Urban Honking

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 [...]

I was recently invited to tag along as an artist-in-residence/photographer for the Columbia River Keeper’s annual kayak/paddle trip down the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River.  The Reach is the river’s last remaining stretch of free-flowing current and runs right by the decommissioned Hanford Nuclear Reservation- a WWII/Cold War reactor where plutonium for most of [...]

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 [...]

This world is a Haven for Extra-terrestrial Stones. The Earth Yields them, Nestled in the dirt and Thoroughly unconcerned with Humanity. Every night, They quietly Invent perfect Copies of Men. A dream is all we are, the Nightmares of a jewel.

Virtual Light is the first book of William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, in which an nonfunctional, shanty-town Golden Gate bridge is a major feature. Like his previous “Sprawl” trilogy, it leans low and hard into its dystopian city-scape, positing a completely probable slumification of the modern metropolis — one which has developed laterally, growing in spontaneous [...]