The human thumb has a really dynamic movement, the opposing movements working together make the thumb more functional than a single finger. The Third Thumb replicates these movements by using two motors pulling against the natural tension of a flexible 3d printed material. The motors are controlled by two pressure sensors retrofitted into your shoes, under your toes, and communicate to the thumb via Bluetooth connection.
The Third Thumb Project
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Tags: mad science, mpegs, mutants, parts, robots
The law expects civilians to remain calm even when police don't
Thank you to my friends and people throughout the country who have reached out to show support in the wake of my potentially tragic encounter with Knoxville Officer Matthew Janish.I wanted to show him the keys or reach into my bag for the registration and bill of sale. I fought every impulse to do anything that would make him feel threatened. I don't have de-escalation training. I'm the one being held at gunpoint. I'm the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I'm the one expected to remain calm.
It seems that the legal system is really asking civilians to de-escalate adrenaline-fueled cops. We must remain calm while facing a loaded gun while the trained officers can panic and overreact.
What about our lives? Who protects us from the people who are supposed to protect us?
Tags: big brother, doomed, stormtroopers
Inspirobot
Every time I've tried Inspirobot it's been pretty bad, but these are ok:
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If You Care About Cities, Apple's New Campus Sucks
The new headquarters Apple is building in Cupertino has the absolute best door handles. The greatest!Apple's new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general. [...] By building a mega-headquarters straight out of the middle of the last century, Apple has exacerbated the already serious problems endemic to 21st-century suburbs like Cupertino -- transportation, housing, and economics. Apple Park is an anachronism wrapped in glass, tucked into a neighborhood. [...]
Ten percent of people working in Cupertino means that 90 percent of the people in the Spaceship will commute. Most of them live in San Jose (10 miles east) and San Francisco (45 miles north). The lack of a cohesive regional transportation network in the Bay Area privileges cars, which is why Google and other tech companies started fielding their own buses in the last few years. [...]
Still, though...Apple has $250 billion in cash. Against that, these community benefits feel small. The company could have chipped in to double the frequency of CalTrain's commuter rail. It could have built a transit center in Cupertino, which, unlike Mountain View and Palo Alto, has none. "Apple could have done anything. Money was no object," says Allison Arieff, editorial director for the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association and lead author of its recent report on corporate campuses. "They want to be innovative in everything, and they're not innovative in this thing." Apple is instead making significant improvements to roads and highways. "If the intractable problems of the region are housing and congestion, they're giving the finger to all that," Arieff says. [...]
So what could Apple have built? Something taller, with mixed-use development around it? Cupertino would never have allowed it. But putting form factor aside, the best, smartest designers and architects in the world could have tried something new. Instead it produced a building roughly the shape of a navel, and then gazed into it.
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Tags: corporations, doomed, sf, sprawl
XScreenSaver 5.37
XScreenSaver 5.37 is out now, including iOS and Android.
Only one new hack this time, Vigilance. They are panoptically adorable, aren't they? This is mainly a bug-fix and performance release. It's been a while. I have been distracted.
The Android version is much improved, thanks to the hard work of Dave and Dennis. It supports both Live Wallpaper and Daydreams now.
Tags: computers, firstperson, linux, mac, mpegs, phones, robots, xscreensaver
Current Music: Les Jumeaux -- Cobalt ♬
