Clockwork Katowice ~ Velour Captures City Life!

io9 spots Polish Velour 's videopiece on Katowice... Tilt-shift timelapse imaging art-magic! See also Keith Loutit's Bathtub series and Sam O'Hare's Sandpit.

LandBearShark ~ Guan's Electrified Thrashboard!

Charles Z Guan unveils latest beast, the electrified LandBearShark Compare and contrast with Ben Gulak's petrol-powered DTV Shredder which, FYI, has undergone over a year of refinement...

Speechomes ~ Roy on Baby Word Development...

MIT Media Lab's Deb Roy speaks at TED about Speechomes++

VoIP Drupal ~ Burd on Voice-Accessible Web...

Check out MIT colleague Leo Burd announcing VoIP Drupal which...

"...brings the power of voice and Internet-telephony to Drupal sites. It can be used to build hybrid applications that combine regular touchtone phones, web, SMS, Twitter, IM and other communication tools in a variety of ways, including Voice- and SMS-based Go Out to Vote campaigns, 2-1-1 and 3-1-1 lines (information hotlines), Phone-based community surveys, PTA or any meeting reminder calls..."

Cataclysmic Events ~ Beyond Magnitude 10.0

While the recent Sendai 2011 quake of magnitude 9.0 and tsunami aftermath loom large in recorded history, it's worth keeping in mind the truly cataclysmic probabilities which await us. (And that's not including man-made terrors including nuclear war, bioengineered plague, or grey goo.) There's a long list, which I won't belabor here. But I do want to spotlight terrestrial impact events, i.e. asteroid and comet hits... Recall that only a few years ago our solar systemic neighbor Jupiter got whacked by the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet... If that happened again on Earth, we'd have magnitude 10.0-plus shockwaves -- some estimate the Chicxulub asteroid strike in Yucatán being between magnitude 11 and 12.5 (!) -- and most likely megatsunami too, since odds are 7:3 it hits ocean. And if you're especially curious what the damage would be like, go visit the convenient DIY ImpactEarth! simulator...

Inventing Tools ~ Leroy Hood on Big Progress...

Lemelson-MIT prizewinning biologist Leroy Hood shares advice he learned from his own mentor on how to really make a difference...

"While a student at the California Institute of Technology, Leroy Hood received words of wisdom from his mentor William Dreyer: "If you want to practice biology, do it on the leading edge and if you want to be on the leading edge, invent new tools for deciphering biological information." With this advice, Hood invented some of modern molecular biology's core instruments, profoundly impacting research and medicine. His DNA Sequencer made possible the Human Genome Project (to identify the nearly 30,000 genes in human DNA)."

Recovery Technologies ~ Post-Disaster Action...

Post-quake, with over a thousand kilometers of tsunami-devastated Japanese coastline, dozens of harbor towns 40-80% destroyed, thousands of cars, trucks, and containers water-damaged and ravaged, millions of tons of rubble left strewn about, hundreds of boats left high and dry, key consumables such as food, liquid fuels, and clean water in scarce supply, reduced electricity power generation affecting 2/3 or ~100M citizens, and more, there's an intensely urgent need for extraordinarily effective Recovery Technologies -- those tools and systems which can accelerate clean-up, provide fast infrastructure, and enable rapid redevelopment. Immediately after the Haiti quake a little over a year ago this first really came to my attention. Among the compelling examples are Dutch firm Tempohousing, which supplies prefab container sheltering, and there are other urgent solutions to speed up local recovery with power generation, water cleansing, and related containerized infrastructure. There are also tools for clean-up and recycling of material. And finally, any rebuilding should be done with future damage minimization in mind. This means designing for flood resilience much like structures are built to endure vibrational modes. The question is not can you avoid quake or tsunami, but how can you suffer least from them.

Seismic Monitoring ~ IRIS Worldwide Quakescope

Realtime IRIS Seismic Monitor... Plus learn something about P, S, and Surface wave propagation... Big quakes (like this 2004 Sumatra event) are so powerful their waves travel around the world multiple times as measured by seismic stations at different distances (in degrees) from the epicenter... Finally, look at the past century of Great Earthquakes... Difficult to see any pattern at all.

Wheels for Wellbeing ~ Mobilizing the "Disabled"

Thanks to Copenhagenize for spotting Wheels for Wellbeing...

Worse Than Worst Case? ~ Fearing Fukushima...

Post-quake, IEEE Spectrum EnergyWise blogger Bill Sweet writes Japan Nuclear Accident: Worse than Worst, Again...

"Because of the explosion and the radiation leakage, Fukushima Dai-ichi already ranks as the second most serious nuclear power plant accident after Chernobyl. In terms of public impact, it may come in first because it's taking place in a country that has the world's most sophisticated earthquake prediction and mitigation systems, top-notch nuclear technology, and a pronounced national radiation phobia. Japan is not a technically backward country with notoriously poor reactor designs, the way the former Soviet Union was. Its nuclear power plants were designed and built with an acute consciousness of extreme earthquake dangers. So how is it, despite that sophistication, awareness, and preparedness, that the Fukshima Dai-ichi has nonetheless exceeded worst-case thinking? Here, the story is reminiscent of Three Mile Island and Chernob and the message seems to be the same: Worst-case scenario builders consistently underestimate the statistical probability of separate bad things happening simultaneously, as the result of the same underlying causes. [...] Every major nuclear accident has been worse than worst case, and that's a fact every nuclear advocate -- this one included -- will have to take into account."

Azamat Abdymomunov cuts to the core of the problem... Nature's Geoff Brumfiel gives Anatomy of a Meltdown...

"The key to the crisis is water. In addition to the uranium fuel rods, the fuel assemblies have channels which carry highly purified water between the fuel. The water acts as both a moderator for the nuclear reactions and a coolant for the reactor core. On top of it all, it makes the electricity: as it is heated by the reactor, it turns into steam that drives the power turbines. Once the water passes through the turbines it is cooled and re-injected into the core to do it all again. It all goes great unless the water stops flowing, and that's exactly what it appears has happened in the wake of a massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake that shook the region on 11 March. Diesel generators designed to keep feeding water to Fukushima Unit 1 apparently shutdown about an hour after the quake. Yesterday, the water supply to Unit 3 was interrupted. In both cases, the cores began to heat up."

And Steve Mirsky writes in Scientific American Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima Power Plant...

"The type of accident occurring now in Japan derives from a loss of offsite AC power and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on site. Engineers there are racing to restore AC power to prevent a core meltdown. [...] Physicist Ken Bergeron provided most of the information regarding the actual damage to the reactor."

NuclearTourist shows the flow inside a Boiling Water Reactor...

iPad 2 Teardown ~ iFixit Disassembles & Inspects

Cool to see step-by-step iPad 2 WiFi Teardown by iFixit...

Sendai Japan Quake ~ Images & Visualizations...

Ongoing post about Sendai quake, Japan, and aftermath. Here's how quake was covered in realtime on TV and the alarms were spread... Brent Kooi captured realtime ground cracking dynamics (!) Tokyo skyscrapers swaying (but not breaking, thankfully)... The tsunami warnings and practiced-population did work... But tsunami's are unstoppable... Here's NOAA tsunami simulation... Tsunami intensity forecast... Aftermath on The Big Picture... WSJ's survey of coastal damages... Google serves Post-earthquake imagery of Japan... And this ABC Before & After visualizer is especially good. Here's NASA Terra satellite's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image of pre- and post-view of northeastern Japan shows massive flooding along the coast centered on Sendai city...

Library to Makery? ~ Post-Pulp Civic Assets...

Thanks to Alan Wu for spotting interesting MAKE article by Phillip Torrone on possible evolution of public libraries into hackerspaces (or to appropriate a spinonym, the makery)...

"Let’s explore what could be ahead for public libraries and how we could collectively transform them into “factories” -- not factories that make things, but factories that help make people who want to learn and make things. Will libraries go away? Will they become hackerspaces, TechShops, tool-lending libraries, and FabLabs, or have these new, almost-public spaces displaced a new role for libraries? For many of us, books themselves are tools. In the sense that books are tools of knowledge, the library is a repository for tools, so will we add “real tools” for the 21st century?"

Hot Wheels Promo ~ Videobeaming in Sydney...

Thanks to Alice at My Modern Metropolis for spotting this promo for Hot Wheels videobeamed in Sydney...

"Skull Racers shattered the facade of Customs House as they competed in the ultimate speed racing battle. Brought to life by international digital advertising agency Muse Amsterdam, the projection featured footage of the world's fastest vehicles in a stunt ridden challenge, travelling through the Customs House facade and into a fantasy world."

Direct Cycle Routes ~ Wagenbuur on NL Bikeways

Thanks to David Hembrow for spotting Mark Wagenbuur's Direct cycle routes in old and new towns...

"...illustrating how direct cycle routes can be accommodated in both new and old towns. [...] cycle routes can be planned to be faster and more direct than the roads in the Netherlands. Some of the better examples are from Assen, Groningen and Houten. Making cycle routes shorter makes cycling a lot more attractive, and is a good part of the reason why the Dutch cycle more than people of any other nation."

JANMA by AYZH ~ Affordable Clean Birth Kit

Excellent to see the inventive and entrepreneurial Zubaida Bai visit us here in the Media Lab to share the latest developments of her AYZH business, the JANMA Clean Birth Kit. Zubaida initiated this social venture at the MIT D-Lab sister program, the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise (GSSE) at Colorado State University (CSU). The central AYZH mission is to look...

"...through the eyes of women to identify the tools they want and need to help improve their standard of living. AYZH serves the needs of impoverished women worldwide by bringing them affordable appropriate technologies that increase income and/or improve health."

Their prime product at the moment is the JANMA affordable clean delivery birth kit which allows rural Indian midwives to deliver babies under the most hygienic conditions possible with the goal of increased post-natal health...

New York by Gehry ~ Surprisingly Appealing...

While I think most of Frank Gehry's designs are fugly architorture -- and MIT's Stata Center is an unmitigated fubar artrocity -- I'm willing to admit his New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce is surprisingly appealing...

"At 870 feet tall, New York by Gehry is the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere and a singular addition to the iconic Manhattan skyline."

Cynic that I am, I suspect this has more to do with Ratner's construction discipline than FG's "lessons-learned" as a starchitect.

Inhabitatables ~ Ultra-Desirable Urban Designs...

Another dose of desirable designs from Inhabitat...

Under Water ~ Visualizing London Superflood...

The DailyMail shares Our future under water: Terrifying new pictures reveal how Britain's cities could be devastated by flood water...

"These dramatic images show how floods could devastate major cities across Britain leaving thousands of homes underwater if no flood defences were put in place. The centres of London, Birmingham, Cardiff and Liverpool would be completely submerged with properties wrecked and businesses shutdown in the event of major flooding. Extraordinary photographs of the devastation flooding could cause were released by the Environment Agency today to warn of the dangers of natural disasters."

Quake Cams ~ Christchurch Sat & Photo Imagery

Very unusual images of NZ dynamics in this piece in BBC News by Jonathan Amos, Christchurch quake mapped from space...

"...the Japanese ALOS spacecraft has been used to map the way the ground deformed during the most recent quake. It shows clearly that the focus of the tremor was right under the city's south-eastern suburbs. The type of image displayed on this page is known as a synthetic aperture radar interferogram. It is made by combining a sequence of radar images acquired by an orbiting satellite "before" and "after" a quake. The technique allows very precise measurements to be made of any ground motion that takes place between the image acquisitions. The coloured bands, or fringes, represent movement towards or away from the spacecraft. In this interferogram, the peak ground motion is almost 50cm of motion towards the satellite."

And Gillian Needham photo'd Christchurch moments after the quake...