randform

David Friedman has an ongoing series of ~60 seconds short movies on his blog ironic sans. I liked the above “60 seconds in the live of a commuter” a lot.

Just an update update about Pianist Nasseri’s last concert. Part of it -namely the Waltzes by Johannes Brahms– are now on youtube.

Since the recording is authorized by the artist, it wont probably be taken off like the video in this post (see the current discussion)

->Brahms 16 Waltzes, Op. 39. (Waltzes 1-5)
->Brahms 16 Waltzes, Op. 39. (Waltzes 6-11)

I am not sure, but it seems that it is forbidden to use a bike on major roads here in Japan. This may get a bit problematic in particular if the bike-lane layout is unfortunate as above, where it is hard to understand why the bus stop had to be made in such a way that the sidewalk got completely squeezed – especially given the fact that if a bus stops it occupies anyways half of the red roadway. It is actually quite easyy to get run over by a bike.

I found an even worse sidewalk/bikelane layout on a trip to the long penninsula which sits in front of Fukuoka (please see map for details). The biketrip there was intended as a refuge into nature – in particular I wanted to have a look at the open sea. But the trip turned out differently -the road to the penninsula’s tip was completely jammed due to heavy excursion traffic, the sidewalk very small and the sidewalk/street complex concealed with fences on both sides so that there was no way to leave the street. Given the heat (no shade) and the smell of the exhausts the biketrip became rather nightmarish.

So instead of having a look at the sea, I took the first exit of the road, which is the seaside park uminonakamichi and visited Marine World instead, which holds a shark (=HAI in german) basin. There was actually a diver in the basin and one wonders what makes people go in there voluntarily.

Some images of the shark basin at Uminonakamichi after the more

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After Tim’s berserk-land video post I thought maybe to post some friendly looking flowers. Yep they look bit candy-like as in a crayonbook colour competition, but its actually only the transparancy and saturation which is different, the calour itself is real.

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spaceborne apes is a music project of Niko Lai and this is a new song and video:
“Urban State Of Mind” (music, lyrics, and animation by Niko Lai).
enjoy.

The hanover fair – the worlds biggest industrial fair – had just ended. Spiegel Online has a good overview about the state of the fair (in german).

For example these airjellies display that future air traffic may -in principle- also look beautiful.

Unfortunately the debate on science in US seems at the moment rather stagnating (via Asymptotia).

However, it seems there will be at least in Europe a little bit of a debate – namely on the ESOF2008 conference.

From the website

The mission of the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) is to provide both the European and the international science communities with an open platform for debate and communication. It presents and profiles Europe’s leading research trends in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is an opportunity to discuss and influence the future of research and innovation in Europe.

We won’t be in Europe for at least a couple of months, but it sounds interesting.

There seems to be an emphasis on innovative future european potential -also with respect to markets. Thus it is a good opportunity especially for young scientists.

->The programme highlights

some images from sakura (cherry blossom) around kashii shrine:

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In this post a class/seminar about collaborative e-learning was mentioned in which I took part in 2004. The seminar was called “Ikarus”. I just noticed that the seminar, which was made accessible online in an anonymized fashion was taken offline recently (somewhat justifying the naming ikarus ;)). Since I found no documentation about the seminar, I would like to use this post to document a bit what this seminar was about, because I think it was a truly innovative occasion.

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We savely arrived in Japan some few more images after the click.

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