techyum ::

Check the date, and enjoy this Guardian UK piece — I love the details and the Twitterised news archive:

• Newspaper to be available only on messaging service
• Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters
(…) As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.
“[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this – his well-known observation ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ is only 36 characters long,” a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.
A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”(…read more, guardian.co.uk)

Image by linecook.
It’s really simple when you think about it. But now we have a graph to refer to.

This article at Inventor Spot made me do a double-take on several levels: Animals As Life Support Machines: Is That Technomimicry? It covers the recent presentation of female designer Revital Cohen about replacing certain kinds of human life support machines with animals genetically designed for the task. It opens up a lot of ethical questions, for sure, but overall as an idea it sparks some pretty wild ideas. What if instead of a seeing eye dog, your “guide dog” provided not vision and guidance, but say, performed the function of existing as a battery for your pacemaker? That’s just the first place my mind went, but here’s a snip:

One example Ms. Cohen discussed was the use of greyhounds as a possible respiratory assistance dogs. As a greyhound bred to race is trained to chases a lure, spends up to five years chasing that lure, and is then generally euthanized, why not train the dog as a respiratory assistant instead of killing the dog? Citing that a greyhound with his large chest and need for exercise is well suited to this job, the dog would also not succumb to separation anxiety because he would be a constant companion to the person depending on him for his life.
Another possibility Ms. Cohen proposed is to use a sheep as a “dialysis machine,” first designing a sheep for that purpose , and then connecting the sheep to a patient suffering from kidney failure via “blood lines” to the patient. The sheep’s kidney would cleanse the blood, urinating its toxins, and return the cleansed blood to the patient.
Ms. Cohen’s primary goal seems to be to keep both the patient and animal alive in the case of the greyhound, but mostly to provide the patient with companionship in the case of the sheep, as the sheep would have to be transgened specifically for the job of “dialysis machine.” (…read more, inventorspot.com)

More detail about her proposals are here (dezeen.com) Here’s a video from Cohen’s project:

Revital Cohen’s Pecha Kucha at Design Indaba 2009 from Design Indaba on Vimeo.

In this video, Slate gives a mini-history of the bacon meme, explaining what most of us knew by 2005 that “once something hits the NYT, it’s long since jumped the shark.” The video is a quick, fun examination of baconmemitry. However, Slate may have also “Grey Ladied” themselves in the process. They cite the bacon meme as a 2008 phenom — which makes sense if you only use big mutant-corporate media blogs for your data sampling. But, for example, it was 2007 when us proletariat bloggers got our peepers on the infamous, it’s-over-now bacon bra.
Not that bacon will ever be over. Or that I don’t like the people I’ve met from Slate. It’s just a matter of knowing how to source your memes.

“Are you a puppy!? Are you a cutest little puppernaut?! Are you a special one? Why are you so little? How did you get so cute and small? Why are you so cute? Why are you so cute!
No, seriously — why?”

* The Science of YouTube: Cuuute! (popsci.com, thanks, Angela!)