Japanese Homey Art-itecture
Awesome Article from NPR:
Japanese architects have turned necessity into virtue, vying to design unorthodox and visually stunning houses on remarkably narrow pieces of land. In the process, they are also redefining the rules of home design.Few Americans would consider a parking-space-sized lot as an adequate site to build a house. But in Japan, homes are rising on odd parcels of land, some as tiny as 300 square feet.
Yet the term “house” doesn’t really do justice to these eye-catching architectural gems, fashioned from a high-tech palate of materials like glittering glass cubes, fiber reinforced plastic and super-thin membranes of steel.
More With Less
The need to do more with less space has sparked a boom in house designs that are as playful and witty as they are livable. One of Japan’s leading designers of kyosho jutaku, or ultra-small homes, is Tokyo architect Yasuhiro Yamashita.
Full article at the NPR website.
Ouch! (But a funny ouch.)
This website appears to be a jab at PR agencies that have to use big words for describing things like posting on twitter. Supposedly the website makes these sentences and phrases just by randomizing certain large adjectives, verbs, and buzz words, example posted below. (Pardon the French.)
Check out the website, and scroll through a few here: http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/
(via TechCrunch)
Aviator iPad
Wired has an interesting article on how the iPad is becoming an aviators cockpit companion.
Typically, a pilot would have to carry a few large briefcases filled with notebooks that contained the paper versions for the thousands of instrument approaches across the country. With its new app, Jeppesen says 965 megabytes is enough to have all of its approaches for the entire world.
This would have been helpful when I flew as a teenager; I accrued 20 hours of air time from my short stint in flying. The plane I trained in was a Cessna 152, which is one of the smallest low-powered planes available, it’s like being in a john boat in the sky.
Elon Musk (Tesla Motors, SpaceX, PayPal)
While there is controversy whether Musk actually co-founded PayPal or Tesla, he was no doubt an extremely large influence on both. Here is an interesting interview with two great men.
VentureBeat’s recent profile on Musk’s recent past.
The upcoming Model S looks like a pretty awesome electric super car, doing 0-60 MPH in 5.6 seconds. The design of the car reminds me of a cross between an Aston Martin and a Jaguar.
I Gotta Try This Internet Thing
1969
1981
1991
1995
2007
Pretty interesting journey from concept to product, in many various forms.
Taiwan News On Antennagate
Since the satirical video is from Taiwan, it most likely has a bias. Apple iPhone competitor HTC, from Taiwan, is currently being sued by Apple for patent infringement. Still an entertaining take on the matter.
From Wikipedia:
Apple v. HTC
Apple Inc. has filed a patent infringement against HTC on 2 March 2010 at the US District Court for the District of Delaware. They (Apple Inc.) also filed a complaint against HTC under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (as amended) at United States International Trade Commission, Washington, D.C. “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours”. This centers around 20 patent infringements relating to iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.
NASA Failure?
First we found out that Obama wanted to end NASA’s Constellation project, and have ‘private enterprise’ take care of our man space travels. The we find out according to NASA’s administrator that Obama’s main initiative for NASA is to help Islamic states, something the White House first confirmed, and then the press secretary then denied. So what is the future of NASA? I personally thought that building a base on the lunar surface would be imperative for the progress of man. Obama’s stance on the moon is that ‘we’ve already been there’. While that is true, what if early Americans said why build in America ‘we’ve already been there’.
The only problem is that the Constellation program almost certainly will be dead within months.
President Obama in January proposed cancelling the troubled moon program, and a key Senate committee voted this week to kill Constellation.
Despite the apparent kiss of death, construction continues at Plum Brook Station and other NASA centers and at private aerospace companies across the nation, where more than 14,000 people are still working on Constellation. Under pressure from Congress, NASA has been spending an average of about $9 million a day on the project.
After accomplishing so much in space for half a century, the nation now appears to lack not only the resources to mount a major human space program, but also the political will to eliminate the thousands of jobs connected with it.
“It is a sad spectacle,” said Loren Thompson, a longtime aerospace policy expert in Washington, referring to the dual-edged political sword that has constrained the once ambitious U.S. space program. “It is devolving into everybody trying to protect their home turf.”
Veteran space industry observers say the manned space program is in deeper trouble and greater turmoil than at any time since the U.S. landed men on the moon more than 40 years ago.
“The choice is: Do we have a space program or a jobs program, because we can’t have both,” said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace Inc. in Mojave and a member of a presidential panel that delivered a scathing assessment of the space program last year.
Politicians cannot agree on long-term goals for the human spaceflight program, and the vast network of NASA facilities and private contractors is unable to make plans that keep pace with political action in the capital.
Inception Prequel?
Just got back from watching Inception. And I kept thinking through out the movie that the 1984 Dreamscape fits as an almost perfect prequel.
Inception is a wonderfully made movie, and director Christopher Nolen and cinematographer Wally Pfister created a visually stunning masterpiece. Stylistically Nolen and Pfister took a drastic change to the 1984 Dreamscape, with ‘photographic realism’ as the visual motive.
From American Cinematographer Magazine:
As with so many of their ventures, the touchstone for Nolan and Pfister was photographic realism. “The underlying idea is that dreams feel real while we’re in them, which is actually a line in the film,” says Nolan, speaking to AC after the production wrapped. “That was important to the photography and to every aspect of the film. We didn’t want to have dream sequences with any superfluous surrealism. We didn’t want them to have any less validity than what is specified as being the real world. So we took the approach of trying to make them feel real.”
Production quality and the visual images of Inception are completely in another league than Dreamscape, just as the story and plot are. But Dreamscape remains a fascinating film, as many of the core ideas behind Inception are the same. I can only imagine that Nolan watched Dreamscape and was influenced by it, strongly. But that’s what artists do, take inspiration and innovate.
More on iADs
AdAge has an article about how iADs are changing the mobile landscape, and how the press coverage from iAD is helping others.
IAd has bested mobile ad competitors when it comes to budgets: Big-name advertisers like Citibank, Nissan and Target have proven willing to cough up million-dollar commitments for souped up, in-app, rich-media ads. But now that the money’s changed hands, the question remains: How will those high-priced ads perform?
It’s going to be hard to gauge the impact of iAds, which work like fully functional mini-apps operating within other apps, for some time. They launched less than two weeks ago, and many charter advertisers still haven’t gone live with their campaigns.
But there may be hints of what’s to come from developers as well as competitors such as mobile ad network Greystripe, whose mobile ads also offer high-end interaction like video and games.
You can read the entire article here.
And here is an example mobile ad from Greystripe: