The Little Nordics ~ Tiltshift Timelapse Holiday!

MissC spots Damp Design's The Little Nordics!

CycloCable ~ Reengineered Bike Escalator!

Steph at WebUrbanist spots that Norway's Trampe has been reengineered and rebranded as the CycloCable...

"Trampe is the world's first bicycle lift intended for urban areas. The prototype was built in 1993. During its 15 years of operation, Trampe pushed more than 200,000 cyclists up the 130m long hill Brubakken in Trondheim. Already from the beginning, it became one of the most popular tourist attractions."

The creation and venture escalation story is compelling...

"The inventor of the Bicycle Lift [...] Jarle Wanvik, is a true bicycle enthusiast. He always finds an excuse for parking his car and using his bicycle instead. [...] In 1992, Wanvik got luminous visions about a bicycle lift that could carry cyclists uphill. Inspired by the ski lift technology, he visualized a lift design by which the cyclists could be pushed uphill without having to descend the bicycle. [...] Wanvik joined forces with the experienced mechanical engineer Stein Løvold and the electrical engineer Magnar Wahl. The local ski lift manufacturer, Protek AS, was picked to manufacture and assemble the world’s first bicycle lift. More than 2.000 people enjoyed the opening ceremony of Trampe on August 18 1993. 15 years and 220.000 trips later it was time to renew the lift. In 2010, the POMA GROUP contacted Design Management AS. After having tested Trampe they asked for a worldwide license. The license agreement was signed on the July 22 2011. Trampe had been authorized by DNV (Det Norske Veritas) in 1994. However, in spite of no accidents during 15 years of operation, International Cableway authorities claimed a more secure design for the next generation of lifts. The answer was CycloCable, a new bicycle lift developed by SKIRAIL (a company member of POMA GROUP), and Design Management AS. CycloCable is based upon the same patent as Trampe but with new, retractable foot plates. The CycloCable in Trondheim is the very first installation of its kind, so Trondheim keep on being the true pioneer of bicycle lifts."

Tragic Memorial ~ Dahlberg's Bold Norsk Cut...

Norway honors youth killed by religious extremist via memorial...

"Dahlberg proposes creating a massive gap of water and air. By slicing a huge section of the island's landmass away, he would create a steep fjord through the site where the shooting occurred -- a void that he describes as "a wound or a cut within nature itself." [...] Rather than building a monument or structure, he would focus on nature itself. A 70-foot-wide gap carved out of the island, separating the headland from the main island, would serve as the ideal spot to reflect and memorialize. On the jagged edges of the cut, the names of those who died in the attacks would be inscribed into smooth stone."

Norsk Aurora ~ NASA spots Sørgjerd's Timelapse

NASA APOD spots Terje Sørgjerd timelapse of aurora over Norway...

Extreme Engineering ~ Statoil & Maersk Lead...

BBC's Roger Harrabin spots Norway's giant sub-marine gas platform... And here's a motivating promo piece about Maersk Drilling spotted by gCaptain!

Aberdeen ~ UK Center for Subsea Engineering...

Fascinating to read NYTimes piece by Stanley Reed on Aberdeen, With a Foot on the Seafloor about a Scottish city that's blossomed into offshore industry boom town...

"Since the early 1970s, when oil was discovered in the British North Sea, Aberdeen has evolved from a fishing town, to an oil boom town, to the world’s center of innovation and execution for the technology that makes the modern offshore energy industry possible. “Scotland has been the home of subsea engineering,” Mr. Blake, a Scot, said in a conference room in Chevron’s European headquarters on a hilltop overlooking this city and its many dark granite buildings. “The expertise generated by the North Sea continually influences undersea work across the globe.” That expertise, with a resurgence of investment in natural gas and oil fields in and near the North Sea, means that Aberdeen, with 468,000 people in the city and surrounding area, has been able to nearly escape the economic doldrums that have plagued most of Britain and Europe. Aside from central London, Aberdeen is the wealthiest place in Britain..."

See also sister-city Stavanger in Norway!

Marine Innovations ~ On Design, Efficiency, Safety

The Economist spotlights Scandinavia's role in novel shipbuilding technologies in A voyage of discovery...

"Norway is an important centre of marine innovation and several foreign companies have operations there, too. One such is the marine division of Rolls-Royce, a British firm, which is collaborating with Farstad, a shipping company based in Alesund, and STX OSV, a shipbuilder. The result of their efforts is Far Solitaire (pictured above), the first of a new class of vessels which bristle with novel technology that promises to make shipping safer, cleaner and cheaper."

gCaptain has also been particularly good at spotting interesting new marine innovations, including this series by Rob Almeida on How to Design a More Efficient Ship...

"Wärtsilä put together a presentation recently that evaluated a number of new technologies and design concepts aimed at cutting operating costs, while at the same time reducing ship emissions."

Just a few images give a taste of the techniques...

WindFlip ~ Simplifying Offshore Installations...

Thanks to Brit Liggett at Inhabitat for The WindFlip Barge Concept Installs Offshore Wind Turbines Inexpensively and With Ease...

"WindFlip barge concept was designed to simplify the installation of offshore wind turbines and in the process has managed to be a solution that also cuts cost. Installing offshore wind turbines can be an expensive task -- the process requires skilled technicians to assemble turbines at sea, and to anchor them at great depths. Alternatively, the WindFlip barge allows turbines to be assembled completely on shore, towed to their location, and then simply tipped into place -- thus minimizing the need for expensive work at sea."

MorpHex ~ From Innocent Ball to Insect-o-Bot!

Geek spots MorpHex, a hexapod robot by Norwegian Kare Halvorsen that transforms from sphere into perambulator!

Floating Solutions ~ Flexible Heavy-Lift Action...

I've written before about floating hospital ships, Shell's ginormous LNG processing ship, floatable power plants, and other flexible infrastructure (including lots of containerized stuff) and even a jail. Here's some new additions to the list! First, NEAPO's float-in three-storey apartment block built at Turku Shipyard and transferred in one go by water to the island of Hirvensalo, Finland... To build the Snøhvit LNG processing facility in the remote northern Barents Sea, Norway's Statoil commissioned the liquefaction plant from a Spanish engineering firm and floated it via heavy-lift to the Melkøya Island off Hammerfest... Perhaps the most (in)famous example of this is American billionaire Daniel Ludwig's Project Jari, shifting a Japanese-made paper pulp mill around the world and up the Amazon to a Brazilian wood plantation! Here'a a more recent example on a personal scale in this BBC Horizons show on Innovations on water featuring Dutch architect Marlies Rohmer and her waterfront development. Each of the dozens of apartments "floats" are made in a shipyard.