randform

speaking about virtual architectural icons in my last post, it worthwhile to mention that the american company Lichtenstein Creative Media is organizing concerts and interviews in the commercial (and expensive) virtual environment called second life. On their webpage they currently feature a virtual concert with wellknown songwriter Suzanne Vega, including a machinima of her concert. If the link is gone — here is another youtube machinima of the concert.

Also MIT professor John Maeda was there. Reflecting on his second life experience in his blog, Maeda suddenly expressed his concern for mathematicians (thats how i interpret it ;)):

At the recent SIGGRAPH, one of the most popular talks was the fellow from i>SL where he spoke about the higher “emotional bandwidth” one gets with communicating through a fully-rendered avatar versus a pitful smiley like :-). Our resident media philospopher Burak took great offense at this comment. He felt that signs/symbols were invented not because we crave for constant realism in life, but that we can get engage deeper feeling through experiencing abstractions of reality. The more abstract the better, in his mind.

And that’s where it is: “in his mind.” Where the emotional bandwidth is truly the highest and where no computers (currently) can venture. To live without reality (or even a simulation of it) and to instead be immersed in a sea of symbols and even more abstract thoughts. Seems like one can go crazy in such a world.

So let’s wait for Madonna to appear there — would relieve her may be from the pressure to do cosmetic surgery for being an icon.

youtube link
Every architectural student has to pilgrim to Falling water. For european architecture students this is a rather expensive architectural initiation rite. A cheaper possibility is to visit it with the game engine Half-life II, where an architectural student named Kasperg did a model of it. Students at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (what a name!!!) at University College London did a fast machinima of it, using the standard sounds of Half-life so that in fact – as Pierre pointed out – one expects the grenades coming every second. Lets see when some US students do the same with Haus Wittgenstein.

via dr0p.net

trees in the urbanforest.

via slanted.

Did the tarsier eat the simple apple because there was a worm inside?

— a celtic moddyfying case modding of apple power book logo design on this video.
—nintendo DS modding
–PC case modding in the upcoming part II of the games convention report…if I find time to upload the images.

The VVR berek – a subsidiary company of the Berlin public transport company BVG which is in charge for selling advertisement spaces in Berlin public transport is going to be sold. Unexpectedly…
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Here comes a little post in between – I haven’t yet found the time to upload the rest of the games convention images. However it is now – after the GC is over – clear that there are anyways no big news from the GC: Despite a record of 183 000 visitors the battle over new game consoles is postponed to the Tokyo game show. Probably even without feeling ridiculous Sony showed at the GC just a dummy PS3 under glas and trailers in wmv format. But also Nintendo didn’t show the wii console to the public (but only to showmasters) and found it funny to make riddles about the wii release date, which seems to be Oct. 2. Somehow I missed the joke probably.

Most interesting for us were the game controllers. Both consoles seem to have sensors for measuring rotation and acceleration. See e.g. STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices.(as an intro: wikipedia on MEMS). However the wii seem to need also infrared contact.

Whatsoever another 3D controller which might be even more interesting – especially if the specifications of the game controllers are not openly usable is the Novint Falcon (see image above from wikipedia) – announced on the E3 to be available for under 100$.

Meanwhile the math TU group/jReality group lost patience and bought this nice little gadget.

From 24.8-27.8.2006 there is the socalled Games Convention (GC) in the City of Leipzig. The games convention is – next to the Tokyo Game Show and the E3 (which got small this year) – the biggest fair for computer games in the world. For this years fair there have been already now more than 150 000 visitors. Part of the GC was the exhibition pong.mythos, which was generously placed right behing the XBox 360s booth. pong.mythos is an exhibition around the game pong, which serves as a central example in the development of computer games. daytars ToPong has an extra stand at the pong.mythos exhibition (see image above) and we hope that all 170 000 visitors or so come to play! :=0.

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Today was the opening ceremony of the ICM (the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid). The ICM which is organized by the IMU (the International Mathematical Union) is the most important social gathering of mathematicians. In particular at the ICM the most prestigious mathematical prizes are awarded. There is no Nobel prize for mathematics and thus the Fields Medal is often denoted as an equivalent. However the Fields medal is only for mathematicians under 40 and rather for their body of work than a particular result. For that reason a special prize had to be created in 1998 for Andrew Wiles who solved one of the longest open problems in math history, but who happened to be over 40. This years winners are: Andrei Okounkov (Russia/US), Grigori Perelman (Russia), Terence Tao (Australia), Wendelin Werner (France).

His Majesty the King of Spain Juan Carlos was honouring the ceremony with his presence. In 1998 the ICM was in Berlin. Neither the president, nor the chancellor attended the opening ceremony. There was even no report on Tagesschau – the most important german public TV news format. I guess this says enough about the current state of public support of mathematics in Germany… So – hopefully good luck for spanish mathematics!

And it is of course very flattering for some of the randform crew to see His Majesty the King of Spain Juan Carlos twisting his head (in the middle with the white jacket) for the new logo of the IMU designed by John Sullivan —since the logo video he is watching had been done with jReality!

Many congratulations to the winners of the various IMU prizes and of course especially to John for winning the logo design competion with his logo and Charles Gunn who realized the video! Thanks to John also for the image.

A short link to a swedish site which is a sharing site for piano music. On this site people can submit their own piano recordings. Likewise the submitted piano music can be downloaded for free. There are no copyright problems if the composer had been dead for over 70 years or consented to the publication.
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This is a sort of follow-up post to the LaTeX and Metafont post, because it features (among others) the text editor “emacs” which is THE editor for LaTeX.
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