examining a tweenbot

placing an 18″ self-propelled, smiling, cardboard robot on a street in manhattan and letting it travel at a constant speed in one direction with a sign asking for assistance – leaving its fate in the hands of passersby

are we maybe moving in a new direction in terms of collective behaviors? or is it only because it was a small robot that people even bothered checking on it, even telling it, “you can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

http://www.tweenbots.com/
from boing boing and engadget and by now, most of the intarwebs

check out how excited everyone is about it

from: ihasahotdog

how would you spend 40 hours with yourself?

here’s the time lapse video:

here’s the article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all

a fun snippet:

Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

“…spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria. An experienced canoe builder, Ogawara spent over 3 months gluing 7,382 chopsticks together into strips to form the canoe shell, to which he added a polyester resin coat.”

link

“vice” has undertaken a video project in which they are posting short, weekly videos taken by a staff member that somehow finagled his way into north korea. the videos are haunting, eerie, and incredibly interesting. i would most definitely suggest a viewing to get an inside look at this cloistered culture.

the vice guide to north korea.