i-eclectica.org

Liverpool is getting a new museum, based on 3XN’s winning proposal. It will be built at one of the city’s most prominent development sites, within the Liverpool’s World Heritage site which was inscribed by UNESCO last year. The building is conceived as inclined or elevated platforms, gradually forming a sculptural structure. It will be fully accessible and will contribute to the public promenade flow along the Docks. Situated at the Pier Head, next to ‘The Three Graces’ (Royal Liver Building, Cunard Building and Port of Liverpool Building), the museum will be visible from both the river and the city.The Museum of Liverpool will become the World’s leading city history museum, showcasing social history and popular culture and will look at Britain and the world through the eyes of Liverpool. Hope is that it will attract at least 750.000 visitors on a yearly basis, and that it will help Liverpool to be resurrected to new grand times while creating a new and attractive image for the city.

Adaptation to the site and a clear distinction between new and existing buildings is essential in a sensitive and listed environment. Architecture true to its own time is the only way the area’s history stays visible; pastiches that mime the existing buildings will inevitably obscure the picture. The distinction is furthermore achieved by using smaller size, lower height and a formal contemporary language. This makes The Three Graces and Albert Dock stand out and maintain their visual power, while the waterfront maintains its characteristic skyline. Distinction does not rule out harmony. Harmony is achieved by a balanced use of materials such as a natural stone in keeping with what can already be found in the area, and by planning the new building according to existing public flow lines along the promenade in order not to block any movement patterns. The new building creates protected outdoor spaces and indoor view points towards the city’s attractions.

The museum will be a focal point of 2008 when Liverpool becomes European Capital of Culture. It is with this impetus that the first phase of the museum must be complete in October of the celebration year. After the Capital of Culture Year, phase two, the exhibition fit out will begin with the museum completion scheduled for April 2010.

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20 years - that’s the age difference between the IBM hard drive on the left, and the SD Card on the right; both feature a maximum storage capacity of 1 Gb. Apparently though, a museum in Norway has a 1Mb IBM drive in their collection; size: about 1 meter in diameter! But apart from size differences, the difference in costs would be quite interesting; I’m sure the 1Gb drive would not have been available for $30 or less 20 years ago .

[via Forever geek]

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I do remember the crossed-hands illusion: holding my arms out in front of me and crossing them over, rotating my hands so my palms face each other, then meshing my fingers together, and slowly rotating my hands up between my arms so I’m looking at my knuckles. Then either asking someone to point to one of my middle or ring fingers or to touch on of them with the tip of my nose and attempt to move it. It is rather hard not to move the wrong one or, in other words, to avoid minor failure of my body schema.

Body schema is the mental memory image of our body, built up from previous impressions of touch, vision and a body-wide network of proprioceptive sensors that monitor positions of the body and its parts. In the crossed-hands illusion the schema fails because the left hand has taken the position of the right hand; therefore when pointing to the left ring finger, the brain creates an impulse to move the right one.

But there is an even more strange schema failure in the rubber-hand illusion which fools people into thinking that a fake hand (or even a piece of wood or a table) is part of their own body (see video below).

What we have here is just another example for how our brain creates reality, even to a point where it totally diverges from what is perceived as reality - by overriding its own proprioception signals. In this particular case of concentrating on the rubber hand, our brain assigns a higher priority to visual input than to touch. This may not be surprising given that visual information seems its preferred mode when creating mental body maps as the following example affirms. In a variation of the rubber-hand illusion Frank Durgin of Swarthmore College left the unseen real hand totally alone, stroking only the rubber hand with a laser pointer. Two thirds of the research participants reported feeling heat sensations and even touch from the laser on the rubber hand, thus integrating it into their own body map. It’s obvious the hand is made of rubber, but this conscious awareness counts for nothing if the brain decides it’s your hand.

Proprioception though is not always the junior partner to vision and touch in creating our body schema; it can play quite a central role as the Pinocchio illusion demonstrates. To experience it, close your eyes and get somebody to apply a so-called physiotherapy vibrator at about 100 hertz to skin at the very top of your bicep while not stretching your arm. The vibration creates the strong sensation that you are straightening your elbow, giving the impression of having a phantom limb: the sensed position of your arm in space doesn’t correspond to its actual position. Touch your nose while applying the vibrator, and you get the feeling that it is simultaneously growing longer and longer, like Pinocchio’s; here the brain integrates the touch sensation from your fingers with the “movement” of your arm and comes to the erroneous conclusion that your nose must be growing to fill the gap. Quite amazing.

All this might sound very academic or just quirky, but this kind of research is quite important. Body schema failures can be quite disorientating and in worse cases debilitating and devastating; a well-know example is anorexia, lesser known ones are dysmorphic disorder and phantom limbs. Understanding how the brain calculates size and shape of our bodies therefore might one day alleviate a lot of suffering.

The next post will look at the curious consequences of the brain being split into two; the previous one dealt with discontinuity of perception.

[Source: New Scientist]

This is another example for environmental terrorism - removing mountain tops to mine coal, and it’s happening in Appalachia in the US (of course). The practice of mountain-top removal blasts the tops off mountains and dumps the soil, rock and waste in valleys below. So far 1,000 miles of West Virginia streams have been buried. The process contaminates the water, fouls the air, and threatens the continued existence of many rural communities, leave alone the damage done to the native worlds of fauna and flora.

Between 1992 and 2002, using explosive equivalent of 27 Hiroshima-style bombs in a year in West Virginia alone, 380,000 acres of mountaintops were destroyed. Yet less than five percent of these flattened areas have seen any economic development, which was one of the benefits coal companies maintained would result from destruction of the mountains. And, not surprisingly, the Bush terrorists are supporting the practice by removing environmental legislation that is in the way of mining companies’ practices - such as the regulations protecting stream through the creation of buffer zones.

For more background information go to Between The Lines and the I Love Mountains website, which has more videos, podcasts, Google Earth files and other materials to document these brutal mining practices.