Archive for the ‘Far out’ Category
Dubai - Palm Islands
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Joachim gave me a link to a strange structure on the coast of Dubai. It looked so weird I had to find out what it was. It turns out it is an island made from reclaimed land called Palm Jumeirah:
The Palm Jumeirah is in the shape of a palm tree. It consists of a trunk, a crown with 17 fronds, and a surrounding crescent island that forms an 11 kilometre long breakwater. The island is 5 kilometres by 5 kilometres and its total area is larger than 800 football pitches. The crown is connected to the mainland by a 300-metre bridge.
Palm Jumeirah:
Google Maps
Palm Jumeirah on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Jumeirah
Video about the construction of Palm Jumeirah is a must see!
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=m3IHnM5K80s&feature=related
Promo video:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=0lXclgws7n8
Dubai image gallery:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/11/dubai_and_the_uae.html
Google street map
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Det her er bare alt for vildt. En ny type map service fra Google i Japan hvor man i bogstaveligste forstand kan vaere langdistanceturist, for med det her map kan man nemlig gaa rundt i hele Tokyo (og en del af Kyoto) og se billeder taget fra stort set alle veje i Tokyo!
Det er sikkert blevet til ved at en bil med et kamera med en fiskeoejelinse er koert rundt i Tokyos gader i nogle maaneder og taget billeder (med GPS koordinater) for hver 5-10 meter. Billederne er saa stykket sammen saa man kan navigere gennem dem ved at foelge vejene. Proev det ved at klikke paa nogle af mine favorit-startsteder:
Omnia i900
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Too much computing power
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
David sent me a link to this amazing demo today. It is a raytraced implementation of the rendering engine from Quake 4. I don’t know how much computing power is needed to run this, but it must be a hell of a lot more than what my AMD Athlon 64X2 can produced!
As the developer explains in the video (in the bottom of the page) it is part of a research project for intel, but let’s hope this makes it into a game soon!
http://www.pcghx.com/aid,646920/News/Video_shows_ray_traced_Quake_Wars/
Do it at home
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008Bit humour
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Bit humour is a term I coined during my university days, and refers to technology (often CS) related quips or short pieces of wit, usually intentional but often unintentional. Mostly in the form of jokes, bit humour was often applied as a means of “de-coupling” from long, boring technical lectures, or as a type of friendly satire during homework preparations!
Today, bit humour, has become an accepted genre of rhetoric, usually termed computer humour. While browsing the Wikipedia today I came up with this little jewel (see link). At first it looks like a regular specification sheet for a memory device from the company Signetics. While Signetics is indeed a real company, they have never (and no company ever has) produced something as silly as a Write Only Memory device! A Write Only Memory (or WOM) would be a type of memory to which you could write your data, but never retrieve it again. Absolutely and utterly useless!
Signetics 25120 Write Only Memory data sheet
If you scroll down to the section with the curves, you will see, amongst others, a chart showing “The number of pins remaining” plotted against “Number of socket insertions”! Poor thing has only 12 out of 30 pins remaining after only 10 insertions!
The data sheet also claims that it will “provide 50% higher speed than you will obtain”! But of course it also requires an additional voltage supply in the form of a 6.3 VAC… for the vacuum tube filaments!



