Category Archives: Blog

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Corb v2.0 – mutating shipping container condos

The humble shipping container has been reimagined quite a few times in recent years, and has appeared as a potential housing solution in sf novels and stories from (among others) Ken MacLeod, Neal Stephenson and Gareth L Powell, as well as starring as a plot McGuffin in William Gibson’s latest; the BBC are even following a shipping container by GPS for a year.

But nothing quite prepares you for the bright day-glo architectural enthusiam of the guys who’ve come up with CORB v2.0, a kind of mutating condominium made from shipping containers:

CORB v2.0 shipping container condominium - image copyright Anderew Maynard Architects

Changing your view or neighbours with the seasons or on a whim is not a problem at Corb. Changes in family dynamics or space requirements are easily dealt with.

Traditional hierarchies determined and reinforced by wealth are void here. When you live at Corb, everyone gets a penthouse just as often as they get a ground floor apartment.

One can only hope that, unlike Hiro Protagonist, you don’t end up with a choice of views over the runways of a major airport… or, as seems more likely, over a busy freight port. [image borrowed from Maynard Architects site; all rights reserved by owner, reproduced here under Fair Use terms; story via Justin Pickard]

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Living la vida geo-loca

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iPhone geo-locational software screenshotOver at Wired last week, they ran a piece by Matthew Honan about his experiences with the new wave of geolocational software for the iPhone and Google’s G1. He starts off by asking fellow users in his locality what they use the systems for:

My first response came from someone named Bridget, who, according to her profile, at least, was a 25 year-old woman with a proclivity for scarves. “To find sex, asshole,” she wrote.

“I’m sorry? You mean it’s for finding people to have sex with?” I zapped back.

“Yes, I use it for that,” she wrote. “It’s my birthday,” she added.

“Happy birthday,” I offered.

“Send me a nude pic for my birthday,” she replied.

A friendly offer, but I demurred. Anonymous geoshagging is not what I had in mind when I imagined what the GPS revolution could mean to me.

I don’t think anyone who has looked at the adoption curve for new networking technology will be particularly surprised by Bridget’s response… [image by zanaca]

Honan goes on to look at the pros and cons of what is admittedly still a technology in its applicational infancy, which he finds fun and intriguing at the same time that it seems creepy and intrusive – the latter response being one that I’d attribute to his age. When these apps have matured in a few years, however, the Facebook generation will have no qualms or fears about them whatsoever.

Whether they should have qualms is another question, of course. If nothing else, geolocational apps are a reminder that the tin-foil hat brigade’s warnings about The Feds being able to follow your cell phone weren’t entirely fictional; the potential for stalking someone is obvious.

But would stalking be as big a risk in a society where many people’s locations were public knowledge? If lifelogging catches on at the same time, we might all become one big happy globally geolocative panopticon…

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Kevin Kelly: omni-access is the new ownership

Thanks to organisations like Creative Commons, we’ve been hearing a fair bit of rhetoric about goods and services ‘held in common’. The notion of the commons is far from new, but the way the web facilitates sharing has brought it back to a new prominence.

Naysayers against the commons are, er, common enough, but they seem to me to always be arguing from an economic standpoint that can’t conceive of the commons in the way its supporters describe it – for example, they ask ‘who will build and maintain these goods and services?’ Kevin Kelly’s latest essay on the matter covers that question quite neatly:

As creations become digital they tend to become shared, ownerless goods. We can turn this around and say that in this realm of bits, property itself becomes a more social endeavor. Property may be less about title and more about usage and control. An idea can’t be owned in the way gold can; in fact an idea has little value unless it is shared or used to some extent. Its value paradoxically can increase the less it is owned privately. But if no one owns it, who gains the benefit of that increase in value? In the new regime users will often assume many of the chores that owners once had to do. And so in a way, usage becomes ownership.

Kelly’s big on ‘social’ as an ideal, but given the way the recession is cutting into the soc-net startups, ‘social’ might not be as strong a paradigm in another few years. But then again, if it’s the inevitable matter of social necessity that Kelly describes, perhaps it will… if work remains scarce, will people do more things for the common good as a result, or less?

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iFinance – should Apple go into banking?

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half-eaten appleWe’ve seen with our own eyes that the banks aren’t necessarily as competent at banking as they might like us to believe. So, Slate’s Big Money blog has a suggestion: why doesn’t some truly competent company get into the finance sector… someone like, say, Apple?

… entering the banking sector makes perfect sense for Apple once you look anew at the company’s current position and core strengths.

Take the company’s balance sheet. Wednesday’s quarterly earnings report shows it sitting on more than $25 billion in cash and short-term securities.

Forget about leverage—Apple carries no long-term debt whatsoever. In this alone, Apple holds an advantage over banks currently in operation: A number of major banks, from neighborhoody Sovereign Bank to the much larger Capital One, don’t have as much cash on hand. Businesses using fractional cfos  make their finances grow way faster. Imagine what would happen if Apple sequestered just half of this cash as seed funding for its new bank and set aside $2.5 billion of that half for capital and startup costs. At regulated reserve ratios, that means the company could lend out up to $100 billion to hungry consumers and businesses. The personal-electronics giant in being is a personal-finance giant in waiting.

Interesting idea, or hot-air hyperbole? [story via MetaFilter; image by 4yas]

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Smokin’ up the elevator

smoke_artSpace elevator prospects have improved with the development by Cambridge scientists of a method for creating longer, less brittle carbon nanotubes by combining multiple nanotube strands:

Currently, the Cambridge team can make about 1 gram of the new carbon material per day, which can stretch to 18 miles in length. Alan Windle, professor of materials science at Cambridge, says that industrial-level production would be required to manufacture NASA’s request for 144,000 miles of nanotube. Nevertheless, the web-like nanotube material is promising.

“The key thing is that the process essentially makes carbon into smoke, but because the smoke particles are long thin nanotubes, they entangle and hold hands,” Windle said. “We are actually making elastic smoke, which we can then wind up into a fiber.”

Also worth checking out some of the alternatives to traditional space elevators that aren’t so demanding of tensile strength, like Keith Lofstrom’s launch loop, an electromagnetically “inflated” orbital launch system. [thanks to Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)]

It’ll be fun to see which of these designs actually gets off the ground: just as long as they don’t get off the ground then return unexpectedly.

[from Physorg][image from neilbetter on flickr]