Pheobe revisited

2011-09-22T17:11:00.000-04:00

fgh

2011-05-17T22:53:00.001-04:00

China's GDP figures bogus?

2010-12-06T23:37:00.000-05:00

LINK

Thanks Wikileaks

.............................
Wikileaks: Top Chinese official doesn't believe GDP figures

China's economic figures are unreliable and not to be trusted, according to Li Keqiang, one of the country's most senior officials.

The 55-year-old is widely tipped to become China's next prime minister and is currently the country's executive vice premier, with responsibility for macro-economic management.

However, in private talks with the US ambassador in 2007, when he was still just the head of the Chinese province of Liaoning, Mr Li cast doubt on China's much-vaunted economic statistics.

A diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website, reveals that Mr Li described China's gross domestic product figure as "man-made" and "therefore unreliable".

Chinese officials have repeatedly been found to have artificially inflated their local GDP figures in order to win face and hit their targets.

On several occasions, the sum of all of China's local GDP tallies added up to more than the national statistic. In 2009, for example, the National Bureau of Statistics said first half GDP had grown by 7.1pc to 13.99 trillion yuan (£1.37 trillion), only to find that the sum of local GDP readouts was 10pc higher.

Mr Li said he used three ways of evaluating Liaoning's economic activity, focusing on electricity consumption, the volume of rail cargo and the amount of bank loans disbursed.

"By looking at these three figures, Li said he can measure with relative accuracy the speed of economic growth," the cable said. "All other figures, especially GDP statistics, are 'for reference only,' he said smiling," it added.

China's attack on Google a personal vendetta?

2010-12-06T22:57:00.000-05:00

LINK

Another revelation from Wikileaks.

...........................
(CNN) -- Several U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show growing anxiety among Chinese officials about citizens getting uncensored online content through Google -- with one Politburo member reportedly angry to find negative comments about himself online.

In May 2009, Google approached the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, according to one leaked cable, "to discuss recent pressure by the Chinese government to censor the company's Chinese website."

Chinese officials were unhappy that the sanitized google.cn, which was established by Google in 2006, contained a link to the uncensored google.com, and appeared especially sensitive about the issue because of the imminent 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The redacted cable, dated May 18 and written by Economic Minister Counselor Robert Luke, says U.S. diplomats had been told that "the root of the problem was China's Politburo Standing Committee member (name redacted)." Later it says: "(name redacted) allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him....He also noticed the link from google.cn's homepage to google.com, which (redacted) reportedly believes is an 'illegal site.'"

In another apparent reference to the Politburo member, the cable says he "believes Google is a 'tool' of the USG being used to 'foment peaceful revolution in China.'"

The New York Times, which had advance access to the cables obtained by WikiLeaks, says that official is Li Changchun, who is a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Standing Politburo Committee -- its highest body -- and runs the Politburo's propaganda apparatus. He subsequently asked three ministries to demand that Google end its "illegal activities," according to the cable.

At the same time the Chinese government was taking commercial steps against Google, instructing state-owned telecom firms to stop doing business with the company -- "a hard blow because mobile Internet is Google's 'big bet in China,'" the cable added.

Google refused to remove the link on its Chinese site, and its lawyers "found no legal basis for China's demands."

The dilemma for the company was that it risked "losing the Chinese market in retaliation for maintaining its integrity and brand," the cable said.

Google had entered the Chinese market on three principles: it would never disclose to the Chinese government any personal information about its users or their search habits; it would always include a disclosure notice to identify when search results had been removed due to censorship; and it would always provide an uncensored, U.S.-hosted site, subject to U.S. law.

Two months later -- in July 2009 -- Google's servers were "virally infected" for 24 hours, amid claims that Google was failing to filter out pornographic sites. The embassy's sources, says a cable from that month, believe "the real reason for the government's wrath is the company's refusal to remove a link to google.com from the google.cn website."

The cable continued, apparently quoting a Google official,: "(redacted) said the negative press coverage and service outages have caused the company to lose market share.....(redacted) said that, faced with the continual difficulties of doing business in China, the company may even consider pulling out of the market."

The attacks on Google servers continued, with the company reporting in January of this year that it had been the victim of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China. It said it also discovered that the "Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties." So it began redirecting users visiting google.cn to the uncensored content of google.com.hk.

A US. cable written from Beijing after that cyber attack said: "A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level."

The cable noted: "An appeal to nationalism seems to be the Chinese government's chosen option to counter Google's demand to provide unfiltered web content." An unnamed Chinese contact "stated that PRC operations against Google were 'one hundred percent' political in nature and had nothing to do with removing Google, with its minority market share, as a competitor to Chinese search engines."

The cable also suggested the move might backfire on the Chinese authorities, apparently citing a Chinese contact. "All of a sudden, (redacted) continued, Baidu (a state-owned internet search engine) looked like a boring state-owned enterprise while Google 'seems very attractive, like the forbidden fruit.'"

However, the cables suggest that the Chinese leadership -- and specifically the State Council Information Office -- believed that the internet in China could be controlled. "Through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: The Web is fundamentally controllable," according to one source quoted in a cable.

Long before the crisis in 2009, Google was running into hostility from Chinese officials.

In November 2007, China asked the U.S. government to reduce the resolution of Google Earth images of military, nuclear and other sensitive sites in China.

Chinese officials warned of "possible 'grave consequences' if terrorists exploit the information to harm China." A diplomat at the embassy said he would report the Chinese request to Washington, but noted that Google is a private company.

Other cables suggest close ties between Chinese state enterprises and private hackers in China. According to a cable from the U.S. secretary of state's office written in June 2009, the China Information Technology Security Center "has recruited Chinese hackers in support of nationally-funded 'network attack scientific research projects.'"

One such enterprise -- TOPSEC -- employed "a known Chinese hacker, Lin Yong (a.k.a. Lion and owner of the Honker Union of China), as senior security service engineer to manage security service and training." Another was "known to affiliate with XFocus, one of the few Chinese hacker groups known to develop exploits to new vulnerabilities in a short period of time."

The cable concludes: "While links between top Chinese companies and the PRC are not uncommon, it illustrates the PRC's use of its 'private sector' in support of governmental information warfare objectives, especially in its ability to gather, process, and exploit information."

Chinese government ossified and resistent to change? BAH!

2010-12-06T22:52:00.000-05:00

LINK

Thanks Wikileaks.

...........................
WikiLeaks: China's Politburo a cabal of business empires

China's ruling Politburo is a cabal of business empires that puts vested interests over the needs of the poor and curtails media freedoms to avoiding having shady business deals exposed in the press, according to a leaked US government diplomatic cable.

The damning description of China's secretive leadership machinations also described how the descendants of China's Communist revolutionaries – known as "princelings" – derided officials from less august revolutionary backgrounds as mere "shopkeepers".

The assessment of what motivates China's opaque top-level decision-makers was relayed to Washington in July 2009 in one of the 250,000 cables published by the WikiLeaks website.

"China's top leadership had carved up China's economic 'pie,'" the US embassy contact said, "creating an ossified system in which 'vested interests' drove decision-making and impeded reform as leaders maneuvered to ensure that those interests were not threatened." The US embassy contact also asserted there were no "reformers" within the top Communist Party leadership, only competing factions that sought to protect their business empires from attack by in-coming leaderships.

The source said that it was "well known" that former Chinese premier Li Peng and his family controlled China's "electric power interests" while the country's security tsar Zhou Yongkang controlled the state monopoly of the oil sector.

The wife of China's premier Wen Jiabao, a popular figure in China often affectionately referred to as "grandpa Wen" for his feelings for the common man, is said to control China's "precious gems" sector, while Jia Qinglin, ranked fourth in the Politburo, has "major Beijing real estate developments".

Further down the political food-chain, the desire of local officials to protect current business interests also explained China's reluctance to rein in rising inflation and take steps advocated by international economists to re-orientate its economy more towards domestic consumption.

"They [local officials] always supported fast-growth policies and opposed reform efforts that might harm their interests," the contact said, adding, "As a result, the proponents of "growth first" would always be in a stronger position than those who favored controlling inflation or taking care of the poor." The assessment also said that economic self-preservation was one of the key reasons why China's leaders were so resistant to increased media freedoms.

"Vested interests were especially inclined to oppose media openness, he [the contact] said, lest someone question the shady deals behind land transactions." China's reluctance to engage in political reform is to be highlighted this week when Liu Xiaobo, the dissident author of the Charter 08 petition for greater rights in China, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "in absentia" after being jailed in China for 11 years for challenging state power.

The perception inside China that the country is run in the interests of a Party elite is also growing, with an online poll last February by the state-run China Daily finding that more than 90 per cent of Chinese believed that the new rich had achieved their wealth through political connections.

The web of commercial interests also forces China's modern rulers to act by consensus, with the current President Hu Jintao likened to the "Chairman of the Board or CEO of a big corporation", juggling factional interests, unlike the autocratic figures of Mao Tse-tung or Deng Xiaoping who could rule by fiat.

The man tipped as China's next leader, Xi Jinping, was selected, not for his leadership qualities but, the contact said, because he "maintained a non-threatening low profile and had never made enemies" and could be relied upon not to wage political vendettas through anti-corruption investigations.

"The central feature of leadership politics was the need to protect oneself and one's family from attack after leaving office. Thus, current leaders carefully cultivated proteges who would defend their interests once they stepped down," the contact said.

In the past in-coming Chinese leaders have consolidated their position by instituting crackdowns, with Jiang Zemin, the former president, shutting down a number of businesses owned by the associates of his predecessor, Deng Xiaoping, when he came to power in the early 1990s.

A similar process was observed in 2003 after Hu Jintao took office, with several high-level figures in Jiang Zemin's Shanghai power-base facing investigations and purges that analysts said were aimed at curtailing the power and influence of the Jiang faction.

The contact also outlined the scornful factionalism that divided the scions of the old 'red' families – those with revolutionary lineage whose fathers and grandfathers fought to bring the Communists to power in 1949 – and those who had risen up the Party ranks, so-called "shopkeepers".

China's current leaders, President Hu Jintao and prime minister Wen Jiabao, both fall into the latter category, while the putative next leader, 57-year-old Xi Jinping, is the son of a revolutionary hero Xi Zhongxun and often referred to as a 'princeling'.

The US embassy contact said that China's princelings felt they had a "right" to the fruits of the revolution, recalling one family deriding those without revolutionary pedigrees by saying: "While my father was bleeding and dying for China, your father was selling shoelaces".

shape exploration

2010-11-12T22:36:00.000-05:00

quick shape exploration

taube

2010-10-13T23:09:00.000-04:00

aviatrix update

2010-09-08T21:30:00.001-04:00

trooper dude

2010-07-12T21:20:00.001-04:00

horq
mangalica
modali
groc
roho
skegger
hard suit
rocknboss

storm trooper
AD Police
Helghast
Kerberos Panzer Cop
Deep Eyes (Final Fantasy)
Bubblegum Crisis
Aliens

latest Sketchbook Mobile on the iTouch

2010-06-17T19:57:00.000-04:00

more aviatrix

2010-05-19T20:31:00.001-04:00

sketchbook mobile

2010-05-11T01:30:00.000-04:00

Finger painting on iPod Touch.

aviatrix update

2010-04-21T18:28:00.001-04:00

The dog is a Papillon. These dogs are pretty expressionless in real life so I tried to give it a bit of character by ballooning the size of the ears and giving it a human facial expression but I don't think I quite pulled it off.

blobbies

2010-04-21T17:59:00.001-04:00

All 2D

l'inconnue

2010-04-18T16:07:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia

The supposed death-mask of the young girl known as L'Inconnue.

The legend is that she was a young 19th century woman who drowned herself in the Seine, possibly because of an unhappy love affair, but that when she was fished out they found her so beautiful that her death mask was turned into an icon and a muse for poets and artists.

To this day we do not know who she is.

aviatrix update

2010-04-14T21:54:00.001-04:00

aviatrix update

2010-04-12T23:14:00.001-04:00

art nouveau patterns

2010-04-06T02:52:00.000-04:00

more 1920s references

2010-04-06T01:10:00.001-04:00

1920s fashion references

2010-04-05T23:41:00.000-04:00

costumes

1920s blog

flapper girl blog

instead of working, I...

2010-03-22T00:59:00.001-04:00

Something I did at work over the weekend.

oldies

2010-03-11T19:39:00.001-05:00

Some really old promotional images I did last year.

quickie

2010-03-11T19:26:00.000-05:00

Something I did at work to test shape transformation. Kinda ugly actually.

monthly food budget

2010-02-07T06:11:00.001-05:00

Being single and only having to provide food for 3 people on weekends and eating out once or twice a week, I spend on average $150 - $200 a month on food. Being an admittedly lazy shopper when it comes to groceries, I suspect I'm overly spending on food by a large margin given my home situation. So I did a quick search online to find out what other people were spending on food.

Next to the rent or the mortgage, food comes in as the second biggest expenditure one will make in one's lifetime. My quick survey revealed that large families (4-6 members) spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 - $1000 per month. Frugal families spend around $300 - $400 per month. I also discovered that the uber coupon clippers out there regularly save 30-40% on their grocery bills and in some cases, up to 75%!

Ultimately my research confirmed what I already knew, that, while I'm not dishing out gobs of money, I do overspend a relatively gross amount on feeding my gut. I'm able to sustain this delicious mismanagement due to my relatively high rate of savings. While I'm not wealthy, going out for a Friday night prime rib au jus and a bottle of Grolsch Premium isn't exactly going to send my bank account into overdraft.

I then came across a blog created in 2006, written by a university student who had challenged himself to eat on a dollar a day for a month.

BLOG HERE

Amazingly he did it on 27 dollars and change! He lost 18 pounds but he never really went morbidly hungry. In fact, his body simply adjusted to the lower calorie intake. Admittedly his food choices were quite bland, tasteless and astonishingly unhealthy with too many carbs (rice), mostly processed junk and little protein or fruit.

Having been on a low (mostly empty) calorie diet at one time in my life for many years, I can relate to his experience. However, it's probably not sustainable. For one thing, it affects your ability to think properly, you become sort of a brain dead, chronically depressed zomboid from the lack of nutrition...

Wait a sec...

I STILL AM A BRAIN DEAD, CHRONICALLY...

Um, nevertheless, if you need your brain like most people do for work, study, family and personal life, then eating on 30 bucks a month is impossible in the long run going about it the way he did.

Yet, I suspect, such incredibly parsimonious budgets are a reality for many who live in poverty and as a grand gesture, this intrepid blogger donated the money he had saved on his one time food experiment to the local food bank, EPIC WIN!

Interestingly, many of his critics were people of various ethnic and immigrant backgrounds claiming that, with proper planning and forsight, many do eat very healthily and satisfyingly on similar budgets.

"We live like this all the time and this is a very expensive area of California. Under $200/month to feed 6 - this includes "splurges" for holidays like Thanksgiving. We have lots of veggies. Protein is dairy, beans and a smidgen of meat."

He was especially singled out for his lack of cooking skills and basic nutritional knowledge both necessary for maintaining a low cost food budget. The really anally retentive comments further pointed out how he had failed to factor in the energy costs of preparing the food which can be a big deal for the poor.

One of the more unusual cost cutting measures is the never ending stew.

"My dad told me about never ending stew where you add a new ingredient every day to a large pot of stew (and more water) - the stew gets tastier every day as you reheat it and the flavours blend."

YUMMIES!!

Other comments,

"...Asian families in married student housing would go in together and buy vegetables from the resturant supply houses. Many a Saturday morning saw them dividing a 30lb bag of onions or a 50lb bag of rice. I'll bet that saved a ton of cash."

and,

"Have you ever tried e-mailing companies for foods you like and complementing them? A lot of the times, they will send you coupons for free items and you can do this about every 3-4 months. Bar-S (meat products) usually sends '$5 off your total Bar-S purchase' coupons, along with a bunch of coupons for $.25 or $.50 off any products... This means in the summer, the hot dogs at places that double coupons, are free up to $.50. You should try it. You might be able to stick to that $30 per month and actually be able to have some yummy food (not just rice) I can usually do $200 or less each month for my family of 4 (including buying Pampers diapers for 2 kids)"

I'm not sure if I could ever go to such extremes to save money on food, especially given my current fiscal situation, but it's quite admirable how people are able to fill their tummies nourishingly on a nickel and dime budget. If anything many of these cost cutting measures actually look fun and doable, and once I'm truely independant and living on my own, I'll most likely make some sort of adjustment to my edible spending habits.

Time to eat!

homemade facial masks

2009-12-13T00:31:00.000-05:00

Three Choices

Depending on your skin type, here are some great masks to try. For oily skin use some plain Milk of Magnesia, rub it on and let dry, then rinse with lukewarm water. It absorbs oil wonderfully!

For Normal/combination skin mix one egg and 1/2 cup cooked instant oatmeal and a teaspoon olive oil until smooth. Spread on your face and leave 15 min then rinse.

For dry skin, mix one egg yolk, one teaspoon honey and a teaspoon olive oil and some vitamin E oil if you have it. Smooth on and leave on for 15 min. , rinse in lukewarm water and pat dry. If your skin is a bit dry you can put a dab or two of either olive oil, or any other light oil, or plain crisco if you want something heavier, on your moist skin after washing or a mask and your face is set without the $$ some people spend for the same look.
Jamie L.
Homemade Facial Scrub Instead of Soap

This is for the lady who wanted a homemade facial mask. First, clean your face with water only. Never use soap. You can open your pores with hot compresses (washcloth) For a facial scrub, moisten oatmeal to a "goo", use it to scrub your face (not around your eyes). Wash off with cool water.You may also make a paste of the oatmeal and allow it to dry..remove with cool water.You may also beat an egg white, put it on your face and let it dry, rinse with cool water. Sliced fresh cucumber placed on your closed eyes will reduce bagginess and dark circles.To make your hair shine, rub in some regular mayonnaise,shampoo out after 15 minutes.
Sonja in Goose Creek
Honey for Best Facial

The best facial mask that i have found is honey. Use warm cloth to open pores, smear on honey, leave on 15 to 30 minutes, rinse off with warm water, and then use cold water to close pores. Use for 3 days in a row and then once a week. Sometimes I mix a little gound oatmeal with the honey, which makes a great mask.
M.
Facial Feels Good

One my daughter and I had fun with and found to have a cleansing and softening effect was to mix regular clean kitty litter, the clay kind, with water and strain out the grit. It really felt good.
Carol

Exfoliating Mask

For an easy exfoliating mask, mix three tablespoons olive oil or any good oil and one tablespoon kosher salt mix and gently rub into dry skin. Do not use around eye area. This works great on elbows and feet, but it can also be used on cheeks and forehead
Donna R.
Egg Whites

I use egg whites. Just beat one egg white until it is frothy. Spread it all over your face. Wait until it dries. Rinse it off. My face feels very clean and "tight" after this application. And then I use the yolk for cooking.( I have yet to have found a use for the shell)
DS
Egg Yolk

The best homemade facial mask that I have used is a raw egg yolk. just apply the raw yolk to your face and neck for 30 minutes and rinse with cool water. Egg yolks are high in vitamin A. The mask is very effective in healing blemishes.
Leona
Match Mask to Your Skin Type

For trouble-prone skin, mix oatmeal with water to form a paste.

For normal to oily skin, use an egg white.

For dry skin, use an egg yolk.

In all cases, spread mixture on face and allow to dry. Rinse thoroughly with cool water.

For oily skin, witch hazel makes an inexpensive toner.

For dry skin, you may want to add moisturizer while skin is still damp.
Susan
Oatmeal

The cheapest and best facial mask I have ever come up with is oatmeal processed to a powder in the blender and either skim milk or if you are trying to fade spots lemon juice. Really works well for me and I have dry skin.
Jan
More Facial Maks Choices

The kind of the mask you want to use depends on your skin type.

For dry skin, try:

* an egg yolk mixed with olive oil and warmed honey

* sour cream

* plain olive oil

* avocado

For oily skin:

* dissolve a teaspoon of baking yeast in a small amount of warm milk, wait until foamy, then apply (best done in the bath tub);

* puree flesh of a tomato and mix with some potato flour to make a paste;

* cucumber (it will whiten your skin);

* beaten egg whites with a few drops of lemon juice (great for getting rid of blackheads);

* carrots (but don't use this one more than about every other week because it can overdry your skin). This one will make you look tanned.

General refreshing masks:

* grapes (just cut a berry in half and rub lightly)

* strawberries (test behind your ear first, because many people are alergic to strawberies used this way even thougth they can eat them just fine)

* honey and ricotta cheese

Many fruits and vegetables can also be used to good effect. Anything acidic (lemon, strawberries, etc) will tend to whiten and refresh your skin, but you need to be careful if your skin is dry.

In general, don't apply masks more often than about twice a week, and try to vary the ingredients.

It is a good idea to test the mask first. Apply a small amount behind your ear, wait 20 minutes, then wash off. Then wait 24 hours. If the skin behind your ear is normal, then go ahead and use the mask.
Marzena
Egg Yolk and Honey

I reader recently asked if anyone had a recipe for homemade facial masks. I often use an egg yolk and honey mask. Just mix one egg yolk with a little honey and spread it on your face and neck. When it dries, rinse it off. Your skin will feel so fresh and soft!
Sarah W.

Pampering our skin is something we should learn to do for our health and well being. Many of the commercially made soaps, lotions, and bath products are actually harsh on our skin, despite what they claim. However, there are some simple things you can do to nurture your skin without buying expensive spa products.

Do not over wash your face or body. A gentle rinse in the morning is often all you need for your face and neck area. Avoid scrubbing with the abrasive cleaners that are available or harsh soaps. I have found that a good quality handmade soap works well. When washing use warm water and finally, pat your face dry gently with a soft towel. The key to pampering your skin is to be as gentle as possible.

In "Age Erasers for Women" (Rodale Press, 1994) the editors of Prevention Magazine recommend this quick home facial. Grind 2 cups of dry red beans in a food processor or grinder. Mix 1/2 cup of the powder with a little water to form a paste. Spread on your face, avoiding your eye area, and leave on for about 5 minutes. Rinse with warm water. Save the remainder of the powder in a covered container. After this cleaning mask, you can follow with a hydration mask as follows:

Mix together:

* 1 tsp. honey

* 1 egg yolk

* 1/2 tsp. olive oil

* 1/2 tsp. half-and-half or heavy cream

Apply to your face, including your eye area, and leave on for 15-20 minutes and rinse with warm water.

I have found that the best moisturizers are fragrance and color free. The simpler, the better. It's important that you do not towel dry your face or body completely before adding a moisturizer. They do not ADD moisture, but instead they help retain the moisture from your bath or shower. If you do want to add fragrance, try adding a few drops of essential oil such as calendula, which has skin soothing properties.

Making your own facial masks and scrubs is really easy, really fun, and really inexpensive. Many of the ingredients that make up a scrub or facial you probably already have in your kitchen or bathroom, but you may find yourself visiting bulk stores and natural food stores to find new ingredients to experiment with.

Masks:

Before you decide whether you want to make a scrub or a mask, you need to know the difference between the two. A scrub generally contains scrubby bits to exfoliate away dead skin, but a mask may as well. A mask is left on for about ten minutes and may or may not "harden." A mask contains an ingredient that needs to stay on your skin for several minutes for full benefit. Some of these are yogurt (plain, full fat, unsweetened), honey (astringent), green tea powder, (macha tea contains anti-oxidants that are great for your skin), aspirin (combats acne) banana (moisturizing) and avocado (moisturizing).

Why aspirin? Aspirin (even the generic types) contains a type of salicylic acid, which is great for keeping acne away. Use one aspirin per mask. If you're preparing a large batch of your mask, try to figure about one aspirin per mask. If you use more, it will sting and dry out your skin. Aspirin masks should only be used once a week, and people with very dry skin may want to avoid aspirin masks. You don't need to crush the pills; simply place a drop of water on the pill and it will turn to powder within a few minutes.

An aspirin mask can be as simple as aspirin mixed with honey and/or yogurt and spread on the face for ten minutes. When you wash mask off, you can use the little aspirin bits to scrub your skin. Here's my favorite aspirin mask recipe:

One aspirin
One large tablespoon of plain, full-fat yogurt
One teaspoon green tea powder
One small teaspoon of honey

Whisk the above ingredients together. You can make a large batch, as it will keep in the fridge for several weeks.

If my skin is feeling dry and oily, I use this recipe:

One aspirin
One tablespoon olive oil or almond oil (or any oil, really)
One tablespoon ripe, mashed banana
One teaspoon green tea powder

Scrubs:

When making a scrub, avoid using honey alone as a base, as you will find it very hard to spread. Scrubs really just need to, well, scrub.

Choose a base: I typically use olive oil. You can use honey mixed with an oil of your choice; you can also use yogurt or mashed banana, although I prefer those in a mask.

Choose a grit: A trip to your local bulk food store should give you plenty of ideas! You can use coarse, organic sugar or coarse sea or kosher salt. You can also use cornmeal or oats passed through a blender. You can use dry, ground tealeaves or dried flowers (food grade).

When you're done with your mask or scrub, you can use a mild cleanser to wash it away. Follow up with a moisturizer. I just use plain shea butter.

Less than a month after switching from commercial soaps, scrubs, masks and moisturizers, my face has gone from being acne and dry skin prone (around my nose and forehead) to being smooth and small-pored.

Sux to be an animator in Japan

2009-11-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

LINK HERE

Twilight of Pax Americana

2009-10-02T14:30:00.000-04:00

Interesting article on the fall of the American Empire.
ARTICLE HERE

...........................

The international order that emerged after World War II has rightly been termed the Pax Americana; it's a Washington-led arrangement that has maintained political stability and promoted an open global economic system. Today, however, the Pax Americana is withering, thanks to what the National Intelligence Council in a recent report described as a "global shift in relative wealth and economic power without precedent in modern history" -- a shift that has accelerated enormously as a result of the economic crisis of 2007-2009.

At the heart of this geopolitical sea change is China's robust economic growth. Not because Beijing will necessarily threaten American interests but because a newly powerful China by necessity means a relative decline in American power, the very foundation of the postwar international order. These developments remind us that changes in the global balance of power can be sudden and discontinuous rather than gradual and evolutionary.

The Great Recession isn't the cause of Washington's ebbing relative power. But it has quickened trends that already had been eating away at the edifice of U.S. economic supremacy. Looking ahead, the health of the U.S. economy is threatened by a gathering fiscal storm: exploding federal deficits that could ignite runaway inflation and undermine the dollar. To avoid these perils, the U.S. will face wrenching choices.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have adopted policies that have dramatically increased boththe supply of dollars circulating in the U.S. economy and the federal budget deficit, which both the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office estimate will exceed $1 trillion every year for at least the next decade. In the short run, these policies were no doubt necessary; nevertheless, in the long term, they will almost certainly boomerang. Add that to the persistent U.S. current account deficit, the enormous unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs and the cost of two ongoing wars, and you can see that America's long-term fiscal stability is in jeopardy. As the CBO says: "Even if the recovery occurs as projected and stimulus bill is allowed to expire, the country will face the highest debt/GDP ratio in 50 years and an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem." This spells trouble ahead for the dollar.

The financial privileges conferred on the U.S. by the dollar's unchallenged reserve currency status -- its role as the primary form of payment for international trade and financial transactions -- have underpinned the preeminent geopolitical role of the United States in international politics since the end of World War II. But already the shadow of the coming fiscal crisis has prompted its main creditors, China and Japan, to worry that in coming years the dollar will depreciate in value. China has been increasingly vocal in calling for the dollar's replacement by a new reserve currency. And Yukio Hatoyama, Japan's new prime minister, favors Asian economic integration and a single Asian currency as substitutes for eroding U.S. financial and economic power.

Going forward, to defend the dollar, Washington will need to control inflation through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases and interest rate hikes. Given that the last two options would choke off renewed growth, the least unpalatable choice is to reduce federal spending. This will mean radically scaling back defense expenditures, because discretionary nondefense spending accounts for only about 20% of annual federal outlays. This in turn will mean a radical diminution of America's overseas military commitments, transforming both geopolitics and the international economy.

Since 1945, the Pax Americana has made international economic interdependence and globalization possible. Whereas all states benefit absolutely in an open international economy, some states benefit more than others. In the normal course of world politics, the relative distribution of power, not the pursuit of absolute economic gains, is a country's principal concern, and this discourages economic interdependence. In their efforts to ensure a distribution of power in their favor and at the expense of their actual or potential rivals, states pursue autarkic policies -- those designed to maximize national self-sufficiency -- practicing capitalism only within their borders or among countries in a trading bloc.

Thus a truly global economy is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Historically, the only way to secure international integration and interdependence has been for a dominant power to guarantee the security of other states so that they need not pursue autarkic policies or form trading blocs to improve their relative positions. This suspension of international politics through hegemony has been the fundamental aim of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s. The U.S. has assumed the responsibility for maintaining geopolitical stability in Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf, and for keeping open the lines of communication through which world trade moves. Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. has sought to preserve its hegemony by possessing a margin of military superiority so vast that it can keep any would-be great power pliant and protected.

Financially, the U.S. has been responsible for managing the global economy by acting as the market and lender of last resort. But as President Obama acknowledged at the London G-20 meeting in April, the U.S. is no longer able to play this role, and the world increasingly is looking to China (and India and other emerging market states) to be the locomotives of global recovery.

Going forward, the fiscal crisis will mean that Washington cannot discharge its military functions as a hegemon either, because it can no longer maintain the power edge that has allowed it to keep the ambitions of the emerging great powers in check. The entire fabric of world order that the United States established after 1945 -- the Pax Americana -- rested on the foundation of U.S. military and economic preponderance. Remove the foundation and the structure crumbles. The decline of American power means the end of U.S. dominance in world politics and the beginning of the transition to a new constellation of world powers.

The result will be profound changes in world politics. Emerging powers will seek to establish spheres of influence, control lines of communication, engage in arms races and compete for control over key natural resources. As America's decline results in the retraction of the U.S. military role in key regions, rivalries among emerging powers are bound to heat up. Already, China and India are competing for influence in Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Even today, when the United States is still acting as East Asia's regional pacifier, the smoldering security competition between China and Japan is pushing Japan cautiously to engage in the very kind of "re-nationalization" of its security policy that the U.S. regional presence is supposed to prevent. While still wedded to its alliance with the U.S., in recent years Tokyo has become increasingly anxious that, as a Rand Corp. study put it, eventually it "might face a threat against which the United States would not prove a reliable ally." Consequently, Japan is moving toward dropping Article 9 of its American-imposed Constitution (which imposes severe constraints on Japan's military), building up its forces and quietly pondering the possibility of becoming a nuclear power.

Although the weakening of the Pax Americana will not cause international trade and capital flows to come to a grinding halt, in coming years we can expect states to adopt openly competitive economic policies as they are forced to jockey for power and advantage in an increasingly competitive security and economic environment. The world economy will thereby more closely resemble that of the 1930s than the free-trade system of the post-1945 Pax Americana. The coming end of the Pax Americana heralds a crisis for capitalism.

The coming era of de-globalization will be defined by rising nationalism and mercantilism, geopolitical instability and great power competition. In other words, having enjoyed a long holiday from history under the Pax Americana, international politics will be headed back to the future.

iPhone sketches

2009-09-08T17:04:00.001-04:00

A few images I did on Sketchbook Mobile for the Apple iPhone/iTouch

uniqlock

2009-08-20T21:57:00.000-04:00

Uniqlo is the GAP of Japan. Each year, along with their seasonal line of clothing, they release an artsy dance video. Lame clothing annd pretty lame dancing imo. Follow the link and click on a season. HERE

Neato shorty

2009-08-20T21:30:00.001-04:00

White Box from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.

Short flick by Makoto Yabuki

134 billion dollars of funny money

2009-06-19T16:07:00.000-04:00

HERE

The amount is $ 134.5 billion. Many may not have an idea as to what this number adds up to. In Indian currency terms today, of course, it is Rs 6,44,000 crore. But this equals the cash value of the GDP of the bottom 49 countries of the world. The annual income of the entire people of these 49 countries adds up to $134.5 billion. What is the significance of this $134.5 billion? This was the value of US treasury securities which two persons had attempted to smuggle into Switzerland from Italy. It happened on June 3. The persons who attempted this daring act were two Japanese in their 50s. An Italian newspaper reported it on June 10; other media began following it up and kept reporting. But surprisingly none of the mainline newspapers anywhere in the world, except the online Bloomberg, even reported it.

The substance of the report was this. On June 3, the Italian finance police detained two Japanese nationals who tried to enter Switzerland with US Treasury bonds of the value of $134.5 billion. They were caught at Como, which is 50 km from Milano in Italy. They were caught in Chiasso’s train station after an inspection. The two men had hidden US treasury bonds in a suitcase with a false bottom. There were 249 bonds of the face value of $500 millions each amounting to $124.5 billion and another 10 bonds titled ‘Kennedy’ bonds of the face value of $1 billion each, that is $10 billion in all, making it a total of $134.5 billion. The Japanese consul in Milan in Italy confirmed that the detention had taken place; it was trying to confirm with the Italian authorities whether they were Japanese nationals and their identities. The media reported that the Italian police had asked the US Securities Exchange Commission to confirm whether the securities were genuine or not. Financial experts in Italy had already expressed the view that such high denomination securities could not have been issued by the US Treasury in 1934 which was the date appearing according to reports on the 249 bonds valued at $124.5 billion. Also no ‘Kennedy’ bonds ever existed, according to them. A few days later, on June 18, a spokesman of the US Treasury told the media that the bonds seized were fake ones; the US had never issued individual bonds of high value at all. So the US has officially declared the bonds which were being smuggled into Switzerland are fake. But this raises more questions than it answers. Yet none of the mainline media would touch this mysterious subject despite its high and exciting news value.

If the bonds seized by Italian police were fake, it would suggest, as William Pesek, columnist at Bloomberg says, that at the minimum the US risks control over its monetary supplies on a massive scale. There have been reports for long that the US dollars in the denomination of 100s were being counterfeited all over the world. But this is the first time that counterfeiting of US Treasury securities has been found. This report comes at a time when the US economy is going through its worst phase since the Great Depression. As a commentator said, in Asia the fear of counterfeit treasury security makes the genuine ones suspect in the minds of the investors. How will new investors put in their money in US treasury securities if there is no guarantee that the bonds which circulate in the name of the US government are genuine? The commentator further points out that while circulating perfectly counterfeited enemy currency was resorted to by rival governments during the World War II, the Bank of Italy went a step further and issued its very same security twice over with duplicate numbers to conceal the extent of public debt. Could the US government have done something similar? Raising this shocking question and answering it Karl Denninger in his blog titled Market Ticker wonders ‘if the US treasury has been surreptitiously issuing bonds to, say, Japan as means of financing deficits that someone didn’t want reported for the last 10, 20 years’. That the Bloomberg columnist cites Denninger’s comments shows the extent of desperation in the financial world for an explanation for what has happened at Como.

If one looks at the pattern of holding of the US Treasury Securities, even though the US Treasury asserts that it has stopped issuing bearer securities, it has issued its securities to tax haven entities. Tax haven means that the identity of the ultimate owner is opaque. Out of the total of some 3,262 billion worth treasury securities held by foreign governments and banks as of April 2009, the amount of securities held by what the US treasury says as ‘Caribbean banking sector’ is mentioned as 205 billion and that includes Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Panama and from June 2006 British Virgin Islands. In none of these tax shelters the name of the real investor is ascertainable. Even the British investments into US Treasury takes place through the Isle of Man, the British tax haven. The US government has admitted that it has allowed address-less money, that is black money, into the Treasury bonds. The world of finance has nicknamed this as ‘funny money’. Is the $134.5 billion funny money then?

It is all mysterious. Denninger says, “Let’s hope we get those answer and this isn’t one of those funny things that just disappears into the night”. The Bloomberg columnist says “the US Treasury must go to the bottom of this tale and get the markets informed”. But will that happen? Will the truth come out and will the market ever get informed? Otherwise like many mysteries, this $134.5 billion will remain an unresolved mystery. But this is far too serious a matter to remain mysterious particularly given the depth of the financial crisis the US and thanks to the US the world is in.

QED: If the $134.5 billion bonds were genuine Italy will get 40 per cent of it — that is some $54 billion — as fine from the smugglers. That would solve all its financial problems; its external and public debt will be off its balance sheet.

even more guillotine

2009-06-13T02:08:00.000-04:00

There are accounts of victims of the French Revolution being asked to blink their eyes when they were beheaded. They are supposed to have done this for up to 30 seconds after but it is not sure whether this is mortal spasms or not.

1880. Dr. Dassy de Lignières is given the head of a murderer three hours after decapitation. He pumps blood from a living dog into the head, and for two seconds the lips and eyelids fluttered. Concludes the doctor:"I affirm that during two seconds the brain thought."

1956. Dr. Piedelièvre and Dr. Fournier conclude, "Death is not instantaneous... every element survives decapitation... (it is) a savage vivisection followed by a premature burial."

Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope columnist, was initially skeptical of claims that humans retained consciousness after decapitation, but a reader spun to him the following story of a car crash, in which his friend was decapitated:

My friend's head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me to his body and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression... and he was dead.

Adams declared that he had re-opened his mind on the subject. (http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/1998-06-11/columns.html)

During the French Revolution, when everyone was a little excited about using the guillotine, one aristocratic scientist, an Antoine Lavoisier (thanks mirv!), decided to see if there really was life after death. Sentenced to die by beheading, he vowed to perform a final experiment: he would blink for as long as he remained conscious. As his head rolled away, observers recorded that he blinked five times.

actually a chicken, the body, lived and functioned for 18 months after beheading, the owners had to poke food into the hole to the stomach and it lived, in fact it grew from 2.5 ot 8 pounds in that time... it only died because the breathing tube got a blockage and the chicken suffocated... it wasn't nerve impulses at all...

do a search about 'Miracle Mike the Chicken'...

yes heads remain conscious after decapitation... it was common in the guillotine-happy days of the French Revolution to have heads in the baskets trying to talk, looking up at the executioner and looking around... this is widely recorded history... it resulted in a practice of the executioner picking up the head out of the basket by the hair and holding it's face out to the crowd so the head(person)could see the crowd laughing and mocking it before expiring... this is history... it was so widely known doctors started doing experiments, some of which were the 'blinking' tests already mentioned...

more guillotine

2009-06-13T02:03:00.000-04:00

LINK HERE

Monsieur le Docteur Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not invent that instrument which bears his name. Such devices had been in use in Europe for two centuries. But the times being what they were, some such mechanized expedient was called for. Or perhaps the contraption's excellence cried out for use -- a better mousetrap and all that.

There would be much to recommend such a device. Avoid a reprise of the Mary, Queen of Scots debacle, whose neck took three great whacks and still she didn't lose her head -- the discomfited headsman had to saw through the last bits of integument with his hip knife before the job was quite done. How embarrassing for him. During the interim between the first and the second chops, the poor former queen loosed such a wrenching and protracted groan that the crowd, usually intoxicated in such festive circumstances with blood lust, gaped in horrified silence. So, then -- live and learn, eh?

But what about these heads? Does consciousness survive for some brief moments within the disembodied -- or would it be disbodied -- head? Anecdotal evidence abounds. The heads of two National Assembly rivals were placed into a sack -- when later removed, one had bitten into the cheek of the other so deeply it could not be pried off. The executioner of Charlotte Corday -- who murdered Jean-Paul Marat -- held up her severed head and slapped its cheek; witnesses claimed the face blushed and looked indignant. A soldier who witnessed the decapitation of a friend in a 1989 auto accident relates how the head opened and closed its mouth several times, taking on an expression of shock or confusion, then of terror or grief; its eyes moved from the soldier, to its separated body, then back to the soldier -- direct eye contact, then hazy, then absent and dead.

Which brings to mind the report of Dr. Beaurieux, who, staid man of science that he was, resolved one early summer morning in 1905 to settle once and for all the question of whether a severed head retains for any appreciable time some measure of consciousness, and if so, for how long.

Observe, then, condemned murderer Henri Languille, who mounts with notable sangfroid the scaffold to kneel beneath the blade.

Next, consider his severed head, which fortuitously lands stump-down on the neck, thus perfectly oriented for observation. The doctor notes the eyelids working in irregular contractions for five seconds or so, then they are still and half-closed, the face relaxed. The doctor calls out sharply, "Languille!" The eyelids lift slowly and smoothly, as an awakening, and the eyes focus very definitely upon the doctor's -- clearly, undeniably living. A pause of several seconds, and then the eyes close again. One might almost hear a sigh. Again the doctor cries out, "Languille!" -- and again, smoothly, slowly, the eyelids lift and the eyes fix on the doctor's, with perhaps even more intelligence than the first time. Then a drooping of lids, a fading, a third calling of the name, Languille! but there is no response, and the eyes are glazed, empty, gone. Thirty seconds have passed.

The issue is murky, though. No fewer than three physicians attended the 1879 beheading of one Theotime Prunier, amenable to their end if not his own. The triumverate of medicos immediately snatched up the head and shouted in the face, stuck it with pins, placed ammonia under the nose and candle flames in the eyeballs. No response but a look of astonishment on Prunier's visage, which need have no special significance -- slack jaw and gawking eyes would be expected.

All of it need mean nothing. Two severed heads in a bag need not have been snarling and snapping at each other; one might have been placed sometime after the other, but immediately after its own severing -- and the bite a mere spasmodic reflex. A severed head's cheek might well blush, because blushing is certainly dependent upon capillary blood, but not necessarily upon vascular bloodflow: slaps cause redness. Expressions of shock or of horror are instinctive and universal to the human condition -- perhaps they have no more meaning than the galvanic twitching of frog legs. Eyes widen at a loud sound -- as it happens in this case, the loud calling of a name. Yes. It may all be true, and at the same time meaningless.

The very idea is absurd, that a severed head should be alive. It takes eight seconds to choke a man into unconsciousness -- as I, the third most dangerous middle-aged man west of the Mississippi, ought to know. A severed head can have no blood pressure whatsoever, so one might think that unconsciousness, if not death, must be instantaneous.

But upon deeper reflection, the oxygen that is present, remains present -- it doesn't just remove itself along with the body. Capillaries do not drain themselves in a great Niagara of gore. So we might expect something like eight seconds of consciousness. Further, what effect does having one's entire body mass instantly reduced to some 10 pounds have on the metabolic rate of oxygen usage? Perhaps when the brain doesn't have to think about running the body, it uses less oxygen. And it may be that the concept of consciousness and unconsciousness -- lucidity and dreaming -- takes on an almost incomprehensible meaning, upon the shocking loss of one's bodily appendage. We know the spirit lingers -- heart stoppage isn't death, anymore.

Ah well. It's all speculation. That is, the speculation is speculation. The observations are what they are: phenomena translated into neural impulses within the brain, to manifest eventually as expressions of opinion.

So? Do I have a point? No. I could drag the islamists into it, what with their holy sacrament of beheading infidels and insufficiently subservient women. I could make some bitter correlation between aborted fetuses and still-conscious but not-legally-human-anymore severed heads. I could make it a metaphor for loss and mourning. I could try to blame God for it all. But sometime I just like to chat, share a little of the odd things that have collected in my brain. You know -- the way buddies just talk to each other, sometimes. Let's call this one of those times. Okay? Pal? Because we have voices. We can communicate with each other, in complex ways, with more than just blinking. So that we can know for sure that we're alive.

........

In actuality, the human head does remain conscious fifteen to twenty seconds after decapitation. This was proven when a scientist condemned to the guillotine in the 1700s told his assistant to watch and that he would blink as many times as he could. The assistant counted fifteen to twenty blinks after the head was severed, the blinks coming at intervals of about one second. So the head does remain briefly alive.

........

Let's see. Over the years we've covered crucifixion, kidney theft, and now a second helping of decapitation. What next, you ask — how to perform your own spinal tap? But bear with me. New facts have come to light.

A lot of people disputed my claim that victims of the guillotine blacked out immediately. Many had seen a TV show on the Discovery Channel called "The Guillotine" in which a medical expert tells the story above, with the added detail that the scientist was the pioneering French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was beheaded during the Reign of Terror in 1794.

Not likely. There's no mention of the blinking incident in the standard biographies of Lavoisier. When I contacted the expert quoted on the TV show, neurosurgeon Robert Fink, he said he'd heard the story from a colleague. The colleague said he'd read it in a book, but couldn't remember which. He admitted the story may be apocryphal.

But let's return to the original question, appalling though it may be: Is a severed head aware of its fate? People have been debating the point since the invention of the guillotine, and not just out of morbid curiosity. Some felt the guillotine, far from being quick and painless, was an instrument of the most profound and horrible torture: to be aware of having been beheaded. Numerous anecdotes and bizarre experiments have been adduced as evidence on either side. After Charlotte Corday was guillotined for murdering Jean-Paul Marat, the executioner slapped her cheek while holding her severed head aloft. Witnesses claimed the cheeks reddened (without blood?) and the face looked indignant. According to another tale, when the heads of two rivals in the National Assembly were placed in a sack following execution, one bit the other so badly the two couldn't be separated.

It doesn't get any better. In one early series of experiments, an anatomist claimed that decapitated heads reacted to stimuli, with one victim turning his eyes toward a speaker 15 minutes after having been beheaded. (Today we know brain death would have occurred long before.) In 1836 the murderer Lacenaire agreed to wink after execution. He didn't. Attempts to elicit a reaction from the head of the murderer Prunier in 1879 were also fruitless. The following year a doctor pumped blood from a living dog into the head of the murderer and rapist Menesclou three hours after execution. The lips trembled, the eyelids twitched, and the head seemed about to speak, although no words emerged. In 1905 another doctor claimed that when he called the name of the murderer Languille just after decapitation, the head opened its eyes and focused on him.

Is it possible? The aforementioned Dr. Fink believed the brain might remain conscious as long as 15 seconds; that's how long cardiac arrest victims last before blacking out. (Dr. Fink's colleague put the window of awareness at 5 seconds.) He also pointed out that people have remained alert after having had their spinal cords severed. Still, this didn't seem like the sort of question that could ever be resolved.

Then I received a note from a U.S. Army veteran who had been stationed in Korea. In June 1989 the taxi he and a friend were riding in collided with a truck. My correspondent was pinned in the wreckage. The friend was decapitated. Here's what happened:

My friend's head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression … and he was dead.

I've spoken with the author and am satisfied the event occurred as described. One can of course never be certain that anyone in this predicament is aware of his surroundings and realizes (briefly) what has happened to him. But I concede the possibility that he might.

........

The Medical Answer:
The current medical consensus is that life does survive, for a period of roughly thirteen seconds, varying slightly depending on the victim's build, health and the immediate circumstances of the decapitation. The simple act of removing a head from a body is not what kills the brain, rather, it is the lack of oxygen and other important chemicals provided in the bloodstream. To quote Dr. Ron Wright "The 13 seconds is the amount of high energy phosphates that the cytochromes in the brain have to keep going without new oxygen and glucose" (Cited from urbanlegends.com, no longer extant). The precise post-execution lifespan will depend on how much oxygen, and other chemicals, were in the brain at the point of decapitation; however, eyes could certainly move and blink.

Do You Remain Aware?:
This solely technical survival forms only part of the answer; the second question is 'how long does the victim remain aware?' While the brain remains chemically alive, consciousness can cease immediately, caused by the loss of blood pressure or if the victim is knocked unconscious by the force of the decapitating blow. If that weren't to happen immediately, an individual could in theory remain self-aware for part of the thirteen-second period. There is no consistency in this answer, as the precise length of both actual, and practical, survival will vary depending on the victim. Of course, this applies to many forms of swift decapitation, and not just to the victims of the guillotine.

guillotine

2009-06-13T01:32:00.000-04:00

The guillotine is a curious method of execution and although it is generally held to be humane, there is some question about how quickly one dies after being decapitated.

Two doctors in the 1960s wrote that death is not instantaneous. Every vital element survives decapitation...it is a savage vivisection followed by premature burial." Drs. Piedlievre and Fournier go on to discuss how the brain is capable of breaking down complex sugars in the neurons into oxygen for as long as six minutes after decapitation.

Eyewitness accounts also call into question the swiftness of the onset of death after beheading. "Did it, those who saw the grimacing heads in the basket wondered, kill instantaneously?" writes Colin Wilson. "In the 1790's this question was much debated, as when Charlotte Corday's head was held up and slapped by the assistant executioner, men swore that it not only blushed but 'showed most unequivocal signs of indignation.'"

In an even more graphic account written in 1905, a French doctor experimented with the head of an executed criminal:

"The head fell on the severed surface of the neck ... I was not obliged even to touch it in order to set it upright. Chance served me well for the observation, which I wished to make.

"Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck...

"I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible. ... It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: "Languille!" I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions -- I insist advisedly on this peculiarity -- but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

"Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.

"After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.

"It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. There was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was one further movement -- and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

"I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds."

tokyo memories

2009-05-09T12:27:00.001-04:00

Alone in Tokyo By Philip Bloom
HD version HERE. Click on the HD button below the movie controls.

Shibuya By Philip Bloom
HD version HERE. Click on the HD button below the movie controls.

HD version HERE

Chris Jongkind's Tokyo flickr photo stream HERE
Chris Jongkind on Youtube HERE

erhu demo at the ROM

2008-05-27T00:03:00.000-04:00

May is China month at the ROM. There was a nice lady from Shanghai playing the erhu there. This is just a small clip of her playing. I'm no expert, but sounds good to me. The guide who looked half Chinese gave a nice explanation of the flute and together they played a duet before I moved on.

Japan on the blocks

2008-05-12T11:18:00.000-04:00

From the Globe and Mail

LINK

TOKYO — It all comes down to the two inevitables, says Kenneth Courtis: death and taxes.

Mr. Courtis, an investment banker and veteran observer of Asian economies, is at his usual table in his favourite Tokyo hotel, the Okura, talking about the troubles that threaten Japan's future – and by extension, the world's.

Those troubles don't get much press these days. Distracted by the spectacular rise of China (and now India) and frankly bored by the endless Noh drama of Japanese politics, the world has lost interest in Japan's progress, or lack of it.

Japan has passed through its valley of the shadow of death, surviving the burst of its asset bubble and the resulting economic slump that once threatened to pull down the global financial system like Samson.

Over the past five years, its nearly $5-trillion (U.S.) economy has even enjoyed a modest rebound, growing at an annual average of 1.7 per cent. Japan will host the annual summit of the G8 countries July 7 to 9.

Looks are deceiving

Tokyo in spring, 2008, has every appearance of prosperity, success and order. The streets teem with fashionable young women and neatly dressed salarymen. The shops and department stores of the Ginza overflow with Prada, Ralph Lauren and Luis Vuitton.

At the Okura, an elegant grande dame of Tokyo hotels, a middle-aged man and his much younger wife settle in at a table, parking their infant in a designer stroller, while four wealthy-looking elderly women take coffee in one corner.

“When you have cancer, the stages of remission feel pretty good,” Mr. Courtis says over a bowl of berries and yogurt.

The aura of comfort is deceptive. Japan's recovery has begun to falter as the ripples from the U.S. downturn spread west across the Pacific. Much more serious troubles lie ahead – troubles that, if left unaddressed, could cripple the world's second-biggest economy and affect every industrial country including Canada, which counts Japan as its third-largest trading partner.

The inevitables

That is where Mr. Courtis and his inevitables come in.

Canadian-born, educated in Toronto and Paris, he has lived in Japan for 25 years, advising clients about investing in Japan and other parts of Asia. As an executive with Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs Asia, he was once one of Japan's biggest boosters. Now, he spends just a quarter of his time in his adopted hometown of Tokyo, travelling instead to China and other Asian countries with greater allure for investors.

“Japan is on a massive collision course between two fundamental realities,” he says, scrawling figures on a paper placemat to make his point.

On the one hand, death. Because women are having fewer children, Japanese are dying at a greater rate than they are being born. Result: an aging, shrinking work force.

This is the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac. By the next Year of the Rat in 2020, Mr. Courtis says, 43 per cent of adult Japanese will be over 60. They will be retiring or getting ready to retire. Who will work while they play golf? Who will pay their pensions? Who will provide for their health care when they get old and sick?

The working-age population is expected to fall by one-fifth by 2030, when there will be just two workers for every pensioner.

Now consider taxes. When Japan was trying to dig itself out of its big economic hole in the 1990s, it spent hundreds of billions of dollars on public works and other pump-priming measures, a vast Keynesian exercise that made Roosevelt's New Deal look like a high-school car wash by comparison.

The after-effect is what Mr. Courtis calls a “Himalaya of debt” amounting to 180 per cent of gross domestic product, by far the highest among major economies and indeed the highest ever recorded by a modern industrialized country. Who will pay it back?

To illustrate how hard it will be, Mr. Courtis jots down a few scenarios. Even if Japan stopped adding to its debt tomorrow and recorded annual economic growth of 4 per cent for the next dozen years – both highly optimistic “ifs” – it would still have a debt of 115 per cent of GDP by 2020, as high as struggling Italy's today.

Mr. Courtis's death-and-taxes realities are converging at a remorseless pace. An aging population means a need for higher government spending; a high debt means less government money to spend.

Time for reform

Japan has perhaps a couple of decades to bring in the fundamental economic and social reforms that are needed to make it productive and resilient enough to survive the collision. Can it muster the will to remake itself one more time?

Until recently, the prospects for change were looking up. There has been real progress since what Mr. Courtis calls the near-death experience of the 1990s.

Japanese banks have cleaned up their bad loans and clawed back from the threatened insolvency that frightened the world in the 1990s. Japanese companies have straightened out their balance sheets, paid off their debts and started turning robust profits again. Toyota is vying with General Motors for the title of world's leading auto maker. Nintendo has reconfirmed Japan's genius for innovation with the wild success of its Wii game-playing device.

While the world looked the other way, Japan actually enacted some reforms that foreign critics have recommended for years. New accounting rules make it harder for companies to hide bad results, requiring them to report the performance of subsidiaries instead of just consolidated earnings. Revised labour laws make it easier for firms to hire temporary workers so that they can respond to shifting conditions. Shareholders have gained new rights to challenge inept corporate managers.

In politics, the five-year star turn of reforming Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006), Japan's most successful politician in decades, showed that the public was hungry for change.

“Japan has changed a lot over the past decade and half,” says University of California professor Steven Vogel, whose 2006 book Japan Remodeled documents the reforms. “The economic crisis was a real shock to the system.”

But just as things seemed to be getting better, doubts have begun to gather about whether Japan is really willing or able to remake itself.

Mr. Koizumi's successors, Shinto Abe and Yasuo Fukuda, have been a crashing letdown. Mr. Abe resigned last September, ill and unloved. Mr. Fukuda, 71, has seen his approval ratings fall to near-historic lows. As he appears on television daily with his sober cabinet colleagues, Mr. Fukuda seems to have come straight from central casting for Japanese prime ministers, with the charisma of a bank clerk and policies as opaque as a sliding paper door.

The Fukuda government is so weak that the world's biggest creditor nation found itself without a central bank chief for three full weeks this spring as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party wrangled with the opposition over a successor.

With no clear direction from the top, reform has faltered. The government's decision to block a bid by a British hedge fund to buy more stock in a Japanese electrical utility, J-Power, has confirmed the impression that Japan is allergic to foreign direct investment. The recent resurgence of cross-shareholdings – in which companies make cozy alliances to protect themselves – echoes the bad old days of inbred Japanese corporate leadership.

Clinging to the past

Robert Feldman, managing director of Morgan Stanley in Japan, says conservatives in the government and bureaucracy are staging a rear-guard action to defend Japan's old, insular way of doing things.

“In the end, what the traditionalists prefer is the current system with themselves in power,” he said in his Tokyo office. “For those of us who are concerned about Japan's economy, for its place in Asia and its ability to sustain living standards for an aging population, that sort of traditionalist position is incomprehensible.”

A 20-year veteran of Japan's reform battles, Mr. Feldman says reform goes through a kind of “hog cycle.” When hog prices are good, farmers produce more hogs, so prices go down and they produce fewer hogs. In the same way, government hastens reform when the economy worsens, reform revives the economy and the pressure for reform eases, as it has in the past few years.

If the theory holds true, the case for reform should be strengthening again. The Bank of Japan has lowered its growth forecast for the coming year to 1.5 per cent from 2.1 per cent. Business sentiment has hit a four-year low and consumer confidence is at a five-year low.

With interest rates already at a minimal 0.5 per cent, the government can hardly cut rates to stimulate the economy. In any case, consumer prices are rising, so a rate cut might push up inflation. It can't cut taxes or raise spending much either, it's in such a fiscal bind.

Its place in the world

Yes, Japan still has many world-beating companies, household names such as Canon, Honda, Sanyo and Toshiba. But nearly half of Japanese manufacturing by value is performed by much smaller, less visible firms, many of them struggling. “That's the only sector we're competitive in, so it's a problem,” says Kyoji Fukao, who teaches economics at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. He estimates that the manufacturing sector's share of the economy is down to 20 per cent and falling. In the highly regulated service sector, meanwhile, annual productivity growth has fallen from 3.5 per cent in the 1980s and late 1970s to less than 1 per cent today.

Partly as a result, overall labour productivity, already just 30 per cent the U.S. level, is growing far too slowly – at 1.2 per cent a year, about half the average for industrialized countries.

Japanese still work amazingly, sometimes dangerously, hard. Lights burn late at most Tokyo offices and death from overwork – so common that Japanese have a name for it, karoshi – is a national health problem. But the hard fact is that they are no longer world beaters.

Nor are most Japanese companies. Their return on equity, a common measure of their performance, averaged around 9 per cent, against 14 to 17 per cent in Western countries.

Japan trails in entrepreneurial vigour, too. In the United States, about 14 per cent of companies are startups; in Japan, just 4 per cent. Japan is even faltering in innovation, once the hallmark of Japanese capitalism. The iPod should have been invented in Tokyo or Kyoto, not Cupertino, Calif.

Wireless telecom giant NTT DoCoMo's format for Internet over cellphones, wildly popular in Japan, failed to catch on overseas, partly because its complex menus proved daunting to foreigners.

Japanese sentiment

Japanese are painfully aware of how far their nation has fallen. Economy Minister Hiroko Ota told her countrymen in January that Japan can no longer be considered a first-class economy. Japan, she said, had fallen to 18th among the top 30 industrialized nations when measured by gross domestic product per capita. Among the G7 countries that make up the core of that club – the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada – it has fallen from first in the early 1990s to last today. Meanwhile, its share of aggregate world income has fallen below 10 per cent for the first time in 24 years.

To ordinary Japanese, what matters even more is the rising costs of gas, tolls, electricity and instant noodles. “The politicians keep telling us that the economy will get better, but I don't see it,” says Kaz Shinoda, 50. A high-school English teacher, he has had no pay raise for four years, yet the costs of feeding his wife and two children have soared.

His friend Takumu Kato, a retired biology teacher, has it worse. He recently started work as a night clerk in a 7-Eleven store to make ends meet.

Millions of Japanese like him have moved to part-time and casual work as the lifetime employment system crumbles. About a third of all employees are now non-regular workers. The Japanese call them “freeters,” from the English “free” and the German “ arbeiter,” or worker.

The result is a rising sense of insecurity. “It used to be that if you were hired by a company, you at least had a guarantee for life,” says Tetsuya Iida, whose temporary employment agency recently sent him to operate a machine that picks up street litter. “Now you can get fired any time.”

Twenty years ago, the overwhelming majority of Japanese – 75 per cent – used to consider themselves middle class. Today only about half do.

It's a long way from the “miracle” years. After registering 10 per cent average annual growth in the 1960s, 5 per cent in the 1970s and 4 per cent in the 1980s, Japan's was the most talked-about economy on the planet, a marvel of efficiency and creativity that seemed destined to eclipse the washed-up nations of the West. Readers snapped up books like Harvard scholar Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One to find out how the Japanese were beating the Americans at their own game. U.S. congressmen railed against Japanese companies for flooding North America with cheap cars, stereos and TV sets while buying up famous assets like Hollywood's Columbia Pictures and New York's Rockefeller Center.

It seemed as if the Japanese had invented a new and better kind of capitalism, one that combined with wealth-creating dynamism of the Western market system with the steady hand of government guidance and the security of lifetime employment.

The beginning of the fall

It all started to unravel on Jan. 2, 1990. That day, the main index of the Tokyo stock market started falling from its dizzying peak of more than 39,000 (nearly three times its level today). The collapse of Japan's stock and real estate markets brought on the “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of stagnating growth, rising joblessness and soaring suicide rates.

The things that had been touted as Japan's strengths turned out to be weaknesses. The wise, all-seeing bureaucrats who had guided its rise to riches were, in fact, often blinkered and hidebound, sealed in an unhealthy embrace with powerful, often corrupt, politicians. The giant corporations that had so impressed the world were revealed as coddled, unresponsive dinosaurs whose faults had been covered up by friendly banks and interlinked corporate allies. Mitsubishi's corporate family, for example, included Kirin beer and Nikon cameras as well as Mitsubishi Trust, Mitsubishi Bank, Mitsubishi Chemical, Mitsubishi Electric and others.

Lifetime employment prevented companies from hiring and firing workers to account for economic ups and downs. A stock market that scorned the small shareholder meant that Japanese kept their money in the bank, earning almost no interest and producing virtually no wealth, as it might if invested in the market. Even today Japanese savers have a staggering $15-trillion that is, in effect, stuffed under the mattress.

The capacity to change

Ever since Japan's crisis, it has been clear what has to change to make things right. Companies have to break their incestuous ties with banks and allied companies and govern themselves more like North American or European companies, with independent directors, stronger rights for shareholders and transparent reporting. Government has to ease regulation in the domestic market and put a fire under companies by letting more foreign companies come in to compete.

The country has to make up for the coming labour shortage by bringing in more immigrants and encouraging more women to enter the work force.

“Japan needs the world and the world needs Japan,” says Scott Callon, head of a Tokyo investment fund who is “very much a proponent of more openness, more cross-fertilization with the external world.”

But to get there, he says, Japanese will have to defeat the forces of tradition, insularity and complacency.

“There's a fight on for Japan's future between those who want a brighter future, with more risk, and those who say ‘what we have is what we have and we should protect it.' It's the difference between looking forward and looking back.”

The good news, Mr. Callon says, is that “Japan has demonstrated a tremendous ability to change. This is a country which has proven to be very capable of keeping true to its traditions and culture yet bringing in what works for the rest of the world.”

Despite the inevitables, Ken Courtis agrees. In the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century, he notes, Japan transformed itself from an isolated, feudal state into a modern power with a Western legal system, an all-new education system and the beginnings of parliamentary government.

Again, after the Second World War, it clawed its way out of the ashes of defeat to become the world's economic wunderkind. It is as wrong now to write off Japan as a spent force as it was to say before that it was destined to rule the world economy.

The question is not so much whether Japan can change, but whether it can change fast enough. The answer is still very much in the balance.

To escape the collision of death and taxes, Japan will need to put on a burst of speed in productivity and wealth creation like nothing since its “miracle” years. Possible? Yes, if Japan grasps the nettle and musters the will to act decisively. Likely? Mr. Courtis scribbles a to-do list for Japan, ranging from massive corporate reform and wholesale privatization of state assets to higher immigration and all-out attack on the debt.

The changes that are needed are profound. Allowing mass immigration would require a huge cultural shift. For a country that still depends on its women to raise the young and care for the aged, seeing women shift en masse into paid work would take another sharp adjustment. Companies fear opening up to a world of hostile takeovers, mergers, critical directors and shareholder revolts.

Mr. Courtis looks down at the list. “Now how likely do you think it is that all of that will happen?”

For a society that operates by consensus, with a political system dominated by conservative vested interests, reaching any decision can be an agony, to say nothing of a decision to fundamentally reorder a whole society. “The Japanese knew after Midway that they had lost the war,” says Mr. Courtis, referring to the American naval victory in the Pacific six months after Pearl Harbour, “But they couldn't make the decision to end it.”

Japan had its economic Midway nearly 20 years ago, in the 1990 market crash. Time to change is running out, the inevitables are closing in.

WIP shanghai bund circa 1920

2008-04-09T22:24:00.001-04:00

new work...

2008-04-04T00:25:00.001-04:00

Wii would like to play

2007-12-19T22:26:00.000-05:00

Yoshida Brothers (who did the Wii commercials) doing down on the Shamisen.

hmmmmm

2007-12-14T17:17:00.000-05:00

Kim Chi Dudes: Luv dees guys

2007-12-14T13:16:00.001-05:00

exo-skeleton TODAY!

2007-11-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

tessellations

2007-11-15T23:44:00.000-05:00

Holy cow! Robot otaku culture

2007-10-08T16:52:00.001-04:00

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner vs. Sukhoi's SuperJet 100

2007-09-28T13:40:00.001-04:00

And the winner is...

I wanna be cool too!

2007-09-20T14:29:00.001-04:00

sooooo sloooooow here

2007-08-30T11:53:00.000-04:00

ARTICLE HERE

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

Ultra-high-speed applications are being rolled out for low-cost, high-definition teleconferencing, for telemedicine -- which allows urban doctors to diagnose diseases from a distance -- and for advanced telecommuting to help Japan meet its goal of doubling the number of people who work from home by 2010.

"For now and for at least the short term, these applications will be cheaper and probably better in Japan," said Robert Pepper, senior managing director of global technology policy at Cisco Systems, the networking giant.

Japan has surged ahead of the United States on the wings of better wire and more aggressive government regulation, industry analysts say.

The copper wire used to hook up Japanese homes is newer and runs in shorter loops to telephone exchanges than in the United States. This is partly a matter of geography and demographics: Japan is relatively small, highly urbanized and densely populated. But better wire is also a legacy of American bombs, which razed much of urban Japan during World War II and led to a wholesale rewiring of the country.

In 2000, the Japanese government seized its advantage in wire. In sharp contrast to the Bush administration over the same time period, regulators here compelled big phone companies to open up wires to upstart Internet providers.

In short order, broadband exploded. At first, it used the same DSL technology that exists in the United States. But because of the better, shorter wire in Japan, DSL service here is much faster. Ten to 20 times as fast, according to Pepper, one of the world's leading experts on broadband infrastructure.

Indeed, DSL in Japan is often five to 10 times as fast as what is widely offered by U.S. cable providers, generally viewed as the fastest American carriers. (Cable has not been much of a player in Japan.)

Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan's largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete. "Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations.

His company now offers speeds on fiber of up to 100 megabits per second -- 17 times as fast as the top speed generally available from U.S. cable. About 8.8 million Japanese homes have fiber lines -- roughly nine times the number in the United States.

The burgeoning optical fiber system is hurtling Japan into an Internet future that experts say Americans are unlikely to experience for at least several years.

Shoji Matsuya, director of diagnostic pathology at Kanto Medical Center in Tokyo, has tested an NTT telepathology system scheduled for nationwide use next spring.

It allows pathologists -- using high-definition video and remote-controlled microscopes -- to examine tissue samples from patients living in areas without access to major hospitals. Those patients need only find a clinic with the right microscope and an NTT fiber connection.

"Before, we did not have the richness of image detail," Matsuya said, noting that Japan has a severe shortage of pathologists. "With this equipment, I think it is possible to make a definitive remote diagnosis of cancer."

Japan's leap forward, as the United States has lost ground among major industrialized countries in providing high-speed broadband connections, has frustrated many American high-tech innovators.

"The experience of the last seven years shows that sometimes you need a strong federal regulatory framework to ensure that competition happens in a way that is constructive," said Vinton G. Cerf, a vice president at Google.

Japan's lead in speed is worrisome because it will shift Internet innovation away from the United States, warns Cerf, who is widely credited with helping to invent some of the Internet's basic architecture. "Once you have very high speeds, I guarantee that people will figure out things to do with it that they haven't done before," he said.

As a champion of Japanese-style competition through regulation, Cerf supports "net neutrality" legislation now pending in Congress. It would mandate that phone and cable companies treat all online traffic equally, without imposing higher tolls for certain content.

The proposed laws would probably save billions for companies such as Google and Yahoo, but consumer advocates say they would also save money for most home Internet users.

U.S. phone and cable companies, which control about 98 percent of the country's broadband market, strongly oppose the proposed laws, saying they would discourage the huge investments needed to upgrade broadband speed.

Yet the story of how Japan outclassed the United States in the provision of better, cheaper Internet service suggests that forceful government regulation can pay substantial dividends.

The opening of Japan's copper phone lines to DSL competition launched a "virtuous cycle" of ever-increasing speed, said Cisco's Pepper. The cycle began shortly after Japanese politicians -- fretting about an Internet system that in 2000 was slower and more expensive than what existed in the United States -- decided to "unbundle" copper lines.

For just $2 a month, upstart broadband companies were allowed to rent bandwidth on an NTT copper wire connected to a Japanese home. Low rent allowed them to charge low prices to consumers -- as little as $22 a month for a DSL connection faster than almost all U.S. broadband services.

In the United States, a similar kind of competitive access to phone company lines was strongly endorsed by Congress in a 1996 telecommunications law. But the federal push fizzled in 2003 and 2004, when the Federal Communications Commission and a federal court ruled that major companies do not have to share phone or fiber lines with competitors. The Bush administration did not appeal the court ruling.

"The Bush administration largely turned its back on the Internet, so we have just drifted downwards," said Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. diplomat who served in Japan and is writing a history of how that country trumped the United States in broadband.

As the United States drifted, a prominent venture capitalist in Japan pounced on his government's decision to open up the country's copper wire.

Masayoshi Son, head of a company called Softbank, offered broadband that was much cheaper and more than six times as fast as NTT's. He added marketing razzmatazz to the mix, dispatching young people to street corners to give away modems that would connect users to a service called Yahoo BB. (The U.S.-based Yahoo owns about a third of it.) The company's share of DSL business in Japan has exploded in the past five years, from zero to 37 percent. As competition grew, the monthly cost of broadband across Japan fell by about half, as broadband speed jumped 33-fold, according to a recent study.

"Once a customer enjoyed the high speed of DSL, then he or she preferred more speed," said Harumasa Sato, a professor of telecommunication economics at Konan University in Kobe.

The growing addiction to speed, ironically, is returning near-monopoly power in fiber to NTT, which owns and controls most new fiber lines to homes. Growth of new fiber connections exceeded DSL growth two years ago. Fiber is how all of Japan will soon be connected -- for phones, television and nearly all other services.

"NTT is becoming dominant again in the fiber broadband kingdom," Sato said.

That infuriates its competitors. Yahoo BB and others are demanding that the government once again compel NTT to unlock the lines.

In Japan, the regulatory wars over broadband are far from over.

Best time to buy stuff

2007-08-17T12:24:00.000-04:00

HERE

AT 50 CENTS a roll — instead of the regular retail price of $4 — buying wrapping paper after New Year's is an easy way to save. The same holds true for buying half-price inflatable pool loungers and patio furniture after Labor Day weekend.

In fact, bargain lovers know that there's a smart time to buy just about anything. For example, those looking for a great deal on a car should shop on weekday mornings in September. Groceries are cheapest on Sunday evenings.

We talked to the experts, and found the best time to buy everything from wine to wedding dresses.

Airplane Tickets
When to buy: On a Wednesday, 21 days (or a couple of days earlier) before your flight.
Why: Airlines make major pricing changes (and run fare sales) every week, typically on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings. About 21 days out from your flight, you'll see plenty of deals out there as airlines scramble to fill seats, says Anne Banas, executive editor of SmarterTravel.com, a consumer travel advice Web site. Don't wait much longer, she cautions; prices jump significantly from 14 to seven days ahead of departure.

Appliances
When to buy: During a holiday weekend.
Why: You'll find sales on select models all year long, but retailers bring out the big guns for holiday weekends, says Carolyn Forte, homecare director for the Good Housekeeping Institute. But don't worry about spending your Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends shopping for a new fridge — smaller holidays like Columbus Day and President's Day have their share of sales, too.

Baby Clothes
When to buy: During your pregnancy.
Why: Once you know your due date, keep an eye out for end-of-season clearances, recommends Alan Fields, co-author of "Baby Bargains." "If you're [newly] pregnant now, you know you'll be having a baby next summer," he says. "Well, right now, stores are closing out all the summer clothes." You can pick up newborn essentials like onesies for less than half price. (For more ways to save, see our column Oh Baby!)

Broadway Tickets
When to buy: Hours before the curtain rises.
Why: How does a $25 front-row seat to the smash musical "Wicked" sound? Several musicals offer same-day ticket lotteries that offer up orchestra seats at inexpensive prices. If you'd rather not gamble on getting a seat, wait in line at the famous TKTS booth in Times Square. There, you can get tickets for hit musicals for up to 50% off. On a recent night, prime seats were available for "Hairspray," "Rent," "Sweeney Todd" and "Beauty & the Beast." (For the right times to drop by TKTS, and other ways to save, see our column A Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Cars
When to buy: Weekday mornings in September.
Why: By September, all the next year's models have arrived at the lot, and dealers are desperate to get rid of the current year's leftovers, says Phil Reed, consumer advice editor for Edmunds.com. It's the prime time of year for incentives and sales, not to mention bargaining. "Any car that's been on the lot for a long time loses its value in the eyes of the car salesman," he says.

Heading to the dealership on a weekday morning also helps because there's low foot traffic, meaning you'll have ample time to negotiate and fewer people trying to buy the same car. The more demand, the less willing a salesman is to go down on price, says Reed. (For more, see our column Summer Car Savings.)

Champagne
When to buy: December
Why: Most people assume that because everyone wants a good bottle of Champagne for New Year's Eve that prices go up during the holidays, says Sharon Castillo, director of the Office of Champagne, USA, which represents the trade association of growers in the Champagne region. But due to fierce competition among the Champagne houses, prices are actually lower during the holidays than they are at any other time of year. (For more on picking the right bottle, see our column Break Out the Bubbly.)

Clothing
When to buy: Thursday evenings, six to eight weeks after an item arrives in stores.
Why: After an item lingers in stores a month or more, retailers start dropping its price to get it out the door, says Kathryn Finney, author of "How to Be a Budget Fashionista." These season-end clearances tend to be the same month that designers host fashion weeks (February and September) to preview the next fall or spring collections. So smart buyers can check the catwalk to see if any of this season's trends — say, leggings or military-style jackets — will still be hot next year, and then scoop them up on clearance.

Hitting the mall on a weekday ensures you'll get a good selection. "On the weekend, you'll only get picked-over stuff because the stores don't have time to restock," she says. By Thursday, most of the weekend sales have begun, but everything available is on the floor.

Computers and electronics
When to buy: Just after a new model is launched.
Why: When the latest and greatest of a product is released, you'll often see prices drop on what had previously been the best thing out there, says Tom Merritt, executive editor for CNET, an electronics review web site. Case in point: When Apple released the Nano last September, prices for the now-discontinued Mini dropped 12%, from $199 for a 4GB to about $175. So keep your eyes open for announcements from major manufacturers. Want a little less work? Time your purchases for after big annual technology show like MacWorld (next held Jan. 8-12, 2007) and the International Consumer Electronics Show (next held Jan. 8-11, 2007).

Gas
When to buy: Early morning or late evening on a weekday.
Why: Time your trip based on whether prices are rising or falling, advises Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks, a consumer guide. Gas stations tend to change their prices between 10 a.m. and noon, so hit the pump in the early morning if gas prices are on the rise. Go later in the day if prices are falling. Tipsters on GasPriceWatch.com reported that on Sept. 3, a WaWa gas station in Lanoka Harbor, N.J., was offering regular gas for $2.85 a gallon. One day later the station's price had dropped to $2.65. In that case, going early would have cost you 20 cents more per gallon.

Try not to buy gas on the weekends, Brain says. Gas prices are often slightly elevated, as stations try to profit from leisure travelers. (For more ways to save, see our column Save on Gas.)

Gift Cards
When to buy: A day or two before you give it.
Why: These days, gift cards carry a plethora of hidden pitfalls, from expiration dates to dormancy fees, says Dan Horne, a professor of marketing at Providence College known as the "Gift Card Guru." That countdown to fees starts as soon as you buy the card. "You don't want to short-change the recipient," he says.

Groceries
When to buy: Sunday evenings.
Why: Store sales tend to run Wednesday through Tuesday, says Teri Gault, founder of The Grocery Game, a consumer savings program. On Sunday, you'll also have the latest round of manufacturer's coupons from your morning paper. "You can maximize your coupons available for that shopping week," she says. Heading to the store close to closing time means you'll have access to sales on fresh items that must be sold by the end of the day, such as meats and baked goods.

Of course, you'll also benefit from in-season items that can be frozen for use later in the year, says Gault. That means turkeys at Thanksgiving and hams at Christmas and Easter. During the spring and summer, buy fresh produce. Peaches bought at $1 per pound now can be kept frozen for smoothies and pies throughout the winter, she says.

Shrubs, Trees and Other Plants
When to buy: Fall
Why: Take a break from raking up leaves to purchase trees, shrubs and other perennials for your yard. Prices nosedive after midsummer, as garden supply stores and nurseries try to clear out their stock. You can also get great deals on bulbs during the fall. Just store them according to the package instructions for best planting results next spring. For more, see our column Cheap Landscaping Tricks.)

Televisions
When to buy: Six to 12 months after a particular model is launched.
Why: A new TV drops in price after a few months on the market, says CNET's Merritt. Although there will be newer models out there, it's unlikely they'll offer any significant improvements to justify that brand new price. "The technology is proceeding at such a pace that the models out there are not going to be obsolete anytime soon," he says. (For more, see our column The World Is Flat.)

Wedding Dresses
When to buy: Between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Why: Boutiques are stocked up on dresses for the post-Christmas rush (many people get engaged over the holidays), yet traffic is low, says Fields, who also co-authored "Bridal Bargains." "It's not a busy time to buy a wedding dress because people are thinking about the holidays," he says. You'll also have room to bargain.

Wine
When to buy: Early fall.
Why: For best selection, you can't beat the fall harvest season. That's when most vineyards release their latest vintages. Buying in August and September is also your best shot at snagging so-called "cult wines" — those with limited production and high demand, says Kathleen Schumacher-Hoertkorn, CEO of New Vine Logistics, an online interstate wine retailer. (For more, see our column Buying Wine Online.)

Some marketing thoughts via MSN.

2007-08-01T16:23:00.000-04:00

Sydney says:
you were telling me that part of Dave's problem is he doesn't have a name as a comic book artist, that's part of why his sales are weak. In order to establish a name you need exposure right? So how about this... Bite the bullet... Accept the fact that Dave isn't going to make any more money of this comic book venture? So what does he have left?... A comic book. Why not just post the comic book online for free and get free readership? It's eaked out as much money as it's ever going to make. Get more exposure by offering it for free.
Rhody Belo says:
hey thats a good idea, hmmm, your on to something
Sydney says:
The people who bought it won't be unhappy, they already have a hard copy and for people who get it free, they only get an internet version.
Rhody Belo says:
so far this comic thing isn't great sales wise
Sydney says:
Here's another idea but it's not new, I see other publishers doing the same thing. Next time, publish the first 10 pages free, get people into the story before the comic is finished. People can read the first 10 pages and are left hanging wanting more. They have to buy the comic to find out what happens next. I didn't see Dave do that.
Rhody Belo says:
actually we kinda did that with the first issue
Sydney says:
oh really, I didn't see it
Rhody Belo says:
but its kinda all over the place
Sydney says:
Then you need a dedicated site for the comic, kinda like each feature film has it's own site. A place where a reader can go to get updates and all the info they ever wanted.
Rhody Belo says:
true...we didn't do that
Sydney says:
I think there were major flaws in Dave's marketing strategy, people just don't know his comic is out there, even to this day. A lot can be done for little money to promote the comic beyond just random posts on comic book forums
Rhody Belo says:
we just advertised on some critic pages
Sydney says:
not enough, need more in ur face marketing.
Rhody Belo says:
your right bad marketing
Sydney says:
It's not enough just being an artist. I am find out that too many artists like to hide behind their art as an excuse for not marketing themselves properly. There's too many good artists out there, why is it that the crappiest artists make it into the money... they promote promote promote
Rhody Belo says:
wow...we are bad biz guys, the market is kinda shot too which doesn't help a lot
Sydney says:
i think so, you need to look at the market. Is it an emerging market? Is it a growth market? or is it a mature market in decline? Like i said, just being a passionate artist isn't good enough.
Rhody Belo says:
declining big time
Sydney says:
Then what are your options? Use your creative gift and enter a different market? Or recreate the comic market with something creatively different
Rhody Belo says:
yah
Sydney says:
Here's my take. As a business, you need something that will grab customers, something that is unique to your product, something that the other guy doesn't have. As I see it, Dave is just creating more of the same old same old.
Rhody Belo says:
yeh
Sydney says:
I don't see what's giving his product that extra edge. He may be a talented artist... but, he needs to be more original. Sorry if it sounds harsh, it's purely a critique from a business perspective
Rhody Belo says:
Its not harsh at all
Sydney says:
Picture yourself as a comic book geek. Would you buy it or any other title for that matter? What would you buy? What would catch your eye on that already overly saturated comic shelf? If you can figure that out, then you have a competitive product.
Rhody Belo says:
we need a biz mind...we just do art. I think I would bye it if it were colour thats just me
Sydney says:
but there's already so much color out there. You need something else to pull those sales in. Here's something just for shits and giggles. I did mention this before but not sure how realistic it is.
Rhody Belo says:
haha k
Sydney says:
The one thing I do know readers value... quality quality quality. What exactly do I mean? Too much art these days is created on a monthly deadline, too much quality is sacrificed. I think if one can take the time to really create a high level of design , narrative and rendering quality, then people will notice. It won't be a monthly thing that's for sure, but it'll bring in the bucks in the end.
Rhody Belo says:
your right people would rathar get quality then buying shitty by monthly
Sydney says:
Example, Masamune Shirow, people either buy his comics for the art or for his amazingly complex stories. He's now considered god of sci fi manga.
Rhody Belo says:
I think we just banged this out
Sydney says:
I think most artists bang it out because of publishing deadlines, that's the nature of the industry
Rhody Belo says:
yep

spork?

2007-07-12T14:09:00.000-04:00

Kool designs

Nagoya ramen chain Sugakiya have finally redesigned their famous ramen fork. The old design is shown above on the right, the new design is in the centre with a child's version on the left. It looks even more like a spork now although it is a little deeper and the prongs are longer than other models on the market. It is the first redesign in 29 years for the chain and they aim to roll it out over their 329 stores by September. Sugakiya claims that this new version is easier to use and the big news is that they believe it will become so popular that they will be able to do away with disposable chopsticks almost entirely by March of next year. Disposable chopsticks have become more expensive since China restricted exports with the possibility of a complete halt in 2008.

cheang

2007-07-09T13:33:00.001-04:00

business idea: video game bartering

2007-06-17T03:06:00.000-04:00

Initial idea for gamers barter service

Video gaming is an annual, multi-billion dollar industry. Gamers have an insatiable appetite for newer and more interesting games. The problem is, how to satisfy that voracious need on limited budgets. Games are increasingly expensive to purchase and harder to pirate. Once a game is played and finished interest is lost and the game essentially becomes a piece of junk.

An online bartering service would allow gamers to exchange new and used games and equipment at very little cost. Such a service would facilitate the barter transactions and offer insurance that the terms of barter are met and enforced. Users would ship barter items to a central repository for inspection and repackaging. This would ensure a fair and equitable exchange. BRENT: This wouldn't work, way too much over head for company to deal with thousands of items and the user has to pay postal twice, once to the repository and once more to the final recipient.

A better system would involve each user deal directly with each other and the implementation of a rating system similar to that used by ebay. Self-enforcement, a poor rating from other users would indicate an untrustworthy user.

BRENT: In terms of complexity, a simple 'one to one' barter service could be set up relatively easily. From there a much more complex search matrix would be necessary for more efficient pairing of users and barter items. E.g. a user has items available for barter and a list of items that he/she would like to barter for. The system search capability should be able to find another user with the same or similar barter status. If it can't find any matches the system should be intelligent enough to find alternatives such that the needs of the user can still be met in a round about manner. It may require that the user needs to trade with a third user to acquire that wanted from the first user, etc. This triangulated transaction would be facilitated as a single transaction. An architecture like this would require a vast amount of work.

This service would be free to attract initial customers and as the user base grows, banner ads would generate income.

Service can also facilitate cash or credit card purchases instead of bartering and would mean the implementation of a paypal/verotel style billing solution with SSL encryption. BRENT: This is easy to set up.

While initially an idea to service the gaming market this is conceptually adaptable to any market.

Craigslist offers a form of barter service in the guise of an online classified page. The difference between Craigslist and a dedicated bartering service is that the bartering service would be far more user friendly and purpose built for bartering. Users will be attracted by it's ease of use and more powerful search and matching engine.

COMPETITION: This is not a new idea, the only thing that I came up with while doing a quick google search is barterfest.com and u-exchange.com. There are other barter sites but they seem to be more business to business type bartering and their web pages tend to look uber corporate. In order to out compete sites such as barterfest, we would need to make the service much more usable and maybe target a specific market such as video games. A more extensive search for available services out there needs to be done.

There does not seem to be a single definitive source for games bartering. One can visit many of the infinite number of gaming forums and online message boards out there and find many users bartering, but there is no one-stop source for the exclusive bartering of games. Perhaps by targeting the video game market, it would give an edge over the more generic bartering sites which don't seem to carry much gaming content.

Some barter sites, such as canadianbartersystem.com converts goods and services into a credit system that can then be exchanged.

Many bartering networks that deal in business to business bartering require a paid membership.

A successful franchise would then be open to being acquired by a larger game portal such as IGN or gamespot.com.

wrestler

2007-06-12T16:42:00.001-04:00

body patches WIP

2007-06-11T01:08:00.001-04:00

nose reference

2007-06-08T16:03:00.000-04:00

randomness

2007-06-06T11:59:00.000-04:00

Creature wrestling / jaba the hut creature fest

Wrestler mug and stats incorporated into comic.

scrawny angry chick wrestler

PMS girl / tank girl

salary man

Hado ge

Post comic book pages on lamp post. Something to read while waiting for the streetcar?

Project blog

wrestling collectible cards or Magic style game.

ULTIMATE MUSCLE

business idea: experimental marketing (wrestling concept )

2007-06-05T16:42:00.001-04:00

The following is an edited MSN chat thread I had with a friend that turned into a brainstorming session.

......................
Rhody Belo says:
we can start by doing fake hype and pinup work...a bit of advertising
Sydney says:
lamp post stuff
Sydney says:
Yah, for now it's gotta be a fun thing and not so much for the money
jobs like this aren't going to make us rich
Rhody Belo says:
legal graphitti
Rhody Belo says:
maybe I'll go under an Alias as Suplex
Sydney says:
superplex
Rhody Belo says:
Morphic Suplex
Sydney says:
I'll be atomic drop
Rhody Belo says:
Superplex and AtomicDrop
tagteam Morphic
Sydney says:
The pile driver. He's missing a luchador
Rhody Belo says:
before Bustamante sees this opportunity
Sydney says:
ok crap yah he'd be on it like fly on shit
Rhody Belo says:
pile of shit driver
Sydney says:
hahaha, we should call the luchador, Bustamante in honor of him, Bukakkemante. Nah, I'm not worried, our portfolio is superior, unless he does it for far less pesos.
Sydney says:
We need a Hado Ge too, Hado Ge vs. Bustamante. Hahaha, I think we have a better story already just between us...
Rhody Belo says:
yeah....I think so too
Sydney says:
the thing that I notice that is missing in the Bauer script is that the characters have no character, they aren't the colorful personalities that we see in Hado Ge or any other wwf wrestler. That is what I feel will sell the comic. The dynamic actions and the over the top characters.Hard guy organization. The wrestling moves have to be way way overly exaggerated. The action can't just be text book stuff, gotta have alot of original signature moves.
Rhody Belo says:
a wrestling gimp. Lots of speed lines and vainy muscle tone and broken bones
Sydney says:
I think if this comic does do well,that writer is going to need us in a big way. I don't think he has the vision for the characters
Rhody Belo says:
then we can charge him or branch off, introduce our own characters
Sydney says:
we could just do our own now, drop him now and self publish our own, do our own luche libre
Rhody Belo says:
we'll do a better job for the fans
Sydney says:
We should do a police lineup of characters first, make a poster for lamp posts, make it all campy. An event poster that doubles as a comic bookcover, like this one, http://homepage.mac.com/viktor2/btw/threeheels.jpg. We don't even need to have art on the poster, just a cheezy event announcement for a wrestling match and you'd get attention. Maybe make a url link on the poster to our website where the comic is. Question is, is there enough of a market just in TO to make private publishing profitable.
Rhody Belo says:
hahaha...kool, good idea...I like...even cheezy shirts like this. oh yeah...make it sound like real underground matches...like a fight club. Now we have a gimmic
Sydney says:
I think alot of people would get disappointed it isn't a real fight club
Rhody Belo says:
true atleast we get exposure, lets find a real fight club we can represent, they need to read the comic to find out where it is.
Sydney says:
it can definitely lead to that, branch out of comix eventually into real fight promotion, maybe we can make a proposal to the WWF to do some promo for them...
I think this wrestling idea, if it takes off could end up creating a label for us, HARD GUY COMIX
Sydney says:
How about this, we try this bauer dude and formulate a style and if we are satisfied with it we can do our own
Rhody Belo says:
thats right this should be a testing grounds to see what can work

Sydney says:
I think we can't alienate traditional wrestling too much, it still must have the spirit of wwf wrestling or else it just ain't wrestling. We're trying to appeal to the hard core wrestling fans out there, but with a new interesting twist. To do straight wwf wrestling is just too boring.
Rhody Belo says:
I like the fact that maybe we can use the midget chars as the main char.. We can almost do the afro samurai kinda story using wrestling
Sydney says:
urban guerrilla pop
Sydney says:
I was thinking instead of a mutant wrestler... Have one big wrestler piggybacked by 6 midgets. Both opponents would have 6 midgets that hang on to a specially designed sling worn by the big carrier wrestler. The carriers would jump in the ring and the midgets would do tag teams on each other. They can link to each other and do chain style attacks. The signature move will be the 'meat whip' or the 'multiplex'.
Rhody Belo says:
the midgets are like armour in a way
Sydney says:
I was also thinking of a big traditional wrestler type. I was going to call him Texas Burger Boy. He'd walking into the ring eating those one pound burgers
Rhody Belo says:
he can look like a lucha dor with a Cowboy hat and always eating burgers even when hes fighting when he looses his burgers he loose his strength but the fan throws food he regains strength like popeye especially burgers. Its greatest fan is a hamburger mascot like ronald mcdonald or the king of burger king or a parody of grimmis
Sydney says:
mini nachos, I wonder if he could represent Burger King or McDs, endorsement. He'd have a cape with the logo on it
Rhody Belo says:
maybe Burger king seems more edgey right now
Sydney says:
He'd look like fat southern white trash, kinda like Hacksaw Jim Duggan but much fatter
Rhody Belo says:
give him a mullet with a mask
Sydney says:
I was thinking of a wrestler with a goalie mask on, kinda like that guy from Mad Max or Casey Jones from TMNT

schlock fest

2007-06-05T12:54:00.001-04:00

Whaaaaa?

FOBilicious: History of japanese chick fashion

2007-06-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

I've always tried to describe the whole kogal/ganguro/yamamba scene in Japan to my friends, but the only way to really understand it is to go there and see for yourself. But this video is the next best thing. I've not seen anything remotely like it outside of Japan. Social scientists will tell you it's a knee-jerk reaction to the traditionally austere female role in Japanese culture, they are the Japanese equivalent of the free lovin' easy riders of the 60s. A lost generation or bleeding edge feministas, regardless, it's damn ugly but refreshingly creative and eccentric, a real eyesore but you gotta admire their audacity and pure sass. Fugly and repulsive... yes, but these girls represent the most powerful gender class in Japan today and they know it. While I was in Japan during the height of the yamamba craze in '97, I couldn't believe the droves of them strutting the streets of Shibuya. I understand it's since been long on it's way out and I'm curious to find out what the latest extreme angry chick fashion is.

Prada anyone?

pop science idea

2007-06-04T15:20:00.000-04:00

Was discussing an interesting topic with a friend the other day. Posting this as a reference post.

Many technologies today are artificial analogues of comparable biological systems. That is to say, the camera is essentially a poor representation of the human eye, or the flash drive, data base or operating system clunky man-made abstractions of our brain. Indeed, all these technologies have greatly enhanced our collective human experience, but when matched with the acuity of the real human eye, or the shear processing power of an organic brain, they all fall way short.

Much of modern applied science has followed this notion of synthetic abstraction. However, instead of simulation, why not assimilation? Why not actually use a biological eye as a camera lense? or a chip implant that would harness the expansive memory features of our brain for its limitless storage capacity and raw processing power?

Of course the camera wouldn't literally have an eyeball in it, but would instead contain a biologically synthesized optic nerve with cones and rods instead of a CCCD sensor. The acuity would be optimized well beyond human scope to say that of a cat which has well documented night vision capabilities or a fly that has thousands of lenses packed into the space of a pinhead. The list of possible augmentations are endless.

To take the camera example a step further what's to say the images captured by this enhanced camera couldn't be wirelessly uploaded directly to our brains negating the need for roll film or a flash card. Can you imagine the limitless storage capacity a human brain offers capable of storing an entire life's experiences?

We are all walking computers and cameras, why not develop technologies that enhance these basic biological functions instead of trying to contrive ersatz versions of them? Or vice versa, use what evolution has created to enhance our synthetic technologies many fold.

This is obviously not a new idea and I have no concept of the mind boggling technical hurdles facing something like this but simply something that came up in conversation that I had never really given much thought for before. It certainly makes for an interesting jumping off point for science fiction geeks and otaku.

finally Ears

2007-06-02T17:43:00.001-04:00

Finally finished an approximation of the ear. By far the most difficult modeling task so far. Definitely not a great thing for nurbs.

This represents my 5th attempt and is a rough approximation of an ear. The problem areas included a huge buildup of isoparms along the front edge of the ear causing smoothing problems, the challenge was to keep the isoparm count down while not loosing detail. I was able to get the surface density down to 13 x 9 spans. The other problem area involved capturing that middle flap of cartilage that starts from the front edge of the ear and sweeps rearwards. While I can't speak for polys or subD's, nurbs has a tendancy to want to flow in a uniform direction, but that flap of cartilage interrupts the circular flow around the ear by curling in towards the middle. That was a pure sculpting challenge and I've come to realize nurbs are a total bitch for something as complex as an ear.

In a previous iteration, I had sculpted a decent ear, even matching the right number of spans to interface with the head patches. The problem was, the ear isoparms did not line up to the head isoparms. They were so off in position that it was impossible to align them without fucking up the ear.

My first attempt came from a tutorial which involved duplicating the edge surface isoparms that defined the ear opening into curves. Those curves were then attached and closed. The resulting curve was then duplicated numerous times to form the ring profiles of the ear. Once lofted, the surface was then properly sculpted, detached and stitched to the head patches. This didn't work because positioning the profile curves with any accuracy was impossible, but that was to be expected, and the sculpting process introduced a lot of smoothing problems, not to mention the final ear isoparms did not align evenly with the head isoparms. The other problem involved the final stitch process, the ear was nowhere near properly aligned to the head patches and the stitching became problematic.

Someone else suggested I build the ear profiles out from the head isoparms and then do a radial loft. This was the worst solution as the resulting loft not only introduced so many ring isoparms, the isoparm flow looked like a wavy mass of uncontrollable spaghetti.

The method that eventually worked for me was to build out tangentially aligned 1 degree curves from each head isoparm, lofting them and then closing the lofted surface. I then strategically started inserting ring isoparms and pulling the cv's out slowly sculpting the ear. I was careful to keep the isoparm count down and made sure the difficult sculpting areas were dealt with first so that they would not become problems later on when there were a greater number of isoparms to deal with. Finally when finished sculpting, I detached the ear surfaces and was able to easily stitch them to the head patches.

The next step is to take the ear into mudbox or zbrush for more accurate deep grooving.

Another tweak on the nose to properly shape the nostril and this head should be done.

No matter what pains I took to accurately sketch the character in orthographic, it still contained monstrously glaring flaws in accuracy. I now realize the modeler must also have an intimate knowledge of anatomy. The concept sketch is exactly that, a 2 dimensional abstraction. At best a roughly measured guideline for the modeler who then must translate the spirit of that sketch into 3 dimensions. Therein lies the true skill of the modeler and what sets a good one apart from a mediocre ones.

eye socket

2007-05-25T15:59:00.000-04:00

Re-sculpting the eye socket. Will build a quick ear and surface the nose area before converting to polys and refining in subD's. Should be a good segway into zbrush or mudbox glory.

Looks nothing like the concept sketches or how I envisioned it, but 'wok the hey' as one jolly television personality once said.

smooth shade problem

2007-05-24T01:36:00.000-04:00

stitch this

2007-05-21T22:54:00.001-04:00

head2

2007-05-18T23:44:00.000-04:00

Lara Croft... Is that you?

2007-05-18T18:23:00.000-04:00

Speaking of chicks with guns...

GERMANY LARA CROFT-epa01012351 British actress Karima Adebibe poses as 'Lara Croft' in Berlin's central train station, Germany, 18 May 2007. The 'Tomb Raider' computer game character 'Lara Croft' was developed ten years ago by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. EPA/JOHANNES EISELE

I hate patches

2007-05-17T00:41:00.000-04:00

Doesn't even look like the concept drawing...

IJN YAMATO

2007-05-13T15:17:00.000-04:00

A promotional film for last years Japanese film about the IJN Yamato, the largest battleship ever build. This thing was a behemoth, mounting 18" guns, the largest caliber ever mounted on a ship of the line in any navy. This film is all about celebrating past glory. But the ironic thing about it is the Yamato was never used offensively and died in a suicide attack with only enough fuel for a one way ticket to hell at the cost of several thousand of her crew. Her sister ship Musashi did not fare much better and yet another Yamato hull, Shinano, was converted to an aircraft carrier but was lost on her maiden voyage.

The film actually looks like crap with the over the top acting, uninspired direction and sappy story, but maybe worth watching for the ship.

CG stuff

2007-05-13T14:57:00.000-04:00

Found these movie trailers that contain a few interesting cg scenes. I notice Japan has recently sunk a gajillion dollars in features films recalling the glory days of the war. Just last year a film about the biggest battleship ever built, the IJN Yamato came out. For that film they built a full scale mock up of the ships main deck. Sappy sentimentalism or revisionist jingoism? As far as I know, these films haven't done as expected at the box office.

business idea: experimental marketing (Utility poles and free speech)

2007-05-13T13:00:00.000-04:00

Below is an interesting article from the Sunday Star about posting on city utility poles. I happened across it while chowing down on some Sunday vitels. A pleasant surprise considering I was discussing just such an idea a few days ago.

Utility poles and free speech

If it were a war, as some suggest, this would be one of its fronts: A weatherbeaten utility pole at the corner of Queen and Bathurst, hundreds upon hundreds of rusty staples clinging to its splintering girth.

They're the legacy of decades of posters announcing everything from the disappearance of a much-loved pet to a garage sale to a fledgling band's gig to, on one recent afternoon, a curious proposition to "Breathe Less, Live Longer" (from the Buteyko Breathing Association of Canada).

These are the familiar, the traditional: neighbourhood communiqués writ just large enough for locals to notice, then take or leave.

But on main arteries, like Queen, King, Yonge, College and Bloor streets, neighbourhood notices are withering beneath a flexing of corporate muscle. A recent survey: Companies like Gillette and Amp'd Mobile, blockbuster movies like The Reaping, or mega-clubs such as Koolhaus have pasted over the humble one-offs that sprout up from the grassroots.

"It's been a real shift," says Matt Blackett, creative director of Spacing magazine, which grew out of a campaign to save postering. (The magazine's first issue, in 2003, the slogan: "Freedom of speech is a thousand times more beautiful than clean lamp posts.")

But paving the way for corporate takeover is not what Blackett and company had in mind. "The ones who can afford massive outdoor advertising campaigns are the ones who do the most postering now," he says.

On every second pole on Queen, a massive baby-blue poster with bright orange lettering heralds "Freedom," a sprawling, corporate-sponsored musical event at the Guvernment. Underneath it, a handful of smaller postings are cast in darkness, invisible.

Help is at hand, at least in theory, in the city's current postering bylaw, which is in limbo until the city's new street furniture is installed. Under that bylaw, the city draws a distinction between commercial and community postering. Commercial posters would still be allowed on the new street furniture's kiosks, leaving the utility poles entirely to the community.

But with no date for the furniture set, the postering scene is in chaos. "The people I've ended up protecting are breaching all the etiquette," says Blackett.

For years, posterers jockeying for patches of pole space adhered to a common courtesy: If a rival event is current, don't paste over and don't tear down.

Then, suddenly, postering became identified with a type of urban cool that became saleable to marketers and their moneyed clients.

"That's how we sell ourselves to clients – `take a walk on the wild side with us, but know that your posters are going to be properly maintained,'" says Brian Irwin, the general manager of Grassroots Advertising, a Toronto-based company that does posters for big-name clients like Alliance Atlantis, ClearChannel and Universal Music.

Grassroots is one of a half-dozen postering companies in the city. (Grassroots, though, only posters construction hoardings, not utility poles.) Irwin estimates that the number of posters his company puts out annually is well into the hundreds of thousands. "We should be in the printing business," he said. "It's a ton of paper."

All of it, of course, pasted up in the great outdoors. "It's a huge problem," says Chris Phibbs, in the mayor's office. City crews scrape utility poles on a regular basis, with the mind to taking down the commercial postings. "Strictly speaking, they're not legal," she says. The city has the authority to charge the postering companies for the cost of removal, but rarely does so.

The city means to leave the community postings up, but on thickly layered poles, a clean scrape is usually the only option. On a neighbourhood level, some Business Improvement Associations, like those in Little Italy and Roncesvalles Village, carry out their own poster-cleansing, and tend not to discriminate between community and commercial.

Not long after, of course, the posters are back – more, brighter and bigger than before.

Irwin's posters are constantly being covered by others. "It's free rein out there," he says. "We're in a bit of a street war, to be honest."

On residential side streets, the skirmish does abate, in favour of community dispatches. "It's the lost cat ones that always get me," Blackett says. "They're extremely personal. They mean so much more to me than a huge ad for some nightclub. This is how a community talks to itself."

business idea: marketing experiment

2007-05-09T19:00:00.001-04:00

Sydney says:
We should photocopy our work, staple it all together and sell them at the snail for 50 cents a pop
Rhody Belo says:
I think it would sell actually
Sydney says:
Actually we should do these mock up comic book covers, blow them up like posters and post them up all over the place, get people really interested. We can even set up aweb page to take subscriptions but in the end the comic doesn't exist. We create all this hype over a non-existant comic that only exists as a few nice cover posters
Sydney says:
yes fraud. The covers would look so damn cool
that everyone will be passing money over on the website
Rhody Belo says:
hahaha...good gimmic
actually you maybe on to something
Sydney says:
maybe even publish a few juicy pages. We would take the time to really embellish it. How much do you think we could take in with subscriptions alone?
Sydney says:
Just a couple of guys and some printing costs
Rhody Belo says:
maybe then we can release a comic if the hype demand gets really overwhelming
Sydney says:
true, if there is real interest we could actually make a comic
Sydney says:
if we really want to scam them, we could do a half assed job on the comic and walk away with all this money for little effort
Rhody Belo says:
yah you maybe on to something even if it doesn't take off there would be some nice art without pressure
Sydney says:
We could advertise and post on the internet to increase the hype. Hahaha, I'm sure we'd get sued if we didn't produce anything, lol
Sydney says:
but just the really nice cover posters would create the hype without having to go to a main stream publisher like Marvel
Rhody Belo says:
I like doing pip work anyways better then thinking of a story
Sydney says:
Rhody, I you don't mind my asking, why do you think Dave's comic is not doing so well? What is missing? story? art? marketing?
Rhody Belo says:
fan base and marketing
Sydney says:
maybe a bit of everything?
Rhody Belo says:
exposure too
Sydney says:
What about this? Rather than go to a publisher with an idea, create the comic first, then go to a publisher. That way, you can really embellish it without worry of a deadline
Rhody Belo says:
actually your right
Sydney says:
Really make the story and art really stand out with Craig mullins quality designs and rendered art and a really well thought out story and layouts, then go to a publisher
Rhody Belo says:
hmmm...are you good with writing?
Sydney says:
Nah, not really but I do think about it from time to time, mostly as background stories to my characters and tech designs
Rhody Belo says:
hmmm....me too
Sydney says:
I think if the focus is on quality then, you have an edge over everyone else who is publishing out there. It would have to be a labor of love tho
Rhody Belo says:
yeah...for sure
Sydney says:
If it takes an average of a day for a comic book artist to pump out a page maybe instead embellish it for a week or two per page. It would take awhile, but pay dividends in the end. It would be a true graphic novel. It would be not be considered throw away art but a true collectors art book
Rhody Belo says:
money in the beginning stages a rare...but after a while chances are fan base will pick up
Sydney says:
I think it would require hundreds/thousands of hours of working for free at least initially, consider it is a hobby or fun pastime.
Rhody Belo says:
yeah
Sydney says:
ok maybe not. Maybe when we were young and stupid, lol.
Rhody Belo says:
fun and at times work, free work, lol
Sydney says:
I just see too many comics out there that were just too rushed, it's obvious from looking at the art, what a shame. I'm sure there are fans out there that would mind waiting for better quality
Rhody Belo says:
lets do the pin up, and cover hype thing
Sydney says:
yah, that sounds like fun, We don't even need to do the subscription thing. We just paste up really hot images around town and on the web. People will wonder if it's a comic and if it is, where can I buy it? That's all we need, interest
Rhody Belo says:
create a web buzz
Sydney says:
exactly
Sydney says:
It just means getting exposure, even tho there is no product
Rhody Belo says:
even if the hype is fake at first...fake it till we make it
Sydney says:
It's better than selling posters at the comicon
Rhody Belo says:
we can do that too, Yoyo makes money at those events
Sydney says:
if we post them outside publicly and at comic book shops then we get the greater public looking at it
Sydney says:
lets face it, not every comic book fan goes to these comicons but they all go down to Queen street, they all walk on the streets.
Rhody Belo says:
your right'
Sydney says:
And not only fanboys, but everyone else who might like to read in general (non fanboys). What greater kind of local exposure is there than to have these posters posted on every street corner
Sydney says:
Only problem is printing costs, that's really expensive. We could spend a lazy summer afternoon walking all over town stapling/gluing these thing on every wall and lamp post
Rhody Belo says:
have you heard of ash can comics?
Sydney says:
ashcans are photocopy jobs no?
Rhody Belo says:
yeah, we can do a low cost version too
Sydney says:
I see rave posters all over the place, that's how they advertise, it's all by word of mouth
Rhody Belo says:
thats right
Sydney says:
Heck that might lead to T-shirts. We could create a brand without a product, a style, a look, based on the posters and everyone will be scratching their heads, where's the product? But who cares, the brand looks so cool, I want a t-shirt
Rhody Belo says:
oh that too
Sydney says:
This way we have full control, no messing around with a publisher or 3rd party shit. We could then launch a website selling these t-shirts and vinyl toys, lol. It seems more of a cash cow than the traditional way of spending ungodly hours drawing a comic book and then trying to sell half a million copies. Less work, greater potential for profit doing it my proposed way
Rhody Belo says:
yes
Sydney says:
more fun too. We could create several lines of brands, one manga, one marvel like, etc. Wow, so many comic titles but no comic in the end, just an aesthetic, that is based on comic books
Sydney says:
We have a marketing plan and a product all in the last 5 minutes, lol, haha, can't believe I thought of that just off the top of my head
Sydney says:
My only worry is the printing, cuz the posters have to look very appealing, that's the grab. They gotta be large and glossy. People have to notice it from across the street, this a form of local viral marketing
Rhody Belo says:
how they get so many of those rave flyers on the street, the quality looks pretty good for something throw away
Sydney says:
so we need to post tons of em on every street corner in the downtown core
Rhody Belo says:
see if we can put them on the store windows too
Sydney says:
yes, exactly store windows, cool clothing stores, books stores and even restaurants. The cool thing is, we can take our time producing this material in the first place. If it really picks up, we can turn it into a legit business. It's like we're generating our fanbase first, our client list
Sydney says:
Even better, we can then use this fanbase to create the comic. They can generate ideas for us. We can do polls etc. I can see this going in so many different directions, so many forms of cash milking. Then we can form our own Udon. We can call it Tofu
Rhody Belo says:
hahaha lets try it out yeah...sounds like fun
Sydney says:
Basically we're creating our own franchise. Actually for a first idea I'm thinking of creating a comic book cover using hi end 3d rendering. Instead of the traditional photoshop job. Have you seen anything like that before?
Rhody Belo says:
not really
Sydney says:
Our comic brand will have to be really funky cool, like hip hop kewl, the art will have to be really attractive but very different. I'm thinking we need to stay away from the tradition styles. If it's traditional, then people won't really think much of it. It'll just be another comic. But since we're creating a brand vision, we can go in a totally different direction. eg. totally 3D hi end renders.
Rhody Belo says:
i agree, tend to the urbanitez
Sydney says:
hahaha, this is funny
Sydney says:
You ever heard of flat eric?
Rhody Belo says:
nope
Sydney says:
Flat eric is this stuffed animal that was used in a music video, check it out on youtube. Point is, the doll became very popular despite having no product, just the image of the doll and the associated music. It became bigger than the music itself. It was used in a line of levis commercials and the dolls sold very well. It became the product.

NOTES

-Urban gallery, a form of art, 24 hour exposure
-We decide content instead of others
-Various artistic styles
-You've been punked sort of feel
-stickers, post cards
-Traditional comic business model sux because there are so many middle men and so much work for such little exposure and no profit.
-Similar to how movie posters generate hype, but this time, no product, sort of like a marketing experiment.

-marketing company that posts funky stickers around town for client businesses

-A business model that has potential to generate revenue from various venues instead of a single income source that could dry up.

-Good way of leveraging existing portfolios.

-Lots of high end art out there that never sees the light of day. Mostly found on industry and user specific websites.

-Problem, it is too local? Not enough of a market to support such an idea?

-With a few artists, each producing a new piece every other month, we'd have one poster per month.

-poster could encourage people to send a text message over their cellular phones or an email addy. Or a web page url. Tear off tabs under each poster?

-Web page could sell larger better quality versions of the poster. paypal setup.

feet

2007-05-08T19:46:00.001-04:00

legs

2007-05-07T14:36:00.000-04:00

Threw down some circle primitives and skinned them, hence the tubular look, no muscle definition yet. Wanted to check the proportions on the legs. I had to lower the knees a whole knee length and thicken the legs.

2007-05-06T22:27:00.000-04:00

lomo

2007-05-05T12:19:00.000-04:00

Playing around with trying to embed wmv files. I think it turned out well. I came across these videos 5-6 years ago and thought they were pretty hip in a crude sort of way. Two amateur gaijin videographers in Tokyo walking around with their lomographs macking on chicks and chillin' in Shibuya. They went on to host a gallery exhibit of their work in Japan. (blog: HERE)

BRIEF HISTORY OF LOMOGRAPHY
During the 70s Japan began mass producing cheap yet very high quality cameras. Not to be outdone, Mr Panfiloff, Director of the powerful LOMO Russian Arms and Optical factory, decided - every respectable Communist should have one too, and thus was born the LOMO KOMPAKT AUTOMAT for the pleasure and glory of the Soviet population. It was essentially a really bad copy of it's Japanese counterpart. Nevertheless, the Soviets and their Socialist playmates in Vietnam, Cuba and East Germany snapped happily away throughout the nineteen eighties.

Weakened by dirt cheap, battery-powered imports from Asia, the LC-A's popularity eventually waned, and was available only at quirky, old-school camera shops. It was at an establishment such as this, where a group of Viennese students happened upon the adorable camera, and bought a couple for fun. Back on the resplendent streets of Prague, they zipped through the first few rolls of film: shooting from above and through their legs, shooting from the hip, and even sometimes looking through the viewfinder.

Back in Vienna they soon had the whole bag of film developed at the trusty corner supermarket (super cheapo!) and received a real surprise: Thousands of small, amusing, sad, garish shots of their little tour, wonderful focused and unfocussed images fresh from life in the Czech Republic. The images were amazing, dazzling all those present with a crushing sense of excitement - the likes of which they had never felt before.

Soon, the best sources (and worst-guarded security posts) of the former Eastern Bloc were employed for the clandestine import of these little wonders. The Lomographic Society (Lomographische Gesellschaft) was soon founded in Vienna, with the aim of spreading the message of LOMOGRAPHY throughout the globe.

Truly, the whole progression was more spontaneous and hyperactive than could have ever been planned - a vibrant community grew without bounds; driven by the insatiable thirst for wild, vibrant, shocking images.

Since then, this POS excuse of a camera has gone on to become that fashion item that no discerning hipster can live without with it's cheap plastic body and unpredictably garish color output.

production chick

2007-04-27T10:36:00.000-04:00

Came across a gun totting chick concept made for the PSP game Afterburner: Black Falcon. Obvious use of the the Charlie's Angels theme.

You can see more images HERE.

Use of a stock photo for reference is apparent, a common production shortcut.

new head profile

2007-04-23T19:08:00.000-04:00

I squished the profile width wise. While building the side ortho it became very apparent the side head profile was way too wide. When I flattened the face, I should have also narrowed the entire head profile.

Final Fantasy VII

2007-04-22T01:20:00.000-04:00

A friend recently pointed out the Final Fantasy VII cinematics on youtube. Square Soft seem to outdo themselves each release. Has a real Star Wars feel to it that I find appealing. Also has a strong romantic element to it that gives it an asian soap opera flair to it that might not be so palatable in the West. Part of the reason why IMO, the Final Fantasy franchise is not as big a hit here in North America. The following is just a few of the dozens of FMVs on Youtube. I've embedded the first one. I've also found an interesting but really short development video for FF VIII

The Attack of the Bahamut:

The Epilogue at the end: HERE

Fall of Bahamut: HERE

Battle with Gabranth: HERE

Intro: HERE

Narrow Escape: HERE

Final Fantasy VIII making of: HERE

nude orthos

2007-04-19T21:34:00.001-04:00

side profile

2007-04-17T16:41:00.000-04:00

Started the side profile. In the top image, I've line up the horizontal measurements and added the hair, yet I feel the side profile silhouette doesn't match the front view, too hawkish.

In the middle image I've flattened the face a little, reduced the slope of the forehead, softened the brow, reduced the size of the nose, reshaped the lips, pulled back the chin, packed a little more meat under the jaw and added another bang to her hair.

The bottom image is the finished head.

REFERENCE: suckerfish drop down menus

2007-04-16T21:01:00.000-04:00

I spent the entire weekend losing sleep over the drop down menus for this blog. One can easily create drop downs using the 'select' html tag which produces a standard microsoft drop down widget. However, the actual look of the drop down is not controlled by the web browser, but by the OS, hence it's editable attributes are limited. One can use a java script to alter it's looks and behaviour, but that is just way too much overhead.

A few years back someone wrote a standards compliant drop down menu that doesn't rely on java and is entirely in css and dhtml. It's called the suckerfish drop down because their example page was about, um... suckerfish. These menus are built around html unordered lists. Since then, they've cleaned the code up in a version called 'son of suckerfish' and now have a more functional version called 'grandson of suckerfish' or 'sons of suckerfish' which adds additional functionality such as keyboard support.

Son of suckerfish tutorial: HERE

I came across an example suckerfish drop down written by John Labriola.

John Labriola suckerfish demo: HERE

I cut and pasted his sample code into my blog. It worked!

Here's where it got messy. I went in and mucked around trying get rid of the borders. What a mistake! Everything got broken. If I could get it working in IE, then Firefox didn't work and vice versa. To make a long story short, it wrecked an entire weekend. Finally I stripped everything out and pasted the orginal code back in.

To complicate matters, IE, is not standards compliant and on top of that, it's buggy. I encountered 2 problems with the suckerfish menus on IE. First, the menus don't work at all because of a mouse hover problem specific to IE. The remedy is a javascript patch job and the use of IE specific conditionals so that the script doesn't get in the way of the other browser types such as Firfox, Opera, Safari and to a lesser degree Netscape. These conditional statements were developed by Microsoft specifically for IE and are considered css hacks.

Second, when working, the drop downs get stuck and do not refresh on the mouse out event.

IE7 suckerfish fix: HERE

All in all a weekend in hell.

Tokyo Memories

2007-04-13T14:35:00.000-04:00

I found these images on danny choo's site. An interesting otaku page.

The girl seems unperturbed by the fact that there is an Imperial Stormtrooper relaxing over a bowl of ramen next to her as if it were an everyday occurrence in Tokyo... or maybe it is... a vision of our distant future. Such absurdity.

On our trip, Nick and I would hang out at these small mom and pop soba-ya (noodle shop specializing in soba) at the end of each day. You put a few yen in the coin machine on the right, make a selection, out pops a ticket at the bottom, hand ticket to the guy behind the counter and in a few minutes you're enjoying a hot bowl of kitsune soba and an ice bottle of Kirin Malt. Typical Japanese inefficient efficiency. We'd lounge around pretending to be local bosozuko (thugs), but looking and dressing like the turistas that we really were. Such absurdity.

Just another 9-5 day. I don't look like I hate my job do I?... naaaah

TRANSFORMATION

2007-04-11T13:52:00.001-04:00

A classic werewolf tale. By day a college co-ed at the prestigious St. Cuthbert's Catholic Seminary, by night a man-thing that hangs out at seedy gay/lesbian bars, likes to masturbate in public washrooms and excels at doing calculus in it's head. It's transformation involves growing chest, leg and arm hairs, thickened musculature and vocal chords and loss of hair on the head. This is beginning to sound more like a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ego versus id, or just an extreme case of split personality disorder.

REFERENCE: FRAG-12 fin stabilized shotgun shell

2007-04-11T03:30:00.000-04:00

This thing looks like it came out of a Shirow comic.

An exciting new family of 12-gauge (12ga.) shotgun rounds on the U.S. military horizon to go with the AA12 Shotgun, and it's called the FRAG-12. There are three members of the FRAG-12 munition family: the FRAG-12 High Explosive (HE), FRAG-12 High Explosive Fragmenting Antipersonnel (HEFA, or HE-FA), and FRAG-12 High Explosive Armor-Piercing (HEAP, or HE-AP). This unique and exciting shotgun ammunition has been designed and developed by the Experimental Cartridge Company, Ltd. and Action Manufacturing Inc.

My Fav Commercial

2007-04-11T03:14:00.000-04:00

Thought I'd try embedding a youtube vid. It just gets funnier every time I watch it. Ahh, those funny Asian people.

REFERENCE: M-32 MULTIPLE GRENADE LAUNCHER

2007-04-11T03:04:00.000-04:00

6 shot 40mm grenade launcher, the M-32 is a modified Milkor MGL-140. It can put all 6 rounds on target in under 3 seconds, and can fire "normal" M433 40mm grenades or specialty rounds. Specialty rounds include HELLHOUND rounds with twice the lethal radius of the M433, which will breach doors and kill anything behind them; DRACO thermobaric rounds; and even HUNTIR rounds with cameras in them that descend on a parachute and send back video.

REFERENCE: HK 416

2007-04-11T02:36:00.000-04:00

The Heckler and Koch 416. The AR15 chassis has become the de facto system for most western armies. However it's has major flaws, the biggest being problems with it's direct gas impingement system which requires constant cleaning and lubrication to prevent jamming. H&K rebuilt the Colt M4 carbine from scratch improving everything from it's gas system to more accurate and robust sights. Basically an M4 on steroids. The M4 fires using a system that redirects gas from the expended round to eject it and reload another. The 416 uses a gas-operated piston that physically pushes the bolt back to eject the round and load another. Carbon buildup from the M4's gas system has plagued the rifle for years, resulting in some close calls with Soldiers in combat whose rifles jammed at critical moments.
H&K claims the 416 now has the rugged dependability that was once the sole domain of the AK47. The 416 can be submerged in water and buried in sand and still fire reliably and even upside down. Water on most other weapons would cause the barrel to explode from the temperature differential, but the 416 is able to dissipate it's hot gases away from the barrel and reciever.

The 416 is currently deployed with Delta operators in Iraq, but due to political reasons is not being adopted by the rest of the Armed services.

REFERENCE: WALTHER OSP .22

2007-04-10T23:59:00.000-04:00

On the topic of guns, the KRISS in the previous post reminded me a lot of the Walther OSP (Olympic Sharpshooters Pistol), another unconventional looking gun. While i don't care for the handle, I find the barrel and trigger grouping very appealing. I recently saw Tommy Lee Jones (the Riddler) wielding a chrome plated OSP in Batman 3: Batman Forever.

REFERENCE: TDI's KRISS SUBMACHINE GUN

2007-04-10T23:08:00.000-04:00

Found some pics of the awesome KRISS submachine gun from TDI Inc. There has not been an evolutionary change like this in the submachine gun since the vintage WW2 M1A1 Thompson, 50 years ago. Firing the .45 APC round, the Thompson kicked like a mule and suffered from terrible muzzle rise. Since then submachine guns like the UZI and the MP5 have fired the smaller, less lethal 9mm parabellum. The KRISS has returned to the .45 round with very little recoil using it's patented Super V technology. Essentially, the recoil is deflected downwards mechanically. I've added a pic of the FN P90, a much older design for comparative purposes. The new aesthetic of gun design.

OLD OLD HEAD

2007-04-10T23:06:00.000-04:00

Was digging through my archive recently and came across these pics of a child's head I started to model almost 10 years ago in Maya 1.0 when patch modelling was rather sketchy. Unfortunately my hard drive died soon after and all I have are these two low rez pics. Oh well.

Work related stuff

2007-04-10T00:13:00.001-04:00

Was asked to put together a quick slide for the marketing boys upstairs. Autodesk is putting on a demo for some deep pocket institutional investors like Merill Lynch.

Smaller Eyes, Narrow Head

2007-04-09T01:42:00.000-04:00

Revised the characters face, actually a hack of my original. I must have been on qualoids when I sketched that initial man looking thing cuz it looked pretty good at the time. Hopefully this one actually looks better... lol... ahem.

Reduced the size of the eyes and narrowed the head even more, the eyes are now considerably smaller than the original perspective sketch. I suspect that when modeled in 3D, the larger than life eyes will look even more pronounced than the 2D sketch. Nevertheless, the eyes are still abnormally large anthropomorphically. I also fixed the nose up around the bridge and widened the nostrils, fixed the hair and softened the jaw.

GEARS OF WAR CONCEPT ART

2007-04-04T22:55:00.000-04:00

Here's a neat link to the concept art for Gears of War. Much of this art comes with the game but it's nice to see the artist posting decent digital images. While Gears is considered a landmark game on many levels, the only concepts that really appeal to me are the sniper rifle ans some of the vehicular design.

GEARS OF WAR CONCEPT ART

ORTHO

2007-04-03T19:02:00.001-04:00

Scanned an old front and back view from way back. I have the side view too which I will post later.

As far as names go, I'm thinking of some kind of new age name as opposed to a traditional one. Just as Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple or other recognizable ones like Puffy or Blossom. Again it would better match her non-conformist personality.

Character Modeling 2 - Gears of War

2007-03-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

I picked up the first book and plan on getting this too. Looks like a good book for our purposes:

www.ballisticpublishing.com Gears of War

Game Engine Links

2007-03-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

Syd,

Check out some links involved for just bringing our character into a game engine. As discussed, there are 2, maybe 3 engines that I would like to port this character into. They are the Unreal3 engine - yet to be released but eta this year, the Source Engine, already released and the Doom3/Quake 4 Engine.

Unreal Links
unrealtechnology.com
udn.epicgames.com
wiki.beyondunreal.com

Source Links
developer.valvesoftware.com 1
developer.valvesoftware.com 2

Doom Links
www.modwiki.net
iddevnet.com
www.doom3world.org

update

2007-03-25T01:37:00.000-04:00

3D from Massive Black

2007-03-21T14:39:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to some 3D work from those bastards at Massive Black, the prolific outsource concept studio. They mostly show off their 2D art but here's a rare glimpse into their 3D stuff.

TITAN QUEST

sloperama.com

2007-03-18T01:05:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting site on how to become a game designer, you've probably seen it before. Very discouraging, but first things first, let's just finish this character.

SLOPERAMA.COM