the ghostrider

in this months issue of wired there was a story about the great challenge.
although the whole thing is a military-sponsored thing it chatched me as a truly geeky adventure.
it’s a race from los angeles to las vegas. but the race is not a vanilla-flavoured race, instead it’s for driverless robotic cars which have to find their way completely autonomous.
the official course will not be known until two hours prior to race time and will only released as gps way-points. then the teams have these two hours to fiddle with their equipment, and then are forced to watch how their creation competes without the slightest possibility of interaction, the machine has to do it on their own.
it has to decide where to drive through, it has to decide how fast it can drive and all the other bits and pieces which a machine needs to consider to get from A to B as fast as possible.
of all the portrayed teams (scroll down a bit to see them), the berkeley-team has by far the most impressive setup: their ghost rider is a motorcycle, while all the other contestants rely on at least four-wheeled chariots of fire.
go and download the movies on the ghost rider-page (although they’re HUGE) and if you’re interested in that kind of stuff go and read the article in wired (although it’s far better on big pages and glossy paper :-)

gentleman, start your engines!

update: according to engadget (or actually extremetech) the ghost rider is not designed to win the race but only designed to get some government contracts, it’s not fast enough to complete the race in ten hours. what a disappointment!

war is fucking stupid!

take a look at these two videos:
first this video (mpg-video hosted on bushflash.com, about 4.6mb) which – rather graphically – depicts the killing of three men from a helicopter (and those soldiers don’t even add to the at least 8000 reported civilian deaths already!)
then this video here (.wmv-file, hosted by glider, about 1.1mb) where us soldiers repeatedly shoot a wounded iraqi and then describe it as: “It was a good feeling. Afterwards, you’re like, Hell, yeah, that was AWESOME! Let’s do it again!”

there’s nothing more to say than is already said:
by bushflash:

    This video was sent to me, and I’ll leave the interpretation of such, up to you. I won’t pass judgement on those responsible, as, of course, “They were only following orders”

by glider:

    It all just makes you so proud what we humans have accomplished in the past 6,000 years, doesn’t it?

[via bushflash and glider]

the ipod as a consumer thang…

yesterday i was in rodersdorf, playing ddc with jochen.
jochen stayed over at a friend, so i was on my own in the train to basel and in the tram to bättwil/flüeh.
in the train i was listening to some music on my ipod, when a guy in the opposite compartment scrolls away on the wheel of his ipod trying to find a good tune. then when i walk out towards the tramway i see a girl with the revealing white headphones on the escalator. and to end that silly little story, the girl enters the tramway Nr 10, which i also needed to take and sits in front of me, so i was constantly surrounded by ipods on my journey :-)
the ipod is actually so hip, that it starts to show up in music videos, watch 50 cent’s p.i.m.p-video over at mtv to see 30s seconds of ipod, 50 cent and ladies with white clothes (not very much clothes…).
one point i’d like to make is that altough this little piece of engineering and design has a quite high geek-factor i see more and more girls walking around sporting their personal digital player. so albeit the high geekness it has, it’s also a very good music player for the masses (which is very easy to use, as opposed to other mp3-players i’ve seen bevore. the ipod’s UI is so clever even my mother could use it :-)

ps: if you want to see some action-shots of how ddc looks like, then you find some photos on my pic-page or on damons excellent ddc-page.

ps2: after jochen and me came second at that tournament, i’ll probably have a better ranking on the world ddc rankings than 245th soon :-)