Nuit Blanche 2011 coverage

Suited up for the future.

http://www.kindleproject.org/blog/2011/10/07/feature-on-flightpath-toronto/

How can a public spectacle help to shape our ideas of how we interact with nature, space and cities? Can it really offer a tangible route for creative alternatives to transportation, civic engagement and an investment in how we live with a less harmful impact on the natural world? These questions have been on my mind for years, and in the context of Kindle Project, it has recently become relevant. As we set out to explore the most current incarnations of unique collaborative efforts on the blog these past two months, we came across one such effort that got our attention. Flightpath Toronto took place on October 1 as a part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, where for one sleepless night the city was transformed by hundreds of artists for the sixth annual sunset-to-sunrise celebration of contemporary art.

The mystery of the Kessel Run

“You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”

Han Solo

Mos Eisley Cantina in Tatooine. Two robed men are looking for an escort past an Imperial blockade off the planet. They are negotiating with a smirking lowlife and hairy, bearlike creature. The older of the two men asks if the lowlife’s ship is fast. That is when the lowlife utters his famous line.

What I never got about Han Solo’s line was that a parsec is a measure of distance and not time. I thought about it from time to time until one day, I figured it out while showering.

What I understand about traveling in hyperspace is that a ship cannot pass near massive objects, as the gravity of the object, such as a sun or planet, would pull the ship off course, or worse, out of hyperspace with disastrous effect. That is why everyone says “plot a course to X”, before jumping to hyperspace, and that is why they need navigational computers. Han Solo was able to make the Kessel Run in record time because he plotted routes that edged closer to gravity wells, shortening the length of the Run. Normally this is dangerous, but Han Solo, being a gambler, probably acted on his instinct and went for it.

I was going to draw some diagrams showing a gravity well and its effect on a ship traveling at FTL speeds, but I found a cool map and a fuller explanation of the Kessel Run here.

I just want you to know that I fully put this explanation together in the shower, using knowledge gathered from Einstein’s writings on the gravitational effect on space, and Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, in which ship-borne gravity generators are routinely used to prevent Rebel pilots from escaping to hyperspace.

There are many attempts at retconning this line to show that Solo is lying, but I stand by my explanation, and the following comment from Lucas himself bears out most of it.

In the commentary for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope DVD, George Lucas mentions that the parsecs are due to the Millennium Falcon’s advanced navigational computer rather than its engines, so the navicomputer would calculate much faster routes than other ships could. 1

Gorgeous renderings of an inflatable utopia from the recent past.

http://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/les-utopies-gonflables-jean-paul-jungmann-et-le-groupe-utopia/

Old ass stuff.

My first video presentation for thesis class. It’s pure classic, like.

Hylozoic Ground goes to Venice

Hylozoic Ground, by Philip Beesley and his team, is a collection of works that explore a new kind of architecture, one that is characterised by lightness, flexibility and sensitivity, literally. The installations are made of thin transparent or translucent polymer arranged into delicate webs and appendages that not only respond to the immediate surrounding (i.e. to your presence, or moisture in the air) but also communicate this response to each other over its network, so that each stimulus response ripples out from the stimulus location. In other words, the Waterloo based architect is trying to make architecture more like a living thing, and already he has created somehing that represents a living architecture.

Videos and more images and the rest.

You can help start up the FabLab process, be statistically significant and fill out the survey!

By filling out the survey, you’ll be helping me understand your needs, and also help make a case for the Toronto FabLab’s place in the market.

I’ll need a minimum of 30 responses in order for the survey to be useful in our business plan and funding acquisition. So please, help us help you by filling out the survey below. A million thanks!

Casey

Survey Link http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LWLJMLC

Mismatched socks: standalone part two DRAFT

To give a concrete example of the standalone complex, I’ll use an example from daily life. A while ago I was doing laundry with my girlfriend, and on that particular day she found herself with no matching socks. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to illustrate the difference between a rigid and a flexible system. In a rigid system, in this example a system where all socks need to be matched in order to do work, if you have any sort of failure, such as the lack of a matching sock then your system relies on redundancies to cope. That works for a small amount of failure, but in the case of a complete dearth of matched socks, for instance, you will end up sockless until next laundry day. On the other hand is a flexible and dynamic system that uses a modular units that can be interchangeable catch up with such failures, that is for example if you change your mind about match matching pair of socks is. If you redefine a matching pair of socks to that which you can wear to go out and then do your business, then the system is becomes much more flexible. All it takes is a shift in your perspective and how you react to changes in situations. In that sense I’m trying to create it in organization that can operate as a drawer full of mismatched socks. Just like in the drawer, the socks themselves do not change, rather it is the person wearing the socks that changes . The organization is the one that changes. The members of the organization, the people involved don’t change, only in how you use them.

brickworks cloud prerender

Sino-Urgic Easter eggs

First day at the workshop.