All things future

“Rock Port, Missouri, is a small city of 1,300 people, and they just made history by being the first city in the US to be 100% powered by the wind, also making them #1 in the US for percentage of renewable energy. The Loess Hills Wind Farm, built by the Wind Capital Group, employing 500 workers from 20 states for about a year, is expected to produce about 16 million kilowatt hours annually, while Rock Port only uses 13 million. The excess wind power will be sold to other communities in the area.”

Way to go Rock Port!

[via TreeHugger | photo by andrijbulba]

[YouTube | Bumptop | via Spatial Robots]

[Jason Calacanis | Tesla Motors]

[by Montrasio International on Flickr]

Click the button at the top right to view it large and in charge. Or right click and zoom in.

[Scribd | Download as pdf]

Here is a machine can makes copies of itself:

Here is a robot that can re assemble itself:

What happens when these two technologies are combined?

More on the reprap:

(download this video 179 MB)

[RepRap | Adrian Bowyer @ Poptech]

[YouTube | see also headless robot dog]

[Youtube | Festo Air Jelly | via Sean]

[Artwork by Daniel Dociu | Larger Photos @ Flickr | Interview @ BLDGBLOG]

The Pharos Lens
Drawn from the lighthouse metaphor, the Pharos lens offers a point of reference. It signals and documents the environmental and social performance of products in the marketplace. The Pharos Label will accompany the lens and offer more information than any other green label in the market, including the ability to compare the actual ingredients and attributes of products that bear the label.

Lens Description
The Lens is comprised of a series of wedges that are each assigned a different social or environmental issue. The number of current wedges was determined through a consensus process amongst the Pharos Project team reflecting their vision and expertise. The wedges are not arbitrarily capped at a certain number. This preliminary list of issues is meant to start the discussions on the Pharos Wiki.

The overall intent of the tool will be to organize a vast amount of important environmental and social information into a format that is easily grasped by the consumer. Color is used to set the tool apart with shades of red, yellow, and green graphically showing relative performance on the scale.
Organized around the lens are a series of concentric circles creating the evaluation scale for any particular issue/wedge. The scales are not intended to be the same for each issue – in fact, each will have to reflect the particular set of issues that govern it.

The wedges are grouped into three sectors that serve as organizing elements within the Pharos tool:

• Environment & Resources
• Health & Pollution
• Social & Community

The lens demonstrates the ultimate complexity of material evaluations by highlighting all the issues at once showing that some products may do well in some categories, but poorly in others. It also allows for organizations and individuals to focus in on specific issues in more detail, or to consider a broad range of issues in its selection of materials.

[Pharos Project]

[by Kiel Bryant on Flickr]

[by JulianBleecker on Flickr]

“This bike was the most radical concept of it’s time. It totally epitomizes the “Space Age” with it’s design. This bike looks like it was designed for NASA. It is made up of fiberglass and features built in headlights and rear fender. Designed by Benjamin Bowden, there was a prototype built and displayed in 1948. The production bikes however were made and sold only one year, 1960.”

[Bowden Spacelander via Dinosaurs and Robots]

[Youtube | vipr]

“Enkin introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices.”

“This project is a submission for the first round of the Google Android Developer Challenge and should not be considered a final product. If you want to learn about it in depth, please read our detailed”

[Enkin]

[by Grain Edit.com on Flickr]

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo | listen to this while watching

Some photos tagged robot:

[Learning from the Future with Nova Spivack on Vimeo | RapidStage]

photo by jared

“Last year Google’s archives touched 100 exabytes of data from the web. To put that in perspective, that’s about 107 billion gigabytes (or, over a half a million 200 GB hard drives). The entire catalog of the Library of Congress is about 136 terabytes — which makes Google’s archive the data equivalent of 771,000 Libraries of Congress.”

[Interesting thread on this subject over at Read Write Web]

UPDATE: This was created by Radoslav Zilinsky

[must be viewed large | not sure what the original source is but saw this here]