Keys Corner

William Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed the City Car, with help on the styling from Frank Gehry in his Smart Cities research group. Mitchell felt the Smart car, developed by DaimlerChrysler in Germany didn’t go far enough either in terms of public acceptence or in reducing the space needed in inner cities for the vehicle. So the research group started with a clean sheet of paper and came up with the City Car, an electrically powered two-seater, which can be stacked at airports, train and underground rail stations like a shopping trolleys when they are not in use.

The Guardian reports in more detail here.

Room 407: Forte o Bastante by Speto / Baixo Ribeiro

Memo to self – must find a reason to go to Denmark and stay in Hotel Fox in Copenhagen. The rooms are amazing.

We greatly enjoyed our two-week break in Salamanca – despite getting taught at least three forms of past tense (including a good number of irregular verbs in each tense), two forms of the imperative and piles of new words in that time. Which says a lot for the staff and the other students, since 4 – 5 hours tuition a day certainly isn’t guaranteed to make the time enjoyable! I’m not sure how much we have retained, as our brains felt pretty scrambled by the end of the “holiday”.

The highlight for us was probably the event on the Saturday of the weekend in the middle of our fortnight. The city of Salamanca has been celebrating the 250th anniversary of the completion of the Plaza Major (the main square), and the final celebration was on the 22nd October. There was a spectacular show of light and water in the late evening, which completely filled the square, with girls doing acrobatics suspended under balloons (in the air) and dancing inside even bigger balloons (on the ground). There was also a large surprise for many of the spectators at one end of the square when two large jets of water sprayed up, to form a curtain of water used to project images onto – a lot of umbrellas went up in a hurry, as the water sprayed everywhere! (Unfortunately not too many of my photos came out sharp, as I was shooting at 1/8 second without a tripod, we’re hoping Ruth’s camera, loaded with 800 ASA film will have produced better results than the digital comara managed.)

John Cowan has summarised the top eight languages of the world (by number of speakers). In places 1, 2 and 3 are Chinese, English and Spanish in that order.

The commented list is here. I was surprised, that less people speak Russian than Portuguese.

Ever since we read The Lost Gardens of Heligan, which narrates the story of the rediscovery and restoration of one of the great Victorian gardens of England by Tim Smit, we have been meaning to visit them in Cornwall.

We recently discovered a second reason to visit Cornwall – the Eden Project:

Also a project by Tim Smit, this one is to establish a tropical rain forest and a humid temperate biotope under huge bubble-shaped greenhouses (the largest in the world) in a disused clay pit. The Eden Project houses over 100,000 plants representing 5,000 species. The site was opened for visitors in 2001 and was one of the locations for the Live 8 charity concert earlier this year.

I am quite “under the weather” – I arrived back here with the beginnings of diarrhea, which has had me travelling every hour or two, day and night, between the bathroom and either my bed or a chair ever since we got in on Saturday. Thank goodness it didn’t start 24 hours earlier, or I would probably still be stuck in Spain.

Right now, I’m not feeling like devoting much time to the blog, but here are one or two photos we took in Salamanca which is where we did our Spanish course. We really enjoyed both the classes at the school and Salamanca, which is a very laid back student town, with an extensive old quarter consisting of many well preserved sandstone buildings. There is a large (38 000 students) University there, which was founded in 1218, making it one of the oldest in the world. So, many of the buildings in the old town are university buildings. Most of the teachers at our language school were graduates from the University, which offers a large number of language courses.

One of the highlights of the town is the cathedral – actually two cathedrals: the “old” cathedral and the “new” cathedral, which are directly joined together. The stonework of the main portal to the new catherdral was restored in 1993, when the stonemasons made the additions shown below, They weren’t noticed immediately and caused quite stir when they were discovered, but are now well-known and loved features of the facade:

We just received these Q&As by e-mail. It has cheered me up – I didn’t notice the steps to our front door (see the photo in the previous post) were icy this morning and managed to hit my back on every step-edge on the way down to the ground. Feels like I may have cracked a rib, but for now I have decided to avoid going to the doctor on the basis that at this time of year I am likely to get flu and still suffer from the cracked rib…

The questions below about Australia are from potential visitors. They were posted on an Australian Tourism Website and the answers are the actual responses by the website officials, who obviously have a sense of humour.

Q: Does it ever get windy in Australia? I have never seen it rain on TV, how do the plants grow? (UK).
A: We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around watching them die.

Q: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? (USA)
A: Depends how much you’ve been drinking.

Read the rest of this entry »

An article in the latest Economist highlights a problem with the biometric passports that the USA has been insisting be implemented by October 2005.

I was aware that the new passports would carry data such as digital photographs or finger prints of the owner, which could be read out a chip integrated into the passport, but not that the technology to be used would be radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags containing unencrypted data which can be read out over a distance of several meters.

The original idea, apparently, was that using unencrypted data would make international interoperability easier, and encourage airlines, hotels and car rental companies to also scan the data – thus making it easy to track the movement of suspect persons. Belatedly, the authorities have realised this may not be a very good idea – terrorists and criminals can also read the data, making it easy to target specific nationalities if they wish and increasing the ease of identity theft. Right now, confusion reigns, as the various national authorities scramble to come up with (different national) solutions to this problem.

As the Economist says: Perhaps it is time to go back to the drawing board. (Luckily, my passport doesn’t run out until 2009, so they have plenty of time to fix the little glitches resulting from an over-hasty implementation.)

Ruth has always been a great believer in using paper maps to navigate when she drives anywhere. Yesterday evening she set off the Cologne to attend the EuroSTAR 2004 conference on software testing, where she is presenting a paper on setting up a test lab. As usual, she declined to take our portable navigation system and set off with a printout of the directions and a road atlas.

She reached Cologne in a couple of hours, but then spent over an hour driving round, and round, and round, near the Cologne Exhibition Centre, which is only 800 meters from her hotel – which she couldn’t find. Eventually, she stopped a taxi and followed it to the hotel!

I think she may have finally changed her mind about the usefulness of navigation systems…

Ruth and I enroled a couple of months ago in Spanish evening classes – as you might have guessed, if you spotted the link we added in our general links section (on the right) – and are struggling to keep on top of the homework and learning all those new words. So these tips from kuro5hin are both interesting and helpful, and the comments left by others are also worth reading.