Kinetic Sculpture Race 2011

It’s kinetic time once again in Humboldt County California, and this year there were even more challenges than usual for our brave contestants. The weather has thrown them the usual mix of sun, hail, and rainbows, but this year, in addition to slogging through sand dunes, the bay, and 42 miles of track, they also got to slog through months of politics.

Most of the entries this year seemed a bit sub-par. The bigger contestants like Calistoga and Yakima are no longer in it, and most of the rest are just new paint jobs on last year’s model, though I can see why. It all started with disputes over who was in charge, licensing problems, and threats of cancellation. Why would anyone put months of effort into building a sculpture for a race that may not even happen? On that note, I’ve got a message for those involved in the politics: nobody cares who you are, so either get your crap together or hand over the reigns to someone who will.

This year, the politics went too far. When officials barred Tess and Sara Kraus from piloting their tiger (below, made by local high school students) for failing to prove their age, these two responded in true Amazon style by getting up and rousing chanting supporters from the crowd with a speech that would make Xena proud. In the end, parents had to take the place of the devastated teens, and pedal the float past the officials, at which point they switched back, and continued on. They’ve been told they will not be treated as a part of the race, all in the name of some liability tyrant.  Well, I hope someone feels safer now.

There was certainly no lack of enthusiasm though, and turnout was good, considering. I was glad to see the Endeavor entry come in first on day one. NASA needs a victory under their belt after the gutting of our space program. The high ground and the best technology have won nearly every war and industrial race in history, and those of the future will be no exception.

This albino gorilla even seemed to be having some trouble with the law. I moved on after taking this shot, but I expect the gorilla is in Guantanamo by now.

Above is this year’s entry from Duane Flatmo, a man who puts out so much awesome every year that I’m tempted to put him in the site navigation. I’m not that impressed with the conversion this year after seeing his last several entries, but taken on its own merit against the rest of the field, it is still a contender for number one.

And it breathes fire!

This one gets my vote for most questionable engineering. Maybe I was missing something, but these guys were pedaling like mad and going at a slow walking pace. The guy next to them even felt the need to put his foot on the ground to keep his bike from falling over, and it sounded like they were using their pedaling to tumble rocks in their pontoons rather than for propulsion. It looks heavy, but it was apparently blown over by the winds at the dunes.

Gloryopolis, above, is another great entry. You may remember them from last year’s Classical Nudes sculpture. They reused a well engineered base, but did a complete overhaul of the art. This is what it’s all about, and they pulled off the superhero theme better than I’ve seen done before.

There are some interesting regulars in the race that don’t get a lot of notice, like the dog above. I’ve posted pictures of this cycle/dog pair before, and now I’m curious. Has this dog been in the race since it was a pup? I’m going to have to go through my old pictures. The salmon on the right was entirely scaled with compact discs.

There are hundreds of people in single person contraptions and bicycles as well. I don’t know if it is home made or off the shelf, but I want the cycle below. It looked comfortable, efficient, and she could turn it 360° in place.

If you would like to see more coverage from Kinetic Sculpture Races past, check out my coverage from past years at the links below:

2010

2009

SmartBird – Festo Robotic Flapping Bird

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

Related Posts:

Festo Robotic Penguins

Festo Air Jelly

Lighter than air posts

Robotics posts

Ten Million Dollar Idea?

I’m a big fan of X-Prize style innovation. Instead of hiring a research team, and building a whole facility to research a subject, just start adding to a prize fund for whoever the first person is to give you the answer you seek. This way, you end up getting facilities, minds, correlations, and other resources you may not have realized existed working for you, all without paying a cent until you see results.

Several years ago, Google started a project along these lines, asking the public for their ideas to change the world. They offered big connections and prize money to those ideas they chose as the best. They ended up far behind schedule, and I wasn’t that impressed with their choices in the end, but I like that they tried. My submission is below:

A data path exists for processing credit and debit transactions at stores. Use this system to upload store receipts to online accounts. The customer could then use their account at home (like online banking) to use this information as they see fit, and the aggregated data could be used to varying degrees (allowing for privacy) to better the retail system.

• Like online banking or Amazon recommendations, it could be both secure and useful to all involved.
• Allows people to track their own spending in an interactive fashion while saving manhours.
• Potential for adsense like contextual marketing.
• Could merge with personal finance software, calculate nutritional intake for dieters, alert people with allergies. etc.
• Affects a large portion of the world (everywhere you want to be).
• Employers can keep tabs on company credit card usage.
• Checkboxes to make easy tallying and splitting of bills for roomates.
• Reminders or suggestions for recurring purchases.
• Easy to find one click tech support, manuals for bought products.
• Competing stores could send advertising telling you how much you would have saved shopping with them.
• Quicky target customers with product recalls. This could have prevented many deaths recently in China.
• Could integrate with massive medical databases to find hidden correlations between products and health.
• Manufacturers could target customers with coupons and offers.
• Environmental: Saves paper on receipts, manuals, coupons, advertisements, as well as the other impacts from creation and delivery of such products.
• Google is one of the very few companies with the resources, expertise, and trustworthiness to make this a reality. If you don’t do it, who will?

What problem or issue does your idea address?

• Waste Management
• Deforestation
• Clutter
• Wasted man-hours
• Unnoticed product recalls
• Compulsive spending
• Allergic reactions
• Credit Fraud
• Running out of milk
• Lost product manual/warranty
• Advertising wasted on the uninterested
• Medical research
• Landfills

Involuntary Collaboration

Involuntary collaboration refers to a project contributed to by multiple parties in which at least one of those parties did not intend to be working with the others. Examples include things like covers of songs, spoofs of movies, and in the case of the pictures above (painted in part by Chris McMahon), unwanted landscape paintings bought at yard sales, which he then painted monsters into. I think they’re brilliant, and would be a perfect DIY project to hang in your kid’s room, or send to your grandmother.

A similar process (seen below from The Monster Engine), has adults upgrading children’s drawings of monsters to add realism. Sometimes the toughest thing for an artist can be just sitting in front of the canvas wondering what to paint, or going through all the trouble of painting a whole landscape when what they really want to paint is a big hairy monster, and it can be hard to throw away original artwork, even if it is boring.

Related Posts:

Involuntary Collaborations

Lunch Thief Stealing Your Lunch?

Lunch theft is a serious problem in some offices. You go through all the trouble of shopping, cooking, and then hauling it al the way to work, only to find yourself hungry, angry, and without a plan. Well heres the plan for next week: anti-theft lunch bags, available here.

Alternatively, you could just sprinkle a bit of spirulina powder on the bread. This will make it more healthy and give you the same effect.

If all else fails, this Ghost Pepper Naga Jolokia is one of the hottest hot sauces out there.  Add a very liberal dose to a decoy lunch, and then go out to eat, secure in the knowledge that while you are enjoying your lunch, some thief is getting a preview of their afterlife.

Green Advertising with Reverse Graffiti

Eco friendly marketing is a rapidly growing field, as it should be. With an ever growing number of consumers taking such things into account when choosing which companies to support, a marketer needs to as well, or see their market share go to their competitor.

Now this method in particular isn’t for everyone, as it has social implications from being a bit radical, but some companies have taken to power washing their logo onto dirty sidewalks. It’s hard to prosecute someone for only cleaning part of the sidewalk, and if anyone wants to remove the branding, they have to finish the job. It’s win-win.

See Also:

Reverse Graffiti

(via DudeCraft)

I Made You a Wig

MrsWoman knitted her husband a wig. An Elvis wig.

Why? Well, if you need to ask that, you’re on the wrong website. If I ever go bald, I’m gonna have me a closet full of knitted hair.

(Via the PreSurfer)

See also:

I Made You a Beard

Plastic Molding

Liquid plastic casting resins tend to be expensive and have set properties that limit your flexibility.  Mikey77 has come up with his own material out of materials so common, chances are you already have them. Best of all, you choose the color, viscosity, and set time yourself based on your needs.

He calls the stuff Oogoo, a name reminiscent of Sugru, an off the shelf product with very similar properties. In a nutshell, his recipe is very simple, just mix corn starch with silicone caulk.

The problem with silicone is that it takes a long time to dry from the outside in, the corn starch allows it to dry from the inside out, and very quickly. The ingredients are pretty safe and stable, so you can mix in your own dyes and other ingredients. Check out his full instructable here.

Getting Through Math Class With ADHD

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.

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/

3D Alternative to Glasses

Johnathan Post has a very impressive new method for seeing 3D content on video screens without shutter glasses. While there are some obvious reasons why this particular method isn’t going to catch on, I really am vastly impressed with his ingenuity.

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