Gemma, a 1" diameter Arduino-compatible board for wearable electronics

Gemma, a 1″ diameter Arduino-compatible board for wearable electronics:

Adafruit has announced “Gemma,” a bite-sized, Arduino compatible board intended for use in wearable electronics projects. It measures 1″ in diameter, and while it’s not shipping yet, they’re taking names for people who want to get ’em when they ship:

*
Powered by the ATtiny85 with 3 available I/O pins, one of which is also an analog input and two which can do PWM output*

Progammable over the micro USB connection*

Onboard 3.3v Regulator and power LED*

Reset button*

Works with our Flora NeoPixels (can drive about a dozen – not much RAM!)*

Super tiny design, only 1″ (25mm) diameter & 4mm thick

Adafruit Gemma – Miniature wearable electronic platform

(Thanks, Matthew!)


How Doctors Die

[This would be more compelling to me if he’d included some supporting data, but still interesting. -egg]

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How Doctors Die

Photo: patrick.ward04.

Ken Murray, Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, writes about his experience of how his peers in medicine tend to handle end-of-life issues.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Zócalo Public Square :: How Doctors Die.


The hobbit reimagined as a Golden Book

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The hobbit reimagined as a Golden Book

Rosemary says: “At school we are all busy putting together our portfolios to apply for co op placements this summer and one of my teachers keeps talking about ‘making art you want to get hired to do’. Well I would love to be hired to illustrate a kids book one day and man would I ever love to work on a Tolkien adaptation!”

A Little Tokien Book


“The world is fundamentally changing; the economic…

[This is pretty much my perspective. “Since there simply won’t be enough job slots for the entire population, we’re going to have to account for the shortfall, and recognize that work, as we currently conceive it, will no longer be the average person’s principal contribution to society. If we’re intent on maintaining a capitalist economy, there’s going to have to be a basic allowance allotted to citizens that’s untethered to the labor market—because pretty soon, the numbers just won’t add up. There won’t be any realistic route to full employment when robots become cheap, efficient, and flexible enough.” -egg]
“The world is fundamentally changing; the economic…:

“The world is fundamentally changing; the economic assumptions that currently gird our society will be meaningless in as soon as a few decades. And we’d better get ready to prepare for that shift—if we don’t adjust the current socio-economic structure, we’re going to have mass joblessness, and society-wide chaos. We’re going to need to fundamentally reform not just our policies but our attitudes towards work. We’re going to need to re-engineer the social safety net from the ground up to account for the fact that robots are taking over on the labor front.”
Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon Are Worth $1 Trillion, but Only Create 150,000 Jobs. It’s Time to Reassess the Future of Work | Motherboard

Kids should learn programming as well as reading and writing

Kids should learn programming as well as reading and writing:

Here’s Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (whence the kids’ programming language Scratch comes) doing a TedX talk about the role of programming in education, arguing that kids should learn to code so that they can use code to learn:


Most people view computer coding as a narrow technical skill. Not Mitch Resnick. He argues that the ability to code, like the ability to read and write, is becoming essential for full participation in today’s society. And he demonstrates how Scratch programming software from the MIT Media Lab makes coding accessible and appealing to everyone — from elementary-school children to his 83-year-old mom.

As director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, Mitch Resnick designs new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and finger paint of kindergarten, engage people of all ages in creative learning experiences.


Reading, Writing, and Programming: Mitch Resnick at TEDxBeaconStreet

(Thanks, Mitch!)


3D printed house to emerge

3D printed house to emerge:

A Dutch architecture firm plans on using a D-Shape 3D printer to output a house in the shape of a Mobius strip, a project they estimate will take 18 months:


Dutch architecture studio Universe Architecture is planning to construct a house with a 3D printer for the first time.

The Landscape House will be printed in sections using the giant D-Shape printer, which can produce sections of up to 6 x 9 metres using a mixture of sand and a binding agent.

Architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture will collaborate with Italian inventor Enrico Dini, who developed the D-Shape printer, to build the house, which has a looping form based on a Möbius strip.

Dutch architects to use 3D printer to print a house

(via Beyond the Beyond)


TARDIS dress is bigger on the inside

[Hot damn. -egg]

TARDIS dress is bigger on the inside:

Jere7my sez, “This lovely young woman brought the house down at Arisia this year with her stunning “TARDIS Princess” dress. A “door” on the skirt opened to show the TARDIS control room, giving it the illusion of being “bigger on the inside”… I believe the creator/model is Sasha Trabane.”

TARDIS dress.

(Thanks, Jere7my!)


Parasitic wasp sanitizes its victims from the inside out

[GAAAAAAAAAH. -egg]
Parasitic wasp sanitizes its victims from the inside out: So, the downside is that you are being eaten alive, from the inside out, by a wasp larva. On the plus side, though, at least it has the courtesy to disinfect you as it goes along. At Nature News you can watch a baby cockroach wasp burrows around through the insides of an American cockroach, leaving a trail of clear, liquid anti-microbials in its wake.