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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great Worldwide Star Count

Bright outdoor lighting at night is a growing problem for astronomical observing programs around the world. By searching for the same constellations, participants in the Great World Wide Star Count will be able to compare their observations with what others see, giving them a sense of how star visibility varies from place to place. The observers will also learn more about the economic and geographic factors that control the light pollution in their communities and around the world.

“Without even being aware of it, many of us have lost the ability to see many stars at night,” Ward says. “The Great World Wide Star Count will help raise awareness of the importance and the beauty of the night skies.”

My father’s father was a bit of an eccentric. Among his other achievements (of being the director of an aeroplane factory and a fire station) he painted stars on the ceiling of his sauna. The exact reasons for this remain a bit unclear to me.

Light and sound pollution are an increasingly serious problem, especially in densely populated areas. In this year’s Banff Mountain Film festival I saw a collage-style animated film called Conversing with Aotearoa. In an interview segment, various outdoor enthusiasts were asked “When do you feel that you are out in the wilderness?”. I couldn’t agree more with the person who said “When I can no longer hear the sounds of the civilization.”

On Monday, I’m off to the most remote village in Finland. The village of Lisma is located deep within Lemmenjoki national park in the parish of Inari. It is my departure point for a 10 day solo expedition to the Øvre Anarjóhka area in Norway.

“Polar madness” grips many people working at poles

“Say there’s somebody you go to lunch with and you don’t notice the way that they eat. But if you ate with that same person day in and day out for six months, suddenly the way they chew their food is enough to drive you crazy,” added Palinkas, who has ventured to the Antarctic seven times.

The Lancet paper detailed past cases of polar expeditions gone wrong, including an Arctic scientific expedition in the 1880s that descended into mutiny, lunacy, suicide and cannibalism, leaving only six survivors from a crew of 25 men.

Palinkas cited more recent examples of “polar madness” at research stations, including one staffer clubbing another with a claw hammer and another beating a co-worker with a pipe.

“There was a saying at the station for the remainder of the winter that ‘If you’ve got a gripe, use a pipe,”‘ he said.

The researchers mentioned several other symptoms among people on polar expeditions such as memory impairment, anxiety, reduced alertness, headaches, boredom, fatigue, inattention to personal hygiene, intellectual inertia and over-eating.

Intellectual inertia? I wonder what that means.

I have tremendous respect for people who can live in confined spaces with anyone for half a year or more. Some people can’t even manage to stay married for that long.

One can only imagine what the atmosphere is like at a place like the Halley research station, when one looks at Snow Girl’s collection of photographs from over there. It seems like most of the staff has lost their mind in one way or another, but for some it is a positive experience. Most seem to pursue all kinds of crazy activities just to keep sane. They even have a bar in a mysterious “building number 5″.

Recently polar and arctic regions have started to increasingly interest me. While researching the Kola peninsula as a potential hiking destination, I found out about Varanger in the most Northern part of Norway. It seems like a beautiful, yet easily accessible place. Kola might be a bit too demanding for a solo expedition for someone with my level of experience of arctic regions.

A Greener Apple

It is generally not Apple’s policy to trumpet our plans for the future; we tend to talk about the things we have just accomplished. Unfortunately this policy has left our customers, shareholders, employees and the industry in the dark about Apple’s desires and plans to become greener. Our stakeholders deserve and expect more from us, and they’re right to do so. They want us to be a leader in this area, just as we are in the other areas of our business. So today we’re changing our policy.

I’ve been following Greenpeace’s Green My Apple campaign with great interest. I’m the first one to admit that I’m a real Apple fan boy and that fact can make it difficult to judge the effectiveness of Apple’s environmental efforts with objectivity. However, after reading both sides of the story, I couldn’t help but to re-position Greenpeace as a somewhat hypocritical organization in my personal mind map. They chose Apple as a high profile target and a type of a scapegoat to serve as an example to other companies that refuse to co-operate and communicate with Greenpeace’s activists in a manner that is seen proper by Greenpeace.

To me it is obvious that Apple has been doing a much better job (all in all) with their environmental policy than many of their competitors. The Greenpeace campaign was targeting a very specific part of the policy: toxic substances and recycling practices. One of the goals of this campaign is to make all computer products 100% PVC free. PVC is commonly used as a shielding material for ethernet cables for example. I discussed this matter with one of Greenpeace’s charity muggers on the street and found out that even their own offices still use PVC-shielded cable. Sure the PVC free cabling is more expensive and difficult to obtain, but if 90% of your income goes to a “fund raising and expenses” one would expect that you could use at least part of the remaining 10% to clean up your own act and show a good example to others by phasing out PVC in your own organization. And yes, PVC free cabling is available today. Not speak of feeding electricity from the land lines instead of running the engines of Rainbow Warrior to generate electricity while moored at a port!

It is also obvious that today’s announcement will put Apple to the top end of Greenpeace’s score card and after this they will proudly tout their campaign as a great success. I wonder what they will do with the domain name though.. perhaps they could spend a few thousand euros to rename and repurpose it as “greenmyhp.org” or “greenmydell.org”.

Well, part of my disgust with this particular dirt throwing campaign has something to do with the charity monging practices that Greenpeace and many other non-profit organizations are so aggressively using these days. Although financially extremely lucrative, I am certain that the shameless “face to face” guilt trip marketing strategy will really hurt their reputation in the long run. Unobjective scoring and grading of companies and data for publicity stunt reasons in campaigns like “Green my Apple” will only exacerbate the process.

Ahh, there… I’m glad I got that out of my system! Peace, love and understanding to all of my treehugging brothers and sisters… and the rest of you eco-conscious gadget-freaks and code monkeys as well. And to any Greenpeace activists that might stumble upon here: no offense intended, just please clean up your own act while you are saving the world.

Sony Home – Hollywood Reporter

In the wake of virtual worlds like Second Life and such file-sharing stalwarts as YouTube and Flickr, Sony Computer Entertainment is using its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable to usher in its own virtual online-connected community.

The initiative, dubbed “Home,” will allow gamers to create virtual avatars and congregate in 3-D homes and halls to socialise via text, audio or video chat; watch movie trailers or feature films; and play casual games. Gamers will be able to do all this via a free download that will be offered in the fall in the U.S. and Europe.

“We believe there are now incremental opportunities for publishers to create their own ‘homes’ for gamers to visit and play games while being served up streaming trailers and sponsored advertisements in a reasonable fashion,” he said. “Sony’s online strategy, while behind Microsoft’s Xbox Live service and its 6 million global users, appears differentiated and impressive on first pass.”

McNealy cited an example of how Electronic Arts could make money by selling virtual “Madden NFL 2008″ T-shirts for avatars in the “Home” world. In addition, streaming video content for upcoming games, movies or TV shows could be shown on walls throughout the “Home.”

This came totally out of the blue for me. Sony is a strange creature. On the other hand, they have been mimicking the successful products of other companies since the very beginning. On the other hand, they have shown over and over again that they are not following others when it comes to big, strategic moves.

Sony “Home” essentially seems like a Second Life clone without the ability to build your own objects except in a very limited way. Having total freedom to build your own structures and scripts is both the strength and weakness of Second Life. Over time, it has been riddled by a number security incidents… self replicating virus objects, stolen customer data etc.

I have high hopes for this initiative. It will finally bring secure 3D virtual communities to the masses.

EDIT: Here’s a promotional video clip of the project

New York Surveillance Camera Players

Debut Performance

At around 11 pm on Tuesday 10 December 1996, six members of the Surveillance Camera Players (Michael, Katie, Bill, Susan, Lisa, and Orrin) performed most of Art Toad’s special adaption of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi in front of a surveillance camera in Manhattan’s Union Square subway station. At the same time, three other SCPers (Grrrt, Michelle and John), as well as several on-lookers, watched the play on one of the station’s closed-circuit television monitors.

It is interesting to note that An International Day of Action Against Video Surveillance was organized on September 7th, 2001… just two days before the incident that changed the public opinion about government surveillance in general.

Here in Vienna they have a surveillance camera at the top of every escalator on the U-bahn stations. In contrast, the density of cameras at the Tube stations in London was phenomenal. Each staff member monitors up to 60 cameras. The New Scientist has an interesting article about new software that can spot dubious behaviour, suicide attempts, abandonded packages etc.

Face recognition technology is slowly crossing over from security products sector to consumer electronics. Canon’s new Powershot TX1 has a rather advanced face recognition system that can even recognize multiple faces in a scene while shooting video at HD resolution!

It just occurred to me that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to implement an “identity search” on Google Images. All it would take is to automatically index every face in each image and link it to the profile picture of your Gmail account for example. It won’t probably happen in a year or two, but who knows about the future? The technology is already here.

EDIT: I just learned that Royal Caribbean has a ship-wide surveillance systems utilizing facial recognition technology. This enables security personnel to locate any passenger on the ship, except in private areas (such as staterooms and restrooms).

What is tick-borne encephalitis?

Tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, is a human viral infectious disease involving the central nervous system. The disease is most often manifest as meningitis (inflammation of the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord), encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), or meningoencephalitis (inflammation of both the brain and meninges). Although TBE is most commonly recognized as a neurologic disease, mild febrile illnesses can also occur. Long-lasting or permanent neuropsychiatric sequelae are observed in 10-20% of infected patients.

Check out the map of the endemic areas. Yup, it’s Austria right there in the center of it. I got my second shot of TBE vaccination today. It’s about 45 euros a pop and I highly recommend it to anyone who plans to spend extended periods of time in any outdoor environment in Central Europe. A friend of mine who works at a health centre that specializes in tropical diseases told me a graphic story about an aeroplane pilot who had caught the disease. He was just shaking all over. TBE can cause all kinds of neurological symptoms and it can be difficult to diagnose because it can mimic several other diseases.

Austria is the only country where the number of cases is dropping yearly. I think that they have adopted a rigorous vaccination program and practically everyone is vaccinated at 6 years of age. The vaccine also happens to be austrian.

I’m not sure if I’m a bit over-cautious here, but in my opinion it’s not a big price to pay for some extra peace of mind. Then again, pharmaceutics must be one of the most profitable industries in the world. It thrives on pathophobia – the fear of diseases.

RESETDESIGN

The 2Cycle: two bicycles that can be linked to form a stable four-wheeler in no time. Physically challenged people and senior citizens can ride it together without risking their necks. The spiffy four-wheeler has back supports for a comfortable ride and can be equipped with an auxiliary motor.

I finally got my trusty old Cannondale Silkpath back from Velosport where it was being serviced. They did a really good job and the bike is now as good as new. We are moving to Vienna soon and I’ve found out that you can transport foldable bikes in trams over there. Brompton seems to be the leading brand in that area of bike design.

I guess the contraception pictured above doesn’t count as a foldable bicycle although you can split it in two. It is a design study from Design Academy Eindhoven.

The weather here in Europe has been crazy this Winter and there seems to be a ton of news about ecological matters in mainstream media these days. The alpine tourism industry is being hit by the freight train of global warming really hard this year. I have a feeling that even the most die hard climate change-scepticists are starting to have second thoughts about their stance now. A 1 celsius degree increase in mean temperature would make half of the ski resorts in Germany practically snowless.

I’ve owned two cars in my life and both of them ended up being wrecked in one way or another. I switched to bikes and public transport about 20 years ago. I’m sort of happy that I don’t have to start weaning myself from the car centric way of life at this age.

Soviet Bus-stops by Christopher Herwig via Boing Boing

The last time I shot at an “industrial building” (a match factory) in that part of the world, I got arrested for espionage. That was during the time of the Soviet Union though when St. Petersburg was called Leningrad. The police let me go after playing around with my video camera (!) for quite some time. Our guide was held for “questioning”.

Shelter: Add your name to the Wall of Shame

Shelter is calling on Gordon Brown to fund an extra 20,000 social rented homes each year in a bid to end the housing crisis. And to get his attention, we built a 30-metre interactive Wall of Shame on London’s South Bank.

Thousands of Shelter supporters transformed the grey Wall of Shame into a red Wall of Hope using red ‘brick’ stickers customised with their signatures and messages of support.

I tried really hard to think of a good message to put on the wall, but all I could come up with at the time was “Everyone needs a home“. After I left the scene, I thought of “His shelter is your castle” to underline the mutual nature of benefit campaigns like this.

I uploaded a whole bunch of other London photos as well. If interested, have a look.

Nankyoku Monogatari (“South Pole Story”; released in the U.S. as Antarctica) is a 1983 Japanese movie starring Ken Takakura about the February 1958 Japanese scientific expedition to the South Pole, and the party’s dramatic rescue from the impossible weather conditions they encounter on the return journey. It focuses on the relationship between the scientists and their loyal and hard-working Sakhalin Huskies, particularly the lead dogs Taro and Jiro who, without human leadership or assistance, complete the journey back to the base to summon a rescue party. The film features a score by Vangelis released worldwide (including Japan) as Antarctica.

Disney has recently released a remake of a japanese film called Nankyoku_Monogatari. The remake is called Eight Below. I haven’t seen the original japanese version, but Eight Below is actually a decent flick. I don’t know what it is with these dog movies, but they seem to remain popular generation after generation. There must be the same type of speculation about the next Lassie as there is about the next James Bond. The current Lassie is Lassie number 10 (all from the same line of dogs apparently).

I wonder when they will start cloning the most succesful dog movie stars. The first cloned pet has already been sold. It is a cat though.

Paradise, at a price – World – smh.com.au

“Fiji has been famous in America since Raymond Burr bought Naitouba in 1968, and it grows and grows,” said Morrison. “It would have to be in the top three most sought-after island areas in the world.”

Chiefs sold Gibson’s Mago Island, for instance, and removed its villagers after their conversion by Christian missionaries in the mid-19th century.

The most recent owner, Japan’s Tokyu Corporation, bought it in 1985 for $US6.15 million. Gibson has reportedly installed a bowling alley. Locals told the Herald he intended to keep it as a private getaway and that his son lives there as a caretaker. This week, moguls and magnates can pick up the 90-hectare Blue Lagoon Island, said to have inspired the book and film of the same name, for $US25 million ($33 million) or the boutique 19-hectare Natewa Bay Island for $US8 million.

“Unlike Mago Island purchased by Mel Gibson,” says the listing at luxuryrealestate.com, “Blue Lagoon was never permanently inhabited, thus when it was declared freehold in the 1860s, no native population was displaced”. That selling point provides a clue to the problem of what real estate agents call “alienated freehold” islands: as land values have climbed, so has discontent among nationalists and landless Fijians. Some form of compensation, says the land rights activist Francis Waqa Sokonobogi, is needed to stop the natives from becoming restless again.

Naitouba is currently owned by Adi Dam a.k.a Da Free John. He is a sort of cult leader. While visiting Fiji I met a friendly fellow from San Francisco who said he was a second generation “practicioner”. He was on his way to the private island of the religion.

An island like that is a bit like a miniature nation. You have your own infrastructure, eco-system and in some cases (as in the case of Naitouba), your own culture and beliefs. I spent this morning reading about the celebrity scientologists (John Travolta, Tom Cruise and, gasp, even Beck!). It seems that once you get succesful and rich enough, you start thinking about buying your own tropical island. They are the ultimate symbols of success in the world of the jet set.

Global warming may cause severe problems for paradises like that though. Even if the islands won’t be washed away by the raising sea level, the fresh water may get salinated and there may be major flooding.

Photo : onEdition

Bernard Stamm (Cheminees Poujoulat), fights to for survival in a Force 10 storm in mountainous seas the Bay of Biscay, the day after the start of the VELUX 5 Oceans solo round the world yacht race

Velux 5 Oceans solo round the world yacht race is the real thing.

I used to have a classic wooden yacht. The forecast for today promised winds of up to 24 m/s, which is about 14 m/s more than I would like to experience in a small sailboat. I guess the real sailors are just itching to get out to the sea today though.

EDIT: The wind speeds on the western coast of Sweden reached 32 m/s last night.

Golf clubs have a long tradition of being exclusive hideouts and meeting places of the business elite. There are national equivalents of such clubs in every country, but golf is indeed unique in that respect that it is a truly global stomping ground for the business movers and shakers. Cory Ondrejka from the Linden Labs, the producers of Second Life virtual world, remarked that World of Warcraft is the new golf. There is an interesting discussion about the subject at Terra Nova and, more recently, at Joi Ito’s blog.

As a former Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) addict, I tend to agree with Chris Goggans who said:

If your business partner is addicted to crack, and the only way to consistently reach him is at the local crack house, you would not say “Smoking Crack is the new Golf.”

You might say, “DAMNIT, why in the hell do you not answer your cell phone, forcing me to drive over to the crack house at all hours to get your comments and signature.”

Even more likely, “Get some help. Please.”

Ahem…

WoW is highly addictive and the social aspects of it are as important as the game itself. However, if golf is the single malt whiskey of social clubs, WoW is the Coca-Cola. Whiskey is an expensive, traditional and, in a word, exclusive treat. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, can be bought at any convenience store and it is being consumed by practically everyone. In the words of Andy Warhol:

“You know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

Nobody’s saying that you can’t mix coke with whiskey, though. The “new golf” metaphor doesn’t refer to playing the game itself, but to the fact that there are guilds within the game which are every bit as prestigious and admired by the players as their real-world counterparts, the golf clubs. Sometimes, nobody knows if they are run by a teenager, Tom Hanks or a dog, for that matter. It doesn’t really make a difference and that’s the beauty of virtual worlds and Internet in general.

MMORPG players are often trying to find justification for all the time and effort they are putting into their addiction. It is true that playing MMORPGs can be very educational, entertaining and rewarding, but keep an eye for the compulsive pattern. Games can, and do, break perfectly functioning relationships. Some addiction clinics are treating the compulsive gamers together with chemically dependant people, sex addicts, eating disorders etc.

For the record, the collage above was done with Creative Commons licensed material on Flickr.

My fellow citizens here in Finland have been flooding like lemmings to get an old skool non-biometric passport for themselves while it’s still possible. After last Friday, the only kind of new passport you can get has a microchip with your face as a machine readable JPEG on it. After about two years, the new passports will have your fingerprints on the chip as well. I contemplated on getting a traditional passport for the next ten years for myself, but after having gone through so many immigration interviews in different countries I decided that the privacy issue is not really such a big deal for me.

When I flew from Munich to San Francisco last December they handed out a little form to fill out before I even boarded the plane. The form was for stating your first address after you have arrived to USA. After filling out the form and going through two or three interviews by different types of security personnel in Germany (including a passport authenticity check that took what seemed like an eternity), the actual USA border crossing took less than a minute. I’m not sure if this was a special arrangement with the Munich airport only, but I’m certain that the biometric passport initiative will make the process a lot more efficient.

Actually I think that it is a positive thing that fingerprints are no longer associated only with crime scene investigation and prisons. There is a fingerprint based access control at the gym I use. It seems to me that people are totally habituated to it. I, for one, prefer it to BERTILLONAGE

No longer used, bertillonage was a late 19th century method of identifying people by use of multiple bodily measurements. A person would go through a 20-60 minute measuring exam where they would have various body measurements taken: height, length, and breadth of the head, the length of different fingers, the length of forearms, etc. The results were then recorded and/or compared to a record database. Though all done by hand, the record filing and checking system was quite fast for its time.

Created in the 1890′s by a Paris police desk clerk, an anthropologist named Alphonse Bertillon, this method of identification became the primary method for identifying criminals in the late 1800′s. Bertillon based his system on the claim that measurement of adult bones does not change after the age of 20. He also introduced a cataloguing system, which enabled filing/checking records quite quickly.

The system was a success, identifying hundreds of repeat offenders, and was used world-wide until 1903, when two identical (within the tolerances) measurements were obtained for two different persons at the Fort Leavenworth prison. The prison switched to finger printing the following day and the rest of the world soon followed, abandoning bertillonage forever.

Apple – Report on iPod Manufacturing

Working and Living Environment

The manufacturing facility supports over 200,000 employees (Apple uses less than 15% of that capacity) and has the services you’d expect in a medium city. The campus includes factories, employee housing, banks, a post office, a hospital, supermarkets, and a variety of recreational facilities including soccer fields, a swimming pool, TV lounges and Internet cafes. Ten cafeterias are also located throughout the campus offering a variety of menu choices such as fresh vegetables, beef, seafood, rice, poultry, and stir-fry noodles. In addition, employees have access to 13 different restaurants on campus. Employees were pleased with the variety and quality of food offerings.

The supplier owns and leases dormitories that are offered at no charge to employees, provided they help in cleaning common areas to maintain the facility. Workers are not required to live in these dormitories, although the majority do. Our team randomly selected and inspected a wide range of dormitories (both supplier-owned on-campus and off-site leased facilities) that collectively house over 32,000 people. Buildings are separated by gender, with female dorms containing a private bathroom/shower for each room and male dorm rooms typically sharing bathroom/shower facilities. The dorms have TV rooms, potable water, private lockers, free laundry service, and public telephones. Many also have ping-pong and snooker tables, and sitting/reading areas. All of the on-campus dorms have air conditioning. Visitors are permitted in the dorms, although a sign-in process is used for security purposes.

200000 employees. Two. Hundred. Thousand. That’s two thirds of the population of Iceland.

Apple launched an internal audit proces in order to reply to the claims that iPods are being manufactured in poor working conditions. The report is extremely interesting in many respects. It is a perfect example of well executed proactive measures that modern companies may need to implement in order to avoid public relations scandals. The audit (and the report) leave practically no room for ifs and buts.. this case is closed.

EDIT: Not everyone agrees, though

Wooster Collective: Mark Jenkins New Tape Project… “Embeds”

Mark Jenkins is taking it to another level with his new “Embeds”. The sculptures are made of tape and then clothes are added. The photo above are of first installation that went up yesterday in DC.

I just got a letter from the National Statistics Bureau. It was just a note to let me know that I’ve been selected as one of the 1500 participants in a survey about the new Public Order Act that will unify the public order ordinance throughout the country.

One of the new laws forbids the carrying of spray cans in a public space without an “acceptable reason”. Come on now… How vague can you get!? Obviously the law has been designed to reduce the graffiti or “art crime” or “vandalism” or whatever you want to call it. Interestingly, they have made a similar proposal in New York earlier this year.

As creating graffiti art becomes an increasingly higher legal and economical risk for the people who are interested in street art and culture, some artists have moved beyond the 2D medium of walls to 3D sculptures and electronics and other innovative ways to express themselves in the streetscape. The Wooster Collective has been leading the way and showcasing ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.

LED

A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits incoherent narrow-spectrum light when electrically biased in the forward direction. This effect is a form of electroluminescence. The color of the emitted light depends on the chemical composition of the semiconducting material used, and can be near-ultraviolet, visible or infrared.

LED technology has made a big impact on both interior & architectural lighting and, more recently, on fashion and street culture. Check out the innovative Night Writer and “Throwies” from Graffiti Research Lab.

Blinking rings and scrolling belt buckles have been around for a while, but have you seen LED license plates, backpacks, shirts yet. Check out tbuckles.com.

Bums’ Paradise

Bums’ Paradise is a 53-minute documentary that depicts the lives of the men and women who lived in the ten-year-old Albany Landfill community prior to their eviction. It follows them through the eviction and documents them one month after the eviction. The film emphasizes their concepts of community as well as the amazing art that they created. Instead of being a documentary about homelessness, Bums’ Paradise considers the question: What if the homeless — the indigent, the bums — told their own stories? This is exactly what filmmakers Tomas McCabe and Andrei Rozen set out to explore with the Albany Landfill residents. Both McCabe and Rozen shot for five months. Landfill resident Robert “Rabbit” Barringer was also given a camera to film life as he experienced it as a resident on the Landfill. What unfolds is a rich and complex story showing the full spectrum of human experience. We see segments on love, family, home, politics, community, art, insanity, and addiction: Paula and Chris are a couple — Sparky paints pictures on broken pieces of concrete — Rabbit talks about social egalitarianism and Marxism. Ashby talks about his experiences with the police; “Mad” Mark talks about a gas or liquid drug that induces hypnosis. Jean Paul reveals his shattering thoughts facing jail time versus being evicted:

For a long time I have had a soft spot in my heart for bums, wanderers, hobos, travellers.. whatever you want to call them.

A lot of phenomenal documentary movies have been made about the subject. One of my favorites is Dark Days by Marc Singer. It really opened up my eyes to the harsh reality and hopelessness that some of these people are facing. I’d love to see Bums’ Paradise as well. I don’t know what kind of education movies they are showing at schools these days, but here is probably one fine candidate for that purpose.

Diesel Wall 2006
Artist: Nicolo Piacentino
Title: V’IN SANTO

I wanted to create a contrast between the crowd of young people that every night meet up in the Diesel Wall square and the crowd of believers that every Sunday listen to the Angelus in Piazza San Pietro, Rome. As the people who live in the houses overlooking the square would tell the crowd to go to hell, in the same way the Pope bless them.

I’ve never been to Italy before, but after this quick trip, I wouldn’t hesitate to call Milan one of the fashion and style capitals of the world. People spend huge amounts of money on fashion, interior design and food. One of the t-shirts I spotted said “Will work for shoes”. That sentence sort of sums up the attitude of some of the fashion slaves.

While walking down one of the trendy boutique streets I noticed this piece of wall art apparently sponsored by Diesel.

I wasn’t able to capture the highly visual atmosphere of the city all that well in my holiday snapshots, but have a look at my Milan travelogue gallery if you are intrigued by this city.

An interesting site by an elderly storm chaser:

Extremeinstability.com

I should have redone this page looooonnnngggg ago. So, here we go. I’m a storm chaser. No duh eh? Name is Mike Hollingshead. Born and raised in Blair Nebraska way back when(76 for the age curious out there). One day I’ll have a decent pic of myself and I’ll put it above. This will have to do for now(current as of May 25, 2005). Yes I know I need to shave. So anyway to the nitty gritty to get this over with. I’ve always loved severe weather, or just interesting weather in general. Most chasers have some long ago memory of a tornado or storm they can fall back on as their first interest; I can’t. All I can come up with is one day in a park, maybe age 7 or so, thinking I was controlling the wind. I’d wait and think I could make it blow stronger. Very thrilling eh? I’d always have to stay up during storms and watch the lightning out the window. It all just grew and grew, especially after my first tornado video “Tornado-The Entity”….or was it “The Enemy Wind”? Ok my history is pretty sad since I can’t recall such IMPORTANT details. Anyway, whichever video it was I was impressed, but it didn’t make me a chaser. The more images of supercells I started seeing online (MUCH later) made me become an actual chaser. I just had to see them for myself. This would be about 8 years after those first tornado videos, after the internet had been around for a few years.

We NEVER get storms like that here in Finland which is a pity. But we do get a lot of snow sometimes.

Arctic seed vault

The vault’s purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out.

At temperatures of minus 18C (minus 0.4F), the seeds could last hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even if all cooling systems failed, explained Mr Riis-Johansen, the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing due to the permafrost on the mountainside.

To quote one of my mottos: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Ol Doinyo Lengai – The mountain of Gods

I have climbed about 50 active volcanoes in various parts of the world, but Ol Doinyo Lengai has captured my interest like no other volcano ever has. As of 2005 I have climbed Ol Doinyo Lengai 10 times and have spent 100 nights camping at the summit craters. During my first visit on July 17, 1997, I went up and down in one day and spent about 4 hours in the crater. There was some very minor activity, but four hours is not long enough to have a very good chance of seeing an eruption. I decided that I wanted to spend several nights there to increase my chances of seeing some flowing lava, which is what I did twice in 1998 and once in 1999. The more time I spent on Ol Doinyo Lengai, the more fascinated I became. In July 2000 and July 2001 I organized camping expeditions to the crater for small groups of clients. In August 2002 my expedition, which included photographers, a film team, and a volcanologist, encountered hazardous camping conditions due to violent lava fountains and extremely rapid lava flows. Part of our camp was destroyed by lava and a Tanzanian guide was injured.

Volcano spotting! Now there’s a hobby I can appreciate. Oldoinyo Lengai is the only volcano in the world that erupts natrocarbonatite lava. It’s cooler than other types of lava and looks like black mud or oil during the day, but glows in a mysterious orange hue during night. It also the most fluid lava in the world… almost like water.

This was the volcano of the week at Volcano World. The report is by Frederick A. Belton.

I have been permanently cured of a deep, deep traumatic disorder!

Thank you Lordi, Thank you European Broadcasting Union, Thank You Ladbrokes, Thank you God!

Millennium Park : Cloud Gate on SBC Plaza

Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.

Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest of its kind in the world, measuring 66-feet long by 33-feet high. Cloud Gate sits upon the SBC Plaza, which was made possible by a gift from the SBC Communications.

It takes a lot of determination to get something this big built. As the last step of the building process, the seams between individual components beneath the gate are hidden by polishing them.

Being an artist in projects like this also means being a construction supervisor. Many of the most acclaimed contemporary artists don’t create that much with their own hands anymore. They design the piece and work closely with construction engineers to have it finalized.

Helsinki by Night

Sightseeing. In this performance the audience will be taken for a bus sightseeing tour around Helsinki. In this performance the “stage” is outside of the bus and the “performance” is in the inside. In this performance reality and the performative material will blend in the consciousness of the spectator.

The art of perception. Performance art uses many different levels of communication. Normally the artistic or the symbolic levels are stressed. The art of perception underlines the sensory communication, what does the spectator experience with his or her senses or as his or her immediate impressions. The art of perception concentrates in fine tuning the spectator’s way of perception and focus of observation. The aim is to alternate the spectator’s consciousness and the way of perception for a short while during the performance – or permanently for the rest of one’s life.

We were lucky enough to get tickets to this truly phenomenal performance by Reality Research Centre. I’ve been working with the marketing of several professional theatres for more than a decade now, but this piece is really something else. It has completely renewed my faith in this particular field of art.

To cut a long story short, the Helsinki By Night has a superb dramaturgy, several very pleasant participatory aspects and a deep and meaningful message conveyed in many innovative and unique ways. There was a multitude of different “mini-shows” happening on the street during the sight seeing tour and it was all totally immersive and fascinating. Real life events blended with the staged components just perfectly.. the MC Cannonball birthday party, the burnt Storage houses next Kiasma, the passers-by in Tattarisuo industrial area and the Tax Office building… the show kept on surprising the viewers time and time again. Underlining the contrast to some of the main stream entertainment, I still had the highly predictable plot of Mission Impossible III fresh on my memory. It’s not a fair match to compary live theatre and a movie, but I’ll do it anyway. On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate this a 10- and give M:i:III a 3 or 4.

Helsinki by Night is sold out already, but here’s another modern and cleverly produced piece that I can highly recommend: Helsingin Taivaan Alla by Ryhmäteatteri.

Guide for the Mexican Migrant

Esteemed Countryman:

The purpose of this guide is to provide you with practical advice that may prove useful to you in case you have made the difficult decision to search for employment opportunities outside of your country. The sure way to enter another country is by getting your passport from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the visa, which you may apply for at the embassy or consulate of the country you wish to travel to.

However, in practice we see many Mexicans who try to cross the Northern Border without the necessary documents, through high risk zones that involve grave dangers, particularly in desert areas or rivers with strong, and not always obvious, currents. Reading this guide will make you aware of some basic questions about the legal consequences of your stay in the United States of America without the appropriate migratory documents, as well as about the rights you have in that country, once you are there, independent of your migratory status. Keep in mind always that there exist legal mechanisms to enter the United States of America legally. In any case, if you encounter problems or run into difficulties, remember that Mexico has 45 consulates in that country whose locations you can find listed in this publication.

Familiarize yourself with the closest consulate and make use of it.

DANGERS IN CROSSING HIGH RISK ZONES

To cross the river can be very risky, above all if you cross alone and at night. Heavy clothing increases in weight when wet and this makes swimming and floating difficult.

If you cross by desert, try to walk at times when the heat will not be too intense. Highways and population centers are far apart, which means you will spend several days looking for roads, and you will not be able to carry foodstuffs or water for long periods of time. Also, you can get lost.

Salt water helps keep liquids in your body. Although you may feel more thirst if you drink salt water, the risk of dehydration is much less.

Spanish language original here.

There is an operation called Gatekeeper which is designed to block the traditional border crossing routes. It is causing a lot of grief for the illegal immigrants and their families. Especially heat/hypothermia related deaths have been on the rise. Migrants have started using more desolate and dangerous routes such as the Otay mountains. More information here.

A friend of mine recently got married with her Mexican boyfriend partly because illegal border crossing these days can be really risky in many different respects.

Syndesis, Inc. – Works in Progress

This project is a 55 acre property in the remote hills of Malibu with several sites and unique topography with panoramic views looking out to a nearby mountain range, a valley, and the ocean with distant island views.

The client, a woman, requested curvilinear/feminine shapes for the building. The progenitor of the building’s form was envisioned as a floating curved roof. It soon became apparent, that in fact, an airplane wing itself could work. In researching airplane wings and superimposing different airplane wing types on the site to scale, The wing of a 747, at over 2,500 sq. ft., became an ideal configuration to maximize the views and provide a self supporting roof with minimal additional structural support needed.

Old aeroplanes seem to be a trendy source of building material these days.

Also see Limojet

Chernobyl’s lost city – BBC

A haunting series of images from the model city of Pripyat near Chernobyl.

Although it is a terribly sad and tragic environment, there is something that’s immensively fascinating about it as well. Just like the forbidden fruit, it tempts all kinds of creative people such as the anonymous graffiti artists whose work can be seen in the image above. Parts of the zombie movie Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis were shot in the area as well.

Also see, Kidd of Speed‘s 2004 photographs.

I clicked this ad link by accident, I think.

After a quick scroll down the page, I noticed that practically all of the driveways had a big ass iron gate. James Caan’s driveway (pictured above) was the exception to the rule for reasons unknown.

While I was looking for information about various types of smoke alarms I happened to find Babyproofingplus.com. Co-sleepers, fire escape ladders, VCR locks, corner protectors, lead test kits… After seeing the multitude of products designed to protect the toddlers from all the hazards in a typical modern home, I can’t help but wonder how kids survived before all these nifty safety products were invented.

Is all this “babyproofing” about protecting the baby from the dangers in home or protecting the home from the baby?

One of the most important methods of learning in childhood is “discovery learning” or learning by trial and error. I’m sure that if you used all the safety products in this particular catalog, you would seriously hinder that process.

This painting by a child was sold at a Tsunami benefit auction. I think the child was a local survivor.

Incidentally, also Jet Li (who was starring in Fearless) got caught in the wave. Here is his recount of the experience:

Tsunami ordeal

“When I looked back, everything I saw minutes ago was gone. Everything was surrounded by the ocean. The houses collapsed. I continued to run but the water was already up to my mouth,” he said.

Li said he was then faced with the most difficult choice of his life.

“I thought if the water rose another foot, what should I do? I was carrying my daughters and pulling my maid, do I let go or persist?” he said.

“I chose to go forward.”

Li managed to fight his way through the roiling swells back to his hotel, where the guests donned life jackets for fear of additional waves.

The tsunami left at least 82 people dead in the Maldives. Earlier reports said only that Li had suffered minor injuries.

Li has donated the equivalent of about $158,000 to the victims of the disaster, and he said he hopes that people will continue to give money to the relief effort in the coming months.

He also said Dec. 26 was a defining moment in his life, one that served to bolster his courage.

“Some things I dared not do in the past, I am ready to do them now.”

Also, an interesting quote from our presidential candidate Sauli Niinistö :

But the worst criticism there has come from former Finnish Finance Minister Sauli Niinisto, who survived the tsunami on Khao Lak, and has a firsthand survival tale and loads of criticism for his country. Niinisto saved himself and his two sons by clinging to a lamppost for two hours as floodwaters rose beneath him. He later injured his leg while saving a Swedish child from drowning. “I assumed that there would be an emergency meeting by the government within 4-5 hours of the disaster and more officials would be sent to Phuket,” he told a Swedish TV talk show. “After 18 hours, when I got in touch with Bangkok and Phuket, I realized we had not been taken seriously … I was left with the feeling that no one wanted us anywhere.

1956, The Childs World, Plant and Animal Ways, Various Artists

Lord May

In his final speech as president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will say scientists must speak out against the climate change “denial lobby”.

He will warn core scientific values are “under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East”.

“Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason.”

SnOasis Home

SnOasis when opened in 2008 will be offering both indoor and outdoor entertainment for all the family. SnOasis will be the world’s largest all year round Indoor Winter Resort, some 100 metres high and half a kilometer long. The SnOasis resort will be located 80 miles from London England at Great Blakenham, near Ipswich.

What is it with all these indoor travel destinations? The good ole Brits have already made Eden Project and now they are building this 100 meter vertical drop indoor skiing centre called SnOasis.

I’ve been to Biosphaere in Potsdam which is a giant, modern greenhouse and there is also a giant indoor tropical spa park in Germany.

They are like luxury ocean liners except that they are parked on solid ground.