i-eclectica.org

Via businessweek.com: on April 1 (!), Germany’s ‘Museum Plagiarius‘ in Solingen near Cologne opened it doors to the public to showcase knockoffs. Its message: Plagiarism kills innovation. Permanently exhibiting some 300 original products together with inferior rip-offs produced by unscrupulous companies out for a quick buck, its founders are determined to protect small designers from counterfeiters that stifle innovation. Unlike the Musée de la Contrefaçon in Paris though, which exhibits fake versions of some of the world’s biggest brands, the Museum Plagiarius focuses on copies of products from little-known companies, which lack the money and brand recognition to promote and protect themselves.

The museum has a wide collection of items to choose from. For 30 years, the museum’s co-founder, Rido Busse, has given the annual Plagiarius award to a handful of unscrupulous product rip-offs. Busse, a design professor, created the award in 1977 when he discovered that a Japanese company had copied a set of scales he had made for the German interior design company Soehnle Waagen. He decided to publicly shame the Japanese outfit by symbolically awarding them a prize—a black garden gnome with a golden nose—which he handed out at the Hanover Fair in the presence of the only journalist who decided to turn up. (Naturally, the counterfeiter didn’t show up to accept the award; it’s safe to say that was one bizarre ceremony.) But the idea caught on. The next year several other companies submitted their original designs to Busse along with the rip-offs. Thirty reporters turned up to the ceremony, and the annual Plagiarius awards were born.[businessweek.com]

According to business.com, the overall figures are quite staggering:

The World Customs Organization and the European Commission both estimate that 7% of worldwide commerce is counterfeit, causing global losses of up to $500 billion and several hundred thousand legitimate jobs each year. Both agencies concur that the problem is getting worse. “Of course, each country has laws designed to protect companies against counterfeit organizations,” says Busse. “In Germany, the maximum sentence is five years in prison, but the reality is that not many outfits are convicted. We’re trying to change things for the better, and for the fairer.”

For a slide show of this year’s Plagiarius Award winners, click here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and, amongst other things, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and a writer of books and articles. His blog has many of his talks, papers, videos and articles, including this well-written and quite witty one: “The Perimeter of Ignorance“. In it he looks at the god-factor in science as well as its workings outside of science, where it tries to discredit it. The name of the current incarnation of that factor is of course called ‘intelligent design’.

deGrasse Tyson traces back in history the role god played in science, and he dissects and extracts the core difference between the past and today: then divinity was invoked as ‘god of the gaps’ while now it is simply an expression of ignorance and misdirected messianic fervour. He revisits the understandings of Newton, Laplace, Huygens and Galileo (and also mentions others) and points out that they all were driven by one thing: a passion for and belief in scientific discovery - god only came into the game when they reached the boundaries of their own understanding; and god even then filled the gap only until someone else came along who was able to push the boundaries a bit further.

Intelligent design unfortunately does not have that level of intelligence and therefore desire for exploration; it is happy to cloak its own ignorance and dumbness in the mantle of resigning reality to the hands of a mystery that does not require further investigation - it’s like going back to the dark Middle Ages. Whatever we cannot explain through scientific methods, is attributed to “some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster”, a being that creates or enables all the things in the physical world.

Why do these ‘intelligent design’ adherents though accept one-sidedly only accept the “things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand”, asks deGrasse Tyson. “Why don’t they also tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence? “What comedian designer” for example, “configured the region between our legs—an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?” Or why don’t we have eight arms, which would enable us to “safely drive a car while simultaneously talking on a cell phone, changing the radio station, applying makeup, sipping a drink, and scratching our left ear”? And his list goes on …

“Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself … Yet people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it’s a good antidepressant to think so”, but contrary to intelligent designer claims, it’s not science. And neither is the embrace of ignorance by drawing a line in the sand through conscribing the too-complex aspects of reality into the sacred and untouchable realm of a higher intelligence. “How presumptuous [is it] … to claim that if I can’t solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born”.

“Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance”, or as Dan Neil said in his article In God and Darwin we Trust, “Intelligent Design is lipstick on the pig of Creationism”. I couldn’t agree more.

a couple of products designed by hironao tsuboi, which i think are kind of ingenious. one is called the lamp lamp, a 30W bulb with two sets of screw threads; it certainly would be a brief topic for party guests. another is an umbrella that cleverly doubles as its own stand.

born in tokyo in 1980 and graduated from ‘tama art university’ in 2004, tsuboi established ‘hironao tsuboi design’ in 2006. he is the art director/designer of 100% Inc., where he currently works with japanese and international colleagues on various projects. tsuboi received a number of design awards.

Via Engadgetnet - what a stupid stunt: Motorola apparently supports some guy called Rod Bader in climbing Mount Everest and making a phone call from the summit (via a tower in China with clear line of sight). Well, I’m struggling to get a signal where I live, which is suburbia in the hills surrounding a capital city; am I also supposed to climb mountain peaks for better reception? Marketing always sucks, and in this case dollars would certainly be better spent in developing a product that amplifies weak signals to a point where they can become useful carriers - without becoming a health hazard, of course.

This is quite a funny take on something almost everyone knows from first hand experience … but I better stop surfing and blogging now, so I can get my stuff done