BMW GINA concept

Looking back at latest BMW design trends, I couldn’t expect anything great from these guys. However, this time they have something really interesting.

BMW GINA (100K)

More photos at Wired

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US average Joe spending

New York Times is really good in non-trivial yet useful data visualizations. Here’s a fragment of the most recent one (click to view full interactive version):

NYT - Joe spending graph fragment (77K)

Soda can synchronization

Physics rules. Via SvN.

Silence does not solve problems

There is a kind of people who argue that if you’re using something, you should not critique it. Not that they hold it as a philosophical view, they just always say, in a more or less aggressive way, “Don’t use it if you don’t like it!”. You’re likely to hear this if you start complaining about Windows for example. In Russia, you’ll hear it if you talk about the infinite number of problems — from total corruption to total unfreedom of speech and political monopoly. “Go live in America if you don’t like it here!” »»»

Why iPhone is important to Apple

Applification (66K)

Big Dog rules

Caution: weird sound in the video

This robot, dubbed BigDog, was developed by Boston Dynamics. It’s main feature is the ability to walk through rough terrain the way animals and humans walk (controlled freefall i’d call it), as opposed to moving limbs simply at preprogrammed trajectories. DARPA invested $10M in its development for military use »»»

Leave-me-alone box

Machine-in-itself. Via Machine Thinking. leavemealonebox.com.

Dumb electronics

Most TV sets I’ve dealt with cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and forget current time once they are unplugged or in case of power outage.

Visualising CO2 emissions

Australian eco-awareness ad, via O’Reilly Radar

And let them see what they do

Usually we think of the consequences of our actions after we act. Or maybe it’s not even us who acts, we just give them a silent permission. And maybe the consequences are unobservable if not looked for specifically.

The way the latest major US democracy export incident was conducted could have been evaluated more rationally by ordinary people, immediately after it began. If only what is pictured below had been installed in sufficient number of places.

Living Memorial (104K)

That’s a Matthew Gale’s concept of a living memorial. The black liquid is oil and a gallon of it is added to the pool with every battlefield causality. The more cruel is the war — the more apparent, noxious becomes the memorial and the harder it is to ignore it.

Also be sure to check out Ambient devices and Nuage Vert which materialised just recently.