...in service to the selfish meme...

I was standing on a bridge over the white noise roar of multi-lane Hwy401 in Toronto circa 1968, looking west with a very long lens.

I would have been using my, forever lost, fully manual, Nikon-F. Probably an 2x extender between the telephoto lens and the camera body. The medium was an extemely fast, high contrast, 35mm black and white recording film from Kodak, home developed and printed for contrast.

The original is a 16x20 print.

Miyazaki in Southern Japan (1980): A test maglev track and train.

The magnet levitation transportation meme has a long history. In 1957 Robert Salter envisioned the PLANETRAN, a 6,000 mph maglev subway train. The subway tunnel would support a vacuum, eliminating air friction. Very low fuel requirements, no pollution, silent, But Very Expensive to build. The train would carry a superconductive loop and the tunnel floor would consist of a series of fixed loops. By varying the electric current in the tunnel floor loops, the direction and speed of the train could be controlled. At the time Salter had no solution for keeping the train stable in the tunnel while in motion, but by 1969 he saw that the new microprocessor technology coming online could be used to adjust the strength of the electromagnetic field dynamically - kind of a fly-by-wire in reverse. Maybe the new generation of trains about to come into commercial service will be the 1st step towards the vision.

MAGLEV UPDATE (with pictures) ...

The first maglev in the USA, being developed by American Maglev Transporation, is getting ready for trial runs in Virginia. (Thanks to SLASHDOT for the tip)

I've always had a special fascination with trains. I can still recall the exciting smell of the big London train stations of my youth. After having endulged myself later in life by travelling across the Canadian Rockies in a 'dome' car, taking the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee, and riding the NYC Subway to Coney Island, I still dream about monorails and magnetic levitation trains.

These fast, futuristic trains have been a staple of my science-fiction reading for decades. There now seems to be some hope that they will really come into commercial use. A German design is being built in Shanghai, China, and Central Japan Railways has a test track running public trials.

---

And here's an idea I wish I'd thought of. As a kid riding the London tube (subway) I used to stare straight out the window, watching the wires and cables, which were attached horizontally to the tunnel walls, appear to move, snaking up and down as the train sped between stations. Now an advertising company, Submedia, has developed a somewhat similar idea using technology of illuminated boxes attached to the subway wall which present incremental images, like a flip-book, to passengers travelling inside the train. As a result the passengers see a movie through the train's windows promoting the advertiser's message. See this video about the system in action.

To The Power Of Ten is such a simple sounding phrase, but with profound implications.

This is particularly true when an imaginative journey through logrithmic space and time is presented visually. Many years ago I remember seeing a short movie that started in a boat in a lake, and then moved, by powers of 10, out into the universe, followed by a rapid return to the boat, and then a further journey down to the atomic level. This interactive tutorial provides much of the same, remembered thrill.

Find out what Human Memetic Viruses you have been infected with.
My scan shows that I'm primarily infested with Junk Food and Sci-Fi memes.


And make sure you try TILE MACHINE!
It's an easy way to make colourful and pratical computer image tiles. The best part is that you can save them locally as GIFs



If you don't have shockwave installed, there's a link on the Tile Machine site for downloading the plugin.

Because of the shrinking size of technological gadgets, it's been difficult for us fat fingered humans to find and push the buttons. In some wilder moments I had considered that genetic engineering would enable us to shrink our fingertips to keep pace.
But now, here's a less messy solution. Beams of light, which detect the user's movements, make up a virtual keyboard which can be projected to a comfortable size.

If virtual keyboards and simple voice recognition became accessories, it would make wearable and pocket computers vastly more useful.

"...my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form."

Cory Doctorow