Live LIFE to the max

Remember how Google put up millions of LIFE photos online a while ago? Well, now more are coming in form of an archive service, thanks to cooperation with Getty Images. Seven million photos, dating from the early 20th century up to these days. And best of all, the photos are free for personal, non-commercial use. Good times.

Re-visioning the government

A few weeks ago I mentioned tool proposals for a “Web 2.0 government” with a suggestion brought up by a Slashdot commentator to introduce wikis for pending legislation and an issue tracker for exisiting one. Now, Tim O’Reilly proposes Barack Obama’s new government should introduce revision control for change.gov, the website of the Obama-Biden transition team. O’Reilly notes: “[W]hen public documents can be changed without notice, it’s essential for the public to be able to see what changed, and why”, and continues by envisioning a broader use for revision control in a future transparent government:

The real holy grail, of course, would be to provide revision control on all government regulations, and eventually, on legislation. This would no doubt be fought tooth and nail by lobbyists who don’t want their fingerprints on the final result, but that’s precisely why it would be such a breakthrough. And that’s also why I suggest that the Obama team start with change.gov: demonstrate that the system works, that it has enormous benefits in transparency, and work from there.

If this sort of a versioning system would be properly introduced on legislation level, it would surely make it easier to track changes and see which interest groups have had their say and used their influence on which revisions (at least officially). Also, pending changes could easily be viewed and commented by any member of the public. Plainly this would be good for transparency and democracy on the whole.

Fair and square lights

Art Lebedev’s Luxofor design concept introduces a square traffic light, to “make the signals more easily noticeable and recognizable, with larger lit area for the same overall dimensions”.

Luxofor, the square traffic light

Due to today’s blizzard I was staying indoors and watching a bunch of movies, including one of my favorites, Blade Runner. And what can you see in the streets of Los Angeles in 2019?

Traffic lights of the future Los Angeles in Blade Runner.

I guess someone had to design them around now if we want to have them on every street corner in a decade.

[Via Engadget]

Something aMAZEing

Labyrinths date back to Greek mythology in which King Minos of Crete had a labyrinth designed and built at Knossos to hold the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature.

A mosaic depicting the Minotaur and its slayer, Theseus, inside the labyrinth at Knossos

I can vaguely remember visiting the Bronze Age ruins of this alleged labyrinth with my parents when I was a child and we were on holiday on Crete. These ruins were also featured in one of my all-time favorite computer games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (this should look familiar to anyone who’s played it).

Some years later we visited a castle in France (I think) that had a vast hedge maze in the garden – or at least it felt vast (and extremely fascinating) for a pre-teen boy. What if one got lost in there, and never found a way back out?

Environmental Graffiti has listed the 10 most incredible mazes and labyrinths in the world. The most interesting realization for me, as I researched the subject a bit, was the distinction between a “maze” and a “labyrinth”. I had never thought there was one. Wikipedia explains:

The term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center. A labyrinth has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.

When in turn visiting my late aunt’s summer cottage in Nauvo in the archipelago of Finland many years ago, she showed us a stone-lined labyrinth which in Finnish is called jatulintarha (sometimes translated as “giant’s guard”; jatuli were a race of giants in Finnish folklore). Most of these stone formations are from the Middle Ages or younger, although some of the oldest ones might even be prehistorical. No one knows their exact function; they might have been part of some ritual. Similar structures can be found in other Nordic countries. In Britain, labyrinths made out of turf are called Troy Town.

Jatulintarha, a Scandinavian stone labyrinth

LIFE in photos

Google is putting online ten million photos from the archives of LIFE magazine, many available from the first time. The earliest ones date back to the 18th century. This is cool.

Queen Victoria, from LIFE archives

[Via Helsingin Sanomat]

Comics are the new black in Hollywood

At least 75 comics are being made into films currently in Hollywood. I have somewhat mixed feelings about these projects: in most cases a visually creative graphic novel with a complex storyline gets turned into a mediocre, run-of-the-mill CGI-heavy multi-million dollar Hollywood release, complete with McDonald’s tie-ins and bulk merchandise. I’ve developed some sort of an allergy for these gigantic releases and usually skip them altogether, even when one is critically well-received (I’m yet to see Sin City, for instance). On the other hand, some of my all-time favourite films are adaptations from literature, so why couldn’t a comic-based film be just as good? Maybe it’s just the boombastic no-holds-barred marketing of these Hollywood movies that keeps me from seeing them.

Frank Miller's Sin City got a visually successful film treatment (at least based on these covers!).

More likely though, adapting what is essentially a visual medium (comics) into another visual medium (film) is not such an easy task, especially when talking about live-action adaptations (as opposed to animation, where the stylistic qualities of the original work are more easily preserved). In this respect we are at quite an intriguing point in time as advancing CG technology is giving new possibilities for film makers to merge live-action and animation techniques. Recent examples of motion-capture assisted animation include The Polar Express and last year’s Beowulf, and while the results have been a bit too CGI-like to my liking so far, there’s no telling where we will be a few year’s down the road. Perhaps something like Scanner Darkly? (I’m not saying all comic adaptations must look like comics on the silver screen, but some of the visually more compelling ones might benefit from the new CG techniques.)

The way of future comic adaptations in Scanner Darkly?

An interesting project currently in the works is the series of new Tintin films with Steven Spielberg directing the first one and Peter Jackson the sequel. Jackson’s company WETA Digital, who also created the CGI animation for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, is animating Tintin based on live-action motion-capture. A 20-minute test reel was produced as a proof of concept, with Spielberg commenting to Variety:

Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer-animated characters. We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created.

Jackson further explained that the characters will not look cartoonish, though:

Instead, we’re making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people — but real Herge people!

At least there are enough influential names behind the project to guarantee creative freedom – now let’s just hope they put it to good use.

(No) Mail to the Chief

Once Barack Obama assumes the U.S. presidency in two months, he will have to give up his beloved BlackBerry:

In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

Kind of ironic, seeing how heavily his presidential campaign relied on the Internet for communications and fundraising.

Even if he won’t be reading his e-mail anymore, Obama hopes to be the first U.S. president to have a laptop on his desk at the White House. He also plans to use YouTube to “communicate directly with the American people” even when in office. Is Obama truly the first Internet-era president? It will be interesting to see how these plans will be executed. I don’t have a very good grasp on how the U.S. government uses Internet for making information available, but if the situation is anything like in Finland, it’s not the matter of not having the information at your disposal. Oh no, there’s plenty of that out there for you to browse to your heart’s content. What’s more difficult is how to make it interesting. Government policy changes and committee minutes aren’t exactly what people go looking for as the first thing when they go online. A Q&A with the president will certainly generate more interest, but will the above-mentioned goal of communicating directly with the people mean dumbed-down answers not to confuse the Joe Sixpacks out there, or actual factual hard talk about politics?

Incidentally, a Slashdot commentator brought up some interesting tool proposals for a “Web 2.0 government”:

Wikis for pending legislation.

Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top.

Use an issue tracker for existing legislation. Have a problem with a law? File a bug. It may be marked as trivial or may get fast tracked as a patch. Either way you know it’s status and can organize to get that status changed if enough people agree with you.

Use RSS feeds to distribute Congressional hearing notes, comittee transcripts, and legislative votes.

[Via Slashdot]

News from the future! …I hope

Got mail from my father a moment ago with subject “Saa toivoa” (in Finnish, freely translates to “one is free to wish”), containing a link to what seems like the front page of the New York Times website. Seems like a perfect wish list for the future of the United States (and some world politics, too)!

New York Times next July?

Update: The prank was played by The Yes Men, a group of culture jamming activists who printed and circulated over a million copies of the spoof NYT issue around the U.S.

To blog or not to blog

I started my first blog about five years ago. I believe I made two posts there. At the time I wasn’t so sure why people were starting these weblogs, online diaries, what have you – and nowadays I’m even less certain.

So why the second attempt? Mostly it’s for selfish reasons as I wanted a place for my musings, somewhere to collect things I encounter daily on the Internet, a site for random ideas and impressions. A scrapbook of thoughts, if you will. At this point I have no clue where this is going. If someone finds any of it interesting, all the better. Drop me a line if you do!