Archive for January, 2007

Following another dominant year in the Japanese Leagues, Daisuke Matsuzaka, the feared ace of the Seibu Lions, is coming to America after the Boston Red Sox paid a $51 million posting fee to his team and another $52 million to Daisuke himself. What could make a man worth so much money? Besides pinpoint control, a plus fastball, and a nice slider, rumors are swirling that Daisuke Matsuzaka can throw the gyroball, the mythical unstoppable pitch from the Far East.

Developed by Dr. Ryutaro Himeno, a professor of physics, and baseball instructor Kazushi Tezuka in the late 1990s, the gyroball would be the first new pitch in the Major Leagues in forty years. What makes the gyroball so effective is that it combines the power of a fastball and the movement of a breaking pitch; basically, it’s a power forkball. Thrown sidearm like a football in a tight spiral, the gyroball is almost impossible to recognize and hit effectively.

That is, if it exists and Matsuzaka actually throws it. Yale professor Robert Adair – author of The Physics of Baseball – doubts such a pitch would be anywhere near as effective as claimed. Others contend Daisuke, as an overhand power pitcher, couldn’t throw a ball designed for side-armers, and that – as talented as he is with his fastballs, sliders, and change-ups – he has no need. We won’t know until April, but for $103 million, the Red Sox better get their money’s worth.

Link to Sports Illustrated article
Link to supposed video of a Matsuzaka gyroball
Link to video of a Barry Zito Bugs Bunny curveball, a real (and really good) pitch, just for fun.

Seeing this series of videos of old people playing with the Nintendo Wii was really impressive. They’re having as much or more fun than if they were, say, miniature golfing for real. If I had designed the Wii, this would be very rewarding – look how happy the woman is towards the end of the clip!

A friend of mine who is going into the gaming industry said he was tired of feeling “worthless” when he finished playing a game. I know what he means – after 3 hours of WarCraft, I used to feel terrible. Maybe the Wii is the beginning of a new kind of gaming…

Link

You may have heard about a new way of storing data- 256 Gb (~54 DVDs) on a single sheet of A4 paper, using colors and geometric shapes. Known as the “Rainbow Format,” does it sound too good to be true? Well, maybe…

TechWorld has a scathing article on why they think the technology is a hoax. While some of their objections are technically complicated, others are ludicrous and miss the entire potential of the Rainbow Format. For example, their last point:

14. Paper problems Paper distorts and inks fade so the long term storage potential is strictly limited. Paper also burns and can get torn which also restricts the method’s usability. Paper can be folded which would distort the represented information in the area of the fold.

What they fail to mention is that to date, paper-esque storage is our most reliable storage medium. We’re still reading texts that are thousands of years old. In comparison “archival” CDs claim to have a lifespan of merely 75 years. Not to mention the concerns that the 1s and 0s on those CDs are meaningless unless you have the proper format and tools to read them. Archival paper, on the other hand, can easily last hundreds of years, and needs no tools to decipher the contents, although a Rosetta Stone may come in handy.

A lot of TechWorld’s article (and the view of the tech community in general) seems to evaluate this as a replacement for hard drives and DVDs. Wrong! Obviously, a paper-based storage format would be horrible for conditions where the information needs to be read millions of times, and changed. If nothing else, changing paper is a mechanical process which will always be slower than the magnetic/light techniques we use to change information on hard drives and DVDs.

Instead, this format should be viewed as a revolutionary step in the process of archiving. With huge concerns as the Library of Congress digitizes their entire collection, due to the physical space constraints, in order to house all their documents, the Rainbow Format offers a new chance to preserve information in a lasting form. As long as we’re sure to intermingle Rosetta Stone-esque pages in with those in the Rainbow Format, we’ve given future historians a fighting chance.

To put it in more real-world terms, a 256 GB piece of Rainbow formatted paper could hold the contents of 50,000 Bibles. Let’s say, in the end, the Rainbow Format can only hold 0.00002% of its’ original storage claims: that’s still an entire Bible on a single sheet of paper. Now we’re looking at some serious space savings.

The BBC recently linked to footage from Japan of a prehistoric shark which is rarely seen due to its usual habitat of 600m deep. Since few submarines can make it to these depths, it’s not suprising that little is known about the species. By dating fossils of the animals’ unique three-pronged teeth, however, scientists have been able to determine the frilled shark to be around 18 million years old.

Oceanographer and former NOAA chief scientist Sylvia Earle claims the most bio-diverse region in the world is not the rainforest but in fact the deep ocean. This concept does not stop fishermen from killing the frilled shark, and most other sea life, when they are trawling for other catch, essentially dragging huge swathes of net by boat. Scientists have likened the practice to bulldozing a forest to catch a few deer, a practice that’s surely not sustainable if fishermen want to continue with their profession.

Of course you can also think, like the Japanese man in the video, that “the fish is just weird.”

Link to BBC World News video
Link to Frilled shark stats on Fishbase.com

Pete Habuda and I were looking at new office space for our Boulder office last week when we came across this excellent clock in one of the lobbies. An amazing example of how even the simplest design can convey a very powerful statement.

We’d get one for the new place, except the Boulder office usually works 10-6.

[Jeff Goodman reports: This is a M&Co. 5 O’Clock, designed by the husband-and-wife team of Tibor and Maria Kalman, and is available through the MOMA Store online. Though one of the most important graphic designers of 1980s, Tibor may be best known for his work with Talking Heads, including the cover for Remain in Light and The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. Sadly Tibor Kalman died in 1999.]

This design firm led by Lachlan Laycock out of Richmond, Victoria, Australia, has a very minimal and beautiful site. His portfolio entries are great, and his BaseCamp widget took my breath away, and it goes so well alongside my Backpack widget. His use of Helvetica Neue 45 Light as a primary font is bold – luckily if you don’t have that font (and therefore don’t know what I’m talking about), the site substitutes Arial.

kennedia.com/portfolio
A favorite from his portfolio: Mintd.com

Now that China has successfully demonstrated its capabilities by destroying its own weather satellite with a ground-based “kill vehicle,” their next step should be to improve their poster design. A brief overview can be found here, and while they have a sort of kitschy, retro feel, I just don’t think they convey the volatile mixture of totalitarianism and capitalism found in the country.

In more important news, Vestal Design in Lima was shocked (shocked!) to learn of the first launch of Peru’s space program on Saturday, when the Paulet I rocket reached an altitude of 45 kilometers before crashing into the sea west of Pucusana.

While we are proud of our humble Andean nation’s accomplishment – even if it doesn’t make the tap water any more drinkable – we have to wonder why a nation like Peru is investing in rocketry and not, say, helping the millions of impoverished people.

Unless, of course, Chile wants a space program, in which case we should spare no expense.

Link via CNN
Link to Chinese posters
Link to news of Peru’s launch (in Spanish)
Link to Space.com article on developing world nations’ space efforts

Begun in 1968, the Veterans Memorial Coliseum was the crown jewel in the urban renewal of New Haven, Ct., a 12,000 seat anchor to a rejuvenated downtown. Forty years later, even after the hopeful master planning of urban renewal has long since been proven flawed, the Coliseum remained, abandoned; a rusting symbol of a failed era in American politics. It remained, that is, until Saturday, when a controlled demolition sent the structure crashing to the ground in a cloud of dust.

With hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult to understand why the designers of 1960s New Haven did what they did, especially given the range of power they wielded at the time. During the urban renewal era, no city received more money per capita than New Haven, and Mayor Richard Lee spent it on wild schemes: the Oak Street Connector, a highway to nowhere that gutted the residential core of the downtown, the Chapel Square Mall, one of the most poorly designed malls ever to be built, and the New Haven Coliseum, an ambitious structure with a parking garage on the roof of the stadium. All failed, and the city collapsed in the late 1980s before a rising economy, and a new relationship with Yale University, led the city back from the brink.

The ideological framework of urban renewal, the force that built the stadium, is thankfully dead, buried by failures, killed by its own hubris. The endless supply of government money and local power exposed Modernism’s own flaws, most notably its intense belief that architecture, mega-projects, and automobiles could construct a glorious and efficient future for a blue-collar city without any jobs. Within their own strict style, the Modernist planners of the 1960s could not possibly accept any other solutions besides their own. In the end, New Haven paid the price for being an architectural lab rat, one it is slowly buying back one demolition at a time.

Link to one of the many Youtube video of the demolition
Link to oral history of New Haven’s urban renewal

That’s right, we missed our own birthday: Jan 16th. (Some friends we are!) A lot has happened on the Vestal Blog in the last year: we hit the milestone of 500 blog posts published, had a few facelifts and even got a few new authors. Thanks for being a great audience and for all the participation. Be sure to let us know how we’re doing so we can make Year 3 even better!

A new art project from Julian Oliver, Packet Garden is an interesting exploration into the mapping of data, in this case your own personal web use. Packet Garden captures information about how you are using the Internet – the size of downloads, uploads, the addresses of websites – and transforms them into a virtual world: downloads become valleys, uploads hills, http plants form little digital forests. Each day your garden is saved, allowing you to compare change over time.

Oliver claims that none of this information is shared or made public in any way; I’m dubious, especially if the program saves everyday. Nevertheless, Packet Garden gets us thinking about how to take all the data floating around in the void and make it something visual, something accessible and interesting.

Link to Packet Garden