Hasta La Ideas

Like some people, I use Twitter to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. I also use Twitter to keep up with news, current events, and exciting changes in the world of technology and sci-fi. I hope to think that now (after the changes I describe in this post) I use it wisely and in such a way that doesn’t clutter up my time.

I had already taken some steps to declutter my Twitter stream, but I felt I hadn’t maximized Twitter’s full potential and that I was missing out on some really great information from fellow users and getting stuff I didn’t always want. I created lists but found it frustrating to go through all of the people I was following one by one, look at their profiles, determine if they were still active Twitter users, then finally add them to a specific list. It didn’t seem like a very good use of my time and I started looking for other ways to make the process more effective.

First, I used the service justunfollow. This helped me identify who was not tweeting regularly any longer. I decided I would unfollow anyone who hadn’t tweeted in more than three months. Then, I looked at who was following me and decided whether or not I should follow them in return. I decided out of my followers, I would not follow anyone who only tweeted spam or sales pitches. I chose not to follow anyone with protected tweets and users without photographs or biographies.

There were some people I was following who were not following me back. I guess I don’t really expect Leonard Nimoy or Sir Patrick Stewart to follow me, but I’m going to keep following them because I’m a fan.

Once I had determined who to follow, I created a few new lists based on area of expertise of Twitter users. I also created some lists based on geographical area. My lists include:

• Family and friends
• Business builders
• Technology experts
• Organizing and productivity experts
• Cool people from different areas in which I have lived
• The famous and the infamous

I used TwitList Manager to find who was not already on a list. It allowed me to add users to specific lists in seconds. I could see who was on more than one list and easily move people to my preferred list. Overall, it took me less than an hour to completely re-organize my Twitter stream. By using justunfollow and Twitlist Manager every few weeks, I’m able to easily maintain this level of organization and get all the information I want in a timely, uncluttered manner.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you use Twitter, consider following us at @Unclutterer.

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En plus de son design et de son esthétisme original, la moto Johammer J1, conçue et produite en Autriche, est la première moto électrique de série capable d’atteindre 200 km de distance grâce à son système d’alimentation en énergie innovante. Une création pour les amateurs de design et de technologie.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: micro-robotics and 3D-printing are poised to revolutionise fashion, says the designer of Lady Gaga’s bubble-blowing dress, in the second part of our interview with Studio XO.

Despite a conservative fashion industry, rapid changes in technology will transform the clothes we wear, says Benjamin Males, of London-based fashion and technology company Studio XO.

“We believe fashion is quite antiquated,” he says. “While everything around us becomes intelligent, becomes more computational, our clothes are still very old-fashioned”.

This will not be the case for long, says Males, who believes that advances in micro-robotics and transformable textiles will soon make their way into everyday clothing, helping create clothes that can change shape using small motors.

“We believe in the next decade we’re going to see some pretty amazing things happen around transformable textiles and mechanical movement in our clothes: we are looking at introducing that in the next five years,” he says.

He points to the ubiquitous use of smartphones as evidence that people are becoming increasingly comfotable with having sophisticated technology on or very close to their bodies.

Moving up and down a clothes size may soon be possible without having to buy new clothes, predicts Males.

“We [will soon be able to] change the fit of our clothes at the push of a button, or our clothes could form new architectures around us,” he says.

Males is one of the founding partners of Studio XO, whose work includes dresses for Lady Gaga: Volantis, a flying dress powered by 12 electric motor-driven rotors, and the bubble-blowing dress Anemone, which is documented in this movie.

Males describes Studio XO’s Anemone as a provocation and a commentary on the future of textiles.

Anemone is a dress that blows large and small bubbles, the small ones creating a foam structure around the wearer and the large bubbles flying away.

Males calls the mechanisms that create this effect bubble factories. These are small, 3D-printed jaw mechanisms. When they open, a fan blows out large or small bubbles depending on the size of the mechanism’s aperture.

The dress was unveiled in 2013, when Lady Gaga wore it to the iTunes festival. It is the second so-called bubble dress which Lady Gaga has worn, the first one being a nude leotard with plastic transparent globes attached to it.

The music featured in the movie is a track by Simplex. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Clothes will shrink to fit “at the push of a
button” within five years appeared first on Dezeen.

Focus sur B-Classic et sa nouvelle pub pour son projet The Classical Comeback qui consiste à promouvoir la musique classique. On voit des femmes danser et se déhancher a l’image d’un clip de rn’b, dans différents décors mais sur de la musique classique. Une chute très drôle à découvrir dans la suite.

This week in nouveau-Cold War news: MIT researchers will present plans for floating nuclear reactors, adapting existing technologies towards a goal put to rest during the Ford Administration. Floating reactors might sound futuristic—or dystopian—but they’re not a new idea, having been proposed first in 1971 by Offshore Power Systems (a joint venture by Westinghouse Corporation and Tenneco). That original plan combined several of the features the new MIT design hopes to capitalize on: mass producibility, increased distance from populations and use of the sea as a buffer against damage.

This new design combines modern oil rig sensibilities with light water nuclear reactors in a package that can be mass produced and towed into position five miles offshore. A crucial benefit of oceanic operation is the protection from tsunami and earthquake damage. Deep water insulates well against both seismic waves and the destructive end of tsunami swells, making it an obvious boon for growing, catastrophe-prone energy markets like Japan.

This kind of mass-produced floating reactor fleet was originally scuttled due to economic instability and raging environmental concerns. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident led to over 300,000 people evacuating their homes, and left the public with a powerfully bad taste for the energy source. Subsequent catastrophic failures and willful breaches of safety (see: Chernobyl, Hanford, Fukushima Daiichi) have perpetuated nuclear power’s troubled reputation, but nuclear power development is still on the rise.

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