Ghostrider

Most of the times there are rather boring surfing along on the Net's free spaces. Old vanitysites and cranked fan-sites. But sometimes you find a site that totally blew you off your feet. Elena is a young woman in Russia, and as her father is nuclear-physician she was one of the children who lived through the meltdown of Chernobyl in 1986. I too remember it very well. The fear and all the pollution that fell down even here.

Elena is riding a Kawasaki Ninja and takes trips into the closed area, she document the on-going catastrophe with her camera and puts it up in her site Ghost Town. It's truly fascinating to witness the mess, the totally death of a huge part of the land through her eyes. "The most exciting thing about rides in Ghosttown is to hit a red line on my bike's tacho and break this silence with roar of a wounded dinosaur and then to close throttle and listen how all those ghosts cursing 1100cc kawasaki engin." - and she goes there both for pleasure but also in a mood of sadness, telling about the catastrophe and the life before Chernobyl really was Wormwood.

The concept of a branded car

The magazine Forbes.com have listed the Ten Coolest Concept Cars in the world. This is the cars that is nothing more than a fantasy.

A conceptcar is nothing more than a very expensive way to build a company-brand. No concept car is possible to drive, some might go slow that a boy on a bike would win a race.

Fun, inspired and with a great "wow"-factor. That's the concept of a conceptcar.

Great guy moments

The glossy mens' paper Stuff is putting up a list of the 50 greatest guy moments. Some of the great moments:
43 Babylonians invent beer on January 19, 6000 B.C. On January 20, they invent the term dry heave.
30 The first pizza is delivered in 1889 The lucky recipient: Queen Margherita of Naples. Are Tums far behind?
19 Man invents fire in 1,418,000 B.C. …and goes on to invent the Weber Genesis Platinum Grill in 2000 A.D.
9 The bikini is invented in 1946. No model will wear it, so French designer Louis Reard has to hire a stripper to introduce it at a fashion show. The Vatican swiftly condemns it.
3 President Reagan jokingly kicks off nuclear war. While testing his microphone, he deadpans, “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Don't paw on my IP

Government Computer News (GCN) is running the story that the US Army and DARPA is making their way into the Age of Networking but of course: they will paw on the holy cow.

DARPA wants to see revamped are the Internet Protocol, the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection model—which defines how devices communicate on today’s networks—and the von Neumann architecture, the basic design style underpinning almost all computers built today.

So - let the big boys play. The problem is that this probably will affect the whole Net.

Dangerous profits

Planning a vacation? Then you probably should cast an eye on this list that lists the World's Most Dangerous Destinations.

But the point that Forbes is making is that the business must go on and a lot of companies send their people to dangerous and hazardous surroundings to make some bucks. But they look to their men: Kroll for one is teaching their people in awareness training, including tips on health and hygiene, defensive driving techniques and in the worst-case scenario, an employee being kidnapped, Kroll will deploy personnel to handle it.

The robot challenge

The Grand Challenge, a competition of fifteen vehicles with silicon-brains at the steering-wheel in a 150 mile race through the Mojave-desert. It's the The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at Pentagon sponsoring the challenge and the price to the winning vehicle was one million dollars.

But no one could cash-in cause as the flic at CNN.com tell since all fifteen vehicles was disabled. But hey, it's not money wasted, it's learning money. Or not.

Famous robots

At The Robot Hall of Fame you are able to nominate the robot of your flav. The site's mission is to honor the landmarks of robot-science and is put up of the The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. They both put the industrial- and the sci-firobots on the scene. And on the annual meeting 2003 they honored four robots: Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover, Unimate, R2-D2, and HAL 9000.

The jury is a really cool bunch of people from both the scientific as well as the sci-fiworld. Arthur C. Clarke, well-known sci-fi author and Sherry Turkle, who is professor at MIT and author of the book "living.online".

Ugly site for a good purpose

This site is truly ugly. But Angelwear is for at good cause: they get celebrities to design clothes and stuff and the profit on each sold item is going as charity to an organisation of the celebs choice. Celebs participating is Phil Collins, John Carpenter, Flea and a big bunch others.

But why oh why do all charitysites have to be so ugly? Is it because it would be a contradiction to say that all profit goes to charity but seem to have invested in good design? Beats me. Couldn't a webdesigner bring his knowledge in charity work and do something about it?

Electricity from feces

This is really a strange thing New Scientist puts. Making electricity from sewage. The waste of our eating is possible to use as power. Truly a new definition of "dirty electricity" (organic fuel as oil and coal is often called it).

Since NS often use a language that goes over my head I can't really explain the technic but it's useful since we all have to go to the loo.

But it won't be in the near future: "One way to think of this technology is that it is currently at the state of development that solar power was 20 to 30 years ago - the principle has been shown, but there is a lot of work to do before this is widely used."´.

Letting of steam

Steve Forbes is letting off steam in his fact and comments-piece. What's with this big filings suing companies because of the products they sell and let customers freely choose to buy it or not. For me this somehow proves my theory on guilt: that the people in their forties-fifties is putting their guilt and shame externally. "I'm fat - that is McDonald's fault." or "I'm dying from lung-cancer - that must be Philip Morris to feel ashamed."

• Television makers. Their sets force us to become couch potatoes, thereby damaging our health. They must share the blame for our national fatness.
• Ditto, TV programmers. If Hollywood and independent producers didn't produce shows, we'd be out jogging or exercising at the gym.
• Auto companies. If they didn't make vehicles, there'd be less air pollution, no more carnage on the highways, no more of those aggravating insurance costs.
• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other antismoking zealots. Is it a coincidence that obesity has risen as tobacco use has declined? Cigarette-smoking boosts the metabolism; stop smoking--and wham!--the pounds pour on.
• Trial lawyers. Thanks to their lawsuits, countless schools have shut down or curtailed activities on their playgrounds. Teen-agers aren't eating much more than they did in the past, but they're exercising 30% less than previous generations.
• Volcanoes. A Krakatau-size eruption will spew more stuff into the atmosphere in a day than all the Earth's factories have done over the last 200 years. Since we can't collect money from volcanoes, we should shake down national governments that harbor these environmentally unsound entities. If the countries are too poor to pay, then Washington can put up the cash; after all, the U.S. is responsible for all of the woes of the world, isn't it?

Lost in transition

Lost in Translation is a movie, much talked about since it's Sophia Coppola - the daughter of the legend Francis Coppola - directed the flic, and I truly adore the site. It's beautiful and feel-good in someway, starting with some sort of classic movie-poster. Nice way to work with Flash™.

I can't say I'm an expert on moviesites since I'm no cinema-runner but I can feel that Hollywood and others in the movie-biz is good at using the Flash, using the interactive media in new and profound ways. Probably there is a creativity in the motion pictures industry that other might be lacking.

Green one

"I think we made really serious missteps in 2000 and 2001, and we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent."

A long and pretty interesting
interview with the cyberpunk-theorist Bruce Sterling from Reason where he talks about everything from media to Twin Towers: of fiction and future of this green planet called Earth.

And as the great writer he is, his answers is filled with one-liners:
"Pop will eat itself. I predicted for a long time that the Internet would be a big, stinking deal when there was finally a pop song about it. Sure enough, Destiny's Child did a song that has a line about "some girl trashing me on the Internet." That's funny, but the thing that's peculiar about it is there was always a dark side. There was always the porn/mafia/drug dealer/pedophilia aspect -- the four horsemen of the apocalypse.".

He put up some sketches on the big things for the 21th century: "More like performance-enhancement devices. And I found it more interesting and more significant to talk about an intimate relationship with prosthetics and gizmos than an intimate relationship between one human being and another.".

And on the everchanging technology: "all forms of media, they are very dependent on their technological circumstances. The transformation comes when the people who understood what it was like die. I’m a transitional figure. I’m the very last generation that worked professionally on typewriters. William Gibson wrote his first book on a typewriter. I wrote two books on typewriters. I was taught to use slide rules in schools. Now it’s like having a pet trilobite."

Sterling have started an organization which is working in the environmental movement: "The central topic is the greenhouse effect as a post-industrial design problem. It’s not just about raising money for flood victims, which is one way to deal with the consequences. It’s about thinking about how we got into this mess, making people realize the mess, and exploring mechanisms -- technologies -- by which we might conceivably get out."

The proof of the intelligent nap

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote most of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from scenes he dreamt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was inspired to write the epic poem Kubla Khan while asleep, Dmitri Mendeleyev determined the guiding rule behind the periodic table of elements, the basis of modern chemistry, after bedtime and Friedrich Kekule solved the ring-like structure of carbon atoms in benzene by dreaming of twisting serpents.

And scientists is sure that the sleep is the biggest creative generator of humans. And got proof for it through testing.

Chinese surfers breaks the wall

Chinese surfers have become skilled finding proxies or websites that let them through the Great Red Firewall to reach blocked sites. And the authorities is closing them down but a couple of weeks later they are up and running on some other server. The Amnesty and other human rights watch-organisations have been critizing companies who sell the means of censorship to the chinese government.

But as Liu Qing, one of the 'prominent' dissidents released from jail in 1992, and now chairman of the Human Rights in China-organisation say: "There is no way the Government can be successful in really controlling the internet. That's why in China these days you can see all kinds of organisations and activities springing up, moving the country towards real change,".

The security agent

This column from SecurityFocus BUGTRAQ Columnists is a story of Dave Thomas, former chief of computer intrusion investigations at FBI headquarters, and current Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the St. Louis Division of the FBI, and his meeting with the columnist's students and what the FBI-agent had to tell about the security flaws of the Internet.

It's a long story but very informative. And of course there are examples of hacking:
"In one, a hacker sent a WinPopup message to a fellow: "Hey, put your shirt back on! And why are you using a computer when there's a girl on your bed!" Sure enough, the camera had captured a guy using his computer, sans shirt, and in the background you could clearly see a young woman stretched out on a bed."

And he have a tip to the hacker: "If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac.". Read the sequel: Files show Utah had key role in MATRIX

The great cultural revolution II

On your mark, get set - go. When every small business in USA is following the leaders the big game on outsourcing. And fight is on - battling the calmness of the company.

Who will win? The one who already set the stage (India) or the new economy of China - a mix of communistacensorship and free enterprise.

SCO squeeze the Open Source-bottle

The SCO-battle is totally out of bonds. SCO have been slashing subpoenas at Torvalds, Stallman and other of the Open Source-leaders who have been into the development of Linux. Torvalds is getting the lawyer from Linux labs tells CNET News.com.

Name of the game (or chair)

For us living in Sweden the names of the IKEA furniture ain't strange. That's some swedish villages that have named the more expensive stuff and then Kamprad thought out that a lamp could be named "Lysa" (as in ligt up). But when the strange named company A Hundred Monkeys do their thing on unraveling the IKEA product naming mystery.

When the cultures collide

Two stories which shows that the Global Village still is far away runs in Mediaguardian. First it's the Arabic version of the reality-show Big Brother, a hit in the western hemisphere, but really a scandal beauty in the countries influenced by strong islamic belief: there was an outcry about the fact that men and women, not being married or related, slept under the same roof and the fact that the traditional woman's robe wasn't worn by the women in the show.

The other story is about the first arabic reality-show Al Hawa Sawa - Being Together - where eight women lived together in a Big Brother-like situation and then there was men who could see them and propose marriage. The winner was to be chosen by the audience. But the problem was already there, both where the more fundamentalistic islamists said the show was too liberal and by the liberal wing who meant the show did support the traditional ways in marriage. And when there were rumours of drinking around two of the girls and when one of the final contestants did change her mind about the marriage the show surely was in the gutter of the drain of television. The fact that the show had a runaway bride was too much.

The education on this have to be that there no such thing as Media is the message or that we all live in a global village as Marshall McLuhan put it - there are not that big similarities between the cultures of the world that make it possible to lift in one mediaformat into whatever context.

Most expensive persons ... or not

No listing is complete when not listing the world's richest people and of course the people at Forbes have done it. And of course Bill Gates is the most richest in the world - his worth is about $46.6 billion. That's some chips and dimes. Second wealthiest is Warren Buffet, just $4 billion less than Gates. At the sixth place Alice and Helen Walton resides, the wealthiest women on earth but wee... only $20 billion in the pocket. At 13^th the Swedish furniture-gigant Ingvar Kamprad is putting down his feet and the fun in this is that he might be the most stingy person alive. He lives as he did when he started IKEA.

And both Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer is on the top twenty which truly shows the impact that computers have had recently and the fact that Microsoft tries to become The Operative of the Universe.

Most expensive hotels

In their eager to paint the picture of the rich and famous lifestyle Forbes lists the
world's most expensive hotels and not as one could guess Waldorf Astoria NYC isn't even at the list but instead you can rest at The Mansion at the MGM Grand in Vegas for about $5 grand, nothing more than the room included and only for the night. Meals and the mini-bar is separately paid for. Hell, this have to be good pillows in that bunk. And a map since the villas you hire range from 2,400 to 12,000 square feet. And of course there is original Picasso, Leger and Matisse on the wall. But the map might not become handy since every villa comes with at least one private butler.

Little Palm Island in the Florida Keys is more pricier since the room (only the room) is starting at somewhere $1395/night. Other resorts is including everything from food, expensive French wines, scuba diving and game drives to laundry service as in Frégate Island Private in the Seychelles and The Turtle Island at Fiji (where you can play Brooke Shields in the Blue Lagoon).

Most expensive household items

Forbes having a blast putting up lists on "The Most Expensive..." and of course there is a list on most expensive household items.

What do you think about a toilet for $5 grand? All this includes the very necessary front- and back-aerated warm-water spray, an oscillating spray massage, heated seat, catalytic air deodorizer and a warm air dryer. Or why not the Dualit Combi toaster. You just have to put up about $400. And before you put the jam on the breakfast-bread you might had a good nights sleep at linens for $2400 or something.

Most Expensive Cars 2004

"Pretty soon, the most expensive vehicle in America will not be Italian, but French, supervised by Germans."

The super-premiumcars of USA is pretty strange. The Americans can't apparently not set prices on their top-guns or aren't they able to build them?

Ferrari is the winner in the class - with their Enzo Ferrari, which in it's basedesign cost $650 grand. And then there is a new Beetle: the (VW) Bugatti Veyron 16.4 coupe which price-tag might start at $1,1 million. Yeah - that's a nice shopping-car for the wife... And of course we have The (BMW) Rolls Royce Phantom as well as Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren coupe. And the list goes on at Forbes.com.

Humanoid-technology

The connection between the human and the technology develops as the possibilities to make technology as small as the human organs. It's not only a technological wonder but also a revolution for humans since the technology starts to function more like us rather than we have to adapt to the technology.

Philips is developing a new camera-lens that is function as a human eye. Through fluid lenses they are able to make a lens that is about 3 mm and where focus is made in less than bits of a second.