Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

Architects... in... Spaaaaaaaace

Constance Adams is going where no architect has ever gone before: Up There. As the first architect ever hired by NASA, Constance is designing a new generation of innovative spacecraft that NASA hopes will carry the first humans to Mars.

Adam's TransHab is a revolutionary inflatable spacecraft, whose skin is made of a stronger-than-steel, kevlar-like material that expands in the vacuum of low-earth orbit. This design feature overcomes two critical hurdles of space travel - the high cost of moving materials into space (currently $22,000/kilo!) and the limited width of the shuttle's payload bay. And most importantly, it allows for crew qurters that are actually liveable, not just surviveable. Such spaces will be critical on 180-day round-trips to the Red Planet.

You can learn all about her take on the project here.My favorite quote from Constance: "all architecture is space architecture; terrestrial architecture is just the specialized subset with which we are most familiar."

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 2:43:16 PM | permalink

Neoutensil Boosterism

No, it's not the Spork. It's the Popcorn Fork^TM - a utensil solution in search of an eating problem.

Predicted by its inventor to become the "the 4th commonly used eating utensil in the home", the PopCorn fork facilitates the complex ballet that is moving popcorn from a bowl to your mouth. No longer suffer the shame of accidently tossing popcorn over your shoulder and into the lap of moviegoers behind you. And be sure to check out Popcorn FunDo: fun for the whole family.

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 12:27:56 PM | permalink

The Art of Golan Levin

Golan Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer, and one of the most incredible digital artists working today. He trained at the now-defunct Interval Research, and in John Maeda's Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab - a group which gives artists and designers the coding and hardware development skills to make truly next-generation art.

Golan is one of a handful of polymaths (see also: Daniel Rozin) who are exploring the intersection of mathematics and form and extending the formal language of interactivity to create new kinds of art. Unfortunately, much of his work requires very advanced hardware to experience properly, but his online experiments are absolutely worth checking out. My favorites: Yellowtail, Ozbok, BP, Floccular Portraits, and, especially Ribble.

Also, be sure to check out RE:MARK, an augmented-reality art installation where up to six participants are able to "see" each others' voices, in the form of animated graphic figurations that appear to emerge from their mouths while they speak!

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 9:14:36 PM | permalink

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