will be disappointed! Icotrip is the world of the offbeat humour! Be strong, I trust you dear visitor…”
Pretty slick looking are these Inner City Bikes, which seem to essentially take 2 unicycles and stick them together for a fast looking 1:1 ratio bike. I’m not sure how they feel, but they do look pretty futuristic and the build quality looks nice. I’m questioning structure a bit but hey, it looks good. No pricing has been set. Watch the youtube video of this bike in action after the jump or here.
What appears at first to be a flock of smart starling birds doing their thing around an invisible box between the US and Canadian border near Vancouver is actually a billboard sculpture by Lead Pencil Studio built from thousands of metal rods swarming a shape as if a billboard to draw attention to the living landscape behind.
“Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape… this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.”
This project reminds me a bit of the CityScape project though using several wooden 2×4’s with a mix of the ad free billboard law in Sao Paulo.
Multiple images by Ian Gill courtesy of Lead Pencil Studio, via fastcodesign, after the jump.
Wow. It’s mind boggling think about cultures and groups of people that have been uncontacted in our world, living incredibly different lives, away from technology, the industrial revolution, print, the internet, science, air transportation, and everyday things we take for granted. Watch the video above, and read tons more about these uncontacted tribes at UncontactedTribes.org. I’ll mirror a few of the astonishing pictures after the jump.
” Video of an uncontacted tribe spotted in the Brazilian jungle has been released, bringing them to life in ways that photographs alone cannot.
The tribe, believed to be Panoa Indians, have been monitored from a distance by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, a government agency charged with handling the nation’s indigenous communities. Many of the world’s 100 or so uncontacted tribes live in the Amazon.
Until 1987, it was government policy to contact such people. But contact is fraught with problems, especially disease; people who have stayed isolated from the mainstream world have stayed isolated from its pathogens, and have little immunity to our diseases. Brazilian government policy is now to watch from afar, and — at least in principle — to protect uncontacted tribes from intrusion.
Unfortunately, uncontacted tribes usually live in resource-rich areas threatened by logging, mining and other development. There’s often pressure on governments to turn a blind eye. Videos like this, released by tribal advocacy group Survival International and produced by the BBC’s Human Planet program, are legal proof that uncontacted tribes still exist, and deserve protection.”
video via wired science
Wired story and pictures mirrored after the jump
I’m not sure what to think here, but this project by Jarashi Suki at IAMAS Ubiqutous Interaction Research Group, is one of those projects that make you go woa, wow, oh what if this and that! Watch the video above as these dominos are enabled to fall over at a set time and you can do a variety of, well, lets just say interesting things… I want a set!!! Check out his vimeo site of projects, and his website which I must say is one weird home page, but fun!
Google Art Project is StreetMaps inside several museums plus more. You can explore several museums across the world, while looking at a painting really close or from far away, you can watch Youtube videos about them as your curator, and you can create your own collections. It’s like having the worlds best museum all in 1 webpage! If you own or curate a museum, you can submit your library to the ArtProject as well.
The Noun Projects is a visual library of icons representing everyday things we stumble upon daily, but this library is free to the public for use under Creative Commons. Pretty sweet project, and they also have Kickstarter page if ya want to help them out.
Heres a bit more about them:
Mission
“sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world’s visual language”
The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way. Here is our pledge to you:
FREE
The symbols on this site are and always will remain free. We believe symbols can not be effectively shared with the world if they are not free.
SIMPLE
Everyone like simplicity. We want you to be able to come to our site and effortlessly find and obtain what you are looking for. Simple as that.
FUN
We think a language that can be understood by all cultures and people is a pretty amazing thing. We also think our symbols and the objects or ideas they represent are works of art worth celebrating. Check out our store.
HIGHEST QUALITY
We get excited about things like scale, proportion, and shape. We are committed to design and quality in everything we do.