Vorsprung durch Natur

The German company Festo makes a wide range of fascinating devices, many of which are based upon some kind of naturally occurring model of movement.

Among their products are various drones, and I have to say that the AquaPenguin is among my favourites.



The AirPenguin is obviously less based on actual penguin characteristics; still, it must be one of the most lovely and elegant drones created so far.



Still: stick a Hellfire launcher on that puppy and it'd make the most elegant Flying Robot of Death in the world.

A guy can dream, can't he?

(The BionicKangaroo, BionicOpter and SmartBird are also worth looking at.)

Touring the ghostly technopolis

Via Reason, a video tour around Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

It's a short, interesting and eerie journey through a kind of eco-Ballardian "community" in the desert: there's even an empty swimming pool 53 seconds in!



Whether this particular venture is sustainable or economically viable over the long term, I can't say.

But it does give me the urge to re-read Super-Cannes.

The dragons are already slain

An entertaining performance at the Bundestag today in an event related to the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It helps if you speak German, but if not, Alex Harrowell has provided a description and a few highlights in English at A Fistful of Euros:

Where do we start here? Obviously there’s the bit where he calls the Left Party MPs the “wretched remnants of everything we so fortunately overcame”. There’s the speaker of parliament, the CDU’s Norbert Lammert, a man who looks and talks exactly like a conservative called Norbert, who calls him to order on the grounds that he was invited to sing, dammit, and if he wants to speak he can always get elected. Biermann remarks that the DDR didn’t manage to shut him up and Lammert won’t.

The original:

Full English Brexit

...comes, perhaps, one step closer.

Indeed, as Britain's conservative government is rapidly approaching a red line, it looks from Berlin as though Cameron is neither willing nor able to apply the brakes. Should Cameron move to establish numerical limits on immigration from EU member states, "there will be no going back," say sources in Berlin. First, they say, Cameron's proposal would be torpedoed in Brussels by Germany and several other EU countries and then he would return home and lose the referendum on Britain's exit from the EU.