#embodied meaning

[embodiedmeaning]

Here’s a neat image of a record and a stylus at 1000x magnification. It’s pretty incredible to see the etched grooves on the record up close and how they interact with the needle. I’ve always known how record players worked, but seeing the process magnified like this is way cool.

The photos come from Microscopic Images on Twitter.

-http://dangerousminds.net/comments/vinyl_and_stylus_at_1000x_magnification

[oliverkellow]

When the arcade game Space Invaders shipped the hardware was a fixed known value. This allowed the designer to leave the frame-rate uncapped. The processor would produce a frame-rate at the absolute speed at which it could process content. Emergently this meant that the more invaders killed, the less tasks the software had to complete and the framerate would increase, adding to the movement speed and music tempo, an consequently the difficulty and pressure of the game. Early emulators and clones of the game had to implement artificial clocks to stop the game running at hundreds of frames per second on modern computers.

This is emergent behavior is based on hardware quirks, and also an interesting look into how hardware in computing has changed from the perspective that there was a time when computing hardware ( Turing's universal machine, remember..) was so specialised that one could rely on the specificity of the hardware as a software constant.

As a side note, the game was programmed in black and white. The arcade cabinets were shipped with a red cellophane foil strip at the top of the CRT monitor and a green strip at the bottom to give the appearance of colour.

[embodiedmeaning]

Make a drop-in replacement kit for the 555 integrated circuit with discrete transistors and resistors

[embodiedmeaning]

Carver Mead, Inspiration

Nice short video clip here 

[embodiedmeaning]

http://www.instructables.com/id/Electric-Wurlitzharmonica/#step0 This nice hack is using "electrostatic pickup" technology taken from electric wurlizer "pianets" a type of protable electric piano that used reeds instead of strings.

Essentially the reeds are charged to a fairly high voltage and and the baseplate is grounded creating a capacitor with each reed, the capacitance changes while the reed vibrates.

In this way the Harmonica embodies the instrument and the pickup or microphone at the same time. He even mounts the amplifier in an open fashion. how nice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wurlitzer_electric_piano

[oliverkellow]

Centrifugal force can make an object feel light but does not effect overall weight.  cool cool

[embodiedmeaning]

An "ELECTROMAGNETIC HAMMER" Is a thing that exists,

It smooths out distortions without marring the smoothed surfaces...  I they describe the metal as "flowing", heated by induction and I guess the pressure is magnetic eddy currents because aluminium is not magnetic.. Just wow.

[embodiedmeaning]

This 7:55 this man having a joy-gasm over camera schematics. It is pretty amazing, they even publish the internal logic of the mounted IC chips including expected testing voltages etc.

Also Folding connector hinges, Open-Hardware design! The box of the device is designed to unfold like origami and still work.