Here’s something new to me: a business model for renting out and distributing 2D visual art–you know, stuff you hang on the wall–as streams of electrons.

The business, called FRAME, is a collaboration of two Tokyo designers: Yugo Nakamura, and Yoshihiro Saitoh. Here is what you get with their service: digital representations of various art works are piped into your home, and rendered on a good-sized Samsung flatscreen TVs.

To me this seems brilliant. From what I gather, somebody looked at networked digital picture frames (which I hear, aren’t leaping off the shelves these days). These fellows thought about how we could use them differently, and how the frames themselves might be different, in ways that people would value and pay to obtain.

In an age when 40-inch Hi-Def flatscreens sell for about the same $$$ as a modestly good quality picture frame of that size… somebody puts on their thinking cap, and we get Netflix for Art.

A service such as they describe could be more or less be bolted together with off-the-shelf technologies: like Samsung flatscreen Hi Def TVs, rebranded as digital canvas, able to render static images and video or animation (including Flash, sensibly).

Slick, simple, obvious, fresh, engaging, and a steady revenue stream from content rental once the product is placed.

Think Logan’s Run, picking sex partners–now we’ll do that for art, and if the content is sincerely good, the people who deliver this service can charge a premium. lt’s likely to be quite scalable. And the website is lovely:

http://frm.fm/

Arthur C. Clarke once famously observed that “any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“.

Every now and then I run across a story about remarkable new technology, something that makes my jaw drop a little. Here is a TED Tak, by Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken.

Horner begins his talk with the idea that birds are (literally) modern dinosaurs: they are what some dinosaurs evolved into. I was first exposed to this idea as a young man, reading Desmond’s The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs. I gather it’s now a widely-shared view that birds’ ancestors were dinosaurs, and that therefore, the genetic line of dinosaurs persists into modernity (see Wikipedia on the origin of birds).

Horner is working on a project which involves genetically regressing a chicken into the form of its dinosaur ancestors. This is to be accomplished by enabling obsolete and unexpressed genetic software in a chicken’s DNA that produces things like teeth, claws and a tail.

Horner has a dry wit and it’s a heck of a story. Something I found remarkable: that the technological accomplishment (of being able to turn genes on and off) is almost in the background, it hardly seems novel or cutting-edge. The clever thing in the story is Horner’s idea that contemporary dinosaur DNA is readily available and can be manipulated to reveal its own ancestor. Magic!

Record Range for New Electric Car Battery… 279 Miles! | Wall Street Daily.

I have no special knowledge on the matter, but I would imagine that a fair bit of money is now being spent, here and there around the planet, on researching and developing improvements in (automobile) battery technology. Sooner or later, it seemed likely that somebody was going to find a way to make an electric car with decent range. And lo, here it is!

Wouldn’t it be cool to live in the first Green riding in Canada? We have a shot at making a little history here, a choice that, by my guess, would be noticed by the entire planet.

The risk is low, the payoff is potentially high: something important is within our reach, yours and mine.

It’s said that nearly a million Canadians voted for the Greens in the most recent (2008) federal election. Think back to everything that has happened in the past couple of years, and as you think about our future on this earth, ask yourself… what might you accomplish with your vote?

If we decide to elect a Green Party representative to sit in the next Parliament of Canada, we will be the first Canadian federal riding in history to do so; and meaning no disrespect to Mr. Blair Wilson, that would be interesting.

I’ve heard Adriane Carr say that if every person who voted for her in the last Federal election (about 11,000 of us) could persuade one other person to vote Green, there’s a strong chance that she will win Vancouver Centre.

So… all I need is one person. You. If you live in the Vancouver Centre federal riding (see the map below), I hope you’ll give serious thought to voting for Adriane Carr on May 2nd (bearing in mind, of course, that this means only vote as you think best).

The risk of voting for Adriane Carr and the Green Party is low; they’re not going to be forming the next government any time soon. However, the payoff is potentially spectacular, on many levels. On behalf of our city, we  would be sending a signal to the world, embodying a voice for (according to some polls) potentially hundreds of thousands of Canadian voters, and no doubt broadening Canadian political discourse for the foreseeable future. You know, those Greens, they have some interesting policy ideas. I don’t agree with them point by point, but this isn’t about policy, it’s about who gets to speak.

VOTE! even if it’s you’re first time. Know who you’re voting for and why. Voting info:

• Voting is pretty easy, though in busy ridings you might hit lineups over lunch and in the early evening.
• If you will be working on May 2, your employer will give you an opportunity to vote during your workday.
• Elections Canada can tell you all about how to vote.
• Here’s a map of the Vancouver Centre riding, so you can see if you’re living inside it.

Now here’s a sign of changing times: Martha Stewart’s chicken show.

I find a lot of what I do here is relay videos–I get a little impatient with myself, because I think I should be investing more. However, part of what I’m doing at this moment is simply getting the habit of blogging, and I remind myself, I don’t need to be brilliant. There is so much brilliant stuff out there, so much worth witnessing, so much of what we need in this moment, so that we might learn to live as we ought to live.

Give it 20 minutes and 44 seconds. See if you don’t agree.

I learned about this woman, Brené Brown, from my friend Keith. Dr. Brown describes herself as “a researcher/storyteller.” Here she speaks about people, about feelings of connectedness and love, worthiness, vulnerability. I’m going to have to watch this once or twice more, think about it a little.

I’ve found a panel discussion about the popular uprising in Egypt, offered by a group of American academics most of whom specialize in Middle Eastern studies, and who have some interesting stories to tell about what’s happening. It’s called Egypt Arising… have a look.

It’s so nice to be reminded that American intellectuals are still out there. I’ve just started watching this, it’s good.

…the government always gets in.

Here’s a refreshing article about the vicissitudes of governing. The story is American, but the lessons are timeless: what obstacles might novice Tea Party representatives encounter, on their way to solving the problems facing their great nation?

http://goo.gl/QtmqW

Standout phrase: “Government is hard.”

I like to read articles about science, and about research and experimentation along its various frontiers. These days, it seems to me that I am most amazed by advances in medicine and biotechnology. The New York Times recently told of a group of experimenters who have been able to grow a rat heart. Their process involves introducing a culture of stem cells into the heart of a rat cadaver. The dead heart serves as a “scaffold” for the formation of a new heart.

http://goo.gl/psMB5

I’ve read other articles about progress in human tissue regeneration, and it’s beginning to seem obvious that, perhaps within my lifetime, we will have a medical science capable of growing new organs and tissues for us. Indeed, I read in a recent issue of Wired magazine, that certain cutting edge work is being done on techniques to repair grave wound damage, injecting stem cells at the site of surgery scars to literally “sculpt” new human tissue, including an infrastructure of blood vessels: these techniques are being applied in breast reconstruction after mastectomy.

http://goo.gl/oRJm

There’s a saying attributed to the author William Gibson: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”