Nathan Myhrvold

wiki Myhrvold attended Mirman School, and began college at age 14. He studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA (BSc, Masters). At Princeton he earned a master's degree in mathematical economics and completed a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics by age 23. He also attended Santa Monica College. For one year, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge working under Stephen Hawking, studying cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space time and quantum theories of gravitation, but left to co-found a computer startup in Oakland, California. The company, Dynamical Systems Research Inc., sought to produce Mondrian, a clone of IBM's TopView multitasking environment for DOS. Microsoft purchased DSR in 1986 and Myhrvold worked there for 13 years. At Microsoft he founded Microsoft Research in 1991.

Myhrvold is a real polymath. In this TED talk he shares some of his interests.

He also has a cheap way to mitigate global warming through geo-engineering. Here's a white paper on the proposal.

He also puts too much emphasis on the H :)

transparent fishy

nice freak of nature

Sleepbox, an One-Person Hotel

This project is by the arch-group Russian architects. It's a sleepbox that can be placed on airports, stations, shopping centers etc. The box can be rented for 15 min to a couple of hours so you can take a fast nap. Too bad it's in the concept phase, i wonder how they solve the problem of sound isolation. For more info: Link

They also could call it the wankbox.

The Year in News Bloopers

Does Dubai have enough landmarks/icons?

Imagine that the Big Ben, Eifel Tower, Sydney Opera House, Tai Mahal and the Washington Monument where all placed in one city. To me it looks obvious that the “value” of the landmarks/icons would decrease. After all you can only put one icon at a tourist t-shirt.

I was wondering this because it looks like they only build landmarks in one of the new world city: Dubai.

A small selection of the landmarks/icons of Dubai:First of all they have the articial islands in extraordinary shapes that can be seen as a landmarks/icons.

Picture of the Palm islands

Also they got alot of skyscrapers (click link for all the skycrapers of Dubai) that are landmark worthy. Here are some of my favorites:

World’s tallest building Burj Dubai (nice site with 5 years photo archive of how its build)

Dancing towers made by Zaha Hadid

Dancing/signature towers

Burj Al-Arab world’s only ‘seven star’ hotel.

And then they got some new plans like the ‘deathstar’ from OMA.

Death star by Rem Koolhaas i assume its inspired by Star Wars

The question is are this to many landmarks?

As an architecture lover I say no, there are never to many landmarks! There are many city’s with lots of landmarks I take New York as an example. New York got the statue of liberty, Guggenheim museum, World trade center (luckly it wasn't the only landmark of NY), Brooklyn bridge, Empire state building, Chrysler Building, Time Square and many more. Nobody will say that New York got to much landmarks because they created a beautifull city and they all got another main function like being an office or museum etc. There is one Exception and that’s the Statue of liberty the main and only function of the statue of liberty is being a landmark/icon.

So my statement is a city can only handle 1 or max 2 landmark/icon with the only function of being a landmark/icon.

Some examples:

Paris: Eifel Tower

Brussel: Atomium

London: Big Ben

Washington DC: Washington Monument.

These landmarks/icons have as only function to be an icon and this makes them most of the time the main icons of the city.

In Dubai all the landmarks/icons have another main function like office, residential or hotels. All this buildings are all big investments for a small piece of the spotlight. I don’t know if they are worth the investment but they create a beautiful city that is impossible to ignore in future.

The only thing what is really missing in Dubai is a landmark/icon with no other function except for being printed on the tourist crap. So my Conclusion is Dubai need 1 more real landmark/icon. But only the future will tell how its end with Dubai.

Stop web sites from resizing Firefox windows

I have been bugged by this for a while. If you open links in Firefox in a new tab, some of them automatically resize your whole firefox window. I googled for a fix and it's easy.

# In Firefox go to Tools > Options # Go to the Content Tab # To the right of "Enable Javascript," hit "Advanced..." # Uncheck "Move or resize existing windows"

Fixed!

Man vs Emu

I really like the flying tackle. Emu @ wiki