Cindy McCain lashes out at 'The View'

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Laser show dress

Hussein Chalayan’s recent show for his Spring 08 collection included a screening of a film shot by Nick Knight. The dresses at the end of the film were made using hundreds of servo motor driven lasers and Swarovski crystals extending the dresses visually into space.



http://twenty1f.com/2007/10/

“Electric Jewelry” for Milady

NOW comes an electric light bulb to displace glowing pearls from earrings! The photograph shows a young woman apparently wearing a large pearl earring, but in reality it is a midget electric bulb run from tiny batteries concealed in ornamental coils around it. The bulb is frosted to produce a soft light. It is particularly effective in contrast with dark hair.










http://twenty1f.com/2007/12/

Coming soon – spider socks

It is a miracle substance - lighter than feathers, stronger than steel, one of the toughest fibres found in nature. Now scientists in Japan have found a way of harnessing the remarkable power of spiders’ webs to make anything from tights and fishing nets to bulletproof vests.

Researchers at Shinshu University have succeeded in injecting spider genes into silkworms to create a thread that is stronger, softer and more durable than conventional silk. A Japanese manufacturer is already experimenting with the thread, and spider socks, stockings and even fishing lines are expected to appear on the market within a few years.

The team, based in the city of Nagano and led by Masao Nakagaki, a professor of insect genetics, has beaten rival scientists from around the world in devising a way of mass-producing spider silk.

Conventional “farming” of spiders proved impossible because of their territorial and cannibalistic nature. Five years ago American geneticists devised a bizarre means of generating spider silk by extruding it from the udders of female goats. But Professor Nakagaki’s technique employs a much more manageable creature - the silkworm, whose shimmering fibres have been used to create cloth for more than 5,000 years.

Silkworm eggs are injected with the genes of Nephila clavata, the golden orb spider, known in Japanese as the courtesan spider because its striking yellow, black and red colouring resembles the gorgeous kimono of an up-market prostitute. The silkworm caterpillars that emerge from the eggs weave cocoons, of which 10 per cent consist of spider proteins. These are spun into silk. Professor Nakagaki hopes to increase the proportion of spider thread material to 50 per cent.

“Dragline silk”, which spiders use to raise and lower themselves and to construct the spokes of their webs, has one of the highest tensile strengths of any natural substance - five times that of a thread of steel of the same thickness. In terms of its ability to absorb impact, it is superior to Kevlar, the plastic fibre used for antistab vests and body armour.

Other applications include tennis rackets and fishing line and nets - unlike nylon thread, which pollutes beaches and threatens sea birds, spider silk will degrade naturally over time. Spider thread could also be used by microsurgeons as sutures after operations. The only company developing commercial applications for the spider silk is Okamoto, a business based in Nara, central Japan, which plans to release extra-thin and durable spider socks by about 2010.

Other cultures have found uses for cobwebs. Polynesian fishermen used the threads of the golden orb spider to make fishing line and communities in Papua New Guinea put webs on their heads to keep off the sun’s rays. During the Second World War, threads from black widow spiders were used as hairs in telescopic gun sights.



http://twenty1f.com/2007/12/

Hexagram shirt

The Hexagram shirt was inspired by and conceived to fit into Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle’s dystopic universe, a novel depicting what the world would have been like during the 1960s, had the Axis won WWII.

In the book, the U.S. west coast is a colony of Japan, whose rule and influence has permeated and dominated Californian society for years. The Book of Changes has become the mainstream method, for Japanese and Californian people alike, to take important decisions in life.

Whenever someone has a choice to make, that person takes out three little coins that are shaken and tossed on a surface several times, the resulting heads and tails data is then translated into one of the 64 hexagrams that comprise the Book of Changes.

In a way, from an absurdist point of view, characters in the book are embracing and surrendering to randomness, almost as if they were saying “Since the ultimate purpose of the universe and my own life is beyond my comprehension, I don’t see how hard, rational cold analysis is in any way a better tool for living than random pieces of wisdom fortuitously thrown at me by the cosmos.” Some of these fictional people would probably be willing to wear a Hexagram shirt.

The shirt itself is a very simple device that allows the 1960s dystopian inhabitant to obtain a hexagram that can be looked up in the Book of Changes. It also works as an active agent of randomness by publicly displaying the hexagram, thus giving onlookers an unsolicited random answer to a question that possibly hasn’t been asked yet. (Which might make some sort of sense in Philip K. Dick’s universe.)

To cast a hexagram, the wearer shakes the sleeves of the shirt (as if he was shaking coins in the traditional I Ching way), this gesture generates a series of clicking noises and random luminescent patterns that ritualistically make way for the final configuration of the hexagram (as shown in the videos.)

Most components* that make up the Hexagram shirt are really old school. Arguably someone could have gathered all the materials and built the shirt in the 1960s, it just uses some clicking-sounding relays, noisy inverters, aluminum foil and electroluminescent sheets.