 | You currently have  better things to be doing | Dec 15, 2005 |
Well, when is too young to use a computer? I'm pretty jaded about brilliant college projects which are still in the development phase, but this is an intriguing one - a 3D printer aimed at ten year olds. What intrigued me, thouhg, was not necessarily the overarching concept - which is cute and praiseworthy, don't get me wrong - but one of the technical details which I glaned from reading a magazine article about it. Apparently the printing head is st up in a polar arrangement, as opposed to a cartesian one, to reduce movement and wear. I'm not aware of any other printers which do this, certainly not at the lower end of the market. So, that's interesting.
 | Alarming | Jun 16, '11 8:26 AM
for everyone |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/google-personalisation-internet-data-filtering
Rather disturbing article, this.
Link: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/landscape-futures-super-trip.htmlMust remember this itinerary if we ever do a road trip in the States...
"Our stops include the "world’s largest collection of optical telescopes," including the great hypotenuse of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, outside Tucson; the Very Large Array in west-central New Mexico; the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona, aka the "lunar greenhouse," where "researchers are demonstrating that plants from Earth could be grown without soil on the moon or Mars, setting the table for astronauts who would find potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables awaiting their arrival"; the surreal encrustations of the Salton Sea, a site that, in the words of Kim Stringfellow, "provides an excellent example of the the growing overlap of humanmade and natural environments, and as such highlights the complex issues facing the management of ecosystems today"; the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, with its automated scanning systems used for "robotic searches for variable stars and exoplanets" in the night sky, and its gamma-ray reflectors and "blazar lightcurves" flashing nearby; the Grand Canyon; Red Rocks, outside Sedona; the hermetic interiorities of Biosphere 2; White Sands National Monument and the Trinity Site marker, with its so-called bomb glass; the giant aircraft "boneyard" at the Pima Air & Space Museum; and, last but not least, the unbelievably fascinating Lunar Laser-ranging Experiment at Apache Point, New Mexico, where they shoot lasers at prismatic retroreflectors on the moon, testing theories of gravitation, arriving there by way of the nearby Dunn Solar Telescope."
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/opinion/31brooks.htmlIs it graduation time again? Already? Where does the tme go, eh? Anyway, an interesting article here which laments the advice given to college graduates - the idea tht they should follow their own paths, live their own dreams... just at a time when previous generations (and in all probability, they themselves) are in the process of tying themselves to a spouse, to a career, etc.
"Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling."
I don't really think we should abandon our dreams and subsume ourselves in othre people's misery as a way of validating our lives, but it does have a grain of truth in it - not sure I could tell you, even now, whether my life is going in the direction it should. Assuming such a 'correct' path could ever exist.
|  | This has bubbled up to the surface again as I am currently trying to compile the photobook (or as the older generation would have it an 'album') from our long trip to China... so where were we? Oh yes. From Helsinki we took the train to St Petersburg and then onwards to Moscow, spending a few days in each place... |
Link: http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/230059Ever since I was a kid with a book on castles, I've always had a yen to visit Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, arguably the greatest castle ever built. And today Google suggested "Krak des Chevaliers LEGO"...  ... holy crap. I poked around a little more on the site, and mostly it's pretty... well, fictional and boring (although the siege reenactment from Lord of the Rings looked impressive). But my favourites are definitely the real-life scale models, which require a bit of ingenuity to get the details right. Check out the Belfry:  That's in Bruges, you know. There's some great little details which you can see in the full Flickr set.
Not for anyone with a thing for rounded curves, this... but wow it sure is pretty. The architects claim that all they did was establish the corners of the maximum allowed envelope and join them up, but I've never seen it done like this!  The architects are a firm called Ooze - which makes me think of blobby, amoeba-like stuff rather than than a farmhouse seen through a smashed mirror. If you can stomach their pretentious website, there are a few interesting pictures of the works in progress.
Possibly. This is a really interesting resource, if you happen to have done Economics at A-level or something. "Recently it’s been said that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Crisis, normalized to the point that it appears proper for extinction events to be assuaged through market-based incentives and the atmosphere pimped out to the highest corporate bidder, is the currency by which the world now turns. But what if, for the sake of experiment, we were to press our thoughts just beyond the thin, strangling curtain of capitalist maximization? " http://kickitover.org/
... and don't sneeze, or you'll never see it again.
http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/article/31740/Researchers-unveil-first-millimetre-scale-computing-system.aspx
I like the idea of an 'extreme sleep mode'. I need one of those.
| | I've been putting this off, but now we've managed to trawl through the 3000-odd photos we talk on our big adventure, and narrow them down to a few hundred... and I thought I'd post the first little batch. We crossed Europe in two days and two nights, via Eurostar, Burssels, Cologne and Copenhagen, then on to Stockholm and Helsinki. Helsinki was the first place we actually stopped, hence the majority of phots are from there.
Next stop St Petersburg... |
Link: http://inhabitat.com/2010/10/14/heat-your-home-with-soltech-energys-beautiful-glass-roof-tiles/Now that I am a homeowner - picked up the keys on Friday - I am once again ogling stuff like this. Aren't they purdy?  What I'm wondering is, if they work by heating air instead of water, why bother using the hot air to feed the hot water system? Why not pipe the hot air directly into the house and cut out the middleman? Admittedly in summer this wouldn't be so great, but in winter, why not?
...um, yeah, where was I, last week? Or was it the week before? Moscow, wasn't it? Yes, Moscow. Very roughly, about 75 degrees longitude, fifteen degrees latitude and twenty degrees celsius away from our current position. The weather has swung from being unseasonably cold in Russia to being slightly on the warm side in China, so we can at least console ourselves that at least our we packed for the right mean temperature, if not the full range. ...urgh. Beijing is a very frustrating place to try and recover from a six day train journey. Russia felt like a slow and steady slog - Beijing, though, is a different order of speed, and right now I feel rather outpaced by it all. the problem is, I think, that i haven't fully reconciled myself to feeling (a) like I'm leaking money all over the place like the ridiculous laowei tourist that I am, and (b) that the actual sums involved are ones that I wouldn't concern myself over if I was back home. Right now, I can't help focusing more on (a), so I am grumpy. So, anyway, this will be another brief-oh-so-brief update, as I am tapping away about two feet from Summer Girl's head as she is trying to sleep. It is about 10pm here, and we are tired. I am beginning to recover from a streaming head cold (another reaon why I feel grumpy and slow), and Summer Girl is only a couple of days' recovery ahead of me having got the bug first. So, a few words about the train... take my advice and fly to Irkutsk. The scenery between Moscow and Irkutsk is basically silver birches, with a bit of industry and unloved concrete thrown in occasionally, just for a change. We mostly ate what we could buy at the platforms, having been warned off the buffet car (although i have a sneaking suspicion it wasn't that bad, really).
...
Okay, so that was a few days ago now, and we're now in Chengdu after a pretty tiring 30-hour train trip from Beijing. Looking back, I was a little downbeat in the above paragraphs and sort of implied we haven't had any fun at all. That isn't the case, of course. The train trip managed to be both unvarying and at the same time not at all boring, if that makes any sense - Russia has a vast, vast hinterland which seems to trail along behind the European end of the country like the tail of a comet, seemingly unloved. And then Mongolia I found surprisingly distinct - I expected it to be more overshadowed by its powerful neighbours, but it is a profoundly unique place. Crossing it meant crossing desert, which on the train made a very welcome change from forest - at least until we began running low on water...
Beijing...
Sorry, my impressions are all jumbled up - it's been too long between updates, and knowing I don't have long on this computer my brain struggles to get things into a sensible order. If I could fathom Picasa enough to downscale some photos I would post them but even that seems to be beyond my capabilities right now, so again, you'll probably have to wait until we get home now - sorree! Not what I'd hoped, either.
Anyhow.
There are two quotations which i've been reminded of while we've been in China, and in Beijing in particular. One is Paul Theroux, in his book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, who referred disparagingly to the new China as a peasant's version of modernity - and almost every day I've seen something which has reminded me of that. Modern China is brutal in its use of concrete; neon signs partially obscure the painted slogans of the communist era, which seem to have been left alone to bury themselves in the ever-present dust of the metropolis. At the same time, there's a quote which I think is Yeats, who described Rome (yes, the Italian city) as being like a man who made a living selling tickets to see his dead grandmother. Beijing has the same embarrassment of riches when it comes to the ancient - but there's no suggestion that this is Beijing's main source of income. At the same time, though, you get the impression that not only are they selling tickets, but they've dressed her up in her best clothes, plumped her up a bit, put on a bit of makeup... in short, there were Toyotas in the dusty streets of the hutong we stayed in that had more of a feeling of antiquity than the bit of the Great Wall that we walked on. It's all still impressive, all right - especially when you remember that it was all done by human hands, thousands of them, under an imperial regime careless of their lives... it's a massive achievement. No, that's not right - it's a relentless stream of massive achievements. But it's the scale, rather than the age, which is what impresses, even now.
And talking of scale... Beijing has the same feeling of vastness as St Petersburg, that same sense of having been built at a slightly-larger-than-human scale - but in Beijing the effect is multiplied because it is a relentlessly sprawling place. Don't try to walk anywhere - the nice, neat grid pattern looks appealing on a map, but it's just too damn big. And the effect is heightened by the pollution, which means the vast buildings fade rapidly and then simply loom in the haze.
Anyway. We are now in Chengdu, after a 30-hour train ride (did I mention that?), and we go to start work at the Panda Reservation here tomorrow. Our fellow volunteers seem a motley bunch - the usual teenagers and post-teenagers, but we're starting at the same time as a mother with her teenage son, so who knows what we'll be doing?
A very quick note today, as my half-hour on the computer in the Russian Post Office is about to end! Moscow has, like St Petersburg, been wet - yes, their heatwave ended the day we arrived and it's been 13 degrees C rather than 30 for the duration of our stay... Moscow has been strangely unimpressive in comparison to St P. Although it has much that is monumental in scale, many of the monuments were rather disappointing once you got in. The Orthodox cathedrals are tiny on the inside, although highly decorated... and the VDNKH, which was once Stalin's massive park devoted to progress in the Soviet Union, is now an emtpy husk of a place. Oops, time to go!
Well, it's another damp day in St Petersburg. Rather like yesterday, in fact - frustrating when you're only in a place for three days! I will post pictures soon, but right now all we have here is the pastel confections of St Petersburg under threateningly dark skies, while we scurry from one tourist must-do to another! I was in St Petersburg about... ten years ago, and my abiding memory of that time was the difficulty of finding anything which resembled a modern, western shop. Looking back, we must have wandered up and down Nevskt Prospekt, St p's main commercial sreet, without even realizing it was anything more than a residential backstreet! No fear of that today - it's Oxford Street ransplanted, heaving with people and neon and global brands. But over it all still broods the original baroque buildings, and even the glamour of modern marketing can't quite shake the impression that modern St Petersburg is shoehorned in, that it is trying to find the cracks in Peter the Great's diktat. Perhaps as a result, the place has the feeling of make-do and mend. Here and there are signs of it - the Russian Mint being run out of the incongruously candy-coloured confections of the Peter and Paul Fortress... a decidedly aged antenna strung up over a baroque spire on Nevsky Prospekt... the glitter of the west, thrown over a dustsheet of poverty, covering the original, brutishly-powerful nouveau-riche power-architecture of Imperial Russia... Okay, enough nonsense. There's a girl in a hotel room waiting for me to get back so we can go eat!
Stupid google maps, can't get directions from Cambridge to Beijing. What's the point of it, then? 
Well, Google might not be able to tell you how to get there, but I can. Trains. Oh, all right, there is technically one ferry involved, from Stockholm to Turku, but after that, it's trains all the way to Beijing. Haven't decided how we're getting to places after that, but right now, from the comfort of home, it seems a shame to go all that way and then hop on a plane. So, on Saturday we shall walk to Cambridge railway station (I love that bit), get on a train which will take us to London, get on another train which will take us to Brussels, then to Cologne, then an overnight train to Copenhagen, then a quick hop (in a train) to Stockholm, then an overnight ferry to Turku. A brief train journey takes us to Helsinki, where we shall spend our first night in a hotel, before heading over to St Petersburg. By train. Three days there, then another overnighter to Moscow. Three more days there (unless it's four - I forget), and then the Big One - a straight six day train journey from Moscow to Beijing. Originally, there were going to be stops along the way, but my health and hospital treatments mean we are limited to six weeks, so there's a lot to cram in! So after three weeks of travelling we shall arrive in Beijing, where we have a week of sightseeing. Then we go to the Panda Conservation Thingy Place in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, where we have volunteered to muck out pandas for a week... then onwards to Shanghai for a quick look at the Expo, and finishing in Hong Kong, from where we shall fly back to the UK.
Phew. I feel tired just writing it all down.
So, yes, our Great Adventure - Overland to Beijing, and Beyond. Hence the test - I wanted to see if I was going to be able to keep y'all updated (and you never know, send out emergency messages too when we get arrested for wearing disrespectful socks in Mao Tse Tung's tomb, or something).
I'm just seeing if this works, so that next week when I go on holiday I will be able to send updates to all you lovely people from wherever the heck it is I am.
Link: http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/this_just_inbox_cardboard_interior__16991.asp#more Note sure I like this particular incarnation, but I like the idea of cardboard furniture. We had a crack when I was in uni, making surprisingly sturdy chairs. Just think - it's already 100% recycled, it dents before your child does, and you can design it yourself to exactly fit the space available! And when it gets a bit tatty, or you get a bit bored with it, just make some more!
 | Guestbook | |
| hi there - a friend of mine has just been diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis - have done a search on Multiply, and it came up with your blogs --- In south africa, this is a very very rare disease, and doctors are still scratching their heads about it ! Is there any advice or information that you could give me (to pass on to my friend). Obviously she is quite distraught at the outcome of the scope --- and I need to know what I can do for her, how I can help her through this, what can be done, what should not be done, etc !
Hope you have this under control.
Love and Light |
 | Hoping you are feeling well these days. |
 | Aw, just saw you weren't doing too good. That damned constipation! Always making trouble for people! : ) |
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