Hasta La Ideas

“My own theory about why Picasso agreed to do it [create a sculpture for Chicago’s Richard J. Daley Plaza in 1965] after many stops and starts, and despite being a totally unreliable and temperamental character, as all interesting artists are, is–and it’s buried in the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill correspondence–is that somebody told him that Miró was doing something even bigger in a related space in Chicago. And Picasso really was the Michael Jordan of modern art, not just In the sense of being incredibly accomplished but in the sense of being utterly driven by competitive fire and an unrealized sense of grievance at every turn, that somebody else would outdo him or do better than him. And I suspect that played a significant role in getting him to do it.”

-Writer Adam Gopnik on the Chicago Picasso (pictured), in a recent talk at the Art Institute of Chicago, where “Picasso and Chicago“–the first large-scale Picasso exhibition organized by the museum in almost 30 years–is on view through May 12.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

by Katie Olsen Since former executive editor of V Magazine Julie Anne Quay launched VFiles nearly a year ago, we have been intrigued by the site’s successful merger of…

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Anyone who’s seen James Cameron’s Aliens cannot forget the images of 1.) Ripley in a cargo-loader exoskeleton, and 2.) Vasquez prowling the corridors with that body-mounted machine gun on the swing arm. That was back in 1986; now it’s 2013, and not only have these designs actually come to pass, but they’ve been combined.

As we previously reported, Lockheed Martin licensed a company called Ekso Bionics’ technology to develop the HULC, or Human Universal Load Carrier. It’s got the power-assist legs and the body-supported gun mount:

While Ekso Bionics is targeting the consumer market, enabling paraplegics to walk again, Lockheed has initially gone military. However, they’re reportedly creating a version of the HULC called the Mantis, for industrial applications. As Bloomberg News reports,

The machines may follow a classic arc from Pentagon research project to fixture on an assembly line, similar to the development of lasers, said Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight at investment advisory firm Discern in San Francisco. “The medical devices get the most attention, the military funds it and the first mass application is industrial,” Saffo said in a telephone interview.

[Mantis is aimed at] any industry in which workers must hold heavy equipment that can cause fatigue and back injuries…. Mantis has a mechanical extension for a wearer’s arm and absorbs the strain from hefting a grinder or sander, [Lockheed business development manager Keith] Maxwell said. Tests found productivity gains of more than 30 percent, he said, and wearers showed their Macarena footwork to demonstrate the suits’ flexibility.

“It turns workers away from being a weightlifter and into a craftsman,” Maxwell said.

I’m all for Construction Worker Exoskeletons—as long as the power tools are not integrated, but remain separate objects that you pick up. Because once they start replacing the user’s hands with built-in angle grinders and magazine-fed nail guns, we’re going to have a problem. Last year, I watched a construction worker fight a cabdriver in front of my building; the hack didn’t stand a chance. The last thing I want to see is an angry frame carpenter tramping off the jobsite in one of these things, ready to settle someone’s hash with his Forstner-bit fingers and chopsaw hands.

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To accompany their just-released SS13 accessories collection, Brooklyn-based design outlet The Hill-Side created a dynamic lookbook of 10 cheeky gifs animating exploding neckties, swirling scarves and peeping pocket squares as…

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When American manufacturing jobs move overseas, the factory workers and machines don’t go with them. Which means there are now a lot of very powerful machines popping up on eBay and Craigslist, for far less than the original owners paid for them. Likewise, the people originally trained to use these machines still walk among us, their heads filled with no-longer-tapped knowledge.

That’s why Pennsylvania-based Ken Krout, a one-man manufacturing shop of miniature figurines and structures for gaming enthusiasts, was able to set up an injection molding shop in what looks to be his basement. Krout picked up a used Arburg press built in 1973 for the bargain price of $500—basically the value of the machine to a scrap metal dealer. He then muscled the 2,800-pound beast into his shop with an engine lift and figured out how to hack together enough attendant machinery to injection mold his own parts.

While Krout uses self-made molds milled from aluminum bar stock on a pair of CNC mills, he solicited a little help to get the press running. “I had a guy come out and explain [the functions of the buttons on the press], and I wrote on there with a Sharpie what they do,” Krout explains. “There are so many people with knowledge and skills that are out of work because of all the outsourcing… they’d be more than happy to share the knowledge with you.”

In this video Krout explains, in pretty good detail, what he needed to get up and running and how he did it all “in about a year.” I love this guy’s can-do attitude.

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