Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..
Designing gears is often a matter of knowing what needs to be done, but having trouble imagining into existence the perfect set of gears for the job. The above video does a great job of showing how a simple concept was refined into the elegance of design that is the modern differential gear that allows a single drive to rotate multiple wheels on a vehicle at optimal speeds to prevent slipping.
The above video is an old timey introduction to waves, using a mesmerizing mechanical simulator to demonstrate the main principles.
A basic understanding of waves can be helpful in inventing, since the principles are so similar across very different kinds of waves. Tesla was into waves, and they have applications in electrical theory. The way they build, cancel, resonate, and travel through different materials is central to understanding sound, music, vibration, earthquakes, tsunamis, light, color, economic prediction, and…well, I’ll stop listing things now, so you can watch the video in peace.
This is a self stirring pot. Why this hasn’t been put to market sometime in the past few thousands of years full of around a billion people cooking things, I don’t understand. Every one of us should be embarrassed for not coming up with this ourselves. It was created by a dentist in Japan who no doubt got sick of his noodles sticking to the bottom of his pot. He calls it Kuru-Kuru Nabe, the round and round pot.
This might even have some interesting new cooking possibilities. I wonder if you cracked an egg in there if you might end up with a doughnut shaped egg? This kind of elegant use of thermodynamics has some intriguing possibilities in other fields as well.
It’s Kinetic time once again in Arcata California. It was an overcast morning in the end of May. Labor Day weekend. A cold breeze coming in off of the ocean didn’t phase the spectators, who were out in great numbers to see a race  that seemed a bit subdued compared to olden times. The things that impressed me this year were less in the spectacle of it all, and more in the smaller details.
These guys need a bigger dinosaur. It looks like an afterthought. Putting the driver in the back seat is nothing but awesome though.
The above entry, inspired by roadkill and full of vulture pilots, is the work of Duane Flatmo. I don’t personally see his style shining through on this one, but it was my favorite among the larger entries.
Lost Coast Brewery sponsored this fire truck themed fire ant that shoots fire out its arse!
Predicting the weather in Arcata is unreliable enough that I’m not sure why we employ meteorologists, but the gamble paid off for this crew. A sunny day racing in a wookie outfit would be hellish, but the icy weather made them look more sane than those in shorts. A tribute to the sasquatch or bigfoot which are rumored to inhabit local forests.
The one and two seater contestants really made the race this year. I love this FlintStones inspired car. It seemed well engineered and convincing and they weren’t having any trouble getting around. I’m not sure how the steering works.
This little crab was awesome. Both his arms and claws were fully functional and I have no doubt anything messing with him would have gotten a good pinching. His little eyestalks were on springs.
This one ought to be fun in the bay. These two chicks in a frying pan had a jet of fire above their heads.
It doesn’t look lime much in photo, but this one impressed me more than any of the others. I’m not sure what the creature on the front is. It is deer-like, but had something dragon-like about it as well. It had a strikingly complex seris of controls operated by the lone driver via several levers.
Sometimes all it takes is someone going a small extra step in order to bring something from good to great. There were lots of people in mushroom suits racing around, but going with the full body suit with eyeholes makes this guy look like a viable super hero. The above gnome is best seen in motion, since he gets around by bouncing rather than pedaling. To see him and all the rest, check out Bob Doran’s video below of the first two laps around the plaza at the start of the race. In the coming days the race will go through the dunes, across the bay, and all the way down to Ferndale.
War is about to change in a way not seen since the invention of the missile. DARPA (the defense Department’s advanced research wing) is showing off a scaled up version of Big Dog they are calling Alpha Dog, or Bull Dog. It resembles an actual bull more than any kind of dog, which reminds me of a recent story on adaptive camouflage in which researchers were attaching panels to mask most the infrared signature of tanks, and could project what would look like a walking cow onto the siede of the tank to further remove suspicion. In the case of Alpha dog, rather than projecting the cow on the tank, they seem to be putting the tank in the cow.
More interesting though, is what this says about the ever present arms race. The United States has been the dominant military power in the world, but has had troubles of late with small decentralized terrorist groups. Imagine if they were to convert an auto manufacturer to pump out tens of thousands of weaponized robotic mountain goats. It sounds a bit far fetched, but I don’t see what is stopping them really. Just with the tech they have shown the public, they already show themselves to have the tech not only to do this, but also to make them mostly autonomous. The toughest part at this point might just be giving them a power source that wouldn’t give us problems if it were captured.
It makes sense that the U.S. has cut funding for some of its largest budgeted fighter jets and other new tech. The next war will be lost to the people with the best drone offense and laser defense. What chance does a fighter pilot have against a drone immune to G forces, or a ground based laser system that shreds it from miles away at the speed of light?
In related news, there have been reports that the U.S. drones have contracted some kind of computer virus.
Why hasn’t anyone told me about popsicle stick bombs? These have so much more potential for mischief than dominoes.
For some simple instructions and complex constructions out of these frame bombs, check out framebomb.com
And if the thought of eating all those popsicles makes you blue, you can get a thousand popsicle sticks on amazon for under ten bucks.
Not a year goes by lately without Festo coming out with some awesome new biomimetic toys, well, industrial automation really, but you can bet these will be in toy stores in some form within a year or two.
This time, they’ve created a bionic seagull, fully autonomous from takeoff to landing. It uses the same kind of active torsion to take advantage of vortices that flying animals use to get that extra edge in flight that has previously been hard to duplicate in man made devices. Turning is accomplished wit a tilt of the tail.
Rather than using lighter than air materials like in their past projects,the SmartBird frame is constructed from carbon fiber, polyeurathane foam and other lightweight but strong materials, yet they’ve still managed to keep it aloft even with the weight of the brains, batteries, motors, and even a radio transmitter. Video below.
For more technical specs, check out their pdf
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If you are anything like me, math class was only good for one thing: Quieting down that analytical part of the brain long enough to get in some good doodling, which is why, in order to pass a math class, I had to stop bringing paper and just hope I could absorb something from the lecture before passing out from boredom. Now I find I just had the wrong teacher. If Vi Hart were my teacher, I think I would have learned at lightning speed. Check out the videos above for a sample.
Here’s another:
If you like the concept of learning math, but don’t relish the slogging through textbooks, I highly recommend her site. I actually learned some very helpful things in most of the videos I’ve watched so far, and I enjoyed it. http://vihart.com/