Thursday, January 15, 2009

WTF?!?!?
im posting again after only one day?


well, yeah. but i wanted to tell you guys about my day yesterday... (by the way, im about to throw a wall of text at you. if you dont have the time, go read yesterdays post if you havent already, or be prepared for a mini novelette...)

EDIT: (quickly first:


Bunraku: i havent seen Blackmore's Night Live, but i would like to.

Raina: seeing as the website crashed under the weight of 200,000 plus entries, i sincerely doubt i'd even get considered...besides, its a fairly intense selection process. i'd rather put my eggs in the basket i know i can count on. ^^;; )


so...yesterday.

basically i had to go up to town yesterday in oreder to deliver a package. which i did, and then i found myself up town with nothing to do.


the place where i had to deliver the package was near a few museums, so i decided to go in and check them out. The one i ended up going into was the SCIENCE museum (wooo~)

im glad i did decide to go into that one though, cuz there was an Exhiition that i had wanted to go and see, but had forgotten it was there. Its an exhibition called "JAPAN Car" and its about (believe it or not) Japanese Cars, and more specifically, about the future of automobile design. i even got a student discount for the exhibition, despite the fact im not a student (and even told the cashier so! ha ha!)

It was pretty awesome. It started off with an explanation of Japanese design ethics, marriage of form and function, combining Western and Eastern cultures, a fusion of technology and asthetics.
Then it moved on to the Japanese "micro-car". It was quite funny, one of the cars on display was the Nissan iQ, which is already on sale. Im sure many of the other cars that were showcased are already available in Japan and in other countries, but the iQ is still eing advetised on TV, so i found it amusing to find it in a museum. ha ha!

They also showed Micro Vans, which were suprisingly roomy. and they had a couple of micro-sports cars too, including the classic Mazda MX-5.

There was a brief display on the technology available for the drivers, including the dash board display concepts and there was also this new software that had the ability to read the road ahead and recognise road signs and stuff like that. To demonstrate how effective it was, they had this picture of a city as viewed from a high rise building. Then there were all these little 2x2cm tiles that had bits of the main picture on it. and by placing this tile underneath the camera, the computer could work out where in the picture that tile came from. just by recognising parts of the image in the tile, and matching them to the main picture! it was pretty amazing.


Then there was the alternative fuel cars, hydrogen fuel cells, electric plug ins and all that stuff.

Finally there was the Mobile Cell section, which envisioned cars and vehicles being managed as part of a network, like cells in a blood vessel. The only vehicle displayed in this section was the I_REAL, which basically looks kinda like a wheel chair, but can go on roads in its funky "high-speed" mode, but it quite comfortable rolling around indoors as well. it also has the ability to "talk" to other I_REALs in the area, sharing knowledge like if you were going for a cup of coffee or something...it seemed kinda weird to me, but i guess it would allow you to meet new people, maybe?

The one car i really wanted to see they didnt have there at this time. It was part of the exhibition, but only for a short while. Its called the PIVO 2 and its from Nissan. it kinda looks like a bubble on wheels. the cabin and rotate on its axis, as can the wheels, which basically makes parking a doddle. In addition to this new type of mobility, it also has this cute little robot head peeking out from behind the wheel. The robot monitors your facial expression and vocal patterns and then gives appropriate support or warnings, like an intelligent sat-nav, or an AI support. it seems pretty cool, if the thing didnt look so bizarre. still, we truly do live in the future, no?


so the car exhibition was pretty awesome (sorry if i've bored you!)
but then i walked out of that and straight into a new exhibition that captured my complete attention for at least half an hour, if not longer!

Its called "Listening Post" and it is essetially a dark room with over 200 micro screens strung up in a grid pattern, with speakers. And what this giant contraption is doing is trawling the internet and taking snippets of conversation and posts from unrestricted chat rooms and forums IN REAL TIME. it then displays these on the screens, with an accompanying synthetic voice. (like the Microsoft Sam Speech system on Windows)

The software doesnt do this randonly either, it uses recognition software, so all the data comes at you in movements. One movement might be snippits of chat room conversation arranged into a vague musical montage of peoples thoughts, till it becomes overwhelming. then silence. blackness...then it will display posts with the words "I am" in it. then it might do Usernames. Then it will go on to do something else.

The effect it has is quite powerful. You get to read other peoples chat room posts, but not the whole conversation, just snippets, so its delightfully random and surreal. The various tones of the synthetic voices, particularly when several speak at once, is both gibberish, and yet once in a while you make out what its saying, and the whole ensamble makes for an eerie soundtrack to the overwhelming visual display of green lights as words appear before your eyes, sometimes in large font, so you can see the whole wall of screens, and sometimes in small font so you have to get up close and can only see a few screens at a time. The whole green lights in a black room is sometimes reminiscent of The Matrix code.


The strangest thing about it is how compelling it is. The posts are raw, unedited, so spelling and grammar is thrown out the window, and there is no censorship, so swear words and crude language run rampant. Imagine your typical chat room and what goes on in there. now combine it with a dozen more chat rooms, jumble it all up and give the posts a voice. thats what experiencing "Listening Post" is like. But despite the trash some people throw online, its all so utterly fascinating. The voyueristic feeling of reading and listening to the unwitting contributions of hundreds, maybe thousands of regular people across the globe, the quiet haunting surveillance of people's unquenching need to communicate with one another...it makes for a intense experience.

i cant fully describe what it is like to stand there and experience this thing. Everyone would take it differently. But i stood there for a long time, standing on the edge, peering into the dark deep ocean of the net.



...



anyways, after that i wondered around the rest of the museum, which is a pretty cool place. and then i came home.




so yeah, thats what i got up to yesterday. heh heh...

if you read all of that, go and take a break, maybe have a cookie or a cup of coffee or something. thanks for putting up with me and my weird need to share this stuff with you.


till next time!


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