Commentary Ticker
- Irony In Stone: Ancient Greek Statues Dressed as Modern Hipsters
June 19, 2013 | 9:40 amAfter a day spent wandering around the Louvre in Paris, France, studying the idyllic nude bodies of ancient Greek statues, photographer Léo Caillard got to wondering about the nature of clothing. Each of the statues represented the maximization of human perfection—the human body taken to the extreme. But most people don’t have the ideal Greek [...]
- When in Rome… Make Better Concrete: How An Ancient Mix Beats Today’s Best
June 18, 2013 | 10:40 pmFrom the Hoover Dam and the Burj Khalifa to the Panama Canal, concrete underlies the greatest of modern architectural achievements. But modern concrete, it seems, doesn’t hold a candle to Ancient Rome’s. A little history for you: the Romans were the first to engineer concrete in mass, and it was upon this concrete that they [...]
- Google Wants Balloon Internet for Everybody
June 15, 2013 | 11:06 am“Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]
- Watch Researchers Discover a Sunken Egyptian City
June 13, 2013 | 9:36 pmThonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]
- “I Am The Nucleus” and Other Bizarre Quotes By Kanye West
June 12, 2013 | 10:06 amKanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]
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Watch: Chainsaw-Wielding Robot Carve Two Stools from One Log
Of all the things a robot armed with a chainsaw could carve, a log seems the most benign. Berlin, Germany based company Echtwald started a program with the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design to create what is known as the 7xStool. Designed by Karlsruhe alumni Tibor Weissmahr and Tom Pawlofsky, the 7xStool is produced two at a time by the unnamed (but ever-powerful) chainsaw robot seen above.
The robot made an appearance in Cologne for the Passagen 2013 design week where it would publicly carve logs into stools twice daily. The 7xStool is part of a art collection called kkaarrlls, which highlights student work from the Karlsruhe University. Because of the robots millimeter precision and clever programming, the entire process leaves essentially no scrap parts. The stools carved in live performances at Passagen were auctioned off to audience members.
Attribution
The Verge
DesignBoom