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I’m curious what kind of sensor they’re using to make this breath-monitoring dress with dimming/brightening LEDs under the top layer of fabric.

Al Franken’s Senate career just keeps on getting better: this week he read the Fourth Amendment (“no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”) aloud to a high-ranking Department of Justice official who was making the case for renewing the PATRIOT Act’s provision for roving wiretaps.

“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking Kris how the “roving…

As more people filter into the city, open land to build on will become more and more scarce, and we may have to use every available bit of space we can, including empty bare walls, bridge pylons, and retaining walls. The Prefab Parasite, designed by Australia-based Lara Calder Architects, is such a structure — aiming to turn previously empty vertical surfaces into livable and attractive private space. Mimicking parasitic qualities, the home is designed for durability and…

Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review digs up some startling info that helps explain why network TV news is knee-deep in FAIL while National Public Radio thrives:

Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning…

Spotted this sexy commercial electric bicycle in a back issue of Popular Science at the barber shop today. It’s called Pi, and the company that makes it is based out of San Francisco. The magazine article claims it uses a Nu Vinci continuously-variable transmission but the official company specs now only mention a Shimano 8-speed. Sounds like they’re still working out the kinks. Something to keep an eye on, though.

Two armed thieves entered the Musée Magritte in Brussels at 10am this morning and made off with surrealist René Magritte’s Olympia, valued at £3 million. One of the thieves rang the bell and asked to be let in. When he entered he pulled a gun and ordered the woman who answered the door to let his accomplice in.

A policeman said: “There were three museum workers inside at the time and two Japanese tourists. All five of them were ordered out the back and told to keep quiet by the man…

Kim alerted me to a great deal if you are in the Minneapolis, MN area. If you are looking for a tiny kitchenette unit for your home these are a bargain at $100.

Go to the craigslist listing here to get more information and purchase one.

Check out the Flightcase sideboard, designed by Diesel’s creative team in collaboration with Italian furniture firm Moroso. The aluminum and laminated plywood case comes in two lengths, the shorter 120cm version up top and the longer 180cm seen below.

I like the aesthetic, but part of me feels certain that any magician who gazed upon the longer one would feel a sudden urge to saw his assistant in half.

We Are Colorblind is a pattern library for design around color blindness. About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.

Shipping container homes just keep on getting cooler. Developers Katie Nichols and John Walker along with architect Christopher Robertson wanted to create affordable and sustainable homes for the emerging hipster crowd – modern, colorful and creative. This single-story home, located on the outskirts of downtown Houston in a “transitional neighborhood,” is made from 4 shipping containers sourced from nearby ports. The house is constructed using some fairly advanced building…

Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation has developed this “Co-Draw” exhibit, whereby people draw on a large surface with a light pen and computers begin manipulating the drawing. It’s a far cry from the functionality of the IloveSketching video we showed you yesterday, but perhaps in ten years or whenever we have interface design down to a science we’ll look back on steps like this, say they were somehow necessary and laugh.

via dig info

The Nixie Concrete Clock

The vintage Z560M Nixie tubes, used in former East-Germany in the mid 20th century as numeric displays, were the inspiration for the design of Daniel Kurth’s (www.kurth.lu) Nixie Concrete clock.

The Luxembourgish designer enclosed the shiny orange Nixie tubes in a reinforced rough concrete body which can optionally be wall mounted. The strength of this design lies in the application of ‘retro technology’ and its interesting combination of components and…

[Image: By Daniel Dendra of anOtherArchitect].

To produce this new tea table, Berlin-based designer Daniel Dendra of anOtherArchitect explains that he used sound recordings taken from the streets of Cairo to generate CNC-milling patterns – thus creating one of the most complex joins I’ve ever seen in carpentry.

In Dendra’s own words, he “recorded sound-snips from intersections in the city to generate a furniture piece.”

[Image: By Daniel Dendra of anOtherArchitect].

…

Mona Hatoum (1952) is a performance- and installation artist born in Beirut, Lebanon. During a visit to London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she was forced into exile. She stayed in London, training at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art (University College, London) between the years 1975 and 1981. In 1995 she was nominated for the Turner Prize for her exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and for her show at the…

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By watching this I tripled what I know about music.