12/8/2022 0 Comments Puffin beak![]() #Puffin beak movie#Its beak lit up with stripes of vivid white-blue light, like a hi-vis vest or the luminous trim on the costumes from the movie Tron. Acting on a hunch, and based on what we know of birds’ eyesight (that is, that many birds can see UV light) and the already- attention-seeking quality of puffins’ bills as they appear to we viewers of the human-visible spectrum, he took a frozen puffin out of the freezer and held it under a UV lamp. Jamie Dunning is the man who discovered that puffins’ beaks glow under ultra-violet light. We are now statistically likely to come across unlikely things. But the internet intelligently aggregates content from data sets so inhumanly large as to render probability, trend and deviation meaningless on a scale visible at human level. Or rather, they must deviate sufficiently from trends set by our everyday experience. ![]() To be conventionally interesting, facts or anecdotes must be unlikely. Interesting things would no longer be interesting. My editor said the bigger problem was that such facts and stories would soon be worthless anyway. A team at Goldsmiths University is designing sunglasses for puffins. A man once rode a cart pulled by goats around every state in the continental USA. A bar in Canada serves a cocktail with a human toe in it. I once tried to explain to my poetry editor that I couldn’t stand poems that are clearly written only as an excuse to share an unusual factoid the poet has come across. When I was commissioned to write a piece about a design team who make sunglasses for puffins, I was in two minds. Shortening the distance between having an idea and making an object.” That’s the Makers Revolution – democratising that process. It’s important that we’re able to get up from our desks and walk into the next room and just start making something straight away. Now we’re much freer – and that fits how we like to work. ![]() And it’s so much easier, now that we have access to laser-cutting and other manufacturing technology right here – a few years ago it would have been time-consuming and very expensive to get prototypes made – we would have had to approach manufacturers and produce things on a much larger scale. “This prototype phase is really important, as you can see. ![]() This is one adaptation – we’ve added these bumps on each side for the researcher to hold them on the puffin’s face. And to some we’ve made slight changes or adaptations based on the requirements of the team and the birds. You can see we tried out different materials. “So these are the prototype puffin sunglasses. Like sunglasses you might find on the face of a Lego motorcycle cop or Kanye West. All are the same rough shape – the two-dimensional outline of a pair of blocky, simplified sunglasses. Dean Brown scatters out a few dozen shapes on the table in foam, metal, plastic, rubber. ![]()
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