Artists Benjamin Maus and Prokop Bartoníček have long been interested in industrial automation and its effects on society. They wondered if they could create a piece that was simultaneously technically impressive and functionally useless.
The result is Jller, an installation that Bartoníček describes as a “very complex machine that’s doing nothing very special.” Jller’s main task is sorting pebbles from the Iller river into neat, organized rows. It’s able to do this by using machine learning, computer vision, and an industrial-grade vacuum-gripper.
MORE. Someone Built a Rock-Sorting Robot and It Is Downright Hypnotizing
There are 25,000 streets in central London, laid out in a manner best described as willy-nilly. Anyone who wants to drive a cab must memorize them all. This arcane body of knowledge is called, in typical British understatement, The Knowledge. Mastering it takes more than three years, and physically changes your brain.
Students often say memorizing The Knowledge is the hardest thing they’ve ever done.
MORE. Inside the London School Where Cabbies Learn the Fabled Knowledge
Stephon Alexander, a theoretical physicist and jazz musician, describes the connection between jazz and the most fundamental concept in the universe—the physics of vibration.
MORE. How Chilling With Brian Eno Changed the Way I Study Physics
Gabriel Scanu’s Instagram offers a (literal) stunning overview of Australia, a continent-sized island with 16,000 miles of coastline and some of the most striking terrain on the planet.
His Instagram teems with sheer cliffs, lunar deserts, and turquoise waves photographed from above with a drone. The high vantage lets you savor the details of a rocky shoreline or coastal forest while appreciating the immense scale.
MORE. Instagram of the Week: Sweeping Drone Aerials Prove Australia Is Officially Too Big
Ferrari boss Sergio Marchionne once said an all-electric Ferrari is “an almost obscene concept,” but that didn’t stop a group of guys in California from turning the 308 GT into an EV.
MORE. We Drive an All-Electric Ferrari, The Car that Shouldn’t Exist
False confessions are fairly common. Researchers have classified known false confession cases into three categories: voluntary, “compliant,” and “internalized.”
One such case is transient Daniel S. Voorhees. Voorhees came forward to falsely confess to killing Elizabeth Short, luridly dubbed the Black Dahlia by newspapers.
33 ill-fated Soviet-era relics are photographed in Danila Tkachenko series and photo book Restricted Areas.
Many see these as monuments to the Cold War, a reminder of a time when the world lived under the threat of annihilation. But Tkachenko sees the Soviet Union’s aspirations and failures, and a rejection of the pursuit of political and technological utopias.
“I wanted to show the other side of progress and technology,” Tkachenko says. “It’s not always leading us to better future, but can also be a failure or bring destruction.”
MORE. The Snowy Graveyards Where Soviet Subs and Planes Go to Die
Everyone wants to be the Uber of something, convinced that the world needs an app to help people express their emotions or an online store selling party favors that glow in the dark.
Laura Morton dove headlong into this crazy world and emerged with Wild West Tech. Her ongoing series takes you into the networking parties, hackathons and grubby crash pads where techies tap tap tap away at their laptops.
MORE. Hack, Hustle, Nap, Repeat: Life as a Young Techie in San Francisco
Dantley Davis, Design Director at Netflix, on designing outside the Silicon Valley Mindset:
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is not designing the service for ourselves. We spend a great deal of time talking to our customers and understanding how entertainment fits into their lives. As a company based in Silicon Valley, that means we put very little emphasis on feedback from people who live here because we do not feel the are representative of the broader country or the world. Designers at Netflix travel all over the world learning new insights from people from all walks of life. We visit them in their homes, go to their work, or accompany them on their commutes. These insights fuel our product instincts and provide a level of empathy that is immeasurable.
MORE. How Design is Shaping the Future at Tech Giants Like Facebook
Our childhood hermit crab has a rather more … sizable cousin: the 3-foot-wide, 9-pound coconut crab that can rip coconuts and sometimes, well, kittens to pieces.
MORE. Absurd Creatures: Three-Foot-Wide Coconut Crab Will Eat Your Soul and Maybe Also Kittens
