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Wizardry for Apple II (1981) is perhaps the most influential of the early sandbox-style computer RPG games. There was no plot to speak of, but the gameplay mechanics were revolutionary compared to earlier computer adventure games. I got a serious nostalgia overload while watching a youtube clip of the gameplay.

The almost complete lack of a plot was an integral part of the charm of this game. There were no walk-throughs available at the time and every new encounter with a new monster sent my blood rushing through the veins. Like a drug addict, I find myself looking for that same buzz on all the new games I try, but somehow it is precisely all the bells and whistles that make them a bit too predictable for me. Somehow a lot of the modern games seem like a scripted rides through the ghost train. A tutorial level makes me feel like I’m at a driving school, not in some faraway imaginary world.

Shadow of the Colossus and We Love Katamari are great examples of the kind of games that provide a background setting and sandbox-style environment to explore, but still leave a lot of room for the imagination of the player. I wish there were more games like that available. For me, a true sense of curiosity and discovery is a really essential element of an immersive gameplay experience. I’d be happy to hear any recommendations of modern PC game titles to try out and satisfy the explorer in me.

OK, let me begin this post with a disclaimer: I am an Apple fanboy, there’s no denying it. I’ve been using their products practically for all of my life and, professionally speaking, I’m not sure what I would be doing without them.

After the iPad announcement there has been a lot of posts in the blogosphere about the apparent shortcomings of Apple’s new tablet computer: no multi-tasking, no voice calls, no built-in camera, thick bezels, no flash, no 16:9 form factor, no OLED display. Personally, I was completely thrilled about the feature set of the device. Frankly, I am a bit surprised that so many people are concentrating on minor details that are completely irrevelevant, in my opinion. This is the first generation of a completely new class of device and adding a voice call capability or a camera would be completely trivial from a technical point of view. If you think about it for even a second, there is completely rational explanation to all of the shortcomings. They didn’t make these engineering choices because they didn’t know how to add the missing features, but because they chose not to.

I am excited about iPad precisily for the same reason that some others are disappointed in it. A lot of the excess crap has been shaved off and a brand new platform for truly elegant computing solutions has been created. There are no bootloaders, no trashcans, no display drivers, no extra ports. Some of the other companies that have tried to make this happen like to slap on all kind of extra goodies on products without really thinking that much about the entire pipe-line of events and files in the life of people leading a digital lifestyle.

I, for one, don’t listen to FM radio broadcasts anymore, I don’t like looking at snapshots taken by a crappy $10 cell phone camera module, I do not want to download themes to customize desktop. I think Apple did a superb job of simplifying both the user experience and the channels for both content and software developers to deliver products on a platform that is lightweight, stable and fast. Windows Mobile, Mameo and Symbian are literally years behind with this stuff.

I don’t really need an iPad, but I’m getting one anyway. I think that choosing a computing platform or game console is a lot like buying a hand bag or a bottle of wine or a sports car. You are not only buying a physical product, but an entire philosophy and lifestyle with it. This is something that the pixel counters often miss when they get a knee jerk reaction because of a missing feature. More than anything else, iPad is about simplicity and minimalism.

In the words of Bruce Lee: It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

I stumbled upon this highly iconic and symbolic image while I was checking the daily news stream. Those target crosses and the numeric temperature values just take a whole new meaning in this context. A cross is a universal symbol for disposal or erasure. And how about those numbers.. if they are too high, you are immediately and automatically moved to a lower caste as a human being. You become a potential risk to the society and the environment.

If pandemic threats become more serious and outbreaks threaten bigger populations, it doesn’t take much imagination to see this kind of routine monitoring happening on the streets as well. The surveillance cameras are already there and it doesn’t take much to retro-fit them with additional sensors. And while you are at it, why not add breathing gas analyzers to elevators or rotating doorways, heart rate monitors on door handles and automatic chemical analysis at bar restrooms for example.

Just throwing ideas around here, folks

One of the most universal aspects of various subcultures in the Western civilization is appreciation and pursuit of everything that is “cool”. There are dozens of different kinds of cool: Steve McQueen cool, Miles Davis cool, Snoop Dogg cool, James Bond cool, Bjork Cool, Steve Jobs Cool, Kaurismäki Cool etc. The difficulty to precisely define what makes something cool is in fact one of the most certain signatures of all cool things.

A lot of people devote countless hours in trying to improve their personal aura of coolness. There are two factors that usually work in all scenarios and many people concentrate on them. First of all you need to have some sort of secret and hard to obtain knowledge that can be shared with your peers as valuable drops of trivia to be used in their own quest for coolness. The second important thing is to appear to maintain your composure and remain under control in all situations. Freaking out, messing around, raising your voice or waving your limbs uncontrollably will likely make you “lose your cool” in the eyes of your peers.

The pursuit of coolness may hinder your learning process in other elements of life. Sometimes people who have plenty of cool do not have much else. The willingness to make a fool out of yourself and let yourself make mistakes will help you obtain other individual and valuable characteristics. Embrace erros and failures as an integral part of success.

Even if you don’t initially enjoy a new style of music, a new art form or the way that some people interact or lead their life, do not condemn them and put them in a mental wastebasket just for not being cool. By doing that you will gradually lose your understanding of the big picture and drown in your own increasingly shallow pool of approvable ways of doing things. It is an ever present danger for all connoisseurs of subcultures.

Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. A popular example is seeing colors while listening to music. Anyone can experience it in it’s adventitious form while using psychedelic drugs. There is also another form of synesthesia that is genetically based and constantly “on” with some people. The estimated prevalence of this in the population have varied between 1:20 to 1:20000. As a matter of fact, some might argue that “seeing stars” is a rather common experience.

There was a phase of scientific research between 1880’s and 1930’s, but due to difficulties in assessing and measuring subjective and internal experiences, the studies gradually waned. In the recent years, with the advent of more sophisticated neuroimaging methods such as fMRI, scientists have begun to study synesthesia again and synesthetes have formed organizations and community sites on the Internet.

It is a fascinating phenonomen and if indeed every 1 in 20 persons have mild synesthetic experiences there are a lot of implications in education, for example. The strength of the phenomen varies greatly and there is also variance between the prevelance of different forms as illustrated in the table at Richard E. Cytowic’s Encyclopedia of Neuroscience.

There are a number of other genetically inherited abilities (color blindness, perfect pitch, etc) that can produce rather unusual combinations if the person also happens to be genetically inclined to synesthesia.

While reading about it, it occurred to me that it is possible that some of the paranormal abilities that people are describing are in fact nothing more than a rare form of synesthesia perhaps combined with another extremely rare and unresearched genetically inherited sensitivity. People who claim to see “auras” of other people may be associating another ultra low level sensory experience with colors and therefore have a strong sense of color in the presence of another person. The physical or chemical activity that triggers the color experience could indeed be something as simple as the odor cues that the other person is emitting. The smell receptors in the aura-sensing persons nose could be transmitting the signals to an area in the brain where the cross-signalings takes place although they are not consciously experiencing any kind of peculiar aroma. As an analogy, it is well known that dogs have the ability to detect various forms of cancer in humans just by sniffing.

I googled around and sure enough, other people have come up with this same idea.

To take this theory a bit further and just for the sake of discussion: What if there is a gene that increases the magnetic sensitivity in humans on a cellular level, but it normally causes no sensory experiences whatsoever and therefore is quite difficult to study? Now, what if that gene is combined with an equally rare, say, radiation → visual or radiation → spatial synesthete gene? Again, it is easy to draw a parallels between species with primitive limbic systems that can predict earthquakes and use magnetic fields as a navigation aid. It has been found out that there is a tiny magnetite crystal in the ethmoid bone of humans. The ethmoid bone is located between the eyes, behind the nose. This magnetite is speculated to be vestigial, i.e. lost most of it’s original function during species evolution.

I would like to explore this idea in the form of an art piece or perhaps a short film. I welcome comments by anyone interested in this subject.

My tropical hideout for this Christmas only has electricity from 6pm to 9pm, so I decided to get a Solio to charge my cell phone and digital camera. So far I’ve been very satisfied with this little gadget. You can charge it from a small wall charger or aim it to the sun for 10 hours or more to charge it’s 950 mA internal li-ion battery.

I also bought an ipod cable for it, even though I don’t have an iPod yet. The digital camera battery can be charged via an optional universal 12 V cigarette lighter adapter.

Q4 How long does it take to charge Solio?
In optimum conditions it will take at least ten hours of direct sunlight (longer in cloudy or weak sunlight conditions) to fully charge Solio, but this will give you enough power to charge an average cell phone more than once or give your iPod up to an additional 9 hours of playtime. Apporoximately 4 -6 hours of direct sunlight to your Solio will let you charge an average mobile phone about once depending on temperature conditions and intensity of sunlight, and the type of phone you have. Charging the solio from the mains power supply will takes 4.5 hours using the dedicated Solio travel adaptor (included).

This fine building is incidentally also the headquarters of Nodium. I’ve been a board member for a while now and volunteered to make a web site for the house. There is a really nice section on the history of the building written by Kirsti Toppari… all in finnish though. It is based on the 100th anniversary book which was published last year.

Being able to digitally capture moving images with an apparent quality of 35 mm film has been the proverbial Holy Grail of many people for a long, long time. Independent movie makers with a micro budget, art students, video artists, video production companies and a whole bunch of other organizations and individuals would love to have that elusive “film look” in their productions.

There are quite a few big time Hollywood productions being made with digital image acquisition right now, but the new thing is that some of these technologies are beginning to trickle down to a price level that small companies and even individuals can afford. Here’s a quick round-up of three solutions at a price point of less than 10000 dollars including a lense or two (say, a Zeiss
Planar T* 1,4/50 for example).

Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Nikon and Canon have both introduced DSLR cameras that can capture HD video. Nikon’s D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II can both capture decent HD video. Nikon is using motion JPEG compression and Canon is using the more efficient H.264. Nikon is capturing 720P at 24 fps and Canon is using 1080P at 30 fps. Unfortunately both of these cameras have only an exposure lock, but ISO and shutter speed are automatically controlled by the camera. This is not a very desirable behaviour for more ambitious film projects. Nevertheless they are a huge step up from video capture capabilities of previous DSLR models. A lot of people will most likely be using these cameras, especially the 5D mark II for a new style of independent film production called “web cinematography”. It’s basically a video/film production where the end product will be available only on the web… perhaps as a embedded video in a browser window, a downloadable quicktime file or even an entire film distributed over Bit Torrent. Have a look at this video by the cinema accessory manufacturer Zacuto to get a feel on how to pimp up a DSLR for professional productions.

• Canon 5D videos on Vimeo
• Nikon D90 videos on Vimeo

Scarlet

The other big news this year was the announcement of Scarlet… a more affordable version of the Red camera, which has already been used in several Hollywood productions as the main camera. A price point of 3000 US dollars for a camera that can capture 3K resolution images would have been a laughable proposition just a few years ago. Some of the high-end digital cinema cameras such as the Panavision Genesis are not even available for purchase, but are for rental only. Scarlet has been projected to ship in 2009, but with a small and unique company such as Red, one never knows.

One of the many desirable qualities of the “film look” is the shallow depth of field. It is more easily created with a fully open aperture, but the effect is more noticeable with a larger sensor size. The most economical Scarlet will only have a 2/3 inch sensor which is the same size that is most commonly used in broadcast video cameras. To get as shallow depth of field on a 2/3 inch sensor as on a 35 mm sensor one would have to open up the aperture about 2 and a half stops additional stops. That is, on a 2/3 inch sensor you have to shoot at T1.9 to have the same depth of field as T4.0 on a 35 mm sensor.

2/3 inch is often seen as a completely inferior format to a “full frame” 35 mm sensor. If you have any doubts that a smaller sensor can’t be used for big time productions, have a look at the trailer of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The entire film was shot with a Thomson Viper, which has a 2/3 inch sensor. A very interesting interview with Claudio Miranda about the workflow can be found at the Studio Daily web site.

Besides shallow depth of field, “Film look” does have numerous other components to it. Sound is actually very important as well. One of the other key components is the latitude of the image, or the depth of the dynamic range in an individual frame. Scarlet has an obvious edge in this respect, because it records what is essentially an equivalent of RAW images in still cameras. It is a compressed image, but it does have high bit depth and therefore malleability that one needs in order to color correct or to put it in film terms “grade” it in the post.

Sony PWM EX-1 and Letus adapters

As far as HD image capture is concerned, what’s happening on the prosumer / low-end professional video front? The new big dog on that field is the Sony EX-1 / EX-3 duo which is Sony’s counter strike to Panasonic’s P2 format. Sony is using a new SxS card as a solid state storage solution for their new camera which can shoot at 60 fps for slow motion effects. The DSLR cameras mentioned above cannot do any slow motion effects, by the way. But the DSLR cameras do have that beautiful and saturated film look that everyone is after. How do you recreate that on EX1? The answer is a depth of field adapter that projects the image of a 35 mm lense on a ground class for the video camera to capture. You can get absolutely beautiful results with these, but they are bulky, very sensitive to calibration, inherently lose a lot of light in the optical path and they are quite pricey. However, at the moment, many people think that they are the best that current techonology has to offer for a relatively inexpensive way to capture film like footage on a digital camera. The XDCAM file format, while not as flexible as REDcode format, is still a step up from the DSLR video file formats.. as far as the flexibility for color correction is concerned.

For an assortment of sample videos with a depth of field adapter, have a look at these videos at Vimeo.

• Letus – a manufacturer of depth of field adapters
• Sony XDCAM product line

I believe that in the very near future there will be a revolution in the sheer amount of indie film production made with these new, affordable tools. I am eagerly waiting for more news about Scarlet. I can hardly wait to jump on this wagon and finally be able to produce relatively film like results without breaking the bank and virtually switching careers.

I produced a micro website for the finnish version of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening. In addition to information about the musical itself, the site contains a grungy typographic motion graphics Flash intro produced in Final Cut Pro and a web form to invite your friends to watch yourself on the unique stage seats on a specific date. The stage seats are likely to be sold out rather quickly. I advise to hurry if you are a student and you are interested in this sort of thing.

Spring Awakening is a Tony Award-winning rock musical with music by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater. The musical is based on the controversial 1891 German play of the same title by Frank Wedekind. Set in late-nineteenth century Germany, it concerns teenagers who are discovering the inner and outer tumult of sexuality. The original play was banned in Germany due to its portrayal of masturbation, abortion, rape and suicide. In the musical, alt-rock is employed as part of the folk-infused rock score. During the musical, characters sometimes break the fourth wall to express their motivations and desires directly to the audience.

Edit: I ended up repurposing the flash intro as a full HD pre-movie commercial for theatrical release. It was heavily modified and sweetened with a 5.1. surround sound track.

The Magsafe connector on the Macbook Pros works really well, but the connector on the power supply cable doesn’t have adequate support and will eventually fail if used roughly. I decided to add an additional support structure to the connector using shrink tubing and a champagne bottle cork. While at it, I documented the procedure and made an illustrated guide on how to do it.

Materials and tools used: 12.7 mm shrink tube, a champagne cork, a sharp knife, a kitchen temperature meter, a gas stove.

The Year of the Rat, 2008, in the Hsia calendar, is symbolized by two elements – with earth sitting on top of water. According to the cycle of birth and destruction, which governs the inter-relationship between the elements, earth is the conqueror of water. Therefore, earth sitting on water is a symbol of control.

• Zodiac Location 1st
• Ruling hours 11pm-1am
• Direction North
• Season and month Winter, December
• Lunar Month Dates December 7-January 5
• Gemstone Garnet
• Colours Black, red, white
• Positive Traits
  Meticulous, intelligent, shrewd, charismatic, charming, ambitious, practical, industrious, eloquent, artistic
• Negative Traits
  Controlling, obstinate, venal, resentful, manipulative, mendacious, vindictive, power-driven, critical

On the 16th of November in 1974 an crude 1679 pixel image was broadcast to space from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. It included simple, low resolution images of human beings, solar system and the formula of DNA.

After 34 years another message is being broadcast towards an earth like planet called Gliese 581C. The transmission is being sponsored by Bebo, a social networking site. The content of the message is a collection of the most popular images from their users based on a vote.

Please observe how the increased resolution of imaging technologies and our magnificent advances in the understanding of the universe and life itself are present in the content of this new message.

Practically all apartments being sold in Helsinki center are actually shares of housing companies:

Housing companies are a typical housing system in Finland. The shares in a housing company confer on their owner the right of possession of a specific apartment. The shares are treated as personal property and can be sold and used as collateral for a loan. The company is responsible for the management and upkeep of the building and joint facilities. The housing company system makes it possible to have non-subsidised owner-occupied apartments and free-market rental housing, as well as State-subsidised owner- occupied or rental apartments all in the same building.

Sales of housing company shares and single family houses are most active among the seasoned housing stock. New production brought to the market by the building companies is only part of total yearly sales of apartments in housing companies. The number of dwellings changing ownership has varied greatly according to the economic trends, interest levels and the development of household incomes. Naturally, the prices of owner-occupied dwellings have followed supply and demand on the housing market.

The housing company often sub-contracts the actual management of the house to a management company that acts as a middle man between the shareholders and the various physical service providers such as cleaning companies, waste management companies and other maintenance services.

Kiirava is one of the high profile real estate management companies in Helsinki. Nodium was commissioned to do a complete make-over for their web site. To emphasize their broad and prestigious client base, a photograph of a random client is shown each time the front page is loaded.

In 1982 Steven Spielberg bought the Rosebud sled used the film Citizen Kane

Substance:
That which underlies all outward manifestations; substratum; the permanent subject or cause of phenomena, whether material or spiritual; that in which properties inhere; that which is real, in distinction from that which is apparent; the abiding part of any existence, in distinction from any accident; that which constitutes anything what it is; real or existing essence.

Cathexis is a Freudian term referring to the process of investment of emotional energy to an idea, object or a person. Although I’m not a big fan of Freud (and who is?), I do think that he is onto something with this particular concept. People do, more or less consciously, invest serious amounts of time in contemplating about their favorite thoughts. Whether they are about ideas, physical objects or persons is really irrelevant.. you become more and more emotionally attached to your “pet thought” as you pet it by thinking about it. This is a mental mechanism that enables advertising to work so well. It enables products to be sold for much higher exchange value than their actual use value is. A beauty product is not only some cheap mixture of chemicals in a jar, but a symbolic vessel of an entire lifestyle carefully constructed by the manufacturer and the marketer of the product. A heirloom signet ring of a family is a circular, metallic concentration of generations of memories and traditions. A special photograph or a letter can be the most valued possession of a millionaire. Emotionally speaking, objects like this are worth thousands of times more than a seemingly similar, but a “non-authentic” e.g. copied or pirated object. Even if it has the exactly same signature, logo or picture on it, a non-authentic object may fail to satisfy the emotional desires of the observer.

As technology proceeds and memories are more and more frequently stored in digital form, an interesting dilemma with emotional attachment is bound to emerge. When a particularly meaningful photograph is originally stored only as a digital file only, are the identical, bit-for-bit copies indeed as good as the original? Will people store and cherish old e-mails, screen shots, text messages and chat transcripts with as much care as people used to store their love letters? How about the cloning of pets and, who knows, perhaps even children in the future? The insurance companies sure are careful to include a clause to not compensate for the “emotional value” of anything.

Cathexis is often a pro-active process. An individual’s hopes are sometimes projected and concentrated onto a single target. It might be their family or a business venture or a piece of art they are creating. The more time we spend thinking about a single subject, the more dependant we become on it. In the film Citizen Kane, the word Rosebud written on a sled is a token for poor, but happy childhood. It is sometimes worth to stop and think over what are the most valuable Rosebuds in one’s own life. They are often much more vulnerable and fragile than you might initially think. If you do not prepare for it, suddenly you realize that you’ve lost some of them only when it’s too late. A loss of inspiration or dignity can be just as devastating as a loss of a friend or, to some extent, even health. To quote another great film, Fight Club…

You’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself. You’re not your name. You’re not your problems. You’re not your age. You are not your hopes. You will not be saved. We are all going to die, someday.

Some time ago I started a series of entries called Where are they now? with a little blurb about Paul Hardcastle

Here comes the part two… drum roll..

Where are they now?
Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Tereshkova was born to a peasant family in the Yaroslavl’ region of the former USSR in 1937. Yaroslavl is now a part of Russia.

Soon after starting work in a textile mill at the age of 18, Valentina joined an amateur parachuting club. She was a hard worker. Later, at the age of 24, she applied to become a cosmonaut. Just earlier that year, 1961, the Soviet space program began to consider sending women into space. The Soviets were looking for another “first” at which to beat the United States.

As per the paranoia of the time, the entire program was shrouded in secrecy. When she left for training, Tereshkova reportedly told her mother she was going to a training camp for an elite skydiving team. It wasn’t until the flight was announced on the radio that her mother learned the truth. The identities of the other women in the cosmonaut program were not revealed until the late 1980s. Valentina Tereshkova was the only one of the group to go into space.

According to the about.com article she became a rather influential figure in the politics. She was a member of the parliament and the president of the Women’s Committee. In recent years, she has lead a quiet life in Moscow.

She was awarded the Greatest Woman Achiever of the Century award in 2000.

More information available in Wikipedia

The summer is nearing it’s end and I have crawled back to my keyboard, so I guess it’s time to restart this blog.

In the latest edition of my “Where are they now?” series, please let me introduce… The American Bison!

Pleistocene Park

Pleistocene Park in the Sakha Republic in northern Siberia is an attempt by Russian researcher Sergey Zimov to reproduce the ecosystem that flourished during the last ice age, with hopes to back his theory that hunting, and not climate change, destroyed the wildlife.

Russian scientists are restoring the old ecosystem with plants and animals that thrived in the region 10,000 years ago. Japanese and Russian scientists hope to clone woolly mammoths, and to re-introduce them to the park. However, they have yet to find intact mammoth DNA to use for cloning.

So far, the scientific crew has successfully introduced reindeer, moose, musk oxen and yakut horses to the region, and the introduction of American bisons (instead of the extinct steppe bisons) is ongoing. Future introductions include saiga antelopes, yaks and siberian tigers.

Pleistocene Park is a 160 km2 scientific nature reserve (zakaznik), owned and administered by a non-profit corporation, Pleistocene Park Association, consisting of the ecologists from the Northeast Science Station in Chersky and the Grassland Institute in Yakutsk. The reserve is surrounded by a 600 km2 buffer zone that will be added to the park by the regional government, once animals have successfully established.

Again, in no particular order.. a few suggestions of places to visit if you happen to find yourself in Shanghai one day.

1. The magnificent buffet at Westin Bund hotel
2. Donghu Hotel is located in a very nice area close to Shan Xi road subway station
3. The subway system is quite efficient and cheap. 3 RMB for a short trip.
4. Taxis are 11 RMB for a short trip. You can use the same electronic public transport on both taxis and subway.
5. Museum of Contemporary Art. Located in the southern part of the most central park in the city.. the People’s Park.
6. Another nice park to visit is the Lu Xun Park. You can rent an electric boat for about 30 RMB. You can often spot Tai Chi practicioners and various bands and dance groups rehearsing in most parks.
7. For a glamourous night out at a cocktail bar try M The Glamour Bar
8. For less glamourous night, try the pool table at The Spot. Decent meals available over there as well
9. The permanent Shanghai Circus World is very touristy, but still worth it.
10. Try Karaoke at one the gazillion “KTV” palaces around the city
11. Citizen Cafe at Jin Xian Lu is a nice, quiet place to have lunch or a cappuccino.
12. If you are offered a “a watch or a bag” by someone on the street say firmly “Pu Yau” once and keep on walking. If you say “no, thanks”, they’ll stick to you for a minute or two.
13. Internet require a a passport. Most hotels have internet access. Sometimes it is included in the room price and sometimes it isn’t. Connection speeds vary, but they are usually quite slow.
14. Bohdisattva offers excellent mountainbike and hiking excursions to the outskirts of the city and beyond. Good value for money.
15. El Willy has excellent spanish food.
16. Oriental Oil Massage at Green Massage. It’s relatively expensive, but the atmosphere is nice and they have high quality therapists.

Have a look at my snapshots of this megacity at the gallery

Cetacean intelligence – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dolphins are known to engage in complex play behaviour, which includes such things as producing stable underwater toroidal air-core vortex rings or “bubble rings”. There are two main methods of bubble ring production: rapid puffing of a burst of air into the water and allowing it to rise to the surface, forming a ring; or swimming repeatedly in a circle and then stopping to inject air into the helical vortex currents thus formed. The dolphin will often then examine its creation visually and with sonar. They also appear to enjoy biting the vortex-rings they’ve created, so that they burst into many separate normal bubbles and then rise quickly to the surface. Certain whales are also known to produce bubble rings, or even bubble-nets for the purpose of foraging. Many dolphin species are also known for playing by riding in waves, whether natural waves near the shoreline in a method akin to human “body-surfing”, or within the waves induced by the bow of a moving boat in a behavior known as bow-riding.

The wikipedia article about the intelligence of dolphins and whales is a fascinating read. While sleeping, dolphins appear to rest only one side of the brain at a time. This is sometimes given as an explanation to their exceptionally large brain size. Their brains (1500-1700 grams) are actually heavier than human brains (1300-1400 grams) and the wrinkles in them are of near equivalent complexity.

I’ve seen dolphins underwater once near the Eilat Dolphin Reed in the Red Sea. One of them came all the way to a nearby sandy tourist beach obviously seeking human contact for his or her amusement only. A delighted child ran to the dolphin and whatever they were doing, it was most obviously some sort of playful social interaction for both parties.

Here’s another interesting experiment that is being conducted on captive dolphins:

More recently, researchers at the Sea Life Park in Hawaii have been testing dolphins through an underwater touchscreen attached to a computer. There are no food rewards, so the dolphins use the touchscreen solely for intellectual stimulation. The scientists found that the dolphins weren’t particularly interested in abstractions, such as geometric patterns or artificial sounds. But they were very excited about touching the screen if it resulted in their seeing videos of other dolphins or hearing dolphin sounds. The next step will be to let dolphins choose video or audio sequences and then try to analyze why they’re making those decisions.

I can confirm this behaviour in humans as well. Even without any experiments, I know that people are much more interested in seeing other people and hearing human sounds compared to seeing geometric patterns or artificial sounds.

As a follow-up to the article below about “low” and “high” culture, I decided to write a few words about the relationship between fashion and art. I visited the Espoo Museum of Modern Art last Sunday. The main reason for the visit was the Claude Monet exhibition which is on show over there, but I did take a good, long look at some of the more contemporary stuff that was on show over there. Although some of it was thought-provoking and interesting, I sometimes can’t help but wonder if some of the most creative people are not working as artists after all. There is a huge amount of creativity and depth in modern advertising landscape. Diesel is one of the big brands that has a long tradition of mixing art and fashion in their advertising, but after seeing a blog post about this Viktor & Rolf store in Milan, one can hardly blame them for lack of courage either. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but you have to give them props for actually building that space with that degree of accuracy and commitment. But.. just to put my personal view of art in perspective and for the record, I thought that the Borat movie was a great piece of concept art as well.

Palast der Republik

Construction

The Palast was constructed from 1973 to 1976 in the prevailing architectural style for East German buildings, with bronze mirrored windows. The grand opening ceremony was held on 23 April 1976, and the building was opened to the public on 25 April 1976. It was built on the site of the old Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), which was damaged during World War II but finally demolished by the GDR authorities in 1950, as they regarded it a symbol of Prussian imperialism. It was sometimes nicknamed “Ballast der Republik” (“Ballast of the Republic”), “Erichs Lampenladen” (“Erich’s Lamp Shop”, referring to Erich Honecker and the 1001 lamps hanging in the foyer), or “Palazzo Prozzo.”

Demolition

In November 2003, the German parliament decided to demolish the building and leave the area as parkland until funding for the reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace) could be found. Demolition started on February 6, 2006 and was scheduled to last about 15 months. The demolition was to be carried out as a careful and slow process in order not to endanger neighbouring historical buildings such as the Berliner Dom. The cost of the demolition was estimated at 12 million euro. Dismantling of the structure was seriously delayed after more asbestos was found in various locations, and the estimated completion date was pushed back to the end of 2008.

New Music House in Helsinki

In addition to the appointment of a new DG for the public broadcaster, the Administrative Council of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) also voted 15-5 in favour of the company’s participation in the Music Centre planned for downtown Helsinki. The project has an estimated price-tag of around EUR 112 million, of which YLE is expected to find 26%. The remainder of the money will come from the state and from the City of Helsinki, but it was widely acknowledged that had the broadcaster opted out of the venture it would not have got off the ground.

The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra will make its home in the building, hopefully relieving the musicians from the acoustic doldrums of Alvar Aalto’s lovely but musically-unsuitable Finlandia Hall. The new music complex will also become home to the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Both ensembles will undoubtedly welcome the change.

The building will be completed by 2008 or 2009 at the earliest and will occupy a prime location in the centre of Helsinki, opposite Parliament and on the site of the former railway freight warehouses dating back to the Tsarist period.

In an ironic twist, Eastern european workers also laid the foundation for the new Music House at a less than 2 euro hourly wage. In an epic battle between “high” and “low” culture, the Music House is being erected in midst of great controversy regarding it’s appearance, purpose, financing and location.

I agree that Helsinki needs a acoustically worthy venue for classical music, but trying to wrap this whole thing under the generic term “Music House” is almost an insult to the wealth of other music styles that do not necessarily resonate well within this 1970’s style structure.

Now that the budget is being cut even further down from the estimate mentioned above, I find it almost impossible to believe that the acoustical design of the building will overcome the difficulties that the nearby heavy tram and car traffic present.

In my opinion, this spitting image of Palast der Republik is overpriced, overhyped and an overkill. If the gargantuan “Central Library” will be built next to it, the whole Töölönlahti area will become a sad monument to the idea that culture can be created and maintained by building huge cubes with the proper titles to accompany them.

Modern Plasztikai Sebészet

The philosophy and technics of the operative procedure was developed only a few years ago, but our experiences on more than one thousand ears revealed the fact, that the operation is safe and well-tolerated by patients. We perform the operation as a one-day-surgery, mostly under local anaesthesia.

The procedure itself means a very careful dissection of the structures at the upper pole of the earlobe. The required reshaping is achieved by modellation of a specially designed chondro-cutaneous flap (a flap containing the own cartilage and skin of the patient). The new shape is fixed by means of absorbable sutures, skin closure is made with unabsorbable uninterrupted sutures.

Postoperative care is very important. The bandage protects the new ear for one week. Suture removal is performed after the second postoperative week. The result is seen immediately after the removal of the bandage, but total resoption of the soft tissue swelling and appearance of the very final shape usually needs three or four weeks.

I’ll be participating in a LARP conference this weekend. Upon researching the subject I found out that some people have actually commissioned pointy elf-style ears as a cosmetic surgery. This is a totally novel and exciting genre of body modification.

(Update December 16th, 2009: As J pointed out, this image is indeed a digital manipulation. The clinic seemed authentic enough so I didn’t notice it myself.)

My own personal experiences with larping are limited to a few games of Steve Jackson’s Killer in the 1980’s. At the kick-off party I learned that there are still groups actively playing it.

As computer games get increasingly photorealistic, it is sometimes difficult to discern between screenshots of modern games and actual photographs. Well, we are not there quite yet, but it is a fun conceptual idea to play around with. I formed a Flickr Group called Real Life Computer Game Scenery to have a little archive of images for “Real or Not?” comparison in the future.

While exploring photographs that might suit this definition, I quickly noticed that in real photographs there are often little “mistakes” that wouldn’t make it to a computer model. The random decay and debris is often almost too perfect in computer modelled scenes.

Please join and add a photograph or two if you happen to have anything in your archives that would be relevant to this group.

Every once in a while, while reading any random newspaper, one stumbles across a story about an expedition to the North Pole or some other extremely remote location. The stories usually make the international news treshold if a) an expedition has just started or b) they have just succesfully made it to the destination or c) someone gets lost or dies in the process. I just spotted a story in Helsingin Sanomat about a solo expedition to the North Pole. After a quick look at the website of Hannah McKeand it became obvious that she is one of the professional adventurers who make a living by planning, organizing and realizing expeditions. When she is not on the road, so to speak, she is available for motivational and public speaking engagements.

Adventurers like this usually have an extensive roster of corporate sponsors. On this particular expedition she has a separate shotgun sponsor and even a chocolate sponsor!

There is at least one professional adventurer, or “explorer” in Finland. The profession has a relatively high fatality rate. A highly controversial incident that many people still remember is the North Pole attempt by Dominick Arduin. She died while pursuing her dream. I tend to agree with the people who say it was mostly due to arrogance and lack of preparation. In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Failing to Prepare is preparing to fail”.

If you are interested in the subject of people who venture out to the wilderness to find fulfillment in life, I highly recommend two films: Walking alone across Australia and the Oscar nominated film adaptation of Jon Kraukauer’s Into The Wild by Sean Penn. Into the Wild is not really about a professional explorer, but about a student who just wanted to get away from it all and find his inner self.

For a more technical overview of the field of adventuring around in the modern world, browse Explorersweb.com.

I wish fair weather and all the best to Hannah with her expedition. It is always inspiring to see people who have the guts, dedication and energy to get up and actually do this sort of stuff. I have nothing but utmost respect for people like her.

Occasionally I do redesigns of existing websites. This one was for a small association that promotes networking between executive business women. It was a demanding project which involved a lot of integration and consolidation of various data sources. Membership information is synchronized to an external database via a XML/SSH pipe cronjob. Most of the legacy content had to be imported by hand, because it was originally entered into an unwieldy behemoth of a CMS called Midgard. I still don’t know what was wrong with it, but to give you an idea, load times of simple pages occasionally exceeded 20 seconds.

After tweaking the code and parameters for a month or two, I was happy that the fresh, new site was finally launched last week. The most interesting parts of the site are confidential and members only, but feel free to take a peek at the public side of the site… it’s all in finnish though. Props to Toni for his mad jedi skills and indispensable help. The ladies at Gaia are also a really nice and friendly bunch of people. I hope they like their new virtual home.

When general Yi Song-Gye overthrew the Goryeo (Koryö) dynasty in 1392, he transferred the capital from Gaeseong to Hanyang (Seoul) and had a defensive wall built around the city. It was finished in 1398 after three years of work. In keeping with East Asian precedent there was a gate at each of the four approaches to the city: north, south, east, and west. Of the original four, the south gate is the best preserved, dating from 1447. Since goods used to flow into the city through here, a bustling market grew up along the adjacent street. Though the walls have vanished, the market remains, and is larger than ever.

The wooden part of the gate was destroyed by fire on February 10, 2008. According to some witnesses, the fire was incendiary. The identity of the arsonist is not yet known, but a taxi driver in the area observed a male approximately 50 years of age climb to the second floor with a lighted bag and run from the area.

Stonehenge, Statue of Liberty, the pyramids of Gaza… national monuments around the world have incredibly powerful symbolic value. That’s why they are often blown up in epic action movies.

My condolences to the Korean people. This was indeed a very regrettable incident.

Switchback is a rather appealing product if your work involves performing tasks with a computer in adverse weather conditions. It’s water and dust resistant and can operate at -10 degrees celsius with the solid state hard drive option. You can also get an optional wireless package that includes a civilian GPS module. The display is a touchscreen enable 5.6″ LCD screen which is sunlight viewable.

The processor is a 1 Ghz Intel Celeron� M and if I understand correctly, the device can run multiple operating systems such as Windows XP and Linux simultaniously.

I have no idea how much it costs, but my estimate would be somewhere between 4000-6000 euros per unit.

If you already own a Hummer H2, this is the computer to get further enhance your ruggerized look and feel

Музей советских игровых автоматов

There are moments when you want to come back in the childhood for a short while, because there were so many interesting things that remember cordially till now. From our Soviet childhood they are Souzmultfilm’s cartoons, Olympic Bear, planetarium, Sportloto lottery, football at the yard. They are pioneer camps at the Black Sea, horn sounds, walking-tours and songs near the campfire. They are walks with parents and friends at the Parks of Culture with ice-cream, fizzy drink and candy floss, and more — Arcade Games.

Arcade Games were a part of childhood and youth of soviet people. They were made at the secret military factories from the seventies up to the Perestroika. Forgotten and broken down Soviet-era arcade games are being restored for Moscow’s newest museum and now it is possible to play and feel atmosphere of the passed epoch.

Around 20 of the 37 different kinds of machines are now in working order. They operate with old Soviet 15 kopek coins, the hammer-and-sickle emblem of which itself conjures up a bygone time. Visitors can try their luck with games like ’Sea Battle’, where the player looks through a periscope and pretends to be a submarine commander, attempting to torpedo passing ships. In ’Tankodrom’ the player tries to knock out rocket launchers and jeeps with a small plastic tank. The museum also features Soviet pinball tables, ice-hockey games for two and four players, a target shooting game called ’Sniper’ and early video games with titles like ’Gorodki’ and ’Skachki’ (’horse race’).

Welcome to play, discover and enjoy!

Address of the Museum: 7-aya Parkovaya street, 9/26, Moscow State Technical University “MAMI”, el metro Pervomayskaya

This is like an alternate universe of video game history. One in which Space Invaders, Pacman and Donkey Kong didn’t exist.

Comrades, take good care of those treasures… I’ll come over and visit you one day.

I was seriously considering to build a charger like this myself. After googling around a bit, I found a company (Thermo-Gen) that has already designed a commercial product that allows you to keep low power mobile electronics charged up in the wilderness. It works with water, a heat source and the Peltier effect to generate electricity.

The mobile Thermoelectric Generator / charger (TEG) is based on a Trangia stormproof stove. The TEG can be used with all types of heat sources: LPG, alcohol, kerosene, open log fire, log fired stoves…

• Electric power output: 9W with cool water and 4W with boiling water in the
  kettle.
• Kettle diameter: 160mm
• The “all in one” packs into a compact unit
• Electric connection: DC plug connector
• Optional adapter: DC-plug to car cigarette lighter socket
• Cellular phones and other units are charged via a cigarette lighter charger
  adapter connected to the TEG output

As long as you have firewood and water, you could easily keep a GPS, a digital camera and a Nokia communicator infinitely charged with this ingenious device. I wrote about portable power sources some time ago, but unfortunately solar power is not a realistic option here in Finland.

Sir Edmund was apparently so shy that he even proposed to his wife with a message via her mother.

In the years that followed his famous ascent, he shunned the celebrity that had become his overnight.

On the 50th anniversary of his achievement, he even turned down an invitation from the Queen, so that he could instead travel to Kathmandu to be with lifelong Sherpa friends.

He was made an honorary Nepalese citizen in 2003.

Sir Edmund was far happier exploring.

During the next two decades, he led expeditions to the South Pole, searched for the fabled Yeti, and completed six Himalayan ascents.

And he became increasingly concerned by the plight of the Sherpa people he had met on his expeditions.

He spent two years as New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India, and founded the Himalayan Trust in 1964, which helped establish clinics, hospitals and nearly 30 schools.

It also supported the construction of two airstrips, bringing in more tourists than Sir Edmund liked.

He continued this work after personal tragedy in 1975, when his wife and daughter died in a plane crash on their way to meet him at a construction site.

Although the explorer was inconsolable for a long time, he found solace in the Nepal landscape and its people.

A man of great virtue… may he rest in peace.

During my last hike in Lappland I realized what a difference a little bonfire can make to a camp site. It immediately increases the general comfort level of a wilderness camp. You can cook food, dry your gear and stay warm much more easily when you are staying next to a fire. Unfortunately modern ultralight tent and clothing materials are usually very sensitive to heat. When placed next to fire, a typical tent or synthetic clothing can catch fire in no time.

Many Finnish hikers use a traditional lean-to shelter made of aluminium coated nylon such as the one pictured above. What I cannot understand is why hasn’t anyone made one out of Nomex. Nomex is a type of aramid fibre that is used in textile products used by the military, fire fighters and car racers. It is patented by DuPont and various fabrics based on it seem to be readily available from manufacturers such as Warwick.

A company called Massif even produces fire-resistant, waterproof, breathable outdoor clothing. I’d be interested in sewing a traditional lean-to shelter out of waterproof Nomex derivative. Please drop me a line on the comment section of this post if you know of a supplier that could sell a short roll or a leftover piece of suitable fabric.

EDIT: I’ve learned that Nomex is also used in hot air balloons in the part that is closest to the burner. I’ll contact a balloon pilot tomorrow to ask for more details. All I really need is an approximately 2 x 5 meter piece or 10 square meters… I can’t afford to buy a 500 meter roll.

I usually don’t write negative reviews, but either it was the brain washing of the Vatican or perhaps Golden Compass is just a bad movie. The plot keywords made me salivate in anticipation, but as soon as the lights went out and the endless trailers and commercials had ended, I quickly found out that this particular film wasn’t my cup of tea. While Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra wasn’t exactly an untalented actress, she failed to breathe life to the synthetic, blue screened scenes. Nicole Kidman herself had slight troubles orientating to the invisible daemon friends who were all digitally added to the frames in the post, no doubt.

This is a problem I’ve seen in many, many films. I, Robot suffered from the same blue screen syndrome. So did Mirrormask by the way. (On the other hand, I did like Beowulf quite a bit… perhaps it was because it didn’t mix live action with CGI, who knows)

It is hard for an actor or an actress to imagine that they are talking to a 4 meter tall polar bear when they are actually just talking to a giant chroma key wall or, even worse, to the microphone in a tiny little voiceover booth.

Before I forget it, let me just mention that my favorite performance in Golden Compass was Sam Elliot as Mr. Scoresby.

Technology aside, I wasn’t swept away by the plot either. It felt very much like a made-to-order saga with a little bit of myths and scandinavian names thrown in for good measure. The film is based on a book by Philip Pullman, one of England’s most outspoken atheists. There is a strong anti-christian (or anti-dogmatic, to be more precise) undertone in Pullman’s script. On the other hand the fascination with the ancient mythology seems very shallow and gimmicky in this context.

I’ll give Golden Compass two stars out of five. Ahh, I’m looking forward to I am Legend to also give two stars only. This will equalize my ratings scale nicely and make it look more like a gaussian curve instead of a baseball cap with every other movie getting three and a half or four stars…

I’ll be back

It is that special time of year again. Here’s a collection of images from my archives to enhance your holiday spirit.

If that didn’t help, try one of the Christmas radios

Well, I finally made it to redrum last night. To warm up for a night out, we doped up with some cava (Conde de Haro) and a nourishing meal at Grotesk. The tuna pastrami appetizer at Grotesk was excellent, by the way. Grotesk is a fancy fine dining place with relatively high prices on the menu, so I was surprised to see a high profile biker gang complete with emblems over there enjoying the creations of the chefs. It greatly enhanced the already eclectic atmosphere of the restaurant.

After a quick taxi ride, we ended up at Redrum, the club with allegedly best sound system around. Well, after last night I can confirm that the sound system is indeed unbelievable. It is built by Funktion One and combined with the unique interior the music sounded totally out of this world. Maybe I’m just used to the el cheapo systems at other clubs or maybe it was the Cava, but the acoustics in the wood paneled club sounded practically studio quality to me. You could easily chat with your friends without shouting and still hear the music with vibrant clarity. The bass was superbly satisfying as well. I think there are at least 6 or 7 layers of acoustic material on the walls.

If you are visiting Helsinki and dance music is your thing, I highly recommend redrum for the acoustic experience alone. Sometimes they host rock concerts as well.

Philips, Computed Tomography – Brilliance CT – 64-channel configuration

The Brilliance 64-channel configuration breaks through previous boundaries in CT imaging, providing large volume, thin-slice coverage to improve diagnostic confidence, image quality and productivity.

With 40mm of thin-slice coverage, the 64-channel broadens horizons in cardiac imaging, allowing for unprecedented coronary artery evaluation. The 64-channel configuration also provides breakthrough performance in advanced  pulmonary imaging, multi-organ trauma evaluation and low-dose pediatric applications to boost your clinical capabilities to the highest level attainable.

Remember that story about Tom Cruise buying a $200000 ultrasound scanner for personal use to check his unborn baby? Well, if you have the money to spare, here’s a gadget that any budding scientologist should love, the 64 channel Philips Brilliance! Who wouldn’t want to reach the highest level attainable?

Perhaps one day you will be able to search Google not only for people’s names, but also for their pictures, fingerprints, internal body structure or DNA.

The hottest Christmas present tip this season: a personal fingerprint or DNA poster!

Reuters – EU agrees public funding for satellite project

Supporters say it is a vital technological platform for Europe, but critics say it could be a costly white elephant because the U.S. system already has a dominant market position and Russia and China are working on their own systems.

Berlin had been blocking the use of unspent EU funds partly because it feared German firms could be shut out of major work under the initial tendering scheme, but also out of concern at the precedent of using unspent funds that would otherwise be repaid to member states.

TENDER REDIVIDED

To placate Germany, diplomats said EU leaders could issue a declaration next month pledging that the use of unspent funds for Galileo would remain an exception.

The total cost of Galileo — 3.4 billion euro ($5.1 billion) — is being raised from public funds after private companies declined to carry the risk.

Uncharacteristically, I am going to a political rant mode for a paragraph or two.

“…because the U.S. system already has a dominant market position and Russia and China are working on their own systems”? Isn’t this the main reason why this system is being built in the first place? I am amazed that it has taken this long and that people are not seeing importance of this project. As a mental exercise, just imagine someone pressing a big red button to turn off GPS for everyone else except the American Army. Is it an unprobable scenario? Perhaps it is, but if it happens, there really is no place to call and ask for your money back.

GPS has grown from a military platform to a global, ubiquitous navigation system that has thousands of applications all over the world. It is a mind bogglingly powerful ace card that USA has up their sleeve. They can use that big red button any time they see fit. GPS system’s selective availability could probably be enabled at a relatively small geographical area for a short period of time if needed.

In my opinion, 3.4 billion euros is pocket money to neutralize that threat. Well, granted, it doesn’t take much shoot down a competing satellite positioning system, but it is not only military threats that this system could be used for. Anyway, sometimes it is just time to bite the bullet and show that you have the muscle to get by relatively independently if need be.

This was a tiny little news item at Reuters which probably goes unnoticed by most media. I wanted to highlight it a bit to underline the importance of projects like this instead spending 200 million euros a year on MEPs commuting between Strasbourg and Brussels.

OK, rant mode over, thank you for listening.

A designer friend of mine, Tuija Järvenpää, has come up with the idea of selling pictures of Christmas trees.

She’s been working with the concept of disposable objects of art for quite some time now. One of her earlier projects was a paper wedding dress. The works are dancing around in the gray area of ecological statements, conceptual art, household items and commercial products.

The paper Christmas trees are actually very large scale ink jet prints. They are 134 cm * 280 cm in size and can be stored in the shipping tube for the next year.

I helped her put together a little online store to make it easier for clients to place an order for the tree. Go ahead and mail her if you want one shipped outside of Finland.

Sunshine

The director also considered the story of Sunshine as an appropriate counterintuitive approach for the contemporary issue of global warming, with the death of the sun being a threat. Originally, Sunshine was scripted to begin with a voiceover talking about how parents tell their children not to look into the sun, but once told, the children would be compelled to look. Boyle described the sun as a godly personality in the film, creating a psychological dimension for the astronauts due to its scale and power. The director also described the film’s villain as based on light, explaining, “That’s quite a challenge because the way you generate fear in cinema is darkness.” The director also sought to have the characters experience a psychological journey in which each person is worn mentally, physically, and existentially and is experiencing doubt in their faiths.

I like to get a little dose of science fiction every now and then to keep the subconsciousness nourished with far-out ideas. Sunshine was just what the doctor ordered as far as the science part of the movie is concerned. In the movie a “Q-Ball” , the nucleus of a supersymmetric particle, gets itself lodged in the Sun. The hypothetical Q ball eats through normal matter, ripping apart the Sun’s neutrons and protons and converting them into supersymmetric particles. The Earth’s last and only hope? Why, to launch and detonate a gigantic nuclear bomb to fix the problem, of course!

Here’s an interesting review with the scientific advisor of the film.

Well, science aside, I think the film makers did a pretty good job with many other aspects of the film. The art direction and visual effects in general were well made. More importantly, they were also original and refreshing, which is not an easy task to accomplish in this day and age.

I found it particularly inspiring that the sun was treated as a god-like entity much like the ancient egyptian Sun God Ra and the aztec god Huitzilopochtli. As a matter of fact, sun has been worshipped for all of recorded history.

My personal prediction is that the Sun God is about to get quite angry while us mere mortals are thinning the ozone layer which is protecting us from his angry UVB eye.

Scientists develop Terminator-style helmets which allow fighter pilots to see through their planes | the Daily Mail

A futuristic helmet which allows fighter pilots to see through the walls and floor of their aircraft has been developed by scientists.

The high-tech head gear is attached to cameras on the outside of the aircraft, which project pictures of the plane’s surroundings onto the inside of the pilot’s visor.

The pilot then has 360 degree vision of the world around the plane, allowing x-ray style vision.

This is for the European F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It will also impose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below.

Eye-Fi Wireless Card

Eye-Fi uses home wireless networks to eliminate the time-consuming chore of dealing with cables, card readers or software plug-ins associated with uploading photos. Users simply turn on their digital camera and their pictures are wirelessly uploaded. The Eye-Fi Card works with existing and new SD-compatible digital cameras and stores photos like a conventional SD memory card.

How on earth did they manage to cram a 2 GB memory chip and a wi-fi chip the same card? I remember when a 1 GB hard drive used to cost a thousand dollars and wireless networking required great big satellite dishes.

Well, times they have a-changed and now you can pop in a memory card that uploads your photos automatically via wi-fi as you take them. I am curious if you can also upload your photos directly to iPhoto or if you can only upload them to online services. It does seem to support a wide variety of different services including Facebook, Flickr and the open source Gallery software. At $99 it’s not an expensive add-on if you need something like this for real-time coverage of an event for example.

Micro-Compact Low E-Home

The micro-compact low e-home is all-electric and powered by photovoltaic solar panels of 8 sqm with a small diameter vertical axis wind generator.

Day-time excess power is diverted into the grid. Night-time power is provided by the wind turbine and reserve batteries. Heating and air conditioning is ducted to each of the four function spaces. Long duration LED lighting is used internally and for the external walkways.

I wouldn’t call it exactly portable at 2 metric tonnes of weight, but it is an interesting and quite well though out concept. The Micro Compact home web site has several other variations of this shelter. The price is around 34000 euros per unit.

On my recent trip to Lappland, I met a guy who had built a small transportable fibre glass home mounted on a sledge. It could be moved around with a snow mobile and could house him and his dog. I think that architects who design miniature houses like the Micro Compact home could really learn a lot by interviewing people who have actually built and used homes like this in the real life. Sometimes there is a bit of an ivory tower situation between the architects and the real world users of portable homes.

And don’t let me get started on the huge RV truck conversions that they are building in USA. Sometimes they have a small garage built in the truck for another vehicle. Check out this example of these gas guzzling monsters.