Urban Honking

Through me you go to the grief wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only [...]

In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with photosensitive chemicals, which began gradually fading the words and images from the book’s first exposure [...]

A villanelle is a kind of 19th-century French poem long derided by modern poets for its fusty, pompous formalism —but, like many things, revived when the madness of the 20th century brought about nostalgia for structure. H.G. Wells was a prophetic writer and social critic who has gone in and out of favor since his [...]

The original cover’s horny pronouncement: “Alien Satellites Circle the Earth–and Man’s Only Hope is a Mad Cartoonist!?” The Zap Gun is one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser “pot-boiler” novels. It was originally serialized, so it’s shitty in the way that novels always are when it’s clear a writer is being paid by the word, useless [...]

This past weekend, I had the honor of participating in Art && Code 3D, a conference hosted by Golan Levin of the CMU Studio for Creative Inquiry about DIY 3D sensing. It was, much as Matt Jones predicted, “Woodstock for the robot-readable world”. I gave two talks at the conference, but those aren’t what I [...]

A few friends and I have been running 2020.tumblr.com since 2008. We collect bits of the future that bleed into our present. Every day we find strange new architecture ideas, prototype weapon systems, care-taking robots, artificial reality apps, cybernetic implants, biofeedback machines, military hackers, and more seemingly science fiction that is happening today. This future-present [...]

I’m proud to announce that my book, Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, and Arduino, is now available from O’Reilly. You can buy the book through O’Reilly’s Early Release program here. The Early Release program lets us get the book out to you while O’Reilly’s still editing and designing it and I’m still [...]

The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite…

Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space.

As i…

Our concept of time can be adjusted. In a study on the perception of time participants were exposed to flashes of light at set intervals. After being exposed to 100 flashes that lasted 150 milliseconds participants felt that flashes of 300 milliseconds were closer to 400. I’ve read about the “optimum length” for online articles [...]

Our concept of time can be adjusted. In a study on the perception of time participants were exposed to flashes of light at set intervals. After being exposed to 100 flashes that lasted 150 milliseconds participants felt that flashes of 300 milliseconds were closer to 400. I’ve read about the “optimum length” for online articles [...]