Quite amusing: SarcasticGamer.com presents a twisted take on one of Microsoft's latest and greatest announcements. Truth be told, We actually WANT a Surface Computer, but since we can't afford one, we thought it might be fun to make fun of it . . .
According to a novel study mapping the structure of the
Internet, the increased use of peer-to-peer communications could "improve the
overall capacity of the Internet and make it run much more smoothly."
Bandwidth and throughput issues aside, what really makes the study interesting is the visualizations they did on what the internet looks like: Its a tangled web of hierarchical structures, based on the connections between individual nodes (such as
service providers). >
The Internet: Your speed may vary (I don't see any tubes...)
>
The Inner core of highly connected nodes Still no tubes . . .
>
The outer periphery of isolated networks Is that a . . . ? No, I guess not.
>
Source: Mapping the Internet Duncan Graham-Rowe MIT Technology Review, Tuesday, June 19, 2007
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18944/
"The car employs Audi’s quattro all-wheel-drive system, but the torque split is far more rear-biased than on any other Audi. As with its cousin, the Lamborghini Gallardo, the R8 strives to mimic the feel of a rear-drive car, so only 10 to 35 percent of the V-8’s torque is ever sent forward. At one particularly enthusiastic first-gear launch, I was surprised to find the enormous 295/30/19 rear tires spinning briefly before all four wheels dug in and catapulted the car forward. Burnouts are something you don’t expect from an all-wheel-drive Audi, even an RS 4.
As I said, I didn’t get to drive the R8 on a track, and exploring this car’s limits on a public road would constitute sociopathic behavior on par with juggling chainsaws at a baby shower.
But I can tell you that the R8 grips so tenaciously that it wanted to bounce my head into the side glass on right-hand corners, and there was more g-force in reserve. Midengine cars have a slight weight bias to the rear, which is the best possible setup for maximum grip. Meanwhile, all-wheel drive delivers outstanding traction. Combine a midengine design with all-wheel drive and you have a lesson in what it feels like to have the force of gravity applied to your noggin on the lateral plane.
The stereotypical knock on high-performance Audis is that they put up impressive numbers without delivering much in the way of driver involvement. The R8 delivers the numbers, certainly — 187 m.p.h. top speed and 0 to 125 m.p.h. in 14.9 seconds, to name a couple — but it also has soul."
Source: Growling at the Exotics’ Door Behind the Wheel | 2008 Audi R8
EZRA DYER NYT, May 20, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/automobiles/autoreviews/20AUTO.html
"Yet the ministry building’s design also debunks many of the standard clichés we hold about late Soviet architecture. Rising on an incline between two highways, the building’s heavy cantilevered forms reflect the Soviet-era penchant for heroic scale. Yet they also relate sensitively to their context, celebrating the natural landscape that flows directly underneath the building.
The composition of interlocking forms, conceived as a series of bridges, brings to mind the work of the Japanese Metabolists of the late ’60s and early ’70s, proof that Soviet architects weren’t working in an intellectual vacuum.
Similarly, the Druzhba (Friendship) Sanitarium in Yalta, Ukraine, designed by Igor Vasilevsky and completed in 1986, is an object lesson in bold architectural strokes. The resort building’s cylindrical form stands on a hill overlooking a beach in what was then an exclusive resort town. To enter, visitors cross a bridge encased in a glass tube and then descend into the complex, which is supported on massive legs housing the elevators and stairs. Conceived as a “social condenser,” the building’s core is occupied by a cinema, dance hall, swimming pool and cafe. Circling this core are the guest rooms, arrayed in a dazzling saw-tooth facade orienting each room toward the water and sunlight, while giving the structure an eerie science-fiction quality. (Think Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)
But what’s refreshing about this exhibition is its lack of an ideological agenda: it is open to all sorts of possibilities. The Gaudiesque romanticism of a sanitarium in Druskininkai, Lithuania, for example, spins the aesthetic off in yet another direction. Built as a series of interlocking cylinders, its forms are lifted slightly off the ground to create the illusion of lightness. Decorative concrete ribbons spill out over the facade; columns for draining rainwater splay open at the bottom. The building looks as though it’s unraveling, a blend of creativity and madness spilling out into full view.
In another project, a sports complex and opera house in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, an open-air terrace steps down into the earth, flanked by a pair of immense concrete walls and narrow staircases that evoke the excavation of some forgotten futurist city — not a bad metaphor for the entire show."
Source: Soviet Architects and Their Edifice Complex NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF NYT, May 16, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/arts/design/16cold.html
The Army’s primary machine gun can spit 850 bullets per minute. FN
Herstal developed the gun in the early 1980s for the Pentagon, which wanted a
lightweight automatic weapon (the one here is 17 pounds). The Belgian company’s
South Carolina factory makes about 550 a month for the Army.
Full article is here:
Weapons of Mass Production John Hockenberry Portfolio, May 2007 Issue http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/international-news/ portfolio/2007/03/29/Weapons-of-Mass-Production
The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand:
Source: The Mathematical Lives of Plants Julie J. Rehmeyer
Science News, May 5, 2007; Vol. 171, No. 18 http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070505/mathtrek.asp
Create art while you work! If you find yourself spending more and more time answering email, and less and less time making art then why not do them both at the same time? Turn your emails, internet browsing, and report writing into digital paintings. 9 to 5 paintings are a visual representation of your daily computing routines.
Urban Cactus is a housing project in the Vuurplaat section of Rotterdam
by UCX Architects / Ben Huygen and Jasper Jaegers and done for Vestia
Rotterdam Feijenoord/Estrade Projecten.
Due to its siting at the end of harbor, the architects chose to
conceptualize the project as belonging to the "green nerve" rather than
the surrounding urban structure.
They placed the 98 residential units on 19 floors, using the pattern of
outdoor spaces to determine the overall appearance of the project.
The slightly irregular pattern alternates these outdoor spaces to
create what are in effect double-height spaces. Each unit then receives
more sunlight than a typical stacked composition.
Also the terrace area might be equivalent to a constant depth extended
around the perimeter (say two meters), but their configuration creates
larger "rooms" for gardening and for enjoying the outdoors and the city
views.
"A new generation of supersonic private jets could trigger a boom in luxury
high-speed flight -- without the sonic boom normally associated with breaking
the sound barrier.
Lockheed Martin's advanced Skunk
Works unit is designing a small, 12-seat passenger jet that would travel at
1,200 mph (Mach 1.8) but which would produce only a whisper of the annoying
crack once emitted by the retired Concorde.
The sleek, 130-foot-long QSST (for "quiet supersonic travel")
aircraft is being designed for a Nevada consortium called Supersonic Aerospace International,
or SAI, at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion.
Source: New York to L.A. in Two Hours By Robert Andrews Wired, 02:00 AM Aug, 28, 2006 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71665-0.html
I meant to get to this after the announcement became official last week: GM will make a new version -- retro of course -- of the Camaro. It will be built in Canada.
Camaro fans can thank Ford's updated and hot selling retro Mustang for the production green light. Like the Mustang, the base version will be a 6 cylinder engine, with a high output V8 as an option. In the past, GM has used a detuned LT1 Vette engine in the Z28 Camaros, an I would expect a similar set of choices this time also.
The big question will be how true to the concept car the actual prodcution vehicle will be:
GM revives Chevrolet Camaro muscle car AP, Friday August 11, 2006 http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2006/8/11/apworld/20060811090222&sec=apworld
This fun little creation was on display at the Milan Auto show recently. It’s a sofa, made by Italian designer Zak, that uses some Goodyear RunOnFlat treads.
Aside from the pic and that little tidbit of info, the link chain doesn’t exactly produce any more useful info.
So there you have it. A sofa made from Goodyear tires.
A friend in Sweden sends these photos -- pretty clever stuff, using only some ski gloves and other common household items:
Note: These are not credited, so this could be an urban legend of sorts . . . But based on the people I know from Sweden and the stories of long dark winter nights, this is just the sort of clever, gee-why-didn't-I-think-of-that kinda stuff that is consistent with their sense of humor . . .
The video below reveals a very cool, two handed UI. The written description does not do justice to how wicked cool this looks -- the best way to describe it is that it approximates the fascinating interface in the film Minority Report.
click for video:
In the movie, this is the PC interface in 2054 -- and this video via Jeff Han of NYU of this is an example of how the future sometimes arrives faster than expected.
I'm not sure their description does it justice:
Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users."
Note: this looks like the next logical step to UI interfaces such as Audio pad, first mentioned at bb in 2003.
Interesting NYT article on the increasing girth of pleasure craft in Europe:
"Are boats tending to get bigger? "The answer is yes," he said. Of course, the builders of what have come to be called giga-yachts - even bigger boats of 400 feet to 500 feet - prefer the Monaco boat show, which just preceded Genoa. Still, the best-known builders below that category were all here.
The high price of oil, which yachts burn as fuel, did not seem to worry anyone. Fulvio Dodich, chief executive of Ferretti Yachts, a unit of the Ferretti Group of Italy, described his customers as "middle-tier millionaires," adding that 17 percent of them had liquid financial assets of more than $100 million. "Fuel consumption is not that important," he said.
But the health of the American market affects how European boat builders fare. Ferretti, Italy's biggest yacht builder, does about 20 percent of its business in the United States.
European yacht builders have made their deepest mark in the American market for sailboats, but they are running to catch up with powerboats as well.
To do so, yacht builders from Italy, France, Germany and elsewhere have increasingly transformed the business into a high-end branch of the luxury goods arena by creating yachts that are to sailing what Ferraris or Porsches are to driving."
There was a good documentary on the construction of this on Discovery. It's located in southern France, and is the highest bridge in the world. It is a truly amazing piece of engineering, especially considering the method used to span the distance between the piers.
The red support struts (1 left and 2 right in photo) were removed following completion of the bridge.
The Millau Bridge over the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains is more than 984 feet high - taller than the Eiffel Tower.
"On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as
old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm.
Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000
others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with
dead cows.
Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings.
Afterward, the Dutch - realizing that the disaster could have been much
worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea
level - vowed never again.
After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public works official, put it in an
interview last week, "Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be
threatened."
So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter century, the nation erected a
futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world today as
one of the best barriers against the sea's fury - one that could withstand the
kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years."
>
Why are the Europeans so much more forward thinking about the inevtiable cyclical natural disasters than we in the United States are?
>
"The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with
long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination
into ways of forestalling disaster.
London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on
the Adriatic.
Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on
stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.
Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for
inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane
Katrina recede into history.
"They have something to teach us," said George Z. Voyiadjis, head of civil
and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. "We should
capitalize on them for building the future here."
The Dutch erected a kind of forward defensive
shield, drastically reducing the amount of vulnerable coastline. Mr. de Haan,
director of the water branch of the Road and Hydraulic Engineering Institute of
the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, said the
project had the effect of shortening the coast by more than 400 miles.
For New Orleans, experts say, a similar forward defense would seal off Lake
Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. That step would eliminate a major conduit
by which hurricanes drive storm surges to the city's edge - or, as in the case
of Katrina, through the barriers.
The Dutch also increased the height of their dikes, which now loom as much as
40 feet above the churning sea. (In New Orleans, the tallest flood walls are
about half that size.) The government also erected vast complexes of floodgates
that close when the weather turns violent but remain open at other times, so
saltwater can flow into estuaries, preserving their ecosystems and the
livelihoods that depend on them.
The Netherlands maintains large teams of inspectors and maintenance crews
that safeguard the sprawling complex, which is known as Delta Works. The annual
maintenance bill is about $500 million. "It's not cheap," Mr. de Haan said. "But
it's not so much in relation to the gross national product. So it's a kind of
insurance."
The interactive Gulf of Mexico map illustrates rigs damaged, rigs that drifted, and rigs that have been unreported as of September 2. Use the "Identify Rig" radio button to get more information on a specific rig's status. This map is provided as a public service. For more information on the worldwide mobile rig fleet, please visit www.RigLogix.com.
