Stratodinges

Zo zittend in de achtertuin rolde er een fraaie wolk voorbij; een mooie gelegenheid om opnieuw het iPhone bloggen te proberen...

Posted with LifeCast

Meh

Did you ever think you made up a word and at one point heard it back through someone else? Then you know that making up a word is the easy part, and making sure you really were the first to use it is the hard bit. By the time the word gets printed on T-shirts you're by all means too late to claim it, and even using it loses its cool. When even The Guardian gets hold of it the word is definitely useless as an indicator you belong to the incrowd, the knowing, the initiated, the, eh, sheep? Meh!

Mandelmania Revisited

Re-reading the book by Arthur C. Clarke, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, made me timetravel back to my university days and my first i386 computer. Why? Because a background story in the novel is about the late 1980s Mandelbrot Fractalmania (see the book cover in the Wikipedia story!). I too have spent countless hours at the computer monitor hypnotized by the colors and endless depths of the Mandelbrot set - a shortlived but severe addiction. An addiction shared by many at the time, fed by the new notion of chaos in math but enabled by the simultaneous availablility of home computing power. Out of curiosity I Googled the name of the most popular piece of Fractal software at the time, Fractint, and to my amazement it is still being developed. Although at version 20 it still runs on DOS...

Saturn Rings Crossing by Cassini

The truly amazing technology behind this photo and accompanying video on the NASA site is of course the Cassini spacecraft far in the outskirts of our solar system. However, without the Internet such motion imagery would only reach its audience if a science minded TV program would be so kind as to air a feature on it. Now, space and science buffs just have to surf to the NASA site - an organization, by the way, who knows how to broadcast its achievements with NASA-TV.

Postsecret

Postsecret is a (snail) mail address, a website and a couple of books. As the name implies it allows anyone to make a public (though usually anonymous) confession to small and sometimes big sins - the author's or someone else's. It would be easy to send in imaginary secrets but still the majority seems genuine enough. Watching the site never fails to touch me - some secrets people carry with them daily! Although the main infrastructure of Postsecret is plain cardboard, stamps and regular mail it wouldn't be as popular and well-known without the Internet. It also shows how one man can rival the suspense and intrigue of big media reality TV shows, because that is what this is - a platform for public confession by the writer and a peephole into people's private space for the viewer. A discrete peephole on anonymous lives though, outclassing any Endemol style show by far. A link to the Hopeline service for people in emotional distress is provided.

Nanobliss

Nanobliss is a website that tries to show the beauty in nanostructures - and in some cases succeeds. It is far from a nanoscale art gallery, and in some cases it is nothing more than a show-off of what one can do with carbon atoms and a scanning electron microscope. A logo section? Come on. The site best succeeds with those pictures that weren't so much engineered for effect, but that do show incidental structures at tiny scale. Still worth a visit.

Cheddar Vision

The first ever online camera was of course the coffeepot at The Trojan Room at the University of Cambridge, even before the World Wide Web made publishing images and creating webcams easy. The original cam got unfortunately switched off at august 22, 2001, but now has a worthy successor in perhaps an even more British endeavour (with even a touch of Monty Python?): A webcam showing a maturing Cheddar. For those of us that find watching grass grow a too exhilarating experience, please browse to the CheddarVision website to see, err, mould grow?