Here are some things that I found around the internet this past week (more or less) which I enjoyed, in no particular order…
Nikon had closed its impressive museum in February 2024 while relocating their HQ to a new location. Now the museum is open to visitors again at the new location in Nishioi, Tokyo. With the ongoing tourism boom in Japan, I'm sure this will be a required visit to many photography nerds.
ITN is a British broadcaster, and in 1989 it sent one of its crews to Berlin to observe the East German crisis as it was unfolding. This video is composed of 58 minutes of raw footage with no audio commentary, interspaced with title cards giving context to the events. The commotion is palpable, and incredibly, this includes some raw footage from East Germany (as well as West Germany.) Well-worth the watch.
TikTok science in action! You've probably seen clips of pet owners challenging their cats to go to decreasingly small openings, but now it's been done by a scientist. I'm still not sure this research wasn't done tongue-in-cheek-ly by its authors, but it's still interesting to observe how other creatures perceive their own body sizes and shapes, and to demonstrate they're able to reason about themselves in this regard, even though they have no concept of measurements. A fun read!
Gavin's thoughts on physical media resonate with me. I currently have a ~200 CD collection, plus some DVDs, BluRays, Vinyl Records, MDs, and Audio Cassettes. Although a lot of the MDs and cassettes I've collected were mostly out of curiosity, I still value owning the media in them. I've had stuff I "added to my library" in Apple Music disappear, either due to moving countries or due to copyright disputes, and it's always sad when that happens. For me, not owning at least my favorite albums is unconscionable, but I don't think that's the case at all for most people my age and younger.
This library is sadly a few thousand years too late, but I'm sure the telephonum mobilis developers of the late Roman Empire would have considered it invaluable.
Although I'm a big fan of Star Citizen and what Cloud Imperium Games has been doing, I have to admit I was never a big fan of shooters in general. Either on foot or in vehicles. Either on earth or in space. However, watching this gameplay footage (and we know it's real because it crashed a couple of times on the original live stream lol) I have to say I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. The level of storytelling is beyond anything I've seen in the past 10 years (which is coincidentally how long this game has been under development), and (dare I say) better then many Sci-Fi movies. If you're at all into Sci-Fi, I thoroughly recommend giving this a watch, even if you have zero intent of eventually buying the game.
Ps.: I've been sorta short of things to write about in this blog, but still felt like writing something, and I miss this format from Blogs of yore. Will this be a new theme in this Blog? Only time will tell…