Ever heard of Cordyceps fungus? It’s a fungus that attacks insects, infiltrating their body and brain — driving them mad. Eventually, it kills the insect, eats it and then violently breaks through its body near the head in tentacle forms, dispersing spores to infect any other insects that dare come close.

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The following videos are the amazing mechanical artwork of U-Ram Choe from Seoul, Korea. Somewhat reminiscent of Giger’s designs (minus Giger’s taste for sloppy edges), the smooth and organic motions of Choe’s machines provoke in me a soothing feeling of an alien and distant future. His design, the vertebrae and head shapes fit my taste exactly. Quite inspiring, aesthetically superior machinery.

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A Mr. Robert Williams was the first man to be killed by a robot, in a factory the year 1971. There exists no detailed description online of how it happened — unlike the second recorded accident which has a very descriptive story, borderlining something you’d anticipate to read in a Frank Miller comic. According to Wikipedia, it was quite gruesome:

Kenji Urada (born c. 1944, died 1981) was notable in that he was one of the first individuals killed by a robot. Urada was a 37-year old maintenance engineer at a Kawasaki plant. While working on a broken robot, he failed to turn it off completely, resulting in the robot pushing him into a grinding machine with its hydraulic arm. He died as a result.

Pushed into a grinding machine. Could it be more horrifying? Well. Of course it could. It could have been one of Samsung’s autonomous machine guns following the orders of another human. Or a SWORDS armed Talon robot. In fact, shortly after Kenji’s death I’m sure an army general heard the news from one of his nerdier soldiers and responded through the thick smoke of his cigar: “What? Haha. A robot pushed him into a … hey. Wait just a minute, can we make something like that portable?”.

I illustrated Kenji’s death for dramatic effect, and in his memory. But let’s not forget, you need intent to kill someone. Which the robot obviously didn’t have, so it was just good ol’ human error that killed poor Kenji.

Here’s something to wow over. An interactive (Windows) screensaver which visualizes the blogosphere. It’s downloadable from here — If you try it I’d appreciate to hear from you if it’s as cool as it looks, I don’t have time to play around at the moment. My gray matter is occupied with the comments of a recently peer-reviewed bookchapter I’m working on, so that in addition to my university projects makes Jack a dull boy.

Now this is one of those inventions that’s so mindnumbingly simple, yet so breathtakingly cool that I bash my head against the wall over not having thought of it first. This mechanical door, made out of multiple horizontal bars, opens to approximate the shape of what’s passing through it. It’s visually stunning — if I had enough time I’d build and install this in my house. It’s practical as well, as it probably minimizes draft and transference of dust. This seems to be the distributing company for the door, unfortunately Google Translation seemed unable to translate it (no effect).

This blade of grass was held in liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees Celsius) before it was imaged at the Scanning Electron Microscopy Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Somehow I find the phrase a blade of grass totally captivating — and this microscopic view of a frozen blade of grass borderlines poetry.

This was the Earth Science Picture of the Day from 03-17-2004.

Accordion sofa design! Stretches out from being as slim as a couple of dictionaries to being wide enough for 4-5 people Edit: 16 people. And into multiple shapes. That’s so cool.

From the company’s site:

FlexibleLove™ 16 is made entirely from recycled materials (post-consumer recycled paper and post-industrial recycled wood) and uses pre-existing production processes to reduce environmental impact during manufacture.

Dimensions: 64cm x 56cm x 22.5cm(Collapsed)/720cm(Extended)
Weight：25kgs
Supports weight up to：1920kgs

On February 14th, 1990, Voyager 1 took this picture of Earth from more than 4 billion miles away. The horizontal strokes visible on the image are light rays from the sun. In a lecture in 1996, the same year as he passed away, Carl Sagan shared his thoughts on this picture. Undoubtedly the most inspiring and insightful description to ever accompany an image of the Earth, and I couldn’t agree more:

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

In memory of Carl Sagan. His moment of being continues to inspire.

You know when you get an idea, but then realize someone else had it first? Well. It happens to me so often that I’ve developed a phrase for it: The Confiscation of Ideas. I never owned the idea, really, so it’s confiscated and returned to it’s rightful owner.

One of the latest confiscations is the idea of a Dark Restaurant; An unlit and pitch black restaurant. This would remove any unecessary visual associations and allow your tastebuds to make the most of the food. Well. I got the idea about four years ago, but it seems Blindekuh in Germany was opened 1999.

I realized it existed after finding an article about a new Dark Restaurant in Beijing (called Jingyu Du), where the waiters wear these ultra cool night vision goggles and any luminous substances or gadgets are forbidden.

Thankfully, this isn’t one of the ideas I was actually going to go through with, so I’m just looking forward to eating there. Wink.

(photo credit: XinHua)

I was making myself a toast with bananas & peanut butter (ala Elvis) when I suddenly heard music coming from my room again. Waddya know? It’s OS X’s built in Bruce voice singin’ Imagine again. This time with video!

See the lyrics here.