Transmission #17: Robot Bricklaying, AR Fashion, No Money, Neanderthals and Kosher phones.
Design, ideas and other flotsam
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker and lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
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Design
Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers?
Brian Potter, Construction Physics
Laying bricks is the kind of task that you would think a robot should be quite good at. It’s fairly simple, highly repetitive, involves moving heavy objects, and is extremely physically demanding when done by hand. So ever since industrialisation, people have been trying to create ways to automate it. Of course it hasn’t worked.
It fails for the reason that self-driving cars have so far failed: solving 90% of the problem might be fairly straightforward. But the remaining 10% of the problem means engaging with the thousands of edge cases, minor adjustments and awareness of subtle environmental changes in things like weather and humidity. A big problem for robot bricklaying is the mortar: it’s just not uniform and predictable enough. If you were to add enough sensors and actuators to account for this, the machine would get so complex and expensive that it would be cheaper for people to do it anyway.
Software may be eating the world, but masonry is safe for now.
Why AR Clothing Try-On is Nearly Here
Mahgen McDowell, Vogue Business
The juggernaut of Augmented Reality continues to gather pace. We’re less than a year away from being able to try on clothes in AR that don’t just look photoreal, but also fit and move like real clothing. The immediate benefits are for e-commerce apparel retailers, but the most intriguing ideas seem to be those that bring digitally native possibilities into the physical world – RTFKT producing digital sneakers, or DressX creating a platform for digital clothes of all types. I don’t think anyone really knows where this is all heading. It could be toward a Second Life-style dead end, or are we actually witnessing the rise of the next big computing platform, the Metaverse?
Inside TikTok’s Highly Secretive Algorithm
Wall Street Journal
It wasn’t long ago that social media seemed to have evolved into a kind of static equilibrium. Then in 2019, TikTok came along, seemingly out of nowhere, and captured hundreds of millions of users. It’s secret sauce was a preternatural ability to serve up the right kind of videos to the right people. In this video, the WSJ reverse engineer elements of the video recommendation algorithm. It’s a fascinating insight into how the attention of a generation is being siphoned off and reflected back, with just the right amount of variability to encourage something that just maybe feels close enough to discovery.
Penniless: Why A Victoria Man Has Gone Two Decades Without Money
Tori Marlan, Capital Daily
Touching story about a Canadian man who renounced money after a particularly enlightening acid trip when he was 25 years old. He’s spent the next 31 years living a relatively happy, if unusual life, subsisting on resourcefulness and greater than your average karmic good vibes. Inevitably, the human kindness that suffuses his existence meets its match when it comes into conflict with city ordinances; systems that weren’t designed for, and simply can’t account for, a man who chooses to live so unconventionally.
Quotes
"The passage opened into a chamber, and at its center there were two huge rings made up of hundreds of stalagmites. They’d been broken up deliberately, sometimes glazed in small fires, and arranged like the sign for infinity: ∞."
Describing a Neanderthal cave left undisturbed for 176,500 years.
– The Highbrow Neanderthal, Dean Kissick, Grow by Ginko
Chart of the Week
Per capita CO2 emissions in the US are lower now than in 1918. File under: things I did not expect to be possible. (ht @noahpinion)
Other
📱 Kosher phones are a thing. Link
🤔 File away for retirement, or excessively languid long holidays: a beginners guide to cryptic crosswords. Link
🎳 More about the world of bowling ball innards. Link. (And a link to a great article on the topic I posted in Transmission #13.)
📦 Amazon’s delivery drone program goes down in smoke. Innovation is hard. Link