Here’s a roundup of the most colorful art, products, websites and such that I’ve come across in the last week.
Illustration/Web
COLOURBOX
colourboxonline.com; taktak.net
A wonderfully built and designed portfolio site for talented illustrator colourbox. The site allows visitors to sort through the work by color.
There’s also a fun drawing app, or kind of visual ‘guest book’ for visitors to create their own colored pixel signature then save it to a flickr account. The site was created by taktak.net
City
Light Lane Concept
A great concept that uses lights to both draw attention to a cyclist at night and effectively create a safety parameter giving drivers a visual boundary to avoid when no bike lane is present.
click for full size
The problem isn’t just about visibility, as safety lights are effective at capturing the attention of a driver. However, these lights are typically constrained to the bike frame, which highlights only a fraction of the bike’s envelope. Bike lanes have proven to be an effective method of protecting cyclists on congested roads. One key is that the lane establishes a well defined boundary beyond the envelope of the bicycle, providing a greater margin of safety between the car and the cyclist…
Instead of adapting cycling to established bike lanes, the bike lane should adapt to the cyclists. This is the idea behind the LightLane. Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative.
Science
Robot History
A colorful article over at designboom about the history of robots…
automated machines which led to the development of the industrial robots currently available today.
in the greek myth pygmalion, king of cyprus, is a sculptor who fell in love with his ivory statue of a woman. his passion was so overwhelming, that he asked aphrodite to transform the statue into a living person.
one of the earliest documented automata makers was hero of alexandria, a greek mathematician, physicist and engineer who lived in 10-70 AD. descriptions on various automata (automaton meaning: moving itself) are included in see hero’s pneumatics here.
leonardo da vinci sketched a complex automaton around the year 1495. the design of leonardo’s robot was not rediscovered until the 1950s. the robot, which appears in hiss sketches, could, if built successfully, move its arms, twist its head, and sit up.
