Who's bad?

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

Who’s bad?

A society that asks ‘how are you?’ of strangers may not be ready to hear this but … if you want to get truly creative you might have to get grumpy. All the great innovators have personality disorders, argues the author of The Creative Mind, Dr Margaret Boden. We foresee the birth of a new bargaining plea: “Please sir, I didn’t want to throw my phone at her head, but my creativity made me do it.” Hmmm. Let’s not forward this to Naomi.

I will survive

Put your Leatherman in a museum, Wired has tracked down all the best innovations in survival gear. Gems include a Life Saver Water Bottle that blocks 99.99% of all things nasty and a BCK Solar Cooker that draws the sun’s rays into its centre, building heat up to 90 degrees. Potential drawbacks include the possibility of drinking faecal matter from your Life Saver and being blinded by your Solar Cooker if you don’t use it properly, but hey, survival isn’t for the finicky.

Hide don’t seek

If you haven’t been the most attentive parent lately, this secret passageway will make the kids happy. Alternatively you could continue with your negligent theme and hide out in there yourself. Creative Home Engineering specialising in family fun since 2004. (Via Gizmodo)

Fun with magnets

Rare-earth magnets are being used in some pretty interesting ways these days. Following forays into anti-gravity propulsion and pure energy generation is this: boredom busting. Comprised of 216 rare-earth magnets, the NeoCube Alpha is capable of just about any configuration, but the one involving you curled in a foetal position for ten hours while you make just on more thing is proving the most popular. (Via Geekologie)

The real danger drug

Oh you crazy thrill-seekers. Apparently feeling the wind whip through your motorcycle helmet isn’t dangerous enough anymore—now you have to cut off one of the wheels to get your adrenaline fix. The Uno is a self-balancing motorbike that uses a pair of gyroscopes to keep its rider upright. No we don’t know what gyroscopes are either, but we sure as hell wouldn’t risk straddling something with a name like that.

Your weekly robot

Okay, so summing up we’ve had robots that clean, kick, reassemble, go to war and play music—so you must be about ready for a transparent robotic jellyfish that floats through air and sea. Here’s one an industrial automation company prepared earlier. The AirJelly has no obvious purpose except maybe to scare the goo out of real jellyfish—which, depending on whether you’ve ever stood on one or not, may or may not be completely and utterly worth the investment.

Networking for net worth

Let the Dragons stay in their Den, if you want a real partner for your business it’s got to be Google. Thomas Duterme, Google’s Head of Business Development and Acquisitions, is due to touch down in Wellington on May 30 for X|Media|Lab, an international think tank that will connect leading digital media innovators with local enterprises. Instructions for entry: empty out your bottom drawer, clip on your brown nose and head along.

Don’t forget to kick off your NZ Music Month with a fine cut of NZ rock. Microfiction with Solomon and Calamity Jam should do nicely. On 8pm tonight at Auckland’s The Dogs Bollix.

Quote of the week

“A transformational creative thinker, by definition, is changing the rules of their field. That’s going to cause a certain amount of shock, and a certain amount of resistance”

—Dr Margaret Boden on just one of the many ways to justify being an artistic arse.

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