I’d like to start using this blog to talk more about what’s going on in the wider world of art and craft meeting science and technology, as well as what’s happening in my own little world. I’ve decided to kick this off with a look at some great combinations of hard science with the soft and squishy.
To start, I’d like to direct your attention to fellow Mad Scientists of Etsy team member FurWillFly, whose creations include “The Insiders,” a family of plushies which each feature one anatomical feature, like this friendly-looking guy:
Large Lungs by FurWillFly
GIANTmicrobes turns out cuddly versions of the very small – from dust mites to platelets. We had some of their diseases around the office a few years ago, and everyone took no end of pleasure in giving each other the flu, flesh eating disease, and even the clap!
Penicillin by GIANTmicrobes
And if the single-celled isn’t small enough for you, I also recently discovered ParticleZoo, who makes adorable plush subatomic particles. They’re available singly, or in sets like the Universe in a Box, and she’s gone so far as to weight them by relative mass!
Charm Quark by Particle Zoo
Did all that cute make you feel like crafting your own plush scientific goodness? Perhaps you should take a look at this plush cell model instructable.
One of the goals on my list for 2010 is learning my way around Processing, which is an open source programming language that was designed to be a kind of electronic sketchbook for artists and designers and allow you to program interactive animations, model and visualize data, and more.
I’ve run across some really neat things that people have done with it, and I’m rather fascinated. It looks like it can do some pretty powerful (and attractive!) data crunching:
Flickr tag visualization by Smilehyun
Perhaps more inspiring for those of us who are dipping our toes in for the first time, however, is the ability to do some really interesting things with it using very short programs.
I started off this weekend with my first ever actual woodworking class over at Techshop Portland. Continue Reading →
