Are you a hacker (maker) or a painter? Or both? Or neither? Which of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures do you belong to? Paul Graham’s essay on Hackers and Painters may be of interest.

Fascinating talk given by Professor Mark Reed from Yale talking about The Next Frontier: Bioelectronic Interfaces (video).

Tune your ears (listen) to Donald Norman, deep thinker about the implications of cognitive psychology for usability / HCI / design, getting interviewed by Peter Merholz. (found at putting people first)

Flybot – read about Harvard University’s microrobotic fly. Visit Prof. Robert Wood’s Harvard Microrobotics Lab website. (thanks to Baz for the suggestion)

5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon. Yep, more information visualisations that might be useful, but may well be utterly useless but ever so pretty.

Lots of tiny little builders = massive house. Watch this video showing myrmecologists figuring out how big an ant colony is. If you’re short on time just jump in 4 min 4 seconds for images of the ant colony structure. Tis amazing and beautiful!

Dear Santa can I have a Dattoo (by frog design) and a Timeflex (from solovyovdesign). More at Top 10 technology wonders that don’t exist yet

A clever kinda crowdsourcing business idea: Low Cost Usability Testing

Scientists have discovered a second light-sensing system in the human eye that tells your body whether its day or night.

Got sometime to throw your ears in the direction of Philippe Starck’s TED talk about design?

Pod-a-licious: Talking Robots: The Podcast on Robotics and A.I. has lots of very interesting audio interviews with researchers who are deeply into flying insect robots, robot brains & emotions, bionic design, robot & human teams, etc, etc.

Some good introductory tutorials on building Graphical User Interfaces in Matlab.

Go on – learn how to dance properly with Zefrank.

On idealist you can read about lots of (possible) inventions or share your ideas and creativity. I’d like to get my hands on one of those cutting scales.

Lots and lots of usability and online accessibility tools that perform automated evaluations.

Tomorrow night the Alchemist Cafe in Dublin is meeting where the there’ll be a talk by Dr Vaughan Bell (who writes one of my favourite blogs: Mind Hacks) on the “Science of Hypnotism”.

Yep, Helvetica was entertaining. There was a big big turn out for it in Dublin.

Ooops, nearly forgot – SEED art + science salon is on tonight with a presentation by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac.

Helvetica sounds like a fascinating documentary by Gary Hustwit about “typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.”. There’s going to be a screening of it in Dublin, Ireland on the 28th of June.

If you’re not all podcasted out you could send your ears in the direction of iinnovate. The podcast is about innovation and entrepreneurship and features some interesting interviews with well known entrepreneurs.

During the talk he discusses the implications of some experiments which demonstrate that giving people choice doesn’t necessarily lead to increased satisfaction, and can even have the opposite effect. More choice may impact upon the formation of Synthetic Happiness.

In one (free-choice paradigm) experiment people were given a choice of six Monet prints. They had to rank the prints according to desirability. Then they were told they could have one of prints ranked third or fourth. A few weeks later the same people were asked to re-rank the same set of prints. Lo and behold the print they had was ranked higher than the one they originally preferred most!

They were happier with what they had than what they didn’t have. Some follow on research established that if there was the possibility they could change their choice they would be less inclined to be happy with what they had.

In an Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance there’s a more detailed description of the first free-choice paradigm experiment run by J.W. Brehm in 1956. If you’re interested you could have a look at the related “spreading of alternatives”.

I wonder what are the implications of a malleable world for the generation of synthetic happiness? Will people be more dissatisfied because they constantly have a choice about altering the physical and functional form of their objects (e.g. phones, door handles, etc) and tools?

A very funny spoof paper discussing “The Etiology & Treatment of Childhood“. Found via Mind Hacks.

ThinkCycle: Open Collaborative Design is a small follow up related to yesterdays post about Personal Fabrication. Its a community based around sharing designs usable in personal fabs. We’ll probably see a lot more like-minded communities over the coming years?

You could also wander around the Fab Labs Out Reach website, which details efforts to bring “prototyping capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment.”

There’s never enough time for reading BUT you might want to dig into the deeply related “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata” by John Von Neumann. Or Gershenfeld’s book “Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication”.

All this work on personal fabrication makes me drool. It brings together the fundamental tools people are going to need to design, shape and build anything to meet their needs and wants. Without this kind of basic research we cannot hope to have a future where everything is malleable.

I hope and expect that over time less technical knowledge and skills will be required to build. A lot of the tools mentioned in the personal fab space are complex – though not so complex they’re beyond people’s abilities to learn. Easy building tools are important because lots of people will want to build things that enable them to achieve something else. They won’t be inherently interested in the act of building.

I haven’t played with Ning (yet) but based on the video and from reading around it sounds like the commoditization of software infrastructures for social software.

The implications of Ning and cohorts are that we can expect to see lots of small social networks. Are there certain thresholds for small social networks? Will there be too much choice in a small social network? If you have a bunch of friends, say around 20 connected people, will they drown in too many options?

By giving people so many avenues of communication and interaction you could reduce the amount of shared virtual space between a group of friends. For example I often come across quiet web forums with lots and lots of different sub-forums. Each of those sub-forums commonly only has a few threads consisting of a scattering of posts made by different users, and often the posts are widely spread out in time. If you count the total number of posts on the forums there is activity but because the posts are so spread out between different sub-forums and threads the forum feels empty and devoid of participation. Will the same thing happen with small social networks? Do too many ways of contributing and interacting encourage small social networks to die?

Related to that I wonder will people become overloaded with update choice? Should they update their blogs, their photos, their videos, their profiles, leave comments on members blogs, or respond to comments on forums, etc, etc? All that content creation via so many paths sounds like time consuming work.

Mind you automatically pulling together and mashing together (via Ning, RSS, etc) people’s online contributions might help create a community and sense of focus – a village square.