Posted by Jerry on July 30th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Technology
Toyota have come up with a novel concept for a car – cars with emotion – want to reflect surprise at the ‘creative’ driving style of other road users? Suppose you could narrow your headlights, or wink, or raise eyebrow components. It seems that that time may not be too far away! Imagine a funeral procession in which the cars were crying, or if you could make your car smile when someone finally lets you into the traffic flow. Toyota has patented the idea of expressive cars so the jingle “oh what a feeling” takes on new meaning – on-road smilies – complete with a tail wagging aerial 🙂
But this will be a car with a mind of its own – an on-board computer will note degrees of aggressive braking and accelerating and will then react when a certain style of driving appears to reflect what it perceives as the drivers attitude… hmmm could be room for some serious misunderstanding here – and what of the embarrassing potential of a flacid antenna at the wrong moment – could send the wrong signals here!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on July 18th, 2004 — Posted in History, Technology, Travel, Writing
I have been reading Carlo Pedretti’s recent book on Leonardo da Vinci – it seems that Leonardo took a great interest in the emerging information technology explostion of his time – printing. And he designed a printing press with an automatic sheet feeder. But despite arranging and paginating some of his work to facilitate printing, none of his works were printed in his lifetime. In about 1505 Leonardo designed a basic system for the simaltaneous printing of text and images – a method eventually used by William Blake some two centuries later. It is fascinating work.
He also revisits the notion of an automobile, to be driven by springs which was also designed by Leonardo – And now the Italians are working on a full scale working model. It is as yet incomplete, but the site is well worth visiting!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on June 26th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Music, Technology
Making a firestaff and fire poi – fire dance equipment
I promised some time ago that I’d show you how to make a fire staff – and here it is.
http://www.lostbiro.com/firestaff/firestaffi-04.html
Making a Firestaff
This method works for fire staffs and poi used for fire twirling/ fire dancing – please use fire responsibly and safely!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on June 23rd, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Technology, Writing
Well I’m doing a happy dance tonight – I’m now the proud user of a gmail account – thanks to Mick of ToBlogOrNotToBlog – a fellow Canberra blogger – who had a few on offer for the asking.
I had my suspicions that the service was really a hoax as it was launched on April fools Day (1st april!) But I was wrong – The service offers one gigabyte of storage space so you can use it as an email archive. Of course there is a price – Google gets to run an ad-bot over the emails to provide discrete targeted ads – which are pretty unobtrusive. Privacy advocates are raising questions – but really, it’s not like humans are reading the mails for some strange voyeuristic kicks – and we get the benefit of Google’s search technology to be able to retrieve old mails.
The advantages for me well outweigh the disadvantages – when I travel I have web access to all my old mails, and the account is independent of my ISP – so if I change ISP my email address will remain the same.
So thanks again Mike!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on June 13th, 2004 — Posted in History, Technology
I recently read an old copy of New scientist from 7 November 1998 which carried a story about viking lenses. It says that the vikings made high quality quartz lenses – aspheric ones which have an elliptical, rather than spherical, shape. These were made on simple lathes and were apparently used for as fire starters or to cauterise wounds. There are examples of such lenses in museums in Munich and Sweden and no doubt elsewhere. There is a web page discussing viking lenses and research into them by Olaf Schmidt of the University of Applied Science in Aalen, Germany.
Rock Crystal Lenses from the Viking Harbor Town of Fröjel, Gotland in Sweden
I was talking to a Dane recently about this, and he told me that the vikings also used things called sun stones for navigation, and he suggested that they somehow lit up when held aloft, even on cloudy days, to enable them to locate the sun and thereby derive a position. I suggested that it might not have been far fetched if, say, some sort of crystalline stone which might act like a polarising lens. This might be able to filter diffuse light and reveal the direction of a non-polarised light source, which would have been the sun. And after a bit of a search online found that my hypothesis might be correct! Indeed Norway is one source of a naturally occurring felspar which had polarising properties – the other major source was Iceland where the vikings had continuous settlements.
Certainly the Vikings were excellent navigators and they had ships well capable of traversing open ocean, rather than just being brown water vessels, so it is quite likely that among their many navigational tools, they might have used a polarising filter.
Cheers
Jerry
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