Another new tool appears in the arsenal of marketers for their eternal crusade to make us buy overpriced crap we don’t need – the FogScreen projects imagery onto a vertical sheet of engineered water mist, effectively creating a billboard that can be walked through without physical harm . As someone who subscribes to the Bill Hicks philosophy on marketing [YouTube, very NSFW] , I’m not looking forward to having to step through one of those for every few yards of street I walk down.
Talking of advertising, BoingBoing draws our attention to the exploits of Cayetano Ferrer, who produces billboards decorated with pictures of the things that the billboard hides with its bulk . Maybe he also shares the Hicks philosophy, and this is some way of deconstructing the advertising paradigm. Then again, he’s an artist – so he’s probably just trying to sell himself. Quelle paradox !
First the good news – scientists may have cracked a way of making objects levitate . Now the bad news – this jiggery-pokery with something called the Casimir force only works at the nanoscale so far. [OhGizmo! ]
Which means it’s no use for making commercial flying machines, of course, which is a shame. But new environmental pressures are bringing new ideas and designs to the aviation table – I’d really like to see this ‘flying saucer’ aircraft concept make it into the commercial arena . [BeyondTheBeyond ]
It would suck to get the ability and technology to get to space, but be trapped by an orbiting cloud of space debris that stops us from launching in the near future…
“A New Kind of Science” is now available online , for free, in a really sharp, full color format. I won’t even pretend I’m going to read it, but if I ever do get the gumption to tackle it I’ll probably try it out online before I refinance my house to buy the book. [boingboing]
Google and many others want you to contribute to their mapping solutions. I won’t try to improve on Brady Forrest’s write up at O’Reilly Radar , except to say that if you haven’t checked out the Open Street Map yet, you should.
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