Design Stuff

For Blu-ray, the format war has turned into one of those epic quests you see in badly dubbed martial arts movies.

Sure, its kung fu was too good for rival HD DVD to overcome. But hold on to those nunchaku — Blu-ray still has to overcome an army’s worth of fierce competition before it can officially crown itself the master of the global homevid village.

And that next battle starts with the entrenched format Blu-ray is trying to usurp, good-old 480p-resolution DVD, which may not be the "it" product it was back in the early days of the Bush administration, but overwhelmingly remains the go-to platform for delivering recorded movies and TV shows into the home.

"You will now see more of a comparison towards standard DVDs and less about the difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD," says Sony Pictures Home Entertainment topper David Bishop, summing up Blu-ray’s next major marketing push.

Buoyed by obvious advantages, including a better, nondegradable picture, menu-driven nonlinear playback, not to mention sheer product-design elegance — and, best of all, unanimous studio adoption from the very start — DVD quickly caught big-box-store fire and was able to usurp the once-very-established VHS format and make gobs of money for almost everyone involved with it.

Now that HD DVD is going away and the DVD biz is undeniably in recession — despite a boffo summer theatrical season, North American homevid sales declined 3.1% in 2007, according to Variety sister publicationVideo Business — the studios would love it if Blu-ray became even half as trendy as DVD was just a few years ago.

And there is at least some wind at their backs on this. For one, the federal government is mandating that all over-the-air TV broadcasts go digital next February. In the practical sense, this won’t actually affect that many people, since so many Americans get their TV through a cable or satellite box that will automatically convert digital TV signals for their old analog cathode ray tube-based sets.

But emotionally, having a stodgy government body like the FCC think they’re technologically uncool might be enough to convince many of the 50 million or so American households without high-definition sets that it’s time to take the bewildering plunge into the digital world this coming fourth quarter.

For Blu-ray, that amounts to go time.

In explaining the rationale behind the decision that ultimately doomed HD DVD — that is, homevid market share leader Warner Bros.’ choice in early January to forge exclusive ties with Blu-ray — Warner officials agreed that the long-awaited mass adoption of a high-definition TV was nearly at hand, and that now would be a good time for the industry to cut out this confusing dual-format stuff.

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Read More : Variety.com 

It is called water jewels, very beautiful piece of designs from Vitra, designed by Matteo Thun

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More Pics : Water Jewels Bathroom Collection 

Scare stories about mobile phones cooking our brains come and go as regularly as the seasons. Irrational and unexplained results are periodically hailed by the media as the death knell for the mobile industry.

Schools, colleges and universities advise against - or even ban - the use of wi-fi, and services are closed down as a potential health risk.

There are many protest groups actively campaigning against wireless in any form because of some unknown and unquantified potential risk to health. These groups include those preventing base station towers being erected close to their schools or in the middle of their communities.

Unfortunately their lack of understanding actually has an inverse reality impact. If they understood the basic physics involved they would be asking for more towers and not fewer. Living really close to a mobile phone base station tower is the safest place to be.

Here is what is happening. The mobile phone pressed close to your ear adjusts its transmit power according to the distance from the base station.

That means the further from the tower the lower the power received by a mobile and the higher the power transmitted back as a result.

So if you get really close to a base station your mobile sees lots of signal and therefore transmits back a minimal amount in turn. Interesting, isn’t it? That is the inverse perception of the protestors.

The detailed physics is also interesting. Near-field emissions - those that are mainly magnetic field coupling - fall away at a rate of 1/d^6 while the far-field radiation - that is, electro-magnetic waves - die at the slower rate of 1/d^2 where d is the distance from a transmitter.

These inverse distance laws lead to the situation whereby the power entering the human head from a tower is generally less than 1,000 times smaller than that produced by a mobile.

Hence, to reduce the exposure to radiation to a minimum it is always better to be really close to the base station to ensure the mobile is emitting a minimum energy.

And what of wi-fi and WiMax? Various emission limits and active control systems, plus deployment methods generally render these systems less power aggressive than mobile networks. And of course the same inverse distance/power laws apply.

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Read more : silicon.com

The evolution of light and technology has been illuminated by an artist using a simple light bulb and the Australian Synchrotron.

Melbourne-based multimedia artist Chris Henschke has also connected the facility to its outside environment by ensuring it resonates with the sound of a cicada.

Henschke, from RMIT University, says during his time at the Australian Synchrotron he wanted to expand on a desire to show artistically how science has grown.

"I wanted to use the synchrotron to illuminate an old light bulb and look at it as many different ways as I can," he says.

Henschke describes the tungsten filament light bulb as the great-grandfather of the synchrotron.

"Ironically it is about to become obsolete [under government plans to phase out domestic use], but one day the synchrotron will also become obsolete," he says.

"I am trying to put the new technology into its historical and technological context."

Henschke is still working on pieces for exhibit, but has a series of images produced by exposing the light bulb to different sources of light such as the optical, infra-red and protein crystallography beamlines.

Two-way creativity

He says the residency allowed for a two-way creative process.

One work is the product of a scientist’s suggestion that he expose the light bulb to the protein crystallography beamline.

The resulting image Henschke says is symbolic of his work at the synchrotron.

"I’m at this point where I can almost see into this whole other world, but not quite," he says.

In tune with the synchrotron

One of his creations is permanently embedded in the synchrotron.

Henschke says when he discovered the existence of the so-called synchrotron tune he wanted to hear it.

The synchrotron tune is the balance of frequencies around 13 megahertz needed to make the synchrotron beam work.

With the help of Dr Andreas Wilde, at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, in Dresden, Henshcke made the synchrotron tune audible to the human ear.

"I then thought I could put my own tune into their tune," Henschke says.

He initially planned to insert an audio file of all the synchrotron-based scientists shouting the word "synchrotron" and then toyed with the idea of inserting a guitar riff from one of his own songs into the instrument.

Sounds of the cicada

But the night before the experiment was due to happen Henschke heard a cicada in the facility’s car park and knew he had found his sound.

"The cicada’s deafening high-pitched tune was not only geoacoustically appropriate, it also gave me a perfect synaesthetic picture of the energy beam whirling around the synchrotron ring," Henschke says.

After having the tune encoded in Germany he gave it to the accelerator physicists to inject into the machine.

Henschke says the first attempt shut the synchrotron down.

But on the second attempt the sound file was lifted from a base frequency of 5 kilohertz to 1 megahertz to make the "vibration" fast enough to modulate the amplitude of the beam.

"Even though nothing was directly perceivable, just to know that the heart of the huge facility around me was pulsating with the sound of the cicada that lived next to it somehow connected the synchrotron back to the world around it," Henshke says in his blog on the experience.

"The experiment revealed a relationship between sound and light and energy and matter, the cicada singing in the sunlight and the light in the synchrotron singing with the cicada’s tune."

The works were completed as part of a three-month residency sponsored by Arts Victoria and the Australian Network for Art and Technology.

Henshke will outline his experiences at the Adelaide Festival later this week. His work can be viewed at www.topologies.com.au.

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Source : abc.net 

I’ve seen casulo, now Japan has created trunk station ad.

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More pics : trunk station ad