This one has been quite long in preparation, but I have finally got enough content on my project page to be able to blog it 
Check It Out (and the funky animated favicon)
Monthly Archive for November, 2004
OK, so this one looks a little like Hayes at Christmas (I will try to post some photos this year), but this LED artist has some truly great pieces. One (which he doesn’t have any good pictures of) is a multi-cubed cube with an LED on each corner allowing for 3d images to move around within the cube.
I cant believe this is taking so long to invent…
The cruse control system which monitors the car in front and brakes when they do. The scientists looking into this believe it could cut motorway traffic jams significantly.
I have been waiting for one of these to turn up ever since I first decided it really wouldn’t be that difficult…while stuck in a traffic jam on the m4. Although since most British cars don’t even have cruse control (it is a little more difficult when the majority of the market favour manual gearbox's) this might still be a pipe dream 
Paper Here (including spiffing 'puzzle of the week' at the bottom of the page)
This fantastic artistic installation uses a wireless palm monitor to track the galvanic skin resistance (tension) of the viewer. The more relaxed the viewer is the more forward the virtual woman is. Apparently this has differences depending on which sex is using it.
Homepage Here (They explain it much better).
DaVinci's classic and yet unrealised invention of the self-powered flying machine which flaps its wings to create lift and thrust is being developed over 500 years since it was conceived.
The boffins behind the project aim to have it working to be shown at the 2006 Olympics…will be great if it happens, although I should imagine landing one outside the office might be a bit of a trial.
This is an interesting topic which seems to be taking the advertising industry slowly out of its terrible americanised culture.
Is it is the future? or just a trend furthered by the rise in popularity of the blog?
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
nice…
This is one to remember when the music industry begins to whine that their business model isn’t working anymore. Sales are up!
This surely cant be happening with so many people ripping off their music, perhaps all these people who have been saying that downloading music actually promotes artists rather than hurting them weren’t talking rubbish…
Lycos has just released a screen saver which 'strikes back' against spammers by attempting to use the slashdot effect on the spammers site, effectively slowing and theoretically stopping them from doing their business.
Unfortunately, I really doubt this will have any effect…most spammers are savvy enough to be able to deal with this kind of attack pretty simply. I would imagine there is an underculture where they have to deal with this kind of thing from other spammers too…most of them have no-doubt launched such attacks themselves…so they know how to deal with them.
New Scientist has a detailed look at the world of blogging on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. Seems like a pretty dangerous hobby to me…but some people will always want to blog.
Asked whether he has a strategy to expand blogging under China?s censorship regime, his response is Taoist: ?What is our strategy? We do not have a strategy. But the information flow in the blogosphere has its own Way. The Way is our strategy: personal, fast, connected and networked.?
The 23 kids who sang in Pink Floyd's The Wall have obviously been sweet talked by a lawfirm to claim their royalties from the sales of the album and track with their voices.
I guess this is fair enough, but it was a deal made in simpler times…apparently they were given a mars bar each.
Article Here (skynews carrying a pic for Dark Side of the Moon…duh)
This is the first mention of the problem of sharing TV episodes that I have seen. Seems the media moguls have decided that people downloading TV episodes through Bittorrent is a problem now.
What they don’t (probably) realise is that most people who download them are in countries where the episodes wont be available on national TV for months or perhaps years (if at all).
Downloading Eps allows the user to view the television they want, when they want…without adverts. Until they can provide that (globally) the market for downloading will continue to thrive.
New pedestrian crossing figures in Zwickau, Germany…very P.C.
I do love the green woman, looks like many a German frau marching into town to grab their herr from the local Bierstube
Interesting comment about geek culture in computing and how it is generally detrimental to the 'normal' users experience.
With particular reference to browsers which display bad html:
Geeks like us can't live without something being strictly defined. We crave to know how exactly stuff works - vagueness and ambiguity is abhorred. However, let's look at the explosion of the Web. Almost all the best designers I know learnt their design by doing 'View->Source'. They opened up a page and seeing how the source looked like, typed out a few tags in Notepad. I remember the excitement when I first saw the output of some HTML code 5 years. Now, imagine if all I had got back was an error complaining of a tag which wasn't closed. I might have been geeky enough to try and fix it - most other people would have abandoned their foray.
It is certainly how I learned all them years ago (>5 btw).
Nice essay by Jakob Nielsen about the future of human social networks and the switch from centralization to decentralization triggered by the internet’s proliferation.
In the physical world, you win by being big, with economies of scale in manufacturing, worldwide distribution, and branding. Most of these benefits accrue even if you're mediocre, and in fact, you usually benefit from targeting the lowest common denominator.
In the virtual world, you win by being good: Automation reduces the benefits of scale, the Internet equalizes distribution, and reputation follows from quality rather than incessantly repeated slogans.