randform

When it became common knowledge, that the world is a ball (and not a disk), the world faced its first big problem. (more…)

image form national institutes of health via wikipedia

Mice and men share about 90% of the genome. Therefore we are confident that one can safely assume to search one’s own brain when browsing the Allen Brain Atlas. (more…)

space-invaders put the good old Rubik’s cube to new use.

via cati vaucelle

image from wikipedia

Sometimes sun light protection with simple and energy saving solutions like exterior window shutters or non electric mechanical window blinds (see above image) is not so easy feasible like in the case of big windows, like in business applications or in urgent cases, where a fast shield is necessary like e.g. in aviation.

An alternative to electro-mechanical (and thus energy costly) window blinds (in german also called Jalousie) are may be smart windows like e.g. the SPD light-control technology by research frontiers Inc. who seem to head for a big commercalization of their product see pressrelease from Feb 1.

->see also the information brochure by frontier research.

The elevator in the math building at TU Berlin.

Another note for our IPCC week: It seems like the american enterprise institute has set out a 10 000$ prize
for scientists that are able to disprove the IPCC 4th assessment report. We recomend however to rather try one of the millenium problems the Clay math institute set out for it is a) more money (1 000 000$ prizes) and b) better chances to succeed.
(and no: video rebuttals like this one or this won’t count)

stelarc is an australian artist who investigates the man-machine evolutionary step with his own body. He was giving a lecture yesterday at the transmediale.

Since nobody was responding on the ticketphone for transmediale I just went there. Luckily I guessed right that the location “@studio” on the transmediale website meant the west berlin academy of art and not the east berlin academy of art. However the lecture was apparently already sold out at noon. There were quite a bit of people which came from foreign countries and who like me didn’t manage to extract the right information from the transmediale website.

So I looked at the closing doors and how people were talking to each other in the lounge and went.

->stelarc’s fractal flesh

As I tried to explain in my previous posts it is not so sure, wether mankind will ever reach the posthuman state or any other condition at all. And yes it is hard to comunicate why scientists see so much evidence for not reaching that state due to the climate change , if they fail to do a good weather forecast for more than 3 days. However the two things are different and may be it is at the moment more convincing to look at the number of scientists who warn TODAY.

An addition to todays post: a concise conclusion by Sabine Hossenfelder.

via Asymptotia
to the website of Sabine Hossenfelder

Important things need to be repeated. So this is the first repetition of the announcement of the 2010 initiative, an initiative for raising the awareness for the climate change in the architecture/engineering and design community. As of today the organizers say:

First, a big thank you to everyone who has registered – you are making this an amazing event! As you can see below, people, schools, firms, companies and organizations from all over the world will be tuning in on February 20! This is no small thing, since Noon to 3:30pm EST is very late or very early in many of these countries.

Unfortunately the european response has not been so overwhelming yet, in particular if I look under the letter’s F and G on the participants list then I see for France that the University of Nantes registered and a brave student from the University of Paris (super!) – that is at least something. I was also amazed to see Ghana and even New Zealand on the list! However, as one can see, the german contribution to the climate initiative has been sofar autotally unconvincing – in every respect!