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3D printed exploratory spiders

Fraunhofer’s 3D printed exploration spiders are intended for use “as an exploratory tool in environments that are too hazardous for humans, or too difficult to get to.” They use hydraulic bellows to execute advanced maneuvers, including jumping:

With its long extremities, the spider has a range of ways to get around. Some models can even jump. This is possible using hydraulically operated bellows drives that serve as joints and keep limbs mobile. With no muscles to stretch their legs, these creatures build up high levels of body pressure that they then use to pump fluid into their limbs. Shooting fluid into the legs extends them. “We took this mobility principle and applied it to our bionic, computer-controlled lightweight robot. Its eight legs and body are also fitted with elastic drive bellows that operate pneumatically to bend and extend its artificial limbs,” explains Dipl.-Ing. Ralf Becker, a scientist at IPA. The components required for locomotion, such as the control unit, valves and compressor pump, are located in the robot’s body; the body can also carry various measuring devices and sensors, depending on the application at hand. Hinges interoperate with the bellows drives so that the legs can move forward and turn as needed. Diagonally opposed members move simultaneously, too. Bending the front pairs of legs pulls the robotic spider’s body along, while stretching the rear extremities pushes it.

High-tech spider for hazardous missions

(via JWZ)

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Magic Makes Time

The 9am El Salvadorian sun beat down like a drum. And here we were trying to move a two-ton mound of dirt with nothing but the most primitive tools.

In my hand was a shovel. The blade of the rusty, cracked spade bit down again and again. Every other scoop it would hit a rock, decelerate to zero, and send a jolt through its handle. I wanted nothing more than to sit in the shade and sip fresh green coconuts. But we had many more hours and days to go and the sun had hours more of rising to do. I kept reaching for a phone that was not there to distract me from the discomfort. In its place, I retreated into a day dream filled with air conditioners, coca cola in frosty bottles and orange creamsicles; dump trucks, caterpillars and back hoes of cold, scratched up metal. And the beach. Which I could get to quicker if only we had better tools. Better technology.

***

A month ago I boarded a plane from California to El Salvador. I was going to surf. But I was also going help build the region’s first high school through Surf For Life, a non profit that tucks surf vacations inside of charity work. Most of the rest of the gang came from my sleepy, foggy neighborhood, the Sunset, which is like a little secret beach town inside of San Francisco.

There’s Danny Hess, the gentle giant and former Ventura, California lifeguard who ended up pioneering the modern wooden surfboard. His wife Erin Kunkel, a photographer who took the better photos in this story. And Jay Nelson, an artist who is famous for his treehouses and fantasy techno-surf vehicles that evoke buckminster fuller’s dynocar and geodesic domes.*

I travelled with a bright blue duffel bag filled with gadgets donated for the school’s first computer lab: laptops from Lenovo, cameras from

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What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?

Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs’ Zen teacher. Courtesy kobun-sama.org.

At PLOS, Steve Silberman goes in depth into the influence that Steve’s Buddhist teachers had on Apple’s mission and its products.

“I found myself in a unique position to write it, since I knew Jobs’ teacher Kobun Chino, and studied at Zen Center around the same time that Steve did,” Silberman tells Boing Boing. “I include a quote from a never-published interview with Steve at the end.”

As a young seeker in the ’70s, Jobs didn’t just dabble in Zen, appropriating its elliptical aesthetic as a kind of exotic cologne. He turns out to have been a serious, diligent practitioner who undertook lengthy meditation retreats at Tassajara — the first Zen monastery in America, located at the end of a twisting dirt road in the mountains above Carmel — spending weeks on end “facing the wall,” as Zen students say, to observe the activity of his own mind.

Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Using the mind to watch the mind, and ultimately to change how the mind works, is known in cognitive psychology as metacognition. Beneath the poetic cultural trappings of Buddhism, what intensive meditation offers to long-term practitioners is a kind of metacognitive hack of the human operating system (a metaphor that probably crossed Jobs’ mind at some point.) Sitting zazen offered Jobs a practical technique for upgrading the motherboard in his head.

Read the full article here.

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Class War funnies: 1935 Daily Worker comics

Ruling Clawss was a Daily Worker comic strip by “A Redfield,” better known for his contributions to the New Yorker under the name Syd Hoff. The strips are pretty resonant today, amid the Occupy uprisings and crackdowns.

Syd Hoff’s Teeth: The Leftist Satire of A. Redfield

(via MeFi)

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OWS: the sand-sculpture/Day of the Dead edition

Carl Jara writes, “Calavera del Toro: Gold Medal sand sculpture by Carl Jara, depicts Occupy Wall Street in a Day of the Dead satire. Created last weekend at Sand Castle Days in South Padre Island, Texas. A banker and a politician sit comfortably toasting their overflowing champagne flutes to the skull of their recently slain Wall Street bull, draped in a Golden Parachute.”

Calavera del Toro

(Thanks, Carl!)