Korea IT Times Blog

I saw this via the Marmot’s Hole a few days ago, it is freaky!

The egyptians are green with envy

We need to put this in our magazine.  It is apparently from an exhibition for a new urban plan for Ansan at the Gyeongi Museum of Art. 

The original photos are on the designboom cut ‘n paste weblog, which has some more information.

the joint project by the four firms, BIG (copenhagen), INABA (los angeles), MAD (beijing), an mass studies (seoul) uses versatile architectural forms that change in size and use. th principals of the four offices, bjarke ingels, jeffrey inaba, yansong ma, and minsuk cho reinterpret the term ‘economies of scale’ to mean the value of a single architectural form tha functions at several scales.  The works are adaptable enough so that the same form can b enlarged or shrunk and still function as a building. they have the added capacity to dramatically change in size and transform in use from building to furniture to toy. Given today’s economic instability, the architects propose an architecture that can be sized to accommodate changes in available funding. the forms have been developed so that if a project’s investment capital decreases, it can be scaled down; alternatively, if greater financing becomes available, the same form can be scaled up. A project conceived with greater utility in mind so that the form can be enjoyed even when reduced or increased by 40, 50, or 60 percent.

Exactly how versatile architectural forms?  Look at this:

Adobe Acrobat has been causing me an untold amount of headaches recently.  I use Adobe Acrobat to extract the text and images from our completed magazine PDF files so that I can post them on the web site.  But for some reason I do not understand, the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, version 9, creates very bad jpg images from its embedded images.  If I extract an image in the bmp format, then it’s exactly the same color as the original.  However, if I extract it in jpg format, it is red-tinted and ugly.  You may have noticed that some of the photos on the site don’t look so great this month.  It will be fixed soon, however.

It will be fixed because I found out that Adobe Acrobat 7, two versions older than the one I’ve been using, extracts jpgs better.  And that’s not all it does better.  First of all, it’s only about 200 megabytes on install, and takes about 2 minutes.  Adobe Acrobat 9, with its Creative Suite associations, takes upwards of one hour to install on this old computer and has a disk footprint of over two gigabytes.  Acrobat 7 is faster to start up, faster to read PDF files, and the jpgs it produces from image extraction look just like the originals.  Acrobat 7 is what I wish Acrobat 9 was, and perfectly fits in with my needs.  Maybe they should reference 7 for their inevitable upgrade to 10.

Update: At the request of Mr. Rosenthol of Adobe Systems I’m including four jpg photos to illustrate the problem I’m having.  I probably should have done this in the first place:

Now I can get the same results with Acrobat 9 as I did with 7 if I extract each image as a .bmp file first and convert it to jpg with GIMP or Microsoft Paint, but that’s one extra step I’d rather not do.

I stumbled across something quite interesting today while checking my Gmail.  A link to a story about wireless electricity from FastCompany.com.  The article itself is an awesome read, if only for the fact that is mentions Nicola Tesla.  I’ve always preferred Tesla’s version of electricity with its thigh-thick bars of white-hot lightning and random objects that glowed blue when too near his experiments.  His kind of electricity seemed to be the stuff of excellent special effects made real, while Thomas Edison’s electricity is tame, boring stuff that might give you a slight jump if you touch it, but it won’t harmlessly cascade down your back in blue-white rivulets of awesome.

Perhaps I’m being too over the top.  Anyways, the article says wireless electricity is here, and that devices can be powered by being within an electromagnetic field.  From the article:

Some of the most visually arresting examples of wireless electricity are based on what’s known as radio frequency, or RF. While less efficient, they work across distances of up to 85 feet. In these systems, electricity is transformed into radio waves, which are transmitted across a room, then received by so-called power harvesters and translated back into low-voltage direct current. Imagine smoke detectors or clocks that never need their batteries replaced.

Taking that one step further, imagine active RFID chips that never have to be replaced.  One of the big limitations on RFID chips, the building blocks of the ubiquitous future we always hear about, is that only very little information can be stored on a passive RFID chip.  Active RFIDs, which need a power source, can act like little computers and store tons of information (relatively speaking).  But the power source drives the price up considerably.  With wireless electricity one could develop RFID chips with the low price of passive models and the high data storage of active models.

Additionally, ubiquitous power hanging around ambiently in the air goes right along with the ubiquitous computing we keep hearing so much about.  I should do some research to see if someone is already looking into this.