Kinetic Sculpture Robots

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who creates kinetic sculptures that run on wind and solar energy and are quite amazing. They seem to employ a lot of the techniques used in walking robots, but in a somewhat different way. His vision is to put a whole herd of them on a beach and have them run around, living off of the natural resource that drives them, in definitely.

And here's his kinetic "rhino":


He's also been featured in a BMW commercial, but you can find that on YouTube if you're interested.

In his talk at TED, he discusses how they will be made so that they can sense when they are on the dry sand or in the surf and move back to the wet sand where they "live."

Beautiful.

Magic Fingers

My cousin had an amazing old-skool organ in his basement. He got it free at a yard sale in Pueblo--one of the great things about living in a small town is that you are more likely to get in on a lucky find. I could only imagine what this could have fetched in SF on kitsch value alone. I mean, look at the font for the name. C'mon!

I only had time to mess with it for a few minutes, but I can only imagine that the full sound effect had a lot of magic.