Doppelg

Late 00′s personal homepages under construction / on intermission / in stealth mode… Examples: viilee.org and mikameskanen.com.

Fr

At the summer market in Nurmes. Photo by Eija Mäkivuoti mkk

Next Sunday – that’s 20th April – mkk and I will talk and discuss the mikroPaliskunta project at Wonderbar. It is hosted by Freja and Lady Gaby and in the meantime we’ll have a hearty and arty brunch. Invitation proper below. Come! Come!

Freja und Lady Gaby ladet Euch Herzlich ein:



A travel through Finland for Fr

Twelve pillars

The following is a brain dump I jotted down in the notebook two nights ago. It’s about choice and preference.

Movement before direction

Perpetual before permanent

Friends before lovers

Sarcasm before joking

ADHD before sociopathy

Mercy before pity

Spirituality before religion

Sheldrake before Dawkins

Attitude before achievement

Leadership before management

Intuition before knowledge

Imaginary before objective

The form I have paraphrased from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Winter’s tale

Spring equinox is a good week past now and the weather widget reports that backwinter’s lost its grip. It was too little too late anyway.

Time to go down the memory lane until March 2005 and dust off the photographs from a grownups’ winter party. Converted to a photoset on Flickr, naturally.

Assertiveness

Assertiveness is a trait that can be developed for enrichment of personal and professional life. It’s easiest to begin by identifying the wrong conditions. If you are in a situation which requires you to convince other people, avoid any and all of the following:

#1 Hiccup

#2 Foggy glasses

#3 Bleeding nose

#4 Dental anaesthesia

#5 Open shoelace

#6 Walking on Blitzeis

As each of these eventualities halves your assertiveness, having just three of them at the same time brings your potential to convince down to 12.5%. Such a cumulative effect is of course very unlikely.

(The list is by no means complete)

Cases of perpetual design

Perpetual design is design practice that aims at creating artefacts that are not only permanent but also relevant for an indefinite time.

I’ve already grazed this idea over a year ago. A new wave of thought emerged when pictures of Russian / Ukrainian mobster tombstones surfaced on blog English Russia.

They’re quite amazing. It’s only that shameless showing off of wealth and luxuries in the context of transcendence looks very campy, to us non-mobsters in the west at least.

The desire to leave an earthly mark of one’s existence has already left us with artefacts of perpetual design like the Giza pyramids and Taj Mahal to start with. The privilege to a memorial has democratised since. Yet, I’ve recently learned that even graveyard spots are actually leased and then subject to survivors’ liquidity.

There are other cases to study.

This online document called “Excerpts from Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant” introduces some solutions to a very specific perpetual design problem – how to mark nuclear waste burial sites so that they will survive and deliver the message 400 generations into the future.

It’s a heavy document but worth at least scrolling through for some insight. Interestingly the waste markers are also a special case of what could be called deterrent design. Usually design aspires to create or denote something beautiful and desirable. Now it must achieve something opposite.

The noblest and most elegant example I’ve found so far must be the Pioneer plaques. They are inscribed metal plates sent off in the early 70s with Pioneer spacecrafts towards Jupiter and beyond.

Designed by famous and late science populariser Carl Sagan and his wife Linda Salzman Sagan the plaques contained a specially crafted message to any off-world intelligence that might intercept the one and half man sized space probes. That is a very remote chance and the whole effort makes more sense as a symbolic gesture of uplifting ideals.

Some serious thinking was anyhow put into the designs. The bottom part of the plaque shows Pioneer’s origin and trajectory out of the solar system. Figures of male and female human outline the physical appearance of our species against the silhouette of the probe itself for comparison. To their left converging lines pinpoint the location of the Sun relative to 14 pulsars and the galactic plane. The two connected circles at the top represent hydrogen atoms and as such establish a binary language that can be used to decode the plaque’s information.

That’s all pretty elaborate and I can share those details only because I’ve been told. In real life, reportedly, almost none of the human scientists originally shown the message could get it. Estimating the alien response isn’t even an educated guess.

The initial question remains, how viable is perpetual design? The search goes on.

Pink Floyd – Echoes

Biodiesel motorcycle

Found a nice, alternative personal transport solution for the 30-3000 km range. Mechanic and engineer Jochen Sommer has discovered a market niche that addresses unconventional travellers. He imports classic Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles from India and replaces original petrol engines with industrial Hatz diesels.

Besides the coolness of the machine, which is a subjective thing of course, it also runs on biodiesel. Fuel consumption swings around 2,5 litres per 100 km (over 110 mpg) so you can escape at least 500 km with a tankful. Top speed reaches just 100 km/h, but avenues are nicer than Autobahns anyway.

Kabel eins has a video feature in local language.

85 letters poetry

I’ve been to Wonderbar at an event where Claire Huot and Robert Majzels (left) presented their very interesting poetry concept called 85 letters.

It is fantastic on multiple levels. The output as simple as haiku

House gymnastics

Your house is a dangerous place. Most accidents happen at home. However, there is a discipline, that aims at better understaning of our interiors.

House Gymnastics is a cross breed of yoga, breakdancing, climbing and gymnastics in a domestic setting. House Gymnastics can be performed by anyone, at anytime, anywhere. The greater the height or danger, the better the move.

Like vertical biking this is a post-extreme sport where you accept that your resources are limited. And those of the humanity as well. Nobody’s going to die. Nobody’s going to get hurt.

Nearfield

Materialwise, balancing between mobility and the quality of life is juggling. One bottleneck is the books. Sound system is another.

I had been eyeing for Harman Kardon Soundsticks for a while, but eventually changed my mind and invested in a pair of reasonably priced Edirol nearfield micro monitors. First of all, being cubic in form instead of some alien design they fit better to a T