The World Machine!

After the Burlington Book Camp, one of the campers asked about my inspirations for Zorgamazoo. I revealed where the general idea came from, but didn’t have time for more detail.
Notably, chapter four features an intricate lottery machine called The Hero-Selection Divining Device. While I was writing that particular passage, I drew inspiration from Franz Gsellmann’s [...]

A Better Way to Pee

You know what I love about small, industrialized, densely-populated archipelagos off the coast of Eurasia? All the interesting inventions.
In Canada we have a small population (about half that of the UK and four times smaller than Japan) combined with a lot of space. Which is our basic problem, in my opinion.
To wit: If you come [...]

Kinetica Art Fair (in London…alas)

Machiko, a close friend from London, taunted me recently with pictures of her trip to the Kinetica Art Fair. It was a show featuring the best kinetic art from across Europe and locally from the Kinetica Museum in Spitalfields.
The show featured carnivorous art, animal-machine hybrids, mechanical drawing devices, light sculptures and — perhaps my favourite [...]

Enter the Eyeborg!

Rob Spence, a one-eyed documentary filmmaker, is developing a prosthetic eye that features an embedded video camera.
He’s hoping to achieve greater intimacy in recorded interviews, which he’ll be conducting for a film on the rise of global surveillance. In an article in the Globe last week, Spence was quoted as saying he hopes to become [...]

Global Warming by Computer

It takes so much heat and energy to run (and especially cool) the vast server farms required to maintain the Internet, that apparently it won’t be long before blogging and sending emails will produce as much greenhouse gas as the automobile industry. Um, has anyone heard about this?
Crazy.
Susan Watts recently produced this mini-documentary on the [...]