"With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future"
- Yohji Yamamoto
Aerographite has been dethroned as the world’s lightest substance, replaced by a new form of graphene aerogel.
“Now, a new graphene aerogel created by scientists led by professor Gao Chao at the Zhejiang University has swept past, weighing in at just 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimetre.
For reference, the density of air is 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimetre — so the new material is 7.5 times lighter than air. It’s twice as heavy as hydrogen — the lightest element there is — but beats out helium, which has a density of 0.1786 milligrams per cubic centimetre.”
Via io9
Imperfection might be the price for democracy
Are Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg scary people to have in the world?
A lot of the services they build are useful services. I use Google products all the time. People who are building a service which I pay for with my privacy or money I’m quite okay with. But as time goes by they aspire to do many things that go beyond their business and their initial set of commercial concerns.
We don’t treat them with the level of criticism and scrutiny that they deserve, we assume they are in the business of information which is a benign business and they are part of the enlightenment project. We tend not to think they have shareholders, commercial agendas and are run by people who might not have a very deep appreciation of the human condition and the world around us.
I have a lot of respect for these people as engineers but they are been asked to take on tasks that go far beyond engineering. Tasks that have to do with human and social engineering rather than technical engineering. Those are the kind of tasks I would prefer were taken on by human beings who are more well rounded, who know about philosophy and ethics, and know something about things other than efficiency, because it will not end well.
We did not elect them to help us solve our problems. Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google. We are abandoning all the checks and balances we have built to keep our public officials in check for these cleaner, neater, more efficient technological solutions. Imperfection might be the price for democracy.
Evgeny Morozov / Source
Cardboard Plotter by Niklas Roy
This plotter is made entirely out of cardboard, welding rod, rubber bands, adhesive tape and super glue. The digital memory is a little book with plenty of different drawing codes, which are written down as coordinates. In this video I’m entering the first code, which makes the plotter draw “hello world”.
