Responsive Volatility 活潑建築

女性的堅毅

2012-02-14T22:28:00.004+08:00

昨天從網路新聞中得知鳳飛飛辭世，而且早在一月三日就因肺腺癌往生。

有驚嚇，有不捨，也讓我記起我的母親。

小時候記得母親很喜歡聽鳳飛飛的歌曲，雖然她幾乎不太常唱歌，除了在朝山團的車廂內唱頌佛教歌曲。母親的一生很樸實，沒有沾染一絲一毫榮華富貴的氣息，為了家庭付出所有她的努力。她總是待人和善，溫和有禮，與她接觸過的人從待人接物上沒挑剔出她有甚麼缺點。其實她比這些所謂的禮俗還要教我敬佩與懷念，因為在她的日常生活的點滴裡，更是一個無私充滿愛的人。我所遇到的困境與闖下的麻煩，她總沒有一句憤怒指責與埋怨，總是輕聲細語的勸戒與教導，最嚴厲的處罰大概就是靜默以對。

母親的一生不能說是一帆風順，幼年時她的父親就被白色恐怖抓走，莫名的被抓走關在綠島，不知幾年後捎來一個信息領屍。我不曾聽聞過母親描述過她的父親，可能那時她年紀也還小很陌生吧。她的成長家庭就在我外婆支撐下拉拔五個小孩長大，應該是很辛苦的一段路吧。母親的善解人意與報喜不報憂是她另一個特質，她對我的愛永遠是如海浪般拍打岸邊般，持續溫柔地輕撫我年少輕狂的稜角。太多太多年紀輕不成熟的傻事都有勞她包容與引導我，遇到問題的態度總是不急不徐地找尋解決方法。記得我在哥大念研究所時，因為語言與教學方向不能盡如人意，無法施展與學習到令人滿意的程度，興起了休學的打算。那可是一個大決定，常春藤的學費昂貴與虛榮心作祟下，一般家長應該是不會答應這種遊戲玩笑式的態度。那時的我確實心灰意冷，想施展抱負與自我期望過高，壓力下的我非常沮喪。母親得知之後，並沒有太多反應與即時給意見，只是好好鼓勵我，但她知道我出國留學前，是在猶豫選擇哥大或AA，沒多久後在一次國際電話裡，她說她明後年退休後會有一筆退休金可以支持我轉換到AA去。像這樣都是為我著想放下她自己的故事實在太多太多了。而一年後，我也確實轉換到AA找到令我折服的老師，開啟我全新的建築視野，埋下我個人的建築想法的種子。但是在我念AA一年之後，母親癌末病倒，我AA還沒畢業母親就離開我了，那年我29歲。我30歲從AA畢業時，我感覺到我學到一些很有價值的觀念，值得稱許「三十而立」的當時，我很感謝我的母親，很懷念她。

時隔十二年，一樣在歲末年初時，鳳飛飛傳來病逝的消息，她體貼過年期間大家的喜氣，特別吩咐等到過完元宵再公開訊息，生病期間的隱忍與體貼愛護她的朋友，我雖不認識她，但我很強烈的輾轉透過她的特質，想念到我的母親，一種女性揉合溫柔與堅毅的特質。自此之後我很少有機會再次近距離見識到這樣聖潔的光輝。我追悼鳳飛飛，但更深地懷念我的母親。我希望我的女兒也能感受到我曾感受的溫暖。

Rachel Armstrong: Architecture that repairs itself?

2012-02-13T20:02:00.000+08:00

d3 space org

2012-02-09T21:25:00.001+08:00

d3 space org

有關自然系統的建築競圖

領導方式

2012-02-09T17:08:00.000+08:00

吉米推薦的ted講演

【轉載】THE CITY 2.0 – EVOLVED (NOT MADE) BY ECOLOGICAL HUMANS

2012-02-09T16:37:00.003+08:00

THE CITY 2.0 – EVOLVED (NOT MADE) BY ECOLOGICAL HUMANS

This Live Conversation with TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong will open on February 8th, 2012 at 1pm EST, 6pm UK time.
Join the conversation as Rachel discusses her view on ecological humans and city 2.0.

We are not machines but Ecological Humans. We depend on our networks for survival, like an oak tree in the forest, being made up of highly interacting and interdependent systems. For example, eating is not simply consuming ‘fuel’ to feed our body-machine but is a mutual relationship shared between our gut bacteria, our food and our bodies (which, in turn, are highly interconnected assemblages of specialised tissues). The way that we see ourselves influences the way that we operate through the world in all aspects of our lives - from health, to business and even space exploration!

Ecological Humans, imagine the City 2.0 as being grown from the bottom-up by its communities. It is underpinned by highly interacting and interdependent networks, which use dynamic fabrics that behave in life-like ways. These buildings can be described as Living Architecture that are capable of responding to the changes in our dynamic cities as only real ecologies can.

Questions:

Will The City 2.0 be qualitatively different to modern cities? Or pragmatically, can the transition only be made as a series of incremental changes? What can we do to facilitate this transition?

What does being an Ecological Human mean to me? Can it help me find new or more effective ways of working?

Can we rely on biology to provide all the answers when it comes to sustainable building solutions? Is life a technology - and should we exploit it in the pursuit of more sustainable ways of building?

[新書預告]仿生微生系運作中

2012-02-08T12:43:00.005+08:00

這是正醞釀中的新書仿生微生系。

距離活潑建築出版也差不多四年有了，期間繼續發展自己的理論架構，一方面應用在設計教學的實驗上，很興奮也近關情怯，趕稿中，加油！

do it for you (die for u)

2012-02-03T12:12:00.004+08:00

Bryan Adams :(Everything I do) I do it for you

這幾天出現了兩則不幸的消息，一則成大大肆學生登山失足墜落山谷而亡，一則任職有線電視公司23歲青年網咖打線上遊戲暴斃。當新聞消息出現時，我並非同時看到但卻將兩則聯想在一起。我不認識任何一位，完全不知道他們的生活背景，不敢高談闊論妄下定語。不過對我而言比較可以確定的是不管網咖或登山，都是他們生命的一種出口，一種依賴，一個在絕大包裹住生命束縛的一扇窗。

對於大肆生而言，再三個月就是人生另一個旅程的開始，對於網咖少年而言，下班後繼續拖著疲憊身體來到網咖線上遊戲戰鬥，似乎都在似有似無的綑綁下，找一種希望或寄託。儘管我個人是不喜歡網咖的氛圍，也不是僵化的認為登山比較健康，但我很不捨單純尋求生命出口的兩位，不小心走了。

當年紀增長，經歷現實的許多荒謬，常常需要以更成熟的智慧，更自然的方式接受這個世界，更積極迎向未來，這當中生命出口就很適時的幫助我們前進，我無意判斷甚麼是對或錯的窗口。人生是苦的，好好苦中作樂創造生命價值，似乎是無可迴避的課題。

霎那間，我想起大學時的一部羅賓漢電影，主題曲當然是有關男女非你不嫁不娶要死要活的字語。很肉麻沒錯，但是對於生命中你願意致死不渝的某種信念而言，這首歌好像很弔詭的還OK。

如果有一天，我女兒大了在生命中遇到了挫折很受打擊時，我希望有一種聲音能鼓勵她，有一扇窗能開給她，讓她堅強，也獻給所有繼續在生命裡奮鬥的人，加油！

那就來聽這首巴辣歌吧！

snake robot

2012-01-29T23:32:00.003+08:00

ieee spectrum inside technology

sth about computing

2012-01-29T23:29:00.000+08:00

fution evolution

2011-11-23T17:05:00.015+08:00

在生物學裡有一種叫「融合演化」，我們身體裡的粒線體或植物裡的葉綠素，其實擁有與我們截然不同相異甚遠的DNA，這是在遠古時期微生物間，不同生物體共生後合併一起演化，非獨立生物借基因突變慢慢演化的過程，很奇特是吧!?

這期間看到新聞若干，在在顯示生物數十億的演化的確能應用端視我們當下的生活。

華廈中庭9座墳住戶尊重「先來的」

【聯合報╱記者鄭惠仁／台南報導】 2011.11.22 02:16 am

台南市東區曼哈頓住宅大樓庭院內有九座墳墓，十二年來兩百多戶人家見怪不怪，住戶裡有醫師、律師、教授，小孩子拿博士、考上第一志願的人不少，住戶笑說「福地福人居」，與墓地同處，風水很不錯，住得很平安。曼哈頓大樓附近早期有許多墳墓，廿多前都市計畫變更為住宅區，但墳墓遷移出現糾紛，有十一座墳墓未遷，形成大樓圍著墳墓興建情形。大樓剛蓋好時，許多住戶希望墳墓趕快遷移，但一拖十多年，大家發現住得很平安，對庭院的墳墓已見怪不怪。住戶竺之威住在一樓，從臥室窗戶看出去有兩座墳墓，「他們先來，我們後到，應該尊重先到的。」竺之威說，有座墳墓是清朝時期，應該有二、三百年，這幾年沒看到有後代來掃墓。墳墓散在庭院內，起先沒有美化及掩飾，後來建設公司做庭園造景，將部分墳墓藏在假山中，另有墳墓被樹木遮住，走進庭園，若不仔細看，不容易發現有墳墓。「很有趣吧！」住戶陳俊堯表示，這景象應是世界奇觀，大樓裡的住戶許多是白領階級，大家都住得很快樂也很安心。每座墳墓都整理得很乾淨，若死者地下有知，也應會高興，每年中元節管理委員會舉辦法會，「子孫那捨得遷移？」竺之威說，有來買房子的人對大樓庭院裡有墳墓很忌諱，下了訂金，發現有墳墓，取消合約不買了；也有人利用「墳墓」殺價，希望房價降低些。最有趣的是清明節，竺之威說，大樓住戶都出門掃墓，卻有外地人到大樓內掃墓，住在大樓裡就可看到掃墓畫面。住戶們說，這麼多年大家都習慣了，已經沒有人提遷墓的事，因為大家都住得很平安，子女考上第一志願、明星高中的人多，風水很不錯！

陸婦腹部腫瘤竟是44年前孿生兄弟

2011-11-23 新聞速報【中廣新聞／中廣新聞】

住在大陸張家界市的一名今年四十四歲的婦女，因腹部不適就醫檢查，結果發現是一個5.3公斤的畸胎瘤，而這個畸胎並不是當事人本身所懷胎體，而是她在母親懷胎時孿生兄弟的胎體進入她的腹腔所致。這名婦女原本診察是一個腫瘤，在進行剖腹手術時，醫護人員在切開腫瘤壁囊之後，裏面的情況使現場的所有醫務人員都嚇呆了。因為看到的是一個發育基本成型的死胎，這個死胎除了腦袋沒有發育之外，手、腳、身體軀幹、甚至是生殖器都發育成型了。從生殖器可辨別出死胎是一名男性。醫生解釋說，這個病叫做「寄生胎畸胎瘤」，腫瘤的形成是患者和她的兄弟在母體內胎兒發育的過程中，另一胚胎也就是患者兄弟的胚胎進入患者腹腔所致。換句話說，患者腹腔內的死胎是她雙胞胎兄弟的胎體。

養肝丸 ●「養肝」&「玩」

2011-09-17T10:22:00.000+08:00

前天東海開學，這學期教的是大肆設計。「大肆」是個特殊的年級，剛脫離建築基本核心課程，並賦予學生自我方向探索的開始，是相當關鍵的時刻。

鑑於過往，大肆同學們一脫離核心課程的枷鎖後會疏於課業精進，幾位老師同事們在學生設計分組時苦口婆心道出「大肆...關鍵....非養肝的時刻....」、「要養肝的不要來....」之類的精神鼓勵。老師的苦心與同學的玩心，其實都很有道理，坐在一旁的我一時之間也不知該如何自處.....

但是仔細想想，這兩件事其實也不是這麼衝突，而且似乎更應該揉合「在一起在一起在一起在一起在一起....」才對。第一，做設計為什麼要跟傷身綁在一起?不傷身設計就會差嗎?我想傷身最常的應該指的是熬夜。我並不確定熬夜是否一定傷身，但絕大多數的醫學理論與親身經歷，熬夜常常破壞身體的自我修補。我已中年，有時還是會熬夜，但我每每熬夜時都會自我訓誡自己，怎麼生活安排凸槌，導致這個欠佳的不得已結果，絕非帶著一絲一毫這是為藝術而犧牲的浪漫。設計的好壞與投入的時間當然息息相關，但是熬夜與否其實跟設計者的設計安排有絕大的關連，回顧自己的時間安排，其實很容易就發現時間的奢侈與浪費多在無意義的逃避裡。養肝其實是好事，只是現在為時間的浪費揹黑鍋罷了。就我的觀點，豈止大肆要養肝，從大一新生開始就要養肝。大學時我的父母問我為什麼不早做設計非要拖到熬夜，我那時只覺得有苦難言，覺得他們不懂建築系的生存之道。但是現在我覺得設計相關系所同學更應該重視其他領域的觀點，其實設計不應該脫離他者而自處，而健康之道只是其中之一。尤其現在環保生態建築當道，若自我循環都忽略，也是另一種缺陷汙染不是嗎?

當然，另外一點就是「玩」了。當然要玩囉! 好不容易撐過那段被窒錮的三年，我想任誰都會想放縱一下。當然說白一點就是浪費青春，享受浪費奢華的感受。當人年輕時很難杜絕這種快感，就某種程度而言，也是一種智慧前身的累積吧！不過話說回來，該玩甚麼又玩到甚麼深度，其實又是一種人生的考驗。玩如果奠基在一種放縱的情緒裡是很可惜的，例如只因過去三年被監禁；玩其實應該更積極主動，挖掘自我興趣與世界其他新奇事物的關聯。或許聽起來不夠刺激，但真正的震撼留待大家各自追尋。

不過，養肝丸請大家吃!

ideas about what living conditions we are dealing with

2011-09-17T08:22:00.001+08:00

兩部與關於在當下人類文明所處情境，與在其中對應的談話。第一部關於不可預期性於我們生活中。第二部有關idea的交換，加深創作者對於創意的見解。都是在這個我們所生活的複雜環境裡所需要的觀念，並進一步待我們去探索更多未知的事物。

作者修養與作品

2011-09-15T23:44:00.000+08:00

作者的修養與個性其實都會在作品的許多痕跡裡展現，
但大多數的介紹媒體裡，比較不會這麼細膩去追溯分析。
因為有更多主流的價值需要被關注
作者的個性往往隱身而只剩作品
在很多的現實經驗裡很差勁的人格也常常搭配非常「成功」的作品

自己也常常被這個現實世界的運作所牽絆
也常常需要面對自己檢討自己，修正自己內在與外在的平衡
我相信這樣的作為，不會只是個人修養，也會在作品上流露
另外接觸的學生也愈來愈多
雖稱為學生，其實也是社會的縮影
學生組織也不是那麼單純，各形各色如同真實社會，好的壞的品行兼具
只是帶著還略帶稚氣的臉龐
看著他們的行事風格
以及外在五光十色的各種誘惑
其實蠻感嘆
到底會有幾成最終會同時把設計功夫練好
又能真正打從心裡修養其人格呢?
看到這個影片
讓我想到個人修養的重要
面對這麼多困境時
最後每個人是如何一一做抉擇呢
大學問......
大智慧....

自我建構 self-assembly

2011-09-11T09:24:00.002+08:00

social behaviors effect body fat

2011-09-08T09:38:00.000+08:00

好交朋友的人比較瘦

2011-09-07

中廣新聞／郭希誠

美國研究人員說，朋友多、社交生活比較頻繁的人比較瘦。

俄亥俄大學研究人員拿白老鼠做實驗。經過四個星期，在周圍老鼠多，經常要跟別的老鼠交頭接耳的環境下生活的老鼠，即使吃得多，腹部的脂肪還是比「不跟別的同類來往的老鼠」少一半。
進一步研究他們發現，忙社交的老鼠褐色脂肪多，白色脂肪少。
研究人員說，褐色脂肪是燃燒了提供熱的脂肪而白色脂肪是囤積在腹部讓人肥的脂肪。他說，要把白脂肪轉換成褐脂肪通常得在寒冷的環境裡生活好幾個月。杜靈說，到目前為止他還不清楚交朋友為什麼能燃燒脂肪。

ring finger

2011-09-08T08:06:00.009+08:00

The link between a man's ring finger and sex!

形態不只是形狀，反而是整個機制的具體呈現。
多年下來的觀念，愈來愈強烈....

The form is not just apparent shapes ; on the contary, it is the realization of the whole mechanism.
The idea existed for years, not fading away but getting stronger...

The longer his finger, the higher his libido!
(info from rediff)

Here's advice for ladies who are really passionate about someone -- check his ring finger, as its length could be linked to his sex drive!

The longer the fourth finger compared to the second, known as the 2D:4D ratio, the more attractive he is likely to be to the opposite sex.

Over the years, the difference between the ring finger and the index finger has been linked to everything from health problems and sperm count to aggressive behaviour, sexual orientation and sports prowess.

Now, biologists at the University of Florida [ Images ] have discovered that male-female ring finger proportions are tied to sex hormones in the womb -- a finding that may offer health insights.

Their study explains for the first time why men's fourth fingers are usually longer than their index fingers, while for women it is the other way round.

Martin Cohn, PhD, and Zhengui Zheng, PhD, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the department of molecular genetics and microbiology at the UF College of Medicine, found that the developing digits of male and female mouse embryos are packed with receptors for sex hormones.

Differences in how these hormones activate receptors in males and females affect the growth of specific digits.

By following the prenatal development of the limb buds of mice, which have a digit length ratio similar to humans, the scientists controlled the gene signalling effects of androgen -- also known as testosterone -- and estrogen.

The researchers found that while more androgen equated to a proportionally longer fourth digit, more estrogen resulted in a feminised appearance.

The study uncovered how these hormonal signals govern the rate at which skeletal precursor cells divide and showed that different finger bones have different levels of sensitivity to androgen and estrogen.

"The discovery that growth of the developing digits is controlled directly by androgen and estrogen receptor activity confirms that finger proportions are a lifelong signature of our early hormonal milieu," said Cohn.

The findings appear in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Photograph: Leon Brocard on Flickr/Wikimedia Commons

Penis size, sex drive tied to men's finger length: Why?
(info from CBS NEWS)

(CBS) Women often glance at men's ring fingers to tell if they're married. But in addition to marital status, scientists say a man's ring finger can reveal his sexual orientation, libido level, penis size, and even risk for certain diseases like prostate cancer.

Penis size linked to finger measurements, say Korean scientists

And now scientists say they know why.

A new study reported sex hormone exposure in the womb determines finger length, and this finding could offer insights into the origin of other behaviors and diseases.

For the study - published in this week's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - researchers studied digit length in mice, which are considered to have similar digit ratios as human males and females. When researchers exposed the mouse embryo to more male hormones, the mouse had a proportionally longer fourth digit. More estrogen resulted in a more female-looking mouse, and smaller fourth digit.

"When they added testosterone they got super male ratios, and when they added estrogen, super female ratios," Dr. John T. Manning, evolutionary psychologist at Swansea University in England, who was not involved in this study, said in a written statement. "And they've provided us with a list of 19 genes that are sensitive to prenatal testosterone and prenatal estrogen."

Some of the 19 genes may help scientists discover the origin of certain behaviors and diseases, and may help doctors find new treatments for diseases like ALS and prostate cancer, which have been linked to finger length.

Said Manning, "We can now be more focused in our examination of the links between digit ratio and sex-dependent behaviors, diseases of the immune system, cardiovascular disorders and a number of cancers."

Sex ID
Testosterone
(info from BBC Science)

It's thought that testosterone plays an important role in the way we think and behave. Many of the questions in the Sex ID experiment were related to theories about testosterone.

The Sex ID test was originally an online experiment. We've stopped collecting data now and many of the questions have been removed from the test, but we've kept the fun stuff!

Read about the experiment

Take the test

The role of testosterone

Testosterone is a male sex hormone required for sperm production, the development of male reproductive organs and the emergence of secondary male sexual characteristics such as facial hair, a deeper voice and muscles.

In men testosterone is produced in the testes and adrenal glands.

Testosterone is also produced in women's ovaries and adrenal glands. Little is known about the exact role of testosterone in women, but scientists believe it helps maintain muscle and bone strength and contributes to sex drive or libido.

On average, men produce between 4 and 10mg of the hormone per day and overall they have about 20 times more testosterone than women.

Testosterone and digit ratio

In the Sex ID test we asked people about their index and ring finger measurements. Some scientists believe that the ratio of index finger length to ring finger length indicates how much testosterone we were exposed to in our mother's womb.

Higher testosterone exposure is thought to lead to a longer ring finger. This is determined as early as 14 weeks into a pregnancy.

On average, women's index and ring fingers are almost equal in length because they are exposed to less testosterone. In men, the ring finger tends to be longer because they have higher testosterone levels. In general, women exposed to more testosterone have more 'masculine hands' – ie longer ring fingers.

Testosterone and birth order

When the Sex ID test was an online psychology experiment, we asked people about their siblings in order to investigate the theory that pre-natal testosterone exposure changes systematically every time a woman gives birth to a male child. The scientists who designed the survey will compare the number of older brothers a test taker has with their finger measurements to see if there is any correlation.

Testosterone and assertiveness

In the Sex ID ultimatum task people were asked to decide how they would split £50 between themselves and a stranger. Scientists want to find out if there is a relationship between testosterone levels and assertiveness.

It is assumed that people with higher testosterone levels would drive a harder bargain and be less compromising. Research into the effects of testosterone and competitive behaviour suggests that testosterone increases competitiveness and risk taking.

Interestingly, some studies show that testosterone levels in women change according to the status of their occupations.

可動式藝術

2011-02-14T15:02:00.007+08:00

responsive bio-mimetic tutorial

2011-01-13T21:06:00.002+08:00

2 weeks ago, i had a conversation with my students talking about our final review's goal. along the hard working of this semester, we tried to articulate a view point about a responsive pattern, which is based on the mechanism of the target bio-creature each group is being asked to research. and then the knowledge is materialized into a proto-device, a mimetic prototype. the step followiong is the mutation of its variation and composition of its pattern. the final step is the artificial life formulation wuth the help of arduino and sensor to create a responsive pattern.

flowing rain trace as an adjustable formation

2011-01-13T16:35:00.008+08:00

i took a bus the other day. it was raining and freezing in taipei. i looked outside through the window to see the cityscape. to some degree, a bus window is an excellent observing tool to experience the city life and culture. due to the rain fall and the uneven bus roof, so there came a continuing little "river" flowing vertically passing on the window surface. i am so attractive to this tiny urban spectacle, more charming than the taipei 101 fire work at the new year eve, that i was suddenly isolated from the other city events and focused on the changeable water trace i was witnessing. what is more graceful and astonishing is the story the rain and bus scriped together, sharing the same key structure to the generation of animated forms, vivid forms, or the forms with life. from an embryo in a womb to the landscape of earth, from the baking bread in the oven to the rushing stream of the boiled water demostrates the process of form making and its moveable nature in form. i have to say it is a tiny opening ocasionally happening in daily life, but also a deep insight that sees through the apprearance of the enormous structure that functions steadily in the universe.

【轉載】男性食指比無名指長易是同性戀

2010-12-05T09:04:00.004+08:00

2010年12月05日壹蘋果

英國《每日郵報》報導，科學家自1980年代起進行手指長短的研究，發現食指和無名指的長短，會影響一個人的個性、性向和脾氣。研究認為手指長度受男性荷爾蒙影響，食指較無名指長的男性，容易過敏、罹患精神分裂症，且較女性化，成為同性戀的機率較高。無名指較食指長的男性，行為較有侵略性，幼時容易過動，長大容易為性愛冒險。

WHAT YOUR INDEX FINGER REVEALS ABOUT YOU
By Paul Robins from Daily Star Sunday

WOMEN with short fingers are more likely to be gay and succeed in their jobs.

And men with long index fingers tend to do better at school and have less chance of getting cancer.

Researchers say these are just some of the character traits determined by the size of a person’s index and ring fingers.

The length also determines what films you like, how sporty you are and even your skills on the stock market, according to scientists.

They found men whose index finger is shorter than their ring finger are more fertile, more aggressive and better at sport.

They are also far less likely to be struck down with heart disease and prostate cancer.

However, girls with short index fingers are at greater risk of breast cancer and prone to allergies and schizophrenia.

People with short fingers also make better soldiers, engineers and chess players, but have more chance of ending up behind bars. They are also more likely to experiment with drugs, watch violent films and become addicted to booze.

And they will probably also be poorer and find it harder to hold down a job.

But long index fingers are considered more feminine. Men who have them tend to be gay, while women with long digits are more likely to be lesbians.

Men whose ring finger is longer than their index finger are sexier, according to the scientists.

But women are more attractive as mates if their index fingers are longer.

The findings, by biologist Dr John Manning, are based on the digital ratio between the ring and index fingers.

In men, higher levels of pre-birth testosterone meant the ring finger was generally longer than the index finger.

In women, higher oestrogen levels led to the index finger being the same length or longer than the ring finger.

paul.robins@dailystar.co.uk

A long index finger means less risk of prostate cancer
December 1, 2010 by Rory Fitzgerald from NewsWHIP.ie

New research shows that the length of a man’s fingers can indicate his risk of prostate cancer. A just-published study found that men whose index finger is longer than their ring finger are less prone to the disease. Researchers at University of Warwick and the UK’s Institute of Cancer Research compared the hands of 1,500 prostate cancer patients with 3,000 healthy men. The length of our fingers is fixed before birth, and is largely determined by sex hormone levels in the womb. A long index finger indicates lower exposure to testosterone before birth, which may protect against prostate cancer later in life. The BBC reports that that the findings could offer a simple test for prostate cancer risk.

【轉載】控制基因

2010-12-01T12:39:00.001+08:00

天生好手！建仔多一組運動基因
2010/11/18
【聯合晚報╱記者李樹人/台北報導】

台灣之光王建民站上美國大聯盟投手丘，這是天生注定！？王建民最近完成全基因體定序及檢測，結果發現，他果然與眾不同，與常人相較，他多了一組與動運肌肉表現有關的基因，這也讓他成為天生好手。

鴻海集團首次跨足國內生醫界，投資康聯生醫科技，著手進行一項名為「H-Gene」的基因計畫，將全基因體定序與個人健康管理結合，改寫全球健康產業模式。

康聯生醫總經理蔡政憲指出，「基因」對許多人來說，既熟悉卻又陌生，人體基因由四種鹼基排列組合成鹼基對，人體共有30億對鹼基對，數量相當於15套大英百科全書，120億個文字。

這項基因計畫將基因體定序首度被運用在個人健康管理，每個人只要抽5mL(毫升)的血液，大約兩個月就可得到全基因體定序資料。

蔡政憲指出，基因定序關乎在一輩子的健康，例如可預測罹患糖尿病、乳癌或心臟病等發生率機率，甚至是肥胖、老人癡呆的傾向，清楚自身潛藏的疾病危機。

例如「管理」脂肪的基因如果出現問題，罹患心臟病的機率則將高於正常人群；「負責」排毒的基因如出現缺陷，上了年齡後，患癌風險就大增。與維生素D代謝有關的基因，將直接對骨質產生影響。

蔡政憲進一步指出，經由專家團隊分析，可了解受檢者可能罹患特定疾病的風險、是否有潛在性家族遺傳疾、對藥物的反應、飲食營養的代謝情況，以及自身體質的優缺點。

以王建民為例，兩個月前抽血接受全基因體定序，結果發現他能成為一流投手，除了努力外，基因給予他的先天優點，也是主因之一。

蔡政憲表示，王建民基因定序報告中，出現一組與眾不同的基因，而這組基因表現與運動特質有關，醫界發現，在許多世界籍的優秀運動選手都帶有這個顯性基因。

【2010/11/18 聯合晚報】

蝴蝶、斑馬與胚胎之摘錄3

2010-11-29T20:44:00.006+08:00

◎成功研究出動物形體如何正確發生的其中一個方法，便是研究身體部位數量變化或是長錯位置的怪胎...

◎所有的組織者在生物組織或細胞中都會影響樣式的形成，或作「形態發生」(morphogenesis)的性質。基本上，它們的特殊活動就是來自於組織者細胞會產生影響其他細胞發展的物質，這類物質被稱為「形態生長因子」(morphogen)。

◎組織者的作用取決於它們距離目標細胞的距離....

◎...組織者活性來自於一群細胞的活性，任何一種細胞都會產生上千種物質，而負責組織者活性的物質也可能不只一種。

◎移植雖然是一項利器，胚胎學家仍需要有其他方法，以便在複雜的細胞生化世界中找出形態生長因子...

◎貝特森將這些畸形分成兩種基本型，一種是重複部位的數量發生改變，另一種是身體某部位變形為另一個部位的相似物。他將後者稱之為「同源」(homeotic, 從希臘文homeos而來，意思是同樣或相似的變異)

◎...釐清這類形體究竟是遺傳性的，還是因為胚胎在成形時受到物理性損害而造成(如此一來便不會遺傳下去)...

◎同源突變能夠將一個結構完全轉變為另一個，...這並不是發育不良或失敗，而是整個構造的命運被轉換，造成一個部位的錯置，或是部位的數量錯誤。關鍵在於這是系列同源部位之間的轉變，一種部位變為其他的相似部位(觸角之於腿，後翅之於前翅)...

◎只有少數的「同源」基因會在發生突變時造成同源形體，這意味著有一小群的「主控」基因掌管著果蠅身體中系列同源部位的分化。

蝴蝶、斑馬與胚胎之摘錄2

2010-11-28T11:20:00.004+08:00

◎相近的動物都是由十分類似的構造所組成

◎各類動物都是由類似建材的數量同樣的零件所構成的

◎演化在動物設計上普遍使用重複部位與模組結構

◎個別的身體部位也反映出這種模組設計的主題(比方說手跟腳)

◎「發生」這項大工程─從一個微小的細胞開始，建構出複雜的大型動物

◎動物設計的模組與部位重複，反映出動物形體的次序

◎考量一批特定動物時，會發現牠們之間最明顯的差異是來自重覆結構的「數量」與「種類」

◎「同源」(homologos)(如不同動物之間的同部位，如蠑螈、蜥腳類和老鼠的前肢與我們的手臂)、「系列同源」(serial homologos)(如同物種的不同部位，如前肢與後肢)

◎Samuel Williston 「這(也)是一種演化定律，有機體的各部位傾向減少數量，僅有較少的部位具有高度特化的功能」.....即一旦數量增加，系列同源構造便會出現功能特化、數量減少的情況

◎對稱性(symmetry)與極性(polarity)

蝴蝶、斑馬與胚胎之摘錄1

2010-11-24T21:03:00.002+08:00

發生指的是由一顆卵成長為胚胎，最後轉變為成體的過程，而形體的演化是來自發生的改變。p22

基因時空模式表現的演化會造成形體改變，尤其是那些影響特定結構之數量、形狀或大小的基因。p28

珊瑚練習

2010-11-19T07:35:00.005+08:00

日前經grasshopper的練習捕捉珊瑚生物機制的造型演練，這是階段性的成果，持續演化中...

張大春真敢講，讓人臉紅心跳

2010-11-17T10:13:00.002+08:00

張大春真敢講，大概他也不缺別人賞飯吃吧！
不過....
好像之前造型藝術那首歌
另一件國王新衣事件

過一陣子應該就恢復平靜了
結構這麼穩固，大家都要謀生活，不是嗎？
況且眼光放大旁觀其運作，世界不就充滿如此的荒誕的糾纏嗎?

美國大肆浪費地球資源(石油、消費)，結果破產了就大印美鈔，啟動貨幣戰爭，全球物價上揚，只因他是有牌流氓....
用選票選出一個平庸的人，決定許多影響大家生活的事...好笨喔
設計競圖做太深入怕評審看不懂而平庸化，因為評審都選比較中庸的、有名的...設計師與評審都好不專業喔
近來醫學指出由於口交氾濫，性器官內的潛藏病毒引發人們口腔癌的機率........很矛盾吧

哀！我也很熱血對於這些不公不義不平之事，感到憤怒！
但是，憤怒應該留在某種原初的狀態，擱置放下他，更應專注聚焦在自己的奮鬥上，或許應該這樣勉勵自己，繼續往前走吧！
這些不平之事，還是可以說，但是少點憤怒，多點幽默吧！

大春前輩，息怒阿！還這麼熱血阿！

生物的演化很神奇，都市的運作很複雜，人生的命運很詭譎，一笑置之吧！

原文如下：

張大春：狗屁的文化創意產業 PO文回應淡大生
2010-11-17 中國時報【林欣誼／台北報導】
　張大春在個人部落格貼出「答大學生──關於狗屁的文化創意產業」一文，以「詐騙集團」、「惡性腫瘤」比喻他根本不承認存在的「文創產業」，他指出：「文創產業的來歷是一群寄生蟲般的人物……他們的興趣和職責就是媒合政商資源，看起來充其量不過就是一種兼領經紀人和營銷者身分的幫閒份子。」

　這篇文章的源由來自一名自稱淡江大學學生的留言，這位學生表示校內開設「文化創意產業學分學程」，來自業界的老師，卻藉課堂為自己事業宣傳，因此質疑學界是否該應業界需要而改變學術方向。這位學生也轉貼在淡大任教的台灣文創公司董事總經理陳甫彥的演講文連結，希望張大春為他解釋這篇他「聽不懂的演講」。

　張大春的答覆火力全開。他表示，有一群沒有創作與研究能力的人，闖入出版、表演等傳統領域，虛構出「文化創意產業」一詞。「創作者拉不下臉來談生意，就需要他們。他們生意談大了，就回過頭來指導創作者。創作者要是沒出息一點，就等著被這種人掌控、消費或淘汰。」而淡大設立的這種學程是「建築在臺灣集體幻覺上的一個單位」。他力勸大學生「不要浪費生命，趕快遠離這個學程。」

　張大春昨天接受採訪時表示，他不否認文化界應該要有好的出版業、優良的影視、健全的經紀人制度、充分的技術資源，但作家跟音樂家、舞蹈家跟畫家等跨界合作早已不知進行多少年，現在卻發明出「文化創意產業」一詞，名為鼓勵，其實卻是一個政府補助的名目。

　張大春說：「這個名詞是空泛的，就像『創意總監』這個詞也是空的一樣，我只是指出國王的新衣，以及台灣社會的虛幻與百無聊賴。」

　他認為文創產業是個空泛的名詞，更對於文創產業進入學院成了一門學程，直言是「學院的墮落，低級得要死」。

　他表示，一門學術必須在教育系統經過長時間的累積才足以形成，但有的大學卻趕時髦，跟著語詞起舞，疊床架屋地搞出一套學院論述，「就像老鼠會一樣，不瞭解的人被騙進來，然後就繼續騙人，發展出一套論述，非常離譜。」

【轉貼】Google研發自動駕駛車反應比人靈敏； Google tests cars that drive themselves

2010-10-11T10:56:00.009+08:00

The cars have done thousands of miles, Google says

Nobody spotted the Google car crossing the Golden Gate Bridge

【聯合報╱編譯組／綜合報導】 2010.10.11 04:27 am

網路巨擘Google最近在加州對他們研發的自動駕駛車進行試車，它以豐田的Prius油電車改裝而成，駕駛座有人，但不開車，車頂的漏斗狀圓筒，也是汽車的「眼睛」十分吸睛，不過，Google擅自在加州進行自動駕駛試車，更讓道路安全專家側目，當局正調查是否違法。

Google正祕密研發自動駕駛汽車，它利用人工智慧軟體感應汽車的周遭環境，再模仿人類，作出一連串的駕駛決定。Google有七輛車同時試車。每車的駕駛座有一人，於車子出差錯時隨時接手，後座有一技師，負責監控導航系統。根據紀錄，自動汽車可完全無人為干預狀況下行駛一千六百公里，測試過程總行駛里程已超過二十三萬公里，僅偶爾須人為介入。

七部原型車目前僅有一次車禍紀錄，而且並非自動車本身的問題，而是停在紅綠燈前被後面的車輛追撞。

工程師表示，自動駕駛系統反應比人類靈敏，擁有三百六十度全方位感應，且不受分心、打瞌睡或酒精、藥物影響，自動駕駛汽車一旦上路，工程師相信，車禍死亡人數可望減半。

Google堅稱他們上路前，已問過律師，並無違法問題，且Google的自動駕駛汽車不會危及其他駕駛。該公司強調，研發自動駕駛汽車即是為減少車禍發生，且他們試車時，均有人在車上。

Engineers at Google have tested a self-driving car on the streets of California, the company has announced.

The cars use video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to "see" other traffic, software engineer Sebastian Thrun said.

They remain manned at all times by a trained driver ready to take control as well as by a software expert.

Google hopes the cars can eventually help reduce road traffic and cut the number of accidents.

In a posting on the company's official blog, Mr Thrun said the self-driven cars had so far covered 140,000 miles on the road.

They have crossed San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate bridge, negotiated the city's famous sloping streets, driven between Google offices, and made it around Lake Tahoe in one piece.

'Exciting future'

Engineers told the New York Times that the forays onto the highways have been largely incident-free, apart from one bump when the car was reportedly hit from behind at a traffic light.

In his Google blog post, Mr Thrun - professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University - insisted that safety was the "first priority" in the project.

Routes are pre-planned, mapped first by real drivers, and local police are briefed in advance, he says.

But he pointed to figures from the World Health Organization which show that more than 1.2 million people are killed each year on the roads, and said that number could and should be reduced.

"We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half.

"While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting," he added.

Google has rapidly branched out from its previous core business of search in recent years.

The company already has significant interests in location services through its Google Maps and Google Street View offerings.

是是是視覺藝術 MV

2010-10-05T22:51:00.004+08:00

透過學生的張貼，我看到這首歌，相當有趣！我覺得不只是歌曲RAP也是視覺藝術。
作者資料如下：
詞/曲/編曲/Ukulele/唱：艸執法(藍建庭) MSN and mail:lct9238@hotmail.com

用全螢幕特別爽！
enjoy it! it is pretty cool!

coral reef man

2010-09-27T11:48:00.003+08:00

近來研究珊瑚的生長，無意間看到這男子的皮膚生長出如珊瑚礁的硬材，還真的嚇人！不過也倒是蠻令人奇特的經驗。神奇四超人其一！開玩笑的！比較重要的是形態生成的邏輯與秩序在生活世界裡無所不在，即便疾病都是以精細嚴謹的方式呈現，除了致命與恐懼之外也是美的呈現。

from kidsolo's newspaper

reef man is cured.
MAN who was dubbed the human coral reef after huge shell-like growths appeared all over his body has been cured.

Lin Tianzhuan was unable to move his arms and legs and said his “terrifying” condition made him feel like he was turning to stone.

The 38-year-old, of Shuimen in southern China, added people would scream when they saw him.

Horrified Lin became a hermit, hiding at the family home after he was shunned by friends and neighbours.

He began to notice the hard growths on his hands and feet when he was just 13.

He said: “They grew and grew and soon they were all over my arms and legs, my back and even my head. It was as if I was turning to stone and it was terrifying.

“Gradually my shell became thicker and thicker and I could no longer bend my arms or my legs. It was very frightening.”

But now, thanks to a year of treatment and surgery by doctors from a special skin clinic, he only has a few discoloured patches of skin to show for his horrific condition.

Fuzhou Dermatosis Prevention Hospital vice president Dr Liu Yinghong said: “He may need radiotherapy for quite some time still but he has made very good progress.”

LED triggered by LDR

2010-08-15T15:28:00.008+08:00

The setting for the LDR exercise is the same as the button exercise except that the button is replaced by LDR(light dependent resistor) which leads to the environment light brightness as the factor controlling the LED's on/off. It is a simple interesting sensor-based electrical circuit.

The 2nd exercise is modified based on the previous one, but the output pin is shifted to the PWM which conveys not only the yes or no value but also how much the value is and what quality the value effects the environment condition.

button to control LED's ON/OFF & its brightness

2010-08-10T15:23:00.003+08:00

After resting 4 2 weeks, i am back on my arduino journey. the new practice is about how to use button to control a LED's on/off and its brightness.

LED on/off is shown before, however, the interesting thing is setting the brightness by using the same button with PWM(pulse width modulation) concept. PWM is preset in arduino already. it is arrangement of the proportion of on and off to modulate the desired condition for brightness of LED or speed of motors etc.

it is a little exercise from chapter 5 in "getting started with arduino".

arduino gogogo

2010-07-24T21:27:00.003+08:00

最近開始又多學一件微控制器的平台arduino，之前學的是較難的pic。
arduino是特別開發給原本非專業領域的人員，如設計者、藝術家等。其中程式語言對於使用者而言較簡化，工具也整合的較親民。對於設計教學而言，似乎較為容易。但pic較廣為業界實用，似乎功能也較強大，但孰者較為適切，再慢慢端視情境發展吧！

這是一個按鍵控制led燈發亮的練習。還蠻好玩的。

生命體建築

2010-07-22T22:56:00.006+08:00

近期世界各地建築先鋒的另一群人正在做另一種突破的創舉，不是寫程式、畫3d、製作人工機械，而是真的將生命帶入建築。看見這些作品的成就，很值得為他們喝采！

當建築是生命體時，不管是機械生命、真實的生化生命、機械與生命混種的新結合、奈米微尺度世界裡，建築絕對有另一層的注解。過去如此，現在如此，未來也是一樣。世界是動態的，所有感受認知的都在變化中。

這跟我長期以來的建築思考是很貼近的，也一直有這樣的想法，但總是老跟不上步伐實踐。社會看待設計總是先做先贏。

也該反省反省自己：
一方面，建築先鋒者真不好當，實在需要不斷地努力。
另一方面來說，其實也不能只靠努力，因為獲得資源其實更是重要，這些人背後勢必有很多機構來支持這些工作。光是努力似乎太駝鳥。
學習的速度與效率也需要提升。
另外，一顆平常智慧的心，除了基本陪伴艱辛與孤獨外，更能在受人冷嘲熱諷或是承受先鋒同儕彼此之間的競爭壓力時，不至於失心瘋。

再加油吧！

延伸閱讀：
http://inhabitat.com/2010/07/08/in-vitro-habitat-a-house-made-of-meat/
http://www.archinode.com/index.html

cellbot

2010-04-07T09:52:00.004+08:00

結合android手機，arduino機械控制，一台小機械人出現了！
看看！頗好玩。

原址：http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/android-and-arduino-packin-cellbot-features-voice-recognition

與楚米對話

2010-04-05T23:37:00.008+08:00

因為整理資料，重新整理楚米的理論，在網站上閱讀到此篇文章，覺得受用。
在充滿技術電腦軟件導向的設計趨勢下，有時候也該停下腳步，看看自己在哪裡。
設計思潮不會中斷，遲早都會聯在一起。
原址網站 original website

避免遺失連結，將原文附上如下。

A conversation with
Bernard Tschumi
by Liliana Gómez

Movements, positions and moments of trans-lating/rotating in architectural thinking

Conceptualization and Transcription: Liliana Gómez
Camera: Steffen Popescu

The Manhattan Transcripts differ from most architectural drawings insofar as they are neither real projects nor mere fantasies.
They propose to transcribe an architectural interpretation of reality.
(...) Their implicit purpose has to do with the twentieth-century city. [1]

The act of transcribing an architectural interpretation of reality raises the question of how to define architecture after Modernism. The question came up in a recent conversation with Bernard Tschumi, the New York based architect. Tschumi had raised the question before, in 1974, when he proposed a change in the relation between architectural practice, representation, and thinking architecture. His proposal suggests a shift whose legacy has yet to be confronted by succeeding generations of architects. Although best known for his architectural and urban projects, realized mostly in France, Tschumi is also known for the emergence of Deconstruction theories in architectural debates, particularly for his proposal of a singular conception of architecture’s definition in the context of a postmodern society and culture. The following conversation took place on June 1, 2005, at his New York office, and it took a surprising trajectory when approaching the issue of the state of architecture today.

Prefixes and their contrapuntal routes

Liliana Gómez: With no doubt, today at the 21 st century as it reflects all the ruptures and unfulfilled predicaments of the 20 th century, the questions of crisis of representation, of discourse and of the grand narratives are brought back when the city and its architecture are considered - in search for different forms of writing history. In the processes' complexity, we can observe an attention to movements and positions, logics and practices of "trans-lating" and maybe "rotating". Once, diagnosing a social and theoretical unstable state, you propose in an essay 1987 the prefixes "de-", "dis-", "ex-" to outline a radical shift with programmatic impact on analytic and descriptive categories. You said: "Ex-centric, dis-integrated, dis-located, dis-juncted, deconstructed, dismantled, disassociated, discontinous, deregulated... de-, dis-, ex-. These are the prefixes of today" [2]. Today, we can observe certain signs of fatigue concerning those prefixes, which provoked a necessary decentering of the one's certain position of discourse. Now, we see clearly the transitional state by reverting to prefixes like "trans-" or even "re-", re-defining the conceptual shift once made [3]. Could you as an architect or a philosopher explain your attention to those small linguistic entities once chosen and if you consider them still adequate and programmatic to explain the state we are in? Could you also explain the paradigmatic impact those prefixes had and maybe still have on architectural thinking and practice?

Bernard Tschumi: I could speak about an hour, but I try to keep it very short. And I will start with "de-", "dis-", "ex-", and immediately go to the heart of the subject, in using the prefixes as a tool, as a mode of operation, either for thinking or for doing architecture. You oppose "trans -", "re-", to "de-", "dis-", "ex-". I would suggest that, in order to redefine, you have also to dismantle what you are going to define. In other words, certain processes happen in a sequence . While I will agree that in architecture the notion of "de-", "dis-", "ex-" may have lived most of its useful life, I would also say it was an absolutely indispensable moment of a trajectory. In order to redefine what architecture is, I need to dismantle what it has been and what it may constitute and then bring these pieces back together in a different order. Let me give you an example: If I say that architecture is not simply about façades or static volumes and therefore I want to introduce the idea of movement, I have to be analytical and identify what is static in architecture, so I can bring movement into the equation. So, in a first move, I say that, for example, architecture is dismantled into spaces, events and movement . Before you are synthetic, you may have to be analytical. So, the "re-" and the "trans-" tend to be synthetic, while the "de-", "dis-", "ex-" are analytical. Regarding the " trans-" and the "rotation", that is another story, and I am going to ask you one question now. To which extent do you think that "trans-" and the "rotation" are also reflective of today's globalism?

Liliana Gómez: It is an interesting question because it refers to the observation that those prefixes indicate a kind of movement or shift. And in this sense they can be understood against the background of the political and the wanted, that means programmatically. At least the "trans-" is quite programmatic. Maybe, in order to hide a bit what we called since fifteen years "globalization", having a negative connotation. Today we try to speak much more about "transnationalization", for example, which might be connoted more positively. I would also think that "trans-" indicates this movement in a almost metaphorical way, even if it doesn't reflect a descriptive or analytic dimension. Simultaneously, the prefix "trans-" points to an ambiguity - which is interesting enough about the "trans-" -in a similar way as the prefix "re-" does, because both refer to the movement of taking something which is somewhere else and bringing it back. This movement of bringing it back and bringing it in, indicates the ambiguity's logic and its practices.

Bernard Tschumi: As we are talking today, two days after the vote that took place in France about the European Community, and indeed, when you bring up the notion of "transnationality", you are simultaneously talking about one thing and its opposite, because transnationality crosses over, through entities, and at the same time, preserves some of the aspects of those entities. It is also a right to the difference, as globalism tries to erase all differences. And I think at the moment the fundamental discussion taking place right now, is the fact that you have to keep that notion of difference and bring it into the architectural work. Nobody can have the global modernist attitude of saying a certain kind of architecture can be exported unchanged everywhere. Immediately as you take an architectural object and you export it into a different context, it becomes something else: It is misread because misreading and translating go together, as you know "tradittore/translatore", "traitor/translator". The misreading is one dimension of it, but the other dimension which is crucial is that the context will contaminate the object, or in the other way around, the object will contaminate the context. I would oppose context and concept, saying that we find ourselves at a period where you either conceptualize context or contextualize concepts. In other words, concepts deal with differences but also with homogeneity, contexts only deal with differences. Let me tell you the reason why I bring this up: When I read your text about "trans-" and "rotation" [4], I realized that today's movement of ideas resembles the way once upon a time, germs and viruses stopped being local but became global as people started to travel around the world. Today, ideas move extremely fast, without even allowing time to know how and why they were generated. If you do not look into "de-", "dis-", "ex-", you risk immediately moving into the consumption of the synthetic.

Architecture in search for its "Grundbegriffe"

Liliana Gómez: It is not a secret, as you are reflecting it with your last book Concept vs. context vs. content, that you are working with the dynamic relationship between those different notions proposing a kind of method of "genealogy of concepts" [5]. And it is not a secret that the method is as well discussed as "Begriffsgeschichte" mainly in the field of history of science and social history [6]. As you say, architects often work quite efficiently and sometimes critically with "inventive categories" applied to specific economic and also political demands. I want to stress here that the method of "Begriffsgeschichte" which came up in a context of cultural transition where concepts lost their traditional dimension of significance, their concrete contexts and the certain terminological use because of the shifts in aesthetic uses in everyday life implying a crisis of cultural and aesthetic forms [7]. This is also sketched out by Michel Foucault in L'Archéologie du savoir where he observes the concepts' multiple theoretical "milieux" as a constitution process stressing the variations of the concept's identity [8]. In this sense, concept is also understood as operator. This process of "trans-lating" reminds me of what you also have been working, writing, thinking in your early works. Especially the "Begriffsgeschichte" stresses that concepts are memory, that means, as inter-modal all senses help to make form the concepts' memory. And lately in your work Index of Architecture [9], a kind of dictionary, a kind of search for definitions of architectural concepts in order to find out certain architectural principle concepts -"Grundbegriffe" - you transgress into a much more socio-cultural and political context. In this sense, concepts are used as memory and resistance. Apparently, your preoccupation about concepts reflects a kind of desire and motivation throughout your work. Maybe you can try to explain how it could so strongly involve your architectural thinking since the early works.

Bernard Tschumi: I like very much that you are going back to the German expression of "Begriff" and "Grundbegriff" - that difference: Concept and pre-concept, in a sense of earlier concept, over-concept, "Über"-concept. I will come back to that in a minute. If there is something that I have been trying to do in my own work all these years and I am still trying to do, is about the definition of what architecture is.
I think architecture by no means has a finite meaning. And architecture has been used by other disciplines in order to structure their own discourse. Often, architecture has been associated with the notion of stability, of solidity, of hierarchy - you know the expressions: "the foundations of society" or "the structure of the law", or "being the architect of a policy ". But people have looked at architecture as something that could give permanence to things which are impermanent. Of course, my contention is very different. I would say that architecture cannot be separated from what happens in it. And what happens in it is by definition transient, architecture is constantly destabilized, as destabilization needs stable surroundings to begin to operate. Hence, the concept of architecture, or the "Grund"-concept or the "base"-concept -I do not know how to translate it in English- has to do with... let me try to give you an example about "basic concept" versus "general concept" in architecture: The "plan libre" in French -you know the Le Corbusier's idea of the dialectic between horizontal movement and vertical columns-, this is a concept. I could say also the "spiral ramp" defining a central space at the Guggenheim in New York, this is a concept. But before that you may have "Grundbegriffe", namely the fact that architecture can be defined as space, event and movement. This is even before devising specific architectural concepts. What I have tried to do in our work is to use the projects we do in our office as a mode of exploration, trying to understand this redefinition of what architecture might be. Of course it is not easy, because generally people want architecture to be the representation of certainty, they want architecture to be identity branding. And they do not like when you tell them "yes", it is going to work for a while, but do not believe in it forever! There is something which I would call in French "le dictionnaire des idées reçues" - "the dictionary of the received ideas". Architects are filled with received ideas, architecture has to be good, nice to people, has to be solid, has to be beautiful and so on. No, that is not the way it is.

Beyond communication

Liliana Gómez: With the paradigm shift by popular culture or mass culture [10], you also mention the event-city -I mean the term "event city"- the role of images and the visual surface are radically changed [11]. Especially in architectural, urban strategies, the image will define a quite important efficiency versus the concept realizing a translation into a communicational sphere. This as background, you bring into play a tool to recontextualize the architectural practice what you once called "dismantle", "defamiliarization" and "technologies and practices of defamiliarization" [12], in order to break the classical architectural canon and to mark a different discourse's position towards maybe plurality and the culture of difference. But "defamiliarization" could also be understood as a break of communication - not affirming the logics of difference but negating communication implying a non-communication. And my question now is: How do you delimit this?

Bernard Tschumi: First of all, defamiliarization only happens for a time. Culture has a means to absorb unfamiliar objects. It is very rare that something can stay unfamiliar. There are very few examples of buildings that are hated from the moment they are built through many generations. There is a building in New York called Two Columbus Plaza, which was done in the Sixties by Edward Durell Stone. It has little round holes on its façades and shows possibly some Islamic influence. It is not necessarily a great building but a very interesting one. Everybody hates it, when in reality it raises a lot of remarkable questions about surface treatment, envelope versus structure etc (...).
It was never absorbed as opposed to, say, the Centrepoint Tower also build in the Sixties in London, and hated in the Seventies and Eighties, but now rehabilitated. So the defamiliarization is something which normally gets absorbed. The question of communication is trickier, because: What do you want to communicate? What do we communicate? And here, I feel uneasy about an architecture which tries to communicate. Does it communicate the power of the institution it represents? Does it communicate, like Disney-Architecture, fun and family? So, you see whenever architects have tried to use architecture as a form of communication, it has always been a carry-catcher of discourse, whether it was fascist, socialist or whatever. Ultimately, architecture has no meaning, it is only what you project on to it. A fascist building and a socialist building during a certain era looked the same. It was what society was, in which society it was in that was this projection. The same happens today. So, those readings, those perceptions are unbelievably transient. And therefore I do not necessarily think that it is the role of architecture to communicate. It may be the role of architecture indeed to be like a mirror. In other words to reflect what you are, in what society you are.

Architecture is cultural critique

Liliana Gómez: Going back again, to this early productive phase 1974-1978, to the Architectural Manifestoes [13]. There you explicitly outline a new sense of the political defining it through spatial and architectural logics. In this sense, you set a new frame for the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. Closely linked to the key-notion of use, you realize this relationship within your first built architecture Parc de la Villette [14] manifesting in both projects: Architecture is cultural critique. This is also what you have mentioned right now that it is not about communication. So could you outline if the critical notion of use intrinsically linked to the everyday life reflected a more "generational" context of those times? [15]. How do you describe that cultural critique is the intrinsic dimension of architecture? [16]

Bernard Tschumi: I like your question because it is touching upon a very current conversation at the moment - here on the East Coast in the world of ideas in some universities. And it is opposing two approaches to architecture, one which has been called "postcriticality", and another called "utopian realism". Let us first talk about why was there this movement calling itself "postcriticality". It is clear that the generation of some people like Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and even Aldo Rossi were not considering architecture ideologies as a given, they were questioning a number of received ideas. They were being critical of the institution of architecture, but they were critical essentially in formal terms, in compositional terms. Then came another generation, which I would say has more to do with my generation, with Rem Koolhaas, with Coop Himmelblau and a few others who were trying to address cultural and programmatic issues as opposed to that previous generation which was working only with an intrinsic and formal nature of architecture as opposed to an extrinsic and social one. So in both cases, there was a critical attitude. Then, and I simplify a little bit, another generation arrived and some of its members, mostly in the United States, started to try to define themselves in terms of a "postcritical". In other words, something that would be linked to everyday operations of architecture, which would be opportunist in the best sense by taking advantage of circumstances - in order to work without trying to refer to social or even formal critique. Of course, I still belong to those who are having an interest for an articulation with culture and society. And that is why another dialogue is happening right now with others disputing "postcriticality" and like Reinhold Martin, proposing the notion of "utopian realism" which is based on ideas, but at the same time grounded in reality. You should talk to Reinhold Martin here in New York who has been very articulated about it. How can the architect be simultaneously the inventor of new models while inserting them in reality and not in tabula rasa? And I think that is indeed one of our challenges.

Liliana Gómez: Yes, there come in the figure of "translation" and the counter-figure of "rotating"...

Bernard Tschumi: Absolutely. Whenever someone talks about rotating, I always ask myself if it rotates on one plane or of it rotates as a spiral...

Liliana Gómez: It is about an outer-orbital figure... I want to come back to the metaphor of "tops of mast" ("Mastbaumspitze") which is evoked by Hannah Arendt when she thought a bit about Benjamin's biography and work [17]. Conceiving the metaphor "tops of mast" of both seeing clearly and overlooking as ambiguous, the own discourse's position might be unperceived and overdetermined, the "lieu" and "milieu" from where one is thinking always comes into play for a position's configuration. Observing your trajectories, you are defining a likely dominant discourse's position that means thinking from here, from New York, from the debate's center at Columbia University. It might ask for a certain translation when operating in different cultural and political contexts, as you do, for example, with your project Museo do Arte Contempôraneo in São Paulo [18], taking into account exactly the already fragmented and unstable conditions. With your recent book Event Cities 3, you formulate dynamics between the concepts' generic dimension, and the specific context proposing a third category "content" as a kind of strategy of translation realized by their relational combination. I want to remind here of the counter-figure of "rotating", especially the centrifugal condition "being-in-the-orbital" involves the risk of overlooking the peripheral logics because of the inclusion's position. So, for an architectural, urban project: How to include or exclude and trans-late different cultural contexts and logics, preventing a tendency of the context's homogenization, mediating between the specific and the generic? How to conceive the tool or strategy of contradiction in a cultural context of schizophrenic contradictions? [19]

Bernard Tschumi: With the "context of schizophrenic contradictions", you are touching on one of the most difficult things about architecture and what constitutes "good" architecture. "Good" architecture, generally, is understood, and even when I try to do it, as something which will be exclusive, and by exclusive, I mean underplaying or removing all the things that are not central to the concept. In other words, in order to make a statement you need to be able to say it in the clearest possible way. That is inevitably a reductive process. At the same time, if you want to be socially inclusive or contextually inclusive, I believe the only way to do it is in form of opposition, of tension and not in the form of a direct inclusion. So I can think of a discussion which is never taking place in architectural magazines, namely what is the relationship between the architectural object that they are presenting and what is next to it. I would love to have a special issue of a magazine in which they talk only about the interstices between what is new and what exists. The magazines even did not want to publish images with people in it - because this in-between is really the place of the inclusion, it is not the architecture itself, the architecture cannot be everything. I will give you an example which struck me at the time. When I finished the first buildings at the Parc de la Villette, all the magazines wanted publish it, and they always wanted to publish those red buildings as pieces of sculpture all alone, and never show the derelict buildings next to mine: A 19 th century market hall or a mid- 20 th century office tower. When in reality the project was really about that dialogue and those tensions. Because somehow, again, the "dictionary of received ideas of architecture" is about architects making shapes. So, how do you change the view of your own discipline? The paradox is that what justifies our existence is often actually just an appearance and pretence.

Stating the state of Architecture

Liliana Gómez: O.K. Last question: Recently and also almost programmatically with the theoretical counter-project: Questioning Ground Zero [20] where you expose the ambiguous logics of how the project Ground Zero in New York is conceived and put into realization, and with the project The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21 st century [21] where you directly propose a kind of architectural manifesto which is signed by several actors involved with architecture as a critique to the recent US American history when the war on Iraq started, you outline a critical position from where the figure of the architect as an intellectual and as a translator will be brought back into play - between cultural difference and different uses of space. You propose a change of architectural thinking and practice to a much more political dimension. About this state of architecture: Using manifestoes as a statement, could architecture be a lieu for a reclaiming? You bring in a kind of agenda for politics of translations: The architect as an intellectual. How to define his political roles or his roles in relation to the aesthetic today?

Bernard Tschumi: The Ground Zero phenomena was obsessive for so many of us here in New York, we saw it directly from our window few hundred meters away... but also, of course, because we are architects, and we like the city and suffer to see it brutalized. But it also forced us to try to understand how we operate. And it was interesting to see how ideological the architectural debate became. Any work that tried to be objective and analytical and comparative -by comparative, I mean making comparisons "trans-", analysis in history or nations- was pushed aside by pure ideology initiated by the politicians and even the media. And the project that was finally selected, was the most ideological project of them all. Architecture, instead of being a tool for thinking, became a tool for believing. And as I always thought that one of the most extraordinary things about architecture is that it is a way of thinking. We are confronted with the whole series of facts and information and we have to bring them together and give some coherence to them, even if they are incoherent. Alternatively, we at least have to stage incoherence in a comprehensible manner. This role of architecture as a form of thinking has been increasingly dismissed in certain political contexts. In the case of Ground Zero, ideology replaced thinking with religious patriotism, together with commercialism. Interestingly enough, at Ground Zero they never found a way to make them agree with one another. You would have thought that in America ideology and commercialism could work together. Not always. It is what one used to call the "internal contradictions of the system". What I tried to do with some of my students at Columbia was analytical, approaching it looking at different alternatives: What were the possible scenarios that one could envisage. It has nothing to do with form, it has nothing to do with what it looked like, but what were the potential options, starting programmatically and not formally, with their respective social, cultural and political implications.

Liliana Gómez: So that is then your strategy to deal with the modernity's ambiguity we are living in and the paradox of architecture that we are practicing as architects from the beginning of doing architecture.

Bernard Tschumi: Yes. Amusingly enough, one of the first articles I ever wrote was called the Paradox of Architecture and at the time I emphasized the difference between concept and experience [22]. I often have played this sort of dialectic, it is maybe my form of thinking, between conceptual mathematical precision and social constraints. The articulation in architecture between the objective and the subjective is one of the least understood dimension of what we do. Maybe, it is the effect that architecture deals with ideas but at the same time it also deals with material, and a mathematician generally does not deal with materiality. So, that is what makes architecture for me so fascinating.

Liliana Gómez: And there is laying then the dimension of cultural critique...

Bernard Tschumi: Yes.

Liliana Gómez: So, then we are coming back to "de-", "dis-", "ex-" where exactly the dismantling is present. We should ask for dismantling especially when questioning Ground Zero where we have to see that the ideological dimension is so strongly involved in order to find what you also called the search for an objective knowledge, maybe, and to formulate a critique.

Bernard Tschumi: Yes. And architecture can be a tool thought as an objective critique. But relatively few people use it. But is has that capability.

Liliana Gómez: O.K. Bernard Tschumi...

Bernard Tschumi: Thanks. You know, I quite liked how your questions have been articulated. They can be the beginning of a project, you can write a book on that....

Liliana Gómez: So, puntocero magazine, and especially me, we like to thank you for that conversation. [23]

notes:
[1] Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 7.
[2] Bernard Tschumi, De-, Dis, Ex-, in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p. 225.
[3] editorial, in: puntocero magazine, No. 0, Sept.04/February 05, Berlin.
[4] The mentioned text about the "trans-" and "rotation" was the invitation for the interview sent to Bernard Tschumi as conceptual frame before the realization of this conversation.
[5] Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 3. Concept vs. Context vs. Content , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004
[6] see Reinhart Koselleck, Werner Conze, Otto Brunner (ed.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1972. And, Karlheinz Barck (ed.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, Stuttgart, Weimar, 2000.
[7] Karlheinz Barck, Ästhetik, Geschichte der Künste, Begriffsgeschichte. Zur Konzeption eines "Historischen Wörterbuchs ästhetischer Grundbegriffe" , in: Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Studien zu einem historischen Wörterbuch, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1990.
[8] Michel Foucault, Archéologie du Savoir, Paris, 1969.
[9] Bernard Tschumi (ed.), Index of Architecture, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2003.
[10] [keynote 1] In the work Advertisements for Architecture (1976/1977), Bernard Tschumi tried to translate the new architecture's conditions into the language of mass media and into the logics of the reproducible -like the form of magazine- using the advertisements as surface where image and architecture meet for a greater public. In this sense, he transformed precisely those new conditions into an aesthetic thinking, diagnosing from there a dominant visual perception of architecture, and simultaneously, advertising architecture's production as the process of architecture towards theoretical concepts.
[11] see Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities (Praxis), The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, and Bernard Tschumi, Spaces and Events (1984-1994), in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994,, and Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts (1978), Architectural Design, Great Britain, 1981.
[12] Bernard Tschumi, Six Concepts (1991), in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994.
[13] Bernard Tschumi, Architectural Manifestoes I, (exhibition 8-28 February), Artist's Space, New York, April 1978, and Architectural Manifestoes II, Architectural Association, London, 1979.
[14] Bernard Tschumi Architects, Parc de la Villette, realized project at Paris, 1982-1997.
[15] [keynote 2] Especially the notion of desire, which Bernard Tschumi brought into play, inscribes itself into a context of the Collège de Sociologie around Georges Bataille - archeologically spoken - like the interest for the sacred, and the everyday life, and the notion of limit. In his early work Manhattan Transcripts (1976-1981), Bernard Tschumi developed a kind of ethnographic approach to urban spaces using a sui generis language of notation.
[16] [keynote 3] With the essays' collection Disjunctions (1975-1990), Bernard Tschumi mainly set a conceptual frame outlining series of methods to delimit architecture from just physical manifestation, explicitly he designed the lieu for a critique, in a much wider sense then other disciplines' practices do, like history of arts for example. Within these essays he did not only define an architecture's theoretical dimension, but he formulated his own "rules" which have been made visible lately by his architectural practice. In this sense, he created a kind of "toolbox" which demands an operation of translation towards architectural practice.
[17] Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, in: Men in Dark Times, Cape, London, 1970.
[18] see Bernard Tschumi, São Paulo, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001, in: Event Cities 3. Concepts vs. Context vs. Content , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004.
[19] [keynote 4] Considering Bernard Tschumi's early works, especially notions like "paradox", "contradiction" and "transgression" characterize his preoccupation about architecture. I would like to stress this approach in order to define another modernity, by criticizing the classical rational philosophical thinking and introducing a kind of "irrational rationality". Taking into account the present context, i.e. fragmentation and dispersal fragments describing the new generic urban dimensions which put into question the modernity's paradigm in the traditional sense of progress, it is possible to observe that from there different strategies of dealing with that paradox in architecture might be open up. In this sense, his work could be read as a constant movement and positioning within the architecture's paradox and modernity's ambiguity. Bernard Tschumi once proposed: "celebrate fragmentation by celebrating the culture of differences, by accelerating and intensifying the loss of certainty, of center, of history", Six Concepts (1991), in: Architecture and Disjunction , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p. 237.
[20] Bernard Tschumi, New York, Tri-Towers of Babel: Questioning Ground Zero, 2002, in: Event Cities 3. Concepts vs. Context vs. Content , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004.
[21] Bernard Tschumi, Irene Cheng (ed.), The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21 rst century, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2003.
[22] Bernard Tschumi, The Architectural Paradox (1975-1976), in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994.
[23] [keynote 5] After the conversation was finish, Bernard Tschumi added: "[...] 'for an architect the earth is flat'. And so I was discussing with people whether this was the 'Begriff' or the 'Grundbegriff'. In other words, that in architecture there are certain things which are crucial in terms of the development of the discipline itself. And this notion of the 'genealogy of concept' is very rarely talked about. Again, the approach these days is highly consumeristic, the way you work is apprehended, is purely on what it looks like, never on what it does. [...] But it is very much of the current conversation...".

Liliana Gómez studied architecture and philosophy and lives in Berlin. Actually she realizes a research project about discourses and models of theory of the Latin American Megacity in Berlin, Bogotá and São Paulo. She is editor of puntocero magazine.

wiimode玩樂器

2010-02-22T11:32:00.001+08:00

wiimode控制 + 音樂素養 = 機械人樂團

機械人幫你畫人像

2010-02-20T19:34:00.001+08:00

辨識系統轉化成輸出設備！

MIT Flyfire

2010-02-20T18:57:00.006+08:00

MIT 將LED與微形直昇機結合，成為3D畫素，可以空中成像。
當然很好玩！很棒！
只是將它當成電腦螢幕與突現理論應用是截然不同的。
編排蒙那麗莎！OMG!

MIT確實很強，有些成就獨步全球！
不過有時候其實還有點笨，只強調技術實踐既有的想法，蠻死板的。
不過到是與實業界接合的蠻順暢的，大概就是其中的原因吧！
賺錢不能太本質，俗就有"利"!
(不要打我！)
不過萬丈高樓平地起，有很大的潛力！

消息來源：http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/#

bio-texture in food

2010-02-20T18:07:00.003+08:00

下水餃吃時，把一顆之前用剩的洋蔥也一倂丟下鍋煮，因為已經有點發芽，再不吃應該就要拿去種了。
因為是煮餃子，洋蔥不像洋蔥蛋或羅宋湯之類的把洋蔥切成一片片，我整個半顆直接下鍋煮，心想呆會兒直接大口咬過癮點。
待起鍋後，想不到吃洋蔥的過程，還真是奇妙的旅程...

本想咬下口，但手中握著半顆洋蔥，逐漸被洋蔥的紋理吸引而忘記食慾(當然最有可能是因我煮的很沒吸引力)，開始細看洋蔥的內部結構。其實蠻好玩的，外層都是一圈一圈的皮層被我逐一抽離開而進入我口中，正當我以同樣的邏輯一口接一口時，我看到了一個讓我再度讚嘆的景象，洋蔥從一圈圈的圓圈狀，逐步轉變成扭曲的雙曲面錐體形。更讓我驚奇的是最裡層竟是包裹著另外兩個小漩渦，而不是一個旋！天知道最裡層那一圈的洋蔥之後，到底是發生什麼事讓兩圈變成一圈！真神奇！好感動！這真是生物機制的鬼斧神工。

我想做設計若能做到這一丁點，死而無憾。快！快做！我腦裡有太多東西要做，哀！我的手趕不上！快點加油...

玩具機械人

2010-02-18T23:34:00.002+08:00

紐約玩具展展出許多玩具機械人(生物)，小孩、大人應該都很愛。

我看艋舺

2010-02-15T13:59:00.006+08:00

看完了艋舺，覺得很納悶。這部電影為什麼會賣阿？

追根究底，應該是偶像與行銷，還有盲目的大眾吧！
Avatar會賣，很容易理解。3D觀看技術，充滿想像力的故事背景與劇情結構。

反觀艋舺，劇情蠻鬆散的，呈現的主題漂浮在眾多支線裡，又不能集體烘托出清楚的觀點。
有口號“意義是三小！我只聽過義氣！”，沒有人物內涵。
和尚的背叛與主人翁的執著之衝突點沒有適切劇情鋪陳，沒有說故事的煽動力，或者說感受力，會覺得劇情急轉直下，蠻怪的。
太子幫老大跟豆導演技太差，雖非主角，但卻是關鍵的角色，一個不像得天獨厚的壞小孩，一個不像外省掛的陰沉老大，看到他們會突然抽離劇情。
對照送行者，同樣有一個想要訴說的主題，但是劇情的設計與鋪陳會讓人感同身受。
同樣的海角七號會賣，也讓人很尷尬不知該高興還是感嘆。有票房、有旋風、有潮流，但實質內容缺陷很多。
不過有個新聞，可以試試看瞧瞧國片的希望。陳駿霖的【美】與【一頁台北】。

行銷行銷行銷！當所有事只剩下包裝的嘴與盲從的心，悲慘的處境大概只有經濟泡沫化後那些如同壁紙的股票才能搓破這些虛華的假象。台灣國片加油！但請你也幫幫忙！

【轉載】拍電影，不該廉價到只用商業包裝

2010-02-14T10:13:00.002+08:00

【前言】

在台灣中生代紀錄片導演中，以吳米森的作品，來討論後現代強烈視聽風格影響下的紀錄片新貌，我想是再適合不過的了。他的紀錄片帶有濃烈的美學特色和極富想像力的形式敍事，以「看起來不那麽真實、但實際上可能更貼近真實」的創作狀態，去呈現他心中所認知的紀錄電影。

【導演簡介】

1967年生於台北市。紐約視覺藝術學院 (School of Visual Arts, New York)、紐約市立大學(City University of New York)電影製作藝術學士(BFA)與媒體藝術製作研究所。1995年返台後曾任春暉Sun Movie電影台導演、星空傳媒Channel [V] 視覺創意部經理、廣告片製作公司導演。現任麥田電影有限公司編劇/導演，財團法人公共電視紀錄觀點專案導演，崑山科技大學媒體藝術研究所兼任助理教授及中華民國電影導演協會理事。

曾以《梵谷的耳朵》等片數度獲得金穗獎最佳影片與國際大獎。曾與鴻鴻、蕭菊貞等友人創辦「純十六影展」及「獨立夢工廠」網站。他的第一部電影《起毛球了》──以不到兩百萬元成本製作完成的16釐米影片，為台灣電影寫下驚人佳績，不但入選釜山國際影展競賽片、瑞典Goteberg等國際影展，並打破台灣獨立製作電影等於非商業的迷思。吳米森也拍攝許多紀錄影片，是公視紀錄觀點的常客。

問：現在有很多影像工作者，可能因為紀錄片的技術門檻比較低，需要的經費比較少，可以做為一個劇情片的跳板。您曾提到，你非常地排斥用其他的工作來養片這樣的行為？

吳米森：
因為我把它當成一份很嚴肅的工作（笑）；一個賴以維生、終身要做的事情的時候，你發現有人來攪局，你就會覺得很無聊。It’s my life, not just a job!

你不會看到一個飛行員、一個機師去賣靈骨塔，他一定就是好好開他的飛機啊！那你拍電影就是好好拍電影，如果電影不賺錢，你就失業嘛！你失業的過程裡面你要怎麼樣去維持你基本的生活，就是你自己想辦法，我不贊成去賣魚丸或是先去玩股票然後再回來拍電影。

我覺得假如你把這當作一個嚴肅的工作、創作的工作，你就是要留在這裡去做，而不是做別的行業。至少是跟拍片有關係的，我不設限；至少把拍片這件事情當作一回事。也不是說你想玩票就不能來拍電影，當然每個人都有權利來拍電影；但是我覺得它背後的心態很重要。

我不覺得拍電影只是一個純粹的夢想而已，你幹嘛花那麼多錢來做夢呢？真是莫名奇妙。晚上作夢又便宜又好看又不花錢，又比電影精彩多了；你為什麼要花那麼多錢、那麼多生命來拍一部電影，來完成你所謂的夢？拍電影根本不應該叫圓夢，我不覺得那是夢。

事實上我已經失業很久了啊。我之前大部份的收入都是拍廣告的，MV我也大概已經七、八年沒拍了（笑），因為拍MV很像是拍婚紗照。俗稱CF的電視廣告，我也慢慢選擇性地拍，還是拍一些像新聞局的短片或我覺得傷害性比較不大的商業廣告。

不是我有多麼高的道德標準，而是當你在拍一些你不相信的東西的時候就是會很痛苦啊！否則那跟你幫希特勒拍片沒什麼不同啊！你要是覺得泡麵吃了會死人，你拍泡麵廣告你會覺得怪怪的，不是嗎？除非說你不知道，除非說你自己沒在吃泡麵、你相信抽菸很好，那就沒問題。所以當這個東西開始衝突，你慢慢就會有一個距離。

剛剛說失業很久是因為開拍《松鼠自殺事件》，很多案子就因而推掉，這些收入當然就少了，這一年也沒有在學校兼課了。我知道你們都很喜歡問導演說：你們都靠什麼維生的？（笑）我覺得這些都沒什麼好問的，因為大家都一樣。我覺得大家都處在一個失業狀態，所以沒什麼好講的（笑）。

問：像周美玲她會去拍那個像那個「年菜」的廣告，拍一支很輕鬆可以賺二十萬，像那種你不會排斥吧？因為我現在不太懂你對商業的界線在哪裡？

吳米森：
我拍啊。除非我知道那個年菜是塑膠做的。就是有些太可怕的東西，我不會想去拍啦。例如說某某政黨的政見廣告，我就不會想去拍。我覺得商業性沒什麼罪惡，什麼不是商業？電影也是商業行為啊！沒什麼罪惡。只是說，你在做的某些事情，跟你的想法或你的立場有違背的時候，我就覺得不應該去做。

紀錄片如果做商業院線發行當然也合理，只是要注意，紀錄片的市場操作模式不應該和劇情片一樣。如果開拍一部紀錄片之前就打算狠狠撈一筆，會出問題的。因為你要很多人花錢買票抱著爆米花來看你的紀錄片，這背後有潛在太多和紀錄片價值相違背的力量，比劇情片複雜多了。

之前有人幫民進黨做廣告、然後又幫國民黨，別人質疑他的時候，我記得他說，他只是販賣他的專業。也許是媒體斷章取義吧，可是我覺得拍政黨廣告或政治廣告，它跟拍口香糖廣告的嚴重性不一樣耶！我覺得背後有那種道德性跟說服性的東西，不應該廉價到什麼都用商業去包裝而已，太可笑了。

台灣人什麼最壞的都學美國，什麼都是錢錢錢；誰不愛錢，這是基本的，可是問題是，夠了沒有？不斷地消費、浪費，好像都理所當然。當然我們都是幫兇啦，我不曉得我會因為喝一杯咖啡剝削多少勞工；（笑）但是我覺得我們要有意識地去做這件事情。像我知道某國際家具連鎖店有嚴重剝削第三世界勞工的行為，我就再也不去那家買東西，諸如此類的。因為我們都是在現行的社會體制、全球體制之下，多多少少我們都是幫兇。

(本文摘自《愛恨情仇紀錄片》，同喜文化出版)

【2010-02-14 聯合新聞網】

三則生物機制新聞

2010-02-13T08:44:00.002+08:00

今天是除夕，舊的一年將走，新的一年將來。大家恭喜！
前幾日看到新聞提到新年之際，這段時間中國境內出現人類的大規模的移動，BIG!類似生物遷徙。
順便附上今日生物機制新聞三則。

15歲睡美人！一睡兩星期
2010-02-13 中國時報【諶悠文／綜合報導】
　英國十五歲少女露依莎.波爾（見下圖，摘自英國每日郵報網站）罹患罕見的嗜睡疾病「克萊列文症候群」（Kleine-Levin Syndrome，俗稱「睡美人病」），一睡可長達兩星期，如同睡美人般，但她的生活可不是童話故事。

　露依莎屢因熟睡不醒而缺課，也曾錯過學校考試，她甚至在跟家人一起度假時，整個星期也從頭睡到尾。

　家住英格蘭西南部沃森市的露依莎在二○○八年十月罹患流感後，開始出現這種症狀。據露依莎的母親描述，那陣子她感到很疲累，情況似乎沒好轉，開始在學校昏睡，且出現不合常理的行為，就像夢中囈語一樣。而且昏睡一周或十天後，她根本不記得發生過什麼事。

　同年十一月，露依莎到沃森綜合醫院就醫，醫師查不出問題，懷疑可能是荷爾蒙方面的毛病。那時露依莎一昏睡就十天，她一天沉睡廿二小時，而父母會趁叫醒她的時候，讓她進食並帶她如廁。

　露依莎的父親理查.波爾說：「除了睡覺，她什麼都不能做。她一熟睡，就好幾天不能上學。」

　去年三月，露依莎轉到聖喬治醫院，經診斷係罹患「克萊列文症候群」，病因則不明，而醫界認為可能與大腦中控制睡眠與食慾的「海馬體」功能障礙有關。這種反覆嗜睡症好發於男性，通常成年後會消失，目前也無明確的治療方法。

大象飆速前腳跑後腳走
2010-02-13 中國時報【尹德瀚／綜合報導】
　大象在動物中堪稱笨重，每小時最高移動速度約十八公里，但大象在快速移動時到底是走還是跑？科學家透過實驗確認，大象快速移運動時係走、跑並行─前腳跑，後腳走。

　這項實驗由比利時魯汶大學的海格倫（Norman Heglund）教授主持，研究團隊訂做一種特殊跑道，能精確衡量大象每一步伐所施的力道，然後將這套設備運到泰國北部的「泰國象保育中心」（Thai Elephant Conservation Centre），讓大象在跑道進行運動實驗，並以高速攝影機拍攝大象每個移動步伐。

　研究團隊將測量資料和攝影畫面進行比對，得以估算大象移動時的潛能（potential energy）和動能（kinetic energy）。當動物行走時，每次抬腿會將肌肉的潛能轉為動能，每次腿著地又會將動能轉為潛能，在行走過程中這個能量轉換不斷重複，四條腿抬腿和著地交錯進行，使潛能和動能達到平衡。

　但動物奔跑時，四條腿會同時離地或著地，因此潛能和動能的轉換同步運行。然而大象比較特殊，當其運動速度加快時，科學家仔細觀察錄影帶後發現，大象是前腿奔跑，後腿仍在行走。

口吃代謝基因變異
2010-02-13 中國時報【黃文正／綜合報導】
　長久以來，口吃一直被認為與家族遺傳有關，不過，最新研究證實，與代謝失調有關的三個基因變異，可能也會影響一般人大腦部分功能，進而引發口吃。新發現可望開拓新療程。

　這項發表於《新英格蘭醫學期刊》（New England Journal of Medicine）的醫學報告，廣泛研究巴基斯坦、美英等國案例。據統計，全球成年人約有一％罹患口吃。有口吃的兒童若早期接後治療，多能矯正成功，若是成年人，僅能靠降低焦慮和調整呼吸以改善說話功能。

　如今，美國《國立失聰和其他溝通障礙研究所》（National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders）的研究團隊希望，他們的新發現能提供口吃的新療程。

　三個基因中，與嚴重代謝疾病有關的兩個基因「ＧＮＰＴＡＢ」和「ＧＮＰＴＧ」，被腦細胞用來處理廢物。「ＧＮＰＴＡＢ」和「ＧＮＰＴＧ」基因若變異，會導致「黏脂質症」（Mucolipidosis II），會讓細胞堆積廢物，造成關節、心肝等疾病與語言失調。

da issue9 out on shelves 夯9上架

2010-02-08T22:16:00.003+08:00

夯第九期上架。主題是紙上建築。有收錄之前參加第一屆先進建築競圖獲得佳作的作品。urban rhizome 都市地下莖。是有關環保的集合住宅。

tenga 原型設計、包裝、銷售 ─ 太屌了

2010-02-01T13:27:00.003+08:00

我必須承認一開始我搞不懂這是什麼，但是看了一陣子之後，我必須讚嘆日本人對於生活細節的觀察與專注，實在有過人之處。除此之外，從創意的發想、產品製作到包裝、行銷真的形成一個很縝密的系統。很佩服！

下次朋友生日可以送喔！

生物機械

2010-02-01T09:24:00.004+08:00

由生物出發探尋其機制而衍生人造物的想法，一直在我的創作、實驗、教學扮演重要的角色。這次在元智帶的設計課，因為結合了機械系與藝創系，所以在技術方面獲得機械系同學的幫助，讓作品能更進一步朝我的理想前進。多謝這幾位同學的努力，他們是廖尹瑄、顧和容(藝創系)，王竹安、呂南璋(機械系)！good job

iphone driving a car!

2010-01-25T23:33:00.005+08:00

本來我並非很在意iphone，但是看到這些影片所介紹的效應，iphone引起我的好奇心，想一探究竟。不知道別的智慧型手機是否也能這麼搞？android的可以嗎？

half human half robot

2010-01-25T14:03:00.016+08:00

load carrier from "alien"

control interface from "surrogates"

surrogate robot from "surrogates"

warrior robot from "avatar"

機械人的發展除了往人造生命外，人跟機械人的關係也愈發密切，機械人也可以是人體或意念的延伸。幾十年來在科幻小說、電影、動畫裡都一直勾勒類似的夢想，而這些夢想近十年內也在各地實驗室被開發出來。

bioloid robot kit

2010-01-20T17:31:00.000+08:00

根據維基這是韓國製造商開發出來的機械人套件，真的只有一個字“屌！”

機械人的動作姿態可以透過動畫模式設定，完成一系列的choreography!想到幾乎十年前同樣的邏輯用maya做動畫，十年後是在規劃機械人的animation！對於科技的進步，設計面對新時代的回應有很深的感觸。

bioloid robot climbing up!!

2010-01-20T17:03:00.001+08:00

這學期在元智帶了一個結合機械系與藝創系的設計課，將之前仿生的思考帶入機械人的技術，還不錯的一種組合，也是我一直嘗試的方向。機械人、人造生命等觀念在許多科幻電影推波助瀾之下，一般主流價值並不會排斥，主要在於創意如何進入實質的運作世界，這其中還有許多需要努力的地方。

曾經瀏覽看過一本書，書名忘了，是一本關於日本設計容易閱讀的軟書，它提到日本在八零年代很早就積極研發機械人，企圖引導世界走向一個取代人工的世界。同時期的美國發展網路世界，一個資訊無遠弗屆的遠景。回顧歷史，網路在這二三十年間壓倒性地將機械人工業排擠到次要的角色，網路銀行提供在家裡操控金融，比櫃檯小姐由機械人取代的便利性，確實讓日本的機械人夢想吃了悶虧。

不過時代改變，機械人科技的人造生命絕對是下一個人類文明的里程碑，會重新更替人類文明的思考軸象，勾勒下一個世界奇景。

就是愛動

2010-01-06T09:42:00.002+08:00

前陣子看過使用iphone駕駛汽車，今天無意間在網上看到iphone與直昇機(鸚鵡)結合。還有前些時候mit medialab有位印度研究生發展的sixth sense將數位化的世界與現實世界融合一起，都讓人很興奮！

「讓建築動起來！」已經不能只是口號。let's go 4 it.

arthur ganson's moving sculpture

2009-12-14T12:44:00.005+08:00

許久沒更新網誌，因許多瑣事纏身，抽不出空！但今早我無意偶然間看了這段影片，我覺得蠻正面地感受到一顆熱情的心與一雙堅毅的手，不急不徐地創造人類的文明，比昨晚看到電視對雲端運算前景的介紹還多些內在的震撼力，比許多潮流設計給人的感受要深刻許多。

今天是一位朋友的生日，祝你生日快樂！
今天也是一位心目中重要的人遠行的日子對你的思念一直都在！
僅以此影片分享傳遞我的祝福。

*有英文字幕可供選擇，請按框景下方紅色字"view subtitles"，選擇您要的字幕。

【轉貼】染色體研究三人共獲諾貝爾醫學獎

2009-10-06T09:23:00.003+08:00

【聯合報╱編譯莊蕙嘉／報導】

諾貝爾醫學獎五日揭曉，三名美國科學家伊莉莎白‧布雷克本、卡蘿‧格萊德與休斯塔克，因發現染色體在細胞分裂時的複製過程與老化的關聯而膺選，這項研究可望為癌症治療和抗老化帶來曙光。

三人的研究成果說明了染色體的自我保護機制，可在細胞分裂時成功複製，且不致使基因鈍化。

瑞典卡洛林學院諾貝爾大會表示，三人的研究「解決了生物學的一個重要問題，了解染色體如何於細胞分裂時完整複製，並防止退化。這項發現為我們認識細胞增加新面向，為對抗疾病機制提供曙光，並刺激潛在新療法的發展」。

布雷克本（Elizabeth H. Blackburn）和格萊德（Carol W. Greider）發現，位於染色體頂部的端粒，乃由端粒酶形成，這種酵素正是防止細胞退化的關鍵。布雷克本和休斯塔克（Jack W. Szostak）的研究則指出，端粒酶不足將導致老化。

卡洛林學院教授韓森負責去電通知得獎者，他表示三名科學家都親自接了電話，雖然聽起來有點睏但很高興。休斯塔克還說，要辦個盛大的派對慶祝。

聽聞得獎時，格萊德正忙著送小孩上學，因此延遲發表得獎聲明。她謙虛地說，研究之始純粹出於好奇，並未想到有助於癌症治療。

這也是諾貝爾獎歷來首次有兩名女性同時獲頒醫學獎，出生於澳洲的布雷克本擁有澳洲及美國雙重國籍，她是澳洲第一位榮獲諾貝爾獎殊榮的女性。

格萊德任教於約翰霍普金斯大學醫學院，六十歲的布雷克本是舊金山加州大學的生物學家，曾任格萊德指導教授。五十六歲的休斯塔克目前在波士頓的麻州綜合醫院教授基因學，三人可平分一千萬克朗（約台幣四千五百六十萬元）獎金。

芋頭蕃薯與拓樸

2009-09-19T11:18:00.007+08:00

日前買了一袋芋頭蕃薯當點心吃。煮法只求方便能夠止飢，所以洗靜後蒸熟食用。
不過令人充滿驚奇的並非是該食物驚為天人的美味可口。
而是袋中的芋頭蕃薯長相看似相同，但口感有著極大的不同。

芋頭蕃薯有著比較近似蕃薯的外表，但內在有著紫色的芋頭特徵。
有的咬起來仍舊像蕃薯一般，鬆鬆軟軟澱粉的口感，這到無關痛癢，因為在煮法與口感上沒有逾越心理預期。
另一類則讓我有點驚嚇，口感完全不同，像是吃蒸熟的紅蘿蔔一般，比較像根莖非澱粉的質感。

這個經驗開始讓我想到接觸的拓樸觀念：

同胚 homeomophism
拓樸學強調一種連續性，在不破壞結構的情形下，任何形狀上的變化可視為同一結構性的物。一個環狀的甜甜圈與一個杯子視為「同胚」。一方面強調同一個結構，另一方面強調一個多重性。

兩種口感相異的芋頭蕃薯我吃起來很同胚。

【轉貼】超級奈米紙韌性比鋁強三倍

2009-09-07T15:15:00.003+08:00

2009-09-07 中國時報【陳文和／綜合報導】
　據南韓《朝鮮日報》報導，南韓科學家已研發出延展性更勝於金、鋁等金屬的超級奈米紙，未來可取代聚丙烯和聚乙烯等塑料材質，做為鋰電池的隔離膜，大幅降低鋰電池的生產成本。

　南韓山林科學院環境材料工程系李善榮（音）博士領導的研究團隊，研發出這種延展性最高比鋁強三倍、比金強一倍的超級紙。而且不含任何化學添加物，製造過程不會造成汙染。李善榮表示，他們已於上月對相關技術申請專利。

　延展性是指物質承受拉力時，維持塑性變形而不斷裂的受力範圍，也就是說，要想撕開該研究小組研發的紙張，所需要的力量比扯斷鋁、金所需要的力還大。

　李善榮研究團隊將奈米技術運用於傳統的造紙原料纖維素（cellulose），研磨出粒徑廿至四十奈米（一奈米為十億分之一公尺）的奈米纖維素微粒，用以製造超級紙。

　李善榮指出，超級紙應用領域廣泛，例如可用來生產鋰電池的隔離膜。鋰電池的正極與負極之間必須以隔離膜阻隔，以避免發生短路，現有的隔離膜一般採用聚丙烯（PP）、聚乙烯（PE）單層微孔膜，以及由PP和PE復合的多層微孔膜，價格高昂，往往占鋰電池成本的二○％到三○％。超級紙隔離膜的價格將較塑料隔離膜低廉。

　此外，超級紙還可作為重要的建築材料。因它能夠阻擋水分子，又能讓空氣分子通過，可運用於實現既防潮又通風的高科技建築工藝。

related reference:
Smart cellulose could mean flying magic paper

原型 prototype II

2009-09-07T13:40:00.002+08:00

前幾天乙醬先生回應了原型的看法，大意是原型牽涉一連串的修改。我覺得乙醬先生補充得很好。上次提到原型的意義，今天補充一下原型的特性，原型會不斷修正調適與週遭的關係，今天報紙上H1N1的報導，是個好例子。

****************************************

H1N1天熱照發威患者暴增三成
2009-09-07 新聞速報【中廣新聞／陶泰山】
流感病毒喜好存活於寒冷潮濕環境，台灣過去在每年秋冬才是流感流行季，但今年秋冬未到，夏日炎炎，新流感病毒已經肆虐，專家表示，這與病毒變異、型態與適應性的改變有關；即使是大熱天，近來就醫類流感患者數仍倍增，快篩陽性的比例也高，臨床觀察，一個診次，甚至從過去約20名類流感患者，暴增三倍左右達50~60名，患者數驚人。

流感病毒可在寒冷低溼度的環境中存活數小時，台灣的流感流行季，是發生在每年秋冬，特別是到農曆年節達到最高峰，不過，今年新興的新流感病毒，卻威力驚人，頂著大熱天，散播速度不減，在台灣持續疫情升溫中，依照疾病管制局資料，一天推估超過三千人因為新流感就醫。

類流感患者人數之多，連醫師都感受到壓力，台中榮總小兒感染科主任陳伯彥舉出，往年同期夏天一般感冒病例相當少，執醫多年，頭一次在大熱天裡，看到這麼多的類流感患者，通常在年底才會見到的流感流行，現在卻就醫人數倍增，快篩陽性比例也高，他表示，新流感病毒不怕天熱，夏天也活躍的原因，與病毒變異、型態與適應性的改變有關。

他舉出，過去同期，平均一個門診差不多約20幾個類流感病人，但現在一個診次，卻有高達50、60名類流感患者都要看醫生，增加達至少三倍之多。

衛生署疾管局與醫界專家都強調，目前新流感疫情還未達高峰，隨著天氣轉變，時序入秋冬，民眾有「雙流感」要對抗，包括季節流感以及新流感，呼籲要多注意個人衛生防範。

原型 prototype

2009-09-03T20:52:00.004+08:00

多年前當「原型」還是新鮮的辭彙時，學校裡無論老師學生都會將原型掛嘴邊。不過大家對其中意義的詮釋，往往一知半解，造成許多似是而非的觀念。有的人將原型望文生義，例如是原始最初的型態、基本的類別等，有的學生因為看到原型總是要將研究A的，換到B用，所以說原型一定要換來換去。

即便現在，原型還是很重要的觀念。我的說法是原型是演變歷史的歧路，是樹的分支，是水的沸點。原型將脈絡扭轉通向新的方向，一個新的開始。而之前所有一知半解或只有片斷描述的原型，必須收納在這樣的觀念下才比較完整。

下面從口腔萃取的幹細胞轉變成眼睛的治癒方式，就是原型。

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【轉載】眼球灼傷口腔黏膜幹細胞改善視力

〔中央社〕眼睛被強酸、強鹼潑灑，重則失明，輕則灼傷眼球表層及角膜，視力受損。林口長庚醫院以臨床實驗證實，自體口腔黏膜幹細胞能修復眼球上皮細胞，可改善患者視力。

林口長庚醫院眼角膜科主任馬惠康表示，眼部被強酸、強鹼潑灑導致的化學性灼傷，常會造成眼球表層上皮細胞及輪部上皮幹細胞嚴重損毀，使角膜上皮細胞無法自行修復，眼球表皮就容易出現反覆性潰爛，致角膜混濁、感染、穿孔、新生血管增生等嚴重後遺症，致視力退化或永久喪失。

若只有一眼被灼傷，傳統上醫界都會自另一眼取健康的輪部上皮幹細胞移殖到傷眼，但若雙眼都被灼傷，患者以往多只能自求多福。

不過，2004年日本東北大學西田幸二教授及京都府立大學木下茂教授發表以自體口腔黏膜幹細胞在體外培養後，再移入患者眼部，成功取代輪部上皮幹細胞，這項新技術命名為「COMET」，成為眼部重度灼傷患者拯救視力的新希望。

馬惠康表示，林口長庚醫院眼科團隊看到西田、木下的研究後，獲衛生署的人體實驗許可，自2006年起開始用COMET技術為5名眼部重度灼傷患者治療，證實這項技術有效，其中3人之後接受角膜移殖、1人接受輪部移殖手術，檢驗因手術被切下的眼球上皮組織後發現，組織內並沒有只存在於眼部細胞的第8型角蛋白，證實口腔黏膜細胞能健康存活在眼球表層。

馬惠康說，研究發現，運用COMET技術，在急性期可迅速降低眼角膜發炎並促進眼球表皮傷口癒合；在慢性期則有助於眼表層重建，對恢復患者視力有很大幫助，雖然患者還是可能因角膜混濁等因素仍需移植角膜，但可避免眼球傷口反覆潰爛情形出現。

除了運用COMET技術於修復眼球表層細胞，馬惠康說，不排除COMET技術未來可運用於口腔癌等口腔黏膜受損嚴重患者。

馬惠康率領的眼科團隊運用COMET技術的3篇臨床實驗論文已先後發表於「視網膜與眼之研究進展」、「眼」及「眼表層」等國際期刊上。除了已發表論文的5例病例外，馬惠康團隊運用COMET技術治療的患者已達到18名，並持續進行研究中。

日本用口腔黏膜細胞再造眼角膜
2001-05-22 10:31
　　新華網紐約５月２１日專電（記者張化）日本名古屋大學醫學部最近研究出一種用口腔黏膜細胞再生眼角膜的新技術，為需要眼角移植的人帶來曙光。
　　這項新技術所用的方法是將面頰內側的黏膜切開數毫米，再從深０．２毫米－０．５毫米的缺口取出黏膜幹細胞，加以培養，待２周－３周之後將它製成透明狀薄膜，然後貼在隱形眼鏡的內側，蓋在切除了受損角膜的眼球上，這樣培養薄膜的內側就會再生出角膜來。
　　據悉，這是由於培養膜釋放出來的化學物質，刺激了眼內的角膜幹細胞而促進了角膜的再生過程，但如果損傷到角膜的深層部位，角膜再生就困難了。這項技術的優點是避免了角膜移植，因而不會發生排斥反應，而且採取培養口腔黏膜的幹細胞也很容易，當然，如何避免取出優質的口腔黏膜細胞給患者帶來痛苦，這是今後研究的課題。（完）
資料來源：新華網

【轉貼】冰層消覓食難北極熊軀體縮小

2009-08-27T08:21:00.006+08:00

Environmental stresses could be causing physical changes in the bears
Polar bears are one of the most polluted mammals on the globe
The team used skulls from the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen
The maximum sea ice extent is declining by about 2.7% per decade

2009-08-27 中國時報【潘勛／綜合廿五日外電報導】

丹麥科學家比對百餘年來的北極熊顱骨變化後推斷，因為環境惡化，現存北極熊的軀體相較於一百多年前的熊祖先，已經縮小。

　研究團隊比對「哥本哈根動物博物館」收藏的近三百具北極熊顱骨，發現過去一百廿年間，顱骨尺寸縮減的幅度在二％至九％之間。

　研究報告主撰人「奧胡斯大學」生物學教授裴托迪表示，丹麥團隊研究那批顱骨、顱骨形狀及尺寸變化，可以判斷北極熊軀體大小改變。研究成果發表於《動物學期刊》（Jounal of Zoology）。

　裴托迪表示，北極熊軀體縮小，按推斷原因在環境惡化，造成「生理壓力」。首先，全球暖化，北極海冰層因消融而縮小，北極熊耗費在覓食的力氣增加，因此沒有額外精力讓身軀長大。

　再來，人類製造的化學汙染物存留在北極熊體內，也造成北極熊生育率減少。由於生育率降低，導致交配對象減少，北極熊近親繁殖現象增加，連帶改變了北極熊顱骨的形狀。

　裴托迪表示，北極熊受化學汙染影響特別重，原因是牠們位居食物鏈頂端；食物鏈較低層生物，如魚及海豹等凡沾染汙染物者，都匯聚到北極熊脂肪內。

'Stress' is shrinking polar bears

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

Polar bears have shrunk over the last century, according to research.

Scientists compared bear skulls from the early 20th Century with those from the latter half of the century.

Their study, in the Journal of Zoology, describes changes in size and shape that could be linked an increase in pollution and the reduction in sea ice.

Physical "stress" caused by pollutants in the bears' bodies, and the increased effort needed to find food, could limit the animals' growth, the team said.

The researchers used the skulls as indicators of body size. The skulls from the later period were between two and 9% smaller.

"Because the ice is melting, the bears have to use much more energy to hunt their prey," explained Cino Pertoldi, professor of biology from Aarhus University and the Polish Academy of Science, and lead scientist in this study.

"Imagine you have two twins - one is well fed during its growth and one is starving. (The starving) one will be much smaller, because it will not have enough energy to allocate to growth."

The team, which included colleagues from Aarhus University's Department of Arctic Environment, also found shape differences between the skulls from the different periods.

This development was slightly more mysterious, said Dr Pertoldi.

He explained that it was not possible to determine the cause, but that the changes could be linked to the environment - more specifically to pollutants that have built up in the Arctic, and in the polar bears' bodies.

The aim of the study was to compare two groups of animals that lived during periods when sea ice extent and pollution levels were very different.

The pollutants that the scientists focused on were compounds containing carbon and halogens - fluorine, chlorine, bromine or iodine.

Some of these compounds have already been phased out, but many still have important uses in industry. These include solvents, pesticides, refrigerants, adhesives and coatings.

Genetic brink

The changes, the team says, could also be related to a reduction in the genetic diversity of the species.

Hunting over the last century, said Dr Pertoldi, could have depleted the gene pool, leaving polar bears to suffer the effects of inbreeding.

"We also know from previous studies that some chlorinated chemical pollutants have affected the fertility of the females," he continued.

Rune Dietz from Aarhus University was another member of the research team.

He explained that he and his colleagues had already determined a link between man-made "persistent organic pollutants" and reduced bone mineral density in polar bears - which could leave the animals vulnerable to injury and to the bone disease osteoporosis.

Skull collection

The collection of almost 300 polar bear skulls was provided by the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Christian Sonne, a veterinary scientist from Aarhus University who worked with the team, said that this provided a unique and "fantastic sample", providing a window into the bears' development over a whole century.

During that time, he said, concentrations of many man-made pollutants in the Arctic have significantly increased.

He said: "Polar bears are one of the most polluted mammals on the globe."

【轉載】DNA電腦晶片更小更強更省電

2009-08-18T08:26:00.005+08:00

中國時報 2009-08-18 【潘勛／綜合十七日外電報導】

　美國電腦研究專家表示，他們已找到利用去氧核醣核酸（ＤＮＡ）分子技術製造下一代微晶片的方法，而以ＤＮＡ分子取代傳統的矽元素來造出微電路，可讓晶片變得更小，功能更強，也更省電。但專家也表示，這種晶片要進入商業量產，至少還要好幾年。

　美國ＩＢＭ公司與加州理工學院專家羅斯蒙德合作；羅斯蒙德幾年前便判定，ＤＮＡ分子可以「自我組合」成微小形狀，如三角形、正方形及星形。借用ＤＮＡ的天然能力，可以吸收大量的複雜資訊，轉而運用在其他類型的活動。

　ＩＢＭ公司研究許多方法，讓ＤＮＡ在晶片表面自組成圖案，然後充當某種「支架」，再用數百萬奈米碳管及奈米粒子沉積上去。ＩＢＭ科學家表示，如此奈米碳管及奈米粒子形成的新網絡，可以充當未來電腦晶片的線路及電晶體。

　具體而言，科學家先以傳統晶片技術蝕刻所需的電路圖形，再將ＤＮＡ溶液倒在矽晶表面，此時ＤＮＡ會依蝕刻的電路圖形自我組合成微小的三角形、正方形，這種能力，科學家稱之為「ＤＮＡ的摺紙技術」（DNA origami）。如能將這些微小的ＤＮＡ摺紙技術放置在晶圓表面，那麼科學家便能利用ＤＮＡ的特性，製作出奈米電路板。

　這篇論文發表在最新《自然奈米科技》期刊。過去數十年，矽晶技術不斷微縮，將更小的線路蝕刻在晶片表面，以增進速度表現，同時減少電力消耗。目前最先進的電腦晶片是用四十五奈米製程製造，但再過幾年，要降到廿二奈米以下便瀕臨矽晶材料的物理極限，將變得更為困難、昂貴。

延伸閱讀：
Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns
Design of DNA origami
Six-Helix Bundles Designed from DNA

Flâneur

2009-08-13T07:42:00.003+08:00

"Flâneur"在法文原指流浪漢、街道晃蕩之意。波特萊爾Charles Baudelaire開發其意為“在街頭行走以觀察體驗都市生活”的意思。其背景是在19世紀工業革命下，新式蒸氣發動機、紡織機、火車等各式工具以及金融革命推波助瀾下，從而襲捲而來創造的新型大都會、新型生活型態所引發的思考。這也引發其後許多關於都市的研究與想法：日常生活、由下而上等等。

Golan Levin's artwork

2009-08-04T14:03:00.006+08:00

interstitial fragment processor

scrapple installation

TED lecture

在TED上看到Golan Levin的作品，覺得相當有趣。他的互動作品具備了收集即時資訊、處理、表現，同時也帶著幽默。

robot cooking noodles

2009-08-03T23:42:00.002+08:00

機械人煮拉麵！雖然是噱頭，複製汽車工業的機械人。但是刺激力道還是呱呱叫！

【轉載TED】Bonnie Bassler: how bacteria talk

2009-07-21T16:08:00.003+08:00

TED這個網站每星期都有簡短演講在網上流通，題材廣泛包括各種新知、特別的經驗、智慧結晶等等，相當受用。這則是有關細菌如何藉化學分子溝通，達到群體社會行為，也影響人類對於疾病治寮的觀點。

原始網站：http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html
有中英字幕可選擇！

responsive form

2009-07-14T15:14:00.004+08:00

近來讀greg lynn的animate form，裡面提到一些探討動態形狀的先進，Hans Jenny是其中一位。他利用震動與磁性，置放鐵屑或水泥粉末在盤子上製造形狀的紋理。形狀在場域的力量交互作用下成形。

下面是另一個相關的影片，利用聲波製造米粒的紋理。

another model generated by sounds:

【轉貼】葉綠素電池發功尿布救生衣遇溼主動求救

2009-07-13T20:52:00.002+08:00

上學其指導一位銘傳畢業生做有關綠藻發電的研究，這篇報導有關葉綠素的環保利用，參考參考。

2009-07-13 中國時報【中央社】

失智老人尿溼、意外落水，尿布、救生衣只能提供最低限度功能，不過，搭配遇溼就發電的葉綠素電池模組，功能大大提升，不但會主動求救，而且每個模組花費只要新台幣10元以下。老人、嬰兒尿溼了，照顧者一忙很容易忘了查看；意外落水，就算穿著救生衣，在黑夜、大海中，也只能延長存活時間。研發出「葉綠素電池」的國立虎尾科技大學光電所教授廖重賓表示，利用葉綠素電池遇溼發電的特性，結合會發出音樂的IC晶片及發亮射程更遠的LED 燈泡，尿布、救生衣變得更聰明。廖重賓指出，葉綠素電池結合IC晶片可以做成扁平化模組，放進尿布的不織布層中，葉綠素電池被尿淋溼就會發電，使模組主動發出音樂聲響，提醒照顧者，而大量生產化後，單一造價只要1元。

　同樣的原理，結合LED燈泡模組化後放進救生衣，落水後燈泡可持續點亮達72小時，增加落水者獲救機會，「單一造價只要10元左右」，未來結合GPS全球定位儀，效果會更好。

　廖重賓說，葉綠素電池模組尿布、救生衣都已取得發明專利，且都有廠商開始洽談商業化合作，前景相當可觀。

　廖重賓及研發團隊下午在教育部「2009技專校院技術研發成果聯合發表記者會」發表成果。另外，私立亞東技術學院工商業設計系講師高繼徽研發的「向量式人體工學辦公椅」，利用U型椅腿、T型滾輪等力學結構，使辦公椅可隨人體移動微調，減緩不適感及久坐的傷害，有量產價值，也受到注意。

　其他，國立高雄海洋科技大學研發的無水微生物廁所，利用微生物技術，讓人類排泄物不再只是廢棄物，反而成為再生能源的一環，同樣吸引參觀展覽者的目光。980713

活潑建築大陸版─新仿生建築

2009-06-30T20:57:00.004+08:00

日前接到大陸出版社通知，「活潑建築」一書已在大陸出版問世。接到這個好消息，除了令人振奮之外，真的只能說好品質有內容的書還是有一絲機會與世人見面，也必須感謝許多人的幫忙，沒有他們的幫助，肯定沒機會的。首先感謝老季引薦中國工業出版社，上海清華大學建築系徐衛國教授為文作序，出版社唐旭先生不辭辛勞與我溝通所有細節，好友張碩修的翻譯內容等等。

書名換成「新仿生建築」，顯然「活潑建築」一辭其實真的很沒市場，不太上相。在台灣出版時，偶而會被譏笑書名沒有氣質，殊不知絕大部分的譏笑者其實只幻想著一個絢麗的名稱，搭配一個可有可無的內容罷了，跟此書硬底子扎實的內容對照起來，確實處在天南地北的光譜兩端。我當初叫活潑建築時，心裡不太有任何市場概念，只想著契合內容。不過這一次，我想出版專業的考量也必須加以尊重，是故除了反應內容之外，必須要一個能震攝住讀者的名號，想必與過往行走江湖的術士一般，給人印象深刻些。我採用仿生建築這個主軸，以新的思潮、工具引領出新的仿生契機為目標，包裹這本原本強調活生生反應活性的建築新趨勢，活潑易變的性質成為新仿生的課題，希望仿生一辭能讓大陸讀者有更親近的面容。

六月份最後一天，以此勉勵自己與在各地的中英文讀者，一起加油！

基因屏障與新種

2009-06-26T20:53:00.004+08:00

星期四東海正評，邀請到兩位生科系的助教來客評幫忙，提供有關發育生物學及生物演化的意見，也試圖讓建築生命的實驗方向，有跨領域的激盪，這也是一直以來我所熱衷的方向。

會中討論到新種的形成，有幾種可能性。一種是地理上的屏障。比如海峽、高山等自然的地理因素，讓原本同種的生物隔絕，經過長期的時間分隔在不同的環境下各自獨立交配繁殖，自然會形成不同種的生物。另一種或許是行為模式，如果繁殖時程一直搭不上一致，長期下來即便生活在同一環境中，也可能長期不交配而形成不同種。總而言之，形成屏障隔絕便有可能形成不同種類。有趣的生物知識。

今天看到新聞，提到台灣畫眉因商人大量進口大陸畫眉，因為各種因素造成彼此混種，逐漸讓台灣畫眉快要絕種。對於台灣畫眉快要絕種的情形，我不是很清楚是否該很憂心而需要趕快防範，我沒有任何立場，而讓我比較關心的是屏障的出現與否造成物種之間的消退卻是一個活生生的例子。而物種與環境的關係才正要開始因而改變呢！

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基因汙染兩成台灣畫眉恐滅種
2009-06-26 中國時報【沈揮勝／南投報導】
　台灣畫眉在兩年前獲承認為獨立種，不過因早期國人引進大陸畫眉，導致基因受汙染。農委會特生中心與師大生命科學系合作調查發現，受汙染比例已逾兩成，如不及時控制，台灣畫眉恐將滅種。

　台灣畫眉基因滲漏現象，已引起國際重視。特生中心及師大生命科學系的研究論文，日前獲刊全球排名第一的Journal of Avian Biology鳥類學術期刊，其後續影響與衝擊，農委會正密切關切中，將於這兩天正式發表。

　藍胸、白眉或裸皮眼圈，是大陸畫眉特徵。基因遭汙染的二代台灣畫眉外觀多元且不完整，常具備部分陸眉特徵，且每一個體不太相同。由於民間飼養的大陸畫眉及雜交種數量龐大，如不徹底解決，以後野外看到所謂的台灣畫眉，將與現在看到的長相不同。

　因雜交畫眉四處流竄，農委會見事態嚴重，於九十二年將大陸畫眉亦列為保育，期能夠杜絕民眾豢養。不過此舉反成了繁殖業者的護身符。雜交種無法列入保育，豢養繁殖剛好避過野保法，讓情況更為惡化。

　台灣原生野鳥遭外來基因汙染或領域排擠最嚴重者，非八哥莫屬，南洋白尾八哥縱橫全島，台灣原生八哥在混群中剩下不到○二％。台灣畫眉因具領域性，受汙染族群呈塊狀分布，要控制其繼續擴散，專家認為技術不是問題，但工程浩大複雜。

【轉貼】5個脾肝錯置英女孩內臟如拼圖

2009-05-23T14:26:00.002+08:00

【聯合報╱編譯陳世欽／報導】 2009.05.23 03:46 am

光看外表，英國6歲女孩貝塔妮‧喬登（Bethany Jordan ）與其他活蹦亂跳的小女孩沒兩樣，包括天真無邪的笑容。但是體內，她的五臟六腑卻有與眾不同的排列組合。

貝塔妮出生時就有5個脾臟，心臟有一個破洞，肝臟前後倒置，右肺形成時有如左肺，胃的位置也不對。

倫敦每日郵報22日以「拼圖女孩」（Jigsaw Kid）報導貝塔妮的故事，醫師曾預告她可能很快就會夭折。貝塔妮至今還好端端活著。

貝塔妮與父母住在西密德蘭史托爾橋，罹患的是艾維馬克綜合症（Ivemark Syndrome）。這是一種罕見的臟器先天錯置症狀，特點是心血管系統發育不良，部分臟器位置錯誤。這意味，她無法像正常小孩那樣的承受正常程度的體力消耗。如果貝塔妮運動過度，旁人可自她的背後看到心臟跳動。

這種病例出現的機率約僅15萬分之一，每一個個案都有不同的特點，以致醫學界對它所知甚少。專家認為，原因可能與遺傳有關。貝塔妮的母親麗莎表示：「她的部分臟器前後錯置。我們必須加倍小心，因為她很容易累。」

貝塔妮的5個脾臟比正常脾臟小很多，而且無法有效過濾血液，使她很容易受到感染。

麗莎表示：「這意味，如果她生病，復原的時間會比較久，因為她的免疫系統很薄弱。」

伯明罕婦女醫院的醫師在麗莎接受產檢時，即已發現貝塔妮的問題。他們找不到脾臟，並向她的父母表示，她可能罹患唐氏症。醫師當時並研判，貝塔妮的腦部可能受損，這使她的父母面臨是否終止懷孕的痛苦選擇。稍後的檢測顯示，她的腦部正常；麗莎最後還是決定生下她。

主治醫師表示貝塔妮最終需要肝臟移植，但目前情況良好，每年只需回診兩次。

The'Jigsaw Kid' who has five spleens, a back-to-front liver and two left lungs

By David Wilkes
Last updated at 11:07 AM on 22nd May 2009

On the outside, Bethany Jordan looks like any healthy little girl - cheeky grin included.
But on the inside, she has been pieced together differently from everyone else.
Dubbed the 'Jigsaw Kid', Bethany was born with five spleens, a hole in the heart, a diseased and back-tofront liver, a right lung formed as if it was a left one, and her stomach on the wrong side.

Doctors warned her parents Lisa and Robert there was little chance she would survive birth.
But she did, and six years later is still defying the odds.
Bethany, of Stourbridge, West Midlands, suffers from Ivemark Syndrome, a very rare disorder characterised by a poorly-formed cardiovascular system and having organs in the wrong place.

It means she cannot stand up to some of the normal rigours and strains of an average child. When she exercises too much, Bethany's heart can be seen beating through her back.
There are so few sufferers - one in 150,000 - and each case is so different, that very little is known about the condition. The cause is thought to be genetic.
Yesterday her mother said: 'Underneath her skin everything is back to front and jumbled up.
'We have to really watch her because she gets tired very quickly because of her condition.'
Her five spleens - each much smaller than a healthy one - do not work effectively at filtering her blood, leaving her at risk of harmful infections.
'It means that if she gets ill it takes a lot longer for her to get over it because she has a very low immune system,' said Mrs Jordan.
Doctors at Birmingham's Women's Hospital discovered Bethany's condition before she was born during routine pregnancy scans.
They were not able to find a spleen and warned her parents she could also be suffering from Down's Syndrome.
Doctors also thought Bethany could be brain-damaged, leaving her family with the agonising decision of whether to terminate the pregnancy. Later tests showed her brain was normal and Mrs Jordan chose to go ahead with the birth.
Bethany was born at nearby Wordsley Hospital, weighing 4lb 15oz. She spent ten days in an incubator before being allowed home.
A month later she was taken back to hospital after her heart failed and in the ensuing months had operations on her liver, a collapsed lung and on the hole in her heart, before rejoining her parents and brothers Drew, 19, Joshua, 17, and Reece, 13, at home again.
Dr Patrick McKiernan, Bethany's liver consultant at Birmingham Children's Hospital, said: 'No two children who have this condition would be alike, but treatment for Bethany's syndrome is getting better and better.

'We only need to see her twice a year now, which is great news for her and her family. She will eventually-need a liver transplant but at the moment we are just waiting to see when that will be.
'She is doing very well despite all of her problems, I think she's a very tough little girl.'
Ivemark Syndrome sufferers are slightly smaller than other children their age because of the calories they burn off by their hearts having to work harder.

【轉載】克魯曼:靠出口？除非銷外星球

2009-05-15T10:09:00.002+08:00

2009-05-15【林上祚／台北報導】

諾貝爾經濟學獎得主克魯曼，昨日不改專欄作家快言快語作風，自稱是個「短期樂觀主義、中期悲觀主義、長期樂觀主義」的經濟學家。他說全球經濟狀況，比日本的「失落十年」還糟糕，日本當年還能靠出口復甦，全球要靠出口復甦，「除非和另外一顆星球貿易」。
全球經濟面臨保護主義威脅

由經濟日報、台灣金控、中華經濟研究院合辦的「國際經濟金融論壇」，昨日邀請經濟學大師保羅．克魯曼針對「全球經濟金融展望兼論貿易保護主義」進行專題演說。

克魯曼表示，貿易保護主義與結構性失衡等五項威脅，讓未來十年全球經濟的前景相對黯淡。貿易保護主義不僅在新興市場國家歷史悠久，即使在美國，也有國會議員主張將「買國貨條款」納入擴大內需方案預算。

「全球貿易花了三個世代才走到這個地步，現在走保護主義回頭路，以後要花很長時間才能回頭。」克魯曼表示，貿易保護主義心態雖然值得同情，過度的保護主義卻是全球經濟的一大威脅。

前景黯淡更甚「失落的十年」

克魯曼形容自己是個短期的樂觀主義者、中期的悲觀主義者與長期的樂觀主義者。他相信短期內政府一定會透過貨幣與財政政策拯救經濟，對於美國透過公開市場操作注資，印鈔票發債救通縮，克魯曼認為，美國負債比目前不算太高，未來只要經濟恢復成長，美國聯準會一定有能力把錢從公開市場抽回，「畢竟，美國又不是辛巴威。」

但從中期角度，克魯曼認為貨幣與財政政策效果有其極限，「有限的財政支出，只能創早有限的繁榮」，和日本經濟九○年代「失落的十年」相比，全球經濟目前情況似乎更為黯淡。

克魯曼說，二戰後的馬歇爾計畫，起碼有一個強而有力的美國作為財力後盾，「現在舉世根本找不到一個需求強而有力的國家。」

「日本當初靠出口恢復成長，現在，除非能夠找到另外一個星球，世界各國無法靠出口恢復成長。」克魯曼表示，一九二九年經濟大蕭條發生時，各國政府的舉債水準並沒有現在這麼高，世界各國在這一波經濟衰退能夠施展的財政空間相對有限。

危機當前推動改革最好時機

儘管如此，克魯曼認為，如果把歷史拉長二、三十年，人類一定能夠找到新的替代科技，解決目前二氧化碳排放所造成的溫室效應與環境污染問題，新的科技創造更多就業機會。他也相信，各國之間屆時一定能夠找出解決全球金融體系失衡的方案，「但我擔心的是未來十年。」

除了科技創新帶來希望，二、三十年後，大幅跌價的金融資產也會漲回來。

「全球目前正處於改變的關頭。」克魯曼相信，接下來的環保節能議題，會在經濟政策上扮演重要關鍵，世界各國在危機的當下，是推動改革最好的時機。同樣是失業現象，歐洲因為有完善的失業救濟，失業者在德國的痛苦感受自然比美國小很多，美國政府應該趁這個機會，強化社會安全網。

「除非政治阻礙」克魯曼：沒理由不搞好兩岸經貿

【林上祚、黃馨儀／台北報導】

諾貝爾經濟學獎得主克魯曼十四日表示，中國與美國之間不是「零和關係」，中國在他有生之年，一定會超越美國成為世界最大經濟體；中國做為台灣的鄰國，除非有政治因素阻礙，否則，台灣沒有理由不與這個大國改善貿易關係。

克魯曼本周在上海演講，公開批評中國當局操縱人民幣匯率，引發對岸一陣譁然。克魯曼昨日再度強調，人民幣目前還沒有開放自由兌換，境內債券市場，又缺乏明顯流動性，因此在他有生之年，人民幣不會取代美元成為國際貨幣。在現階段，克魯曼也不主張人民幣開放自由兌換。
不過克魯曼強調，「除非我車禍身亡」，中國應該會在他有生之年，取代美國成為全球最大經濟體，中國與美國雖然在某些領域是貿易對手國，但中國經濟復甦產生的外溢效果，一定會嘉惠到美國，中國與美國並非零和關係。

對於中國為首的亞洲國家，能否逃過全球經濟未來可能的「失落十年」現象，克魯曼回答，在這一波全球的經濟衰退過程，亞洲國家一定會是率先反彈的地區，部分國家應該有能力逃離類似日本的「零利率」流動性陷阱。但說到亞洲經濟是否有能力與歐美「脫鉤」、獨善其身，克魯曼認為，「脫鉤」說易行難，亞洲國家過去經濟成長仰賴出口，現在如果要與歐美「脫鉤」，就要創造出龐大的內需，短期內根本不可能。

克魯曼認為，全球經濟下滑情況雖然已經減緩，但這並不代表金融風暴已經遠離，事實上，金融體系還有一些潛藏危機；事實上，美國的信用卡債與東歐政府負債問題，目前仍然沒有解決，套用醫學術語，「全球經濟病情已經穩定，但尚未脫離險境」。

克魯曼說，雖然有些指標、數據，讓某些人以為危機已經解除，因而鬆了一口氣，但「這也讓我很擔心，雖然全球經濟不至於崩潰，但不要以為復甦在望，就可以太過自信」，希望各國政府都能審慎以對。

機場還是公園？

2009-05-15T09:37:00.002+08:00

松山機場明年中可供A330起降

2009-05-15 工商時報【張佩芬／台北報導】
　松山機場為連結上海虹橋機場、東京羽田機場與韓國金浦機場，建立東北亞都市黃金航圈，民航局長李龍文與相關官員指出，將斥資4億元拓寬松山機場滑行道間距，預定9月底完成，再配合空橋添購與簡易貨棧設立及地勤改善等工程，明年中將可供A330客機起降，未來松山機場將定位為商務機場，以商務客與高價貨物運輸為主。

　兩周前華航A330客機曾因桃園機場側風問題改降松山機場，但是在滑行道繞經空軍油庫的保護牆時，因為間距不夠大，採取拖行方式，未來油庫圍牆將往後移約20公尺，以方便該型機起降。

　A330約可載客270人，而且機上可載貨12噸，經濟效益高很多，由於機場空間有限，將定位為商務機場，未來進出旅客將是付較高票價的商務客。

　在航空貨運部分，進出貨載將以高價的乾貨為主，設置的簡易貨棧每日容量約50噸，全年約2萬噸，無法處理生鮮冷藏貨，將透過對隔日取貨貨載收取高艙租方式，來提高貨物進出速度，增加倉儲利用率。

　機場經過擴充改善後，預計每日起降的國際航班可從目前的22個單趟班次增為44班，由於上海虹橋機場預定明年4月就會完工，我方預定今年夏天就與對岸協商松山、虹橋對飛事宜，如果商訂明年4月對飛，將先以757為最大型起降飛機，預計6月可放寬供A330飛幾起降，與羽田機場對飛時間則排在明年10月，與韓國金浦機場對飛問題預定年底前協商。

　將台北、上海、東京、首爾這四個東北亞大城市連結成雙黃金航圈，是總統馬英九競選時的政見，松山機場是亞洲最靠近市中心的機場，6月份捷運即將行經松山機場，到台北火車站僅需14分鐘車程，方便性無與倫比。李龍文指出，未來包括北京等亞洲主要機場，都會考慮列為對方的航點。

　目前松山機場已經排定的城市對飛航班，包括羽田每天8班（16個單趟）、上海每天6班，班次由雙方航空公司對分，目前台北─上海航線是飛浦東機場，等與虹橋機場對飛後，是否仍與浦東對飛有待協商。

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連續二次競選台北市長時，國民黨與民進黨的候選人對於松山機場的未來，有著極不相同的見解。國民黨希望讓松山機場成為兩岸重要的開口，民進黨希望將它改為公園。

現在松山機場要定位為較有錢人的商務機場，替較少數的人服務。雖然所有的事件不可能一分為二，替有錢人服務的機場，也不見得不會替較貧窮的人帶來好處。但還是完全不同的出發點，決然不同的都市脈絡會呈顯出來。
前幾天在北美館看到龐畢度收藏的二幅畫作，畫作主題表現關於勞工階級的假日休閒活動，是左派的思想。我雖沒有深入研究其背景，但隱約之間，了解到他們的意識形態，強調社會的健康以及如何提升勞工階級的生活型態，他們如同機械般工作，在假日裡享受他們的生活樂趣。藝術家藉此追逐美的定義。

試問為政的官員，你們做的都市規劃，心裡在想甚麼呢？

【轉貼】日本已淪為「貧窮大國」

2009-05-12T22:12:00.002+08:00

【聯合晚報╱國際新聞組/綜合報導】 2009.05.12 03:03 pm

最新一期日本「經濟學人」周刊發表專文，要日本人承認日本雖是經濟大國，卻也已是貧窮大國的事實。報導說，日本上上下下向來不承認日本有貧窮，將貧窮淡化為差距，甚至根本忘記貧窮這回事，但金融危機凸顯這個問題，日本不宜再自欺欺人。

貧窮問題在上世紀90年代開始加深。在泡沫化以後的長期經濟低迷中，政府為了舒活企業，逐步放寬對解雇的限制，許多企業於是把正規雇用改變成非正規、約聘式雇用，也就是日文所謂「派遣人員」。2007年，派遣人員已達1890萬人，占日本勞動力三分之一以上。同時，國家財政重建的論調高唱入雲，社會安全保障的經濟漸被削奪，本來已經不健全的社會安全網由此益趨脆弱。

越來越多擔當家庭支柱的男性淪為派遣人員，一旦從派遣再陷入失業，下場就是街友。日本的派遣工人有事做才有工資，而且大多數沒有保險，有保險者，理賠條件極苛，只有兩成人有幸拿到。他們也住不起房子，日本很少廉租房，無屋者不露宿街頭，只有當「網咖難民」。

今年3月，日本失業率4.8%，增加速度創1967年以來新高。

失業者可以向厚生勞動省求助，但通常不獲回音。日本從1960 和70年代成為工業大國，就以沒有貧民的中產階級社會自視，一般人賤視貧民，認為貧窮全因懶惰，政府的同情更少。看出問題者，至多承認那是「差距」。

根據經濟合作開發組織 (OECD)最新的這方面資料，日本在2005年的貧窮率就以14.9%在OECD三十國裡排第二 (第一是美國，17.1%)。但一直到金融危機，日本人才漸漸不將貧窮美言為「差距」，而正視貧窮就是貧窮，承認貧窮不盡出於懶惰，而有其制度、結構成因。

貧窮不單是經濟問題，也是政治問題，日本有些律師、工會和街友在2007年成立「反貧窮網」，今年1月，五百多名失業在東京日比谷公園紮營，和厚生勞動省打對台，數千志工前往協助，促成政府為貧民搭建臨時棲身之所，總算有個微末的開始。接下來，就看政府是否回心轉意並提出配套政策。
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說實在的，在近代歷史上我們有過真的豐衣足食、創造幸福公民的國家嗎？好像沒有！前前政府人權績效不彰，深怕人民有過多的權力，妨害其統治。前政府貪污惡搞，毀掉改革的契機。這些搞政治的真是濫，到底有沒有改善我們的生活？真的有夠機車.....

Frontier exploration

2009-05-12T10:25:00.002+08:00

這學期在東海設計四年級，帶了生物機制與建築設計的結合。雖然這樣的結合，我已經斷斷續續嘗試了三、四年，這次主要擺在生物機制與「形」的關係上。藉由生物機制來驗證形的成長與驗證。以下是一些同學的作品，雖然是物質模型，但我相信這只是短暫的停留，觀念上絕對是新穎的，比一些以外貌數位形式呈現的東西還要具備實驗精神。我離開英國也堂堂邁入第七年，期待自己逐步整理出自己的建築思想，承接過去的洗禮，踏出個人的建築設計，一個個人小宇宙的誕生。

【轉貼】Tata Nano

2009-05-12T09:39:00.002+08:00

《名家觀點》塔塔汽車如何替百萬人圓夢？

【經濟日報╱■李鍾熙】 2009.05.12 03:40 am

今年4月塔塔公司董事長Ratan Tata履行了他的承諾，該公司新推出的小型國民車「Tata Nano」正式在全印度470個門市，以每輛2,000美元近乎不可能的低價開始銷售，當然立刻吸引了無數民眾瘋狂搶購。對一般印度人來說，能擁有一輛自己的汽車真是美夢成真，塔塔公司是怎麼做到的？這只是短暫的噱頭，還是一場新的產業革命？

六年前，塔塔就展開了這項艱鉅的任務。當時他看到許多人用摩托車滿載一家大小，在風雨中險象環生地滿街跑，就下定決心要開發一輛人人有能力購買的超平價大眾汽車（people’s car）來取代摩托車。當時歐美車廠都認為那只是開玩笑罷了，沒想到他真的籌組了一個開發團隊，用全新的角度開始構想，一步步完成這令人驚艷的創新小車。

Tata Nano是一輛相當嬌小別緻的四人座四門轎小車，只有二個引擎；車輪縮小到12吋，擋風玻璃只有一支雨刷，全車操控儀表也減掉了60%；為了保持結構強度和亮麗外型，車體和外殼都使用日本優質的鋼材；各種新型設計不但使全車成本大減，重量也大幅下降到600公斤，因而能在車速、馬力和油耗方面達到高標準。

在製造方面，塔塔也企圖顛覆大型昂貴車廠的傳統思維，改為靈活便捷的分散式製程（distributed manufacturing），他們儘量運用衛星工廠生產預設的組件（nano kits），再交由許多獨立的小公司，依需求就地組裝銷售。塔塔希望未來可以將大部分製造外包，而公司本身只負責汽車研發、設計和行銷，以達到像資訊電腦產業一樣的高效率低成本。

另一項低價的因素，則是將行銷費用降到最低。

由於它針對的多是全新的低價客戶群，Tata Nano一推出就立刻風靡了全印度，以塔塔公司第一期每年45,000輛的產能，根本供不應求，目前要預訂不但得大排長龍，還要抽籤才有機會，因此不需要額外的行銷費用。

塔塔並不以這輛小車為滿足，他們的研發團隊已在積極開發輕型電動車，做為下一階段新產品。即使面臨當前的經濟不景氣，該公司仍然大力投入研發，找尋對社會有重大影響的創新，例如簡易抗菌水處理機、太陽光電建築材料等。董事長塔塔先生在最近對全公司的演講中就特別強調：即使外界環境再壞，仍然要持續勇於創新、勇於嘗試、挑戰大目標（think big）。

看到Tata Nano成功的案例，我們難免會自問像這樣重大革命性的創新在台灣能夠發生嗎？首先當然要有像塔塔先生的理想、熱情和企圖心，才能推動這麼艱難的計畫，而其中更重要的關鍵則是要有「大膽挑戰不可能任務（grand challenge）」的勇氣和決心，這種精神和氣度在台灣似乎較為少見。

我們的產業由於過去30年產量製造政策的成功，反而習於追求近利、善走捷徑，也養成了習慣跟隨、避免失敗的文化，往往不敢冒險突破，而讓平庸的目標限制了我們成就大事的潛力，Tata Nano的啟示值得我們深自警惕。

（作者是工研院院長）

【轉貼】Autoblog 中文版 by Lawrence Lin
Tata Nano 薄利多銷5天賣5萬台

如果說市場上有一種需求叫作被禁錮的需求，那麼被昂貴汽車售價所壓制的需求大概就是屬於這種。5天接到5萬筆訂單的爆炸性成績，就是被這種需求所推昇出來，其中Tata所設計的預訂系統也幫了不少忙。

Tata車廠使用預訂的方式來銷售Nano，他們會在所有訂單裡隨機選出十萬筆訂筆，作為第一批可以買到Tata Nano的車主。從4月1日到6日這5天裡，他們已經收到來自包括經銷商及個人消費者總共5萬多筆的訂單，這還沒加上另外3萬筆來自Tata合作伙伴的訂單。光是訂單本身，Tata就要賣300盧比一張（約新台幣200元），NanaNano汽車本身則是賣9萬5千到14萬5千盧比（新台幣6萬到9萬5千元）。

這部車的銷售量會爆炸絕對是無庸至疑的，唯一可以討論的是Tata Nano算是四輪摩托車還是汽車，坐在Tata Nano裡安全性比摩托車，只好上那麼一點。Tata Nano的售價很驚人，但你可能對它的規格表現還不是很熟悉，來看看：

動力：有一顆33匹馬力的623 c.c.引擎，而Tata官方宣稱它的極速可以到達每小時105公里（安全極速比較重要）。參考數字，悍將125摩托車的馬力輸出約為10匹。

油耗：Tata Nano每耗1公升的汽油，可以跑上20公里。

安全性：我們遍尋不得Tata Nano撞擊測試影片，不過車廠官方說法說Tata Nano至少有一般安全性，座艙足夠堅固、足以抵擋外來侵入物的車門，車上也有安全帶（這是車廠說的，不是我們無聊當有趣）。

身材：長3.1公尺、車寬1.5公尺，而高度是1.6公尺。

笛卡兒 v.s. 萊布尼茲

2009-05-04T21:08:00.005+08:00

【轉載】北醫今天發表動態式弧形放射線治療設備，可以360度全方位放射線，殺死形狀不規則形狀或躲在器官和組織後的癌細胞。
台北醫學大學附設醫院/提供

弧形放射線 5分鐘殺死癌細胞
【聯合晚報╱記者林進修/台北報導】 2009.05.04 03:26 pm

癌症患者又有新的治療選擇。

台北醫學大學附設醫院引進國內第一套動態式弧形放射線治療設備，360度全方位的放射線射出角度，可將不規則形狀或躲在器官或組織後面的癌細胞逐一殺死，一舉將癌症治療由「放射治療」提升到「放射手術」的層次。

台北醫學大學校長邱文達今天帶領醫療團發表這項新技術。北醫放射腫瘤科主任、癌症中心執行長邱仲峰表示，近年癌症治療突飛猛進，從可避免鼻咽癌患者治療後唾液腺遭破壞的「強度調控放射治療技術」(IMRT)，進展到可有效治療不規則形狀癌症的「影像導引放射治療技術」(IGRT)，如今，可全方位照射癌細胞的「動態式弧形放射治療技術」(VMAT)，無疑創下第三個里程碑。

邱仲峰表示，VMAT給合IMRT及IGRT的優點，能量高達1000萬伏特的光子束可360度、全方位地射入體內，再調控不同劑的放射線，把不規則形狀或躲在器官後面的癌細胞殺死，治療癌症可說是快、狠、準。

治療前一周，癌患要先到醫院做術前的全身模型，再經4D的電腦斷層攝影(4D CT)，做出癌細胞的立體定位，還把呼吸造成的身體位移也算出來。這些數據經過電腦運算，先在全身模型上測試一次，確認無誤後，再為癌患治療。

邱仲峰說，整個治療才短短5分鐘，癌患不用麻醉，也沒有特別感覺。一般說來，腦瘤或已轉移到腦部的腫瘤，因精準度的要求較高，最適合接受這種手術，肺癌、胰臟癌、膽管癌、攝護腺癌及子宮頸癌等惡性腫瘤，也可列為優先考慮對象。

台北榮民總醫院癌病中心主任顏上惠表示，VMAT可在不同時間、不同方位投射不同劑量的放射線，確實可提高癌症治療效率，但再新再好的醫療儀器，還是要仰賴專業醫療團隊。新光醫院腫瘤治療科主任季匡華則表示，不管是VMAT或是目前已在採用的螺旋刀，都提供不同照野的放射線治療，也讓癌患有不同選擇。
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最近閱讀Greg Lynn描述笛卡兒的座標系統與萊布尼茲保留時空線索在座標系統之內的差異，解釋出一個靜態的模型與動態模型的分別。這是個自上個世紀90年代以來，西方人的空間形式論述，的確很吸引人。

上個星期六日是銘傳畢業設計，大部分弧形的曲面形狀都被指責是手癢腦殘的技法(我誇張一點講，別介意)，客評老師的話我非常同意，因為這些同學的形式使用，其實沒有掌握這股思潮的重點，即便有幾分掌握其精隨，都還有不同見解的爭辯呢，更何況連一點論述都沒有！不過，也要提醒評圖老師，雖然評圖場合，100個奇形怪狀的曲面，可能有99.9個都是亂做，但還是希望勉勵其他老師與自己，保留一些奇蹟的機會，千萬別將曲面當成原罪，這樣也會太極端。

這股建築思潮流動之下，或許有人說實在太不經濟、不合成本，也的確道出其中的困境。好比伊東豐雄的台中歌劇院也沒有消息，再怎麼優秀的設計，太貴還是蓋不出，沒有適切的營運內容還是泡沫。是否曲面的東西，真的是宿命的原罪嗎？

不過這則醫療新聞，我會心一笑，聽起來像是雷射切割機或是RP機器的功能說明內容，其實是癌症的新型治療機械，這好比在曲面空間黑暗的時刻，送出一些光明的掌聲。也鼓勵對曲面空間有信心的創作者，脈洛一直在那邊，就等大家重新編織了。

流感、都市、建築思潮

2009-04-29T09:18:00.003+08:00

picture from news BBC

都市的變化與成長，其實與病毒的演變是雷同的。甚至病毒的演化，非常直接的影響都市的運作。墨西哥政府已經禁止餐廳、咖啡店提供飲食服務，除了外帶之外。二者幾乎就是同義的相關名詞。禽、人類、豬流感的病毒基因混合，以新型姿態蔓延全球，跟次級房貸那些貪婪的銀行家所製造出來的金融風暴不也是異曲同工嗎？建築思潮也一樣，此起彼落交融又分離。「動態的世界」需要「動態的觀念」以及「動態的行動」！保守的人請讓開，請不要阻止世界運轉，好嗎？

生活小常識：
禽流感： bird flu
豬流感： swine flu

【轉載】這波疫情衛署正名「新型流感」

【聯合報╱記者陳惠惠／台北報導】 2009.04.29 02:57 am

中央流行疫情指揮中心指揮官、衛生署長葉金川昨天表示，從墨西哥開始的這波疫情，是由豬、人、鳥流感基因重組出來的新病毒，不該稱為豬流感，應正名為「Ｈ１Ｎ１新型流感」。

衛署疾管局說，豬流感容易讓外界誤會，以為此病毒只在豬隻間流行，不會人傳染人。事實上，Ｈ１Ｎ１與豬肉一點關係都沒有，而是在人類身上流傳。

葉金川說，豬肉應煮熟再吃，吃豬肉不會得新型流感。讓他啼笑皆非的是，有媒體報導竟出現「病毒豬」的字眼，他強調，是病毒「株」不是病毒「豬」。

【轉載】保羅．克魯曼專欄－銀行家的報酬又漲回來了

2009-04-28T09:46:00.001+08:00

2009-04-28 中國時報【本報國際新聞中心尹德瀚摘譯】
　二○○七年七月十五日，《紐約時報》登出《富中之富：新鍍金時代的驕傲》，文中吹捧最力的「新大亨」是花旗集團董事長魏爾，他堅稱他和金融界同行是靠對社會的貢獻賺到龐大財富。

　此文登出後不久，魏爾自詡他協助建立的金融體系卻宣告崩潰，過程中造成巨大的附帶損害。就算我們有辦法避免大蕭條慘劇重演，世界經濟也需要多年才能恢復。

　這正好說明為何我們應對《紐時》周日版一篇文章感到不安。根據該文，投資銀行的待遇在去年縮水後又飆漲，已回到二○○七年水準。

　為何我們該焦慮？首先，已無任何理由相信這些華爾街術士真對社會有任何正面貢獻，遑論有正當理由拿天文數字的酬勞。

　切記二○○七年貴氣十足的華爾街並非一向如此。從一九三○年到一九八○年左右，銀行是個沈穩、相當無聊的行業，平均待遇不比其他行業高，但照樣維持經濟巨輪的轉動。

　那為何有些銀行家突然賺進龐大財富？有種說法是，那是對他們在金融創新上發揮創意的報酬。然而此刻很難想像，近年來有任何重大金融創新真的造福了社會。

　聯邦準備理事會主席柏南克試圖為金融創新辯護，他就「好的」金融創新舉出三個例子，一是信用卡（其實不算新構想），二是透支保護，三是次級房貸（我沒瞎掰）。這就是銀行家賴以賺進鉅額報酬的創新？

　有人會辯稱，我們實施的是自由市場經濟，私部門員工的身價由該行業自行決定。這正好觸及我要說的第二點：華爾街實質上已不再屬於私部門，它已經被政府收養，和領取救濟金的人一樣完全依賴政府。

　我說的「收養」不只是已根據「問題資產紓困計畫」挹注金融業的六千億美元，其他還包括聯準會提供的寬鬆資金、聯邦房屋貸款銀行提供的鉅額貸款、聯邦存款保險公司大幅增加保障額度等等。

　讀者大可據理力爭說，為了保護整體經濟必須拯救華爾街，這點其實我也同意。但金融企業受到如此鉅額納稅人的錢挹注，應要學公用事業，而非在營運和待遇方面回到二○○七年。

　讓這些投機炒作者坐領高薪不但離譜，更是危險。歸根結底，為何銀行家要冒高風險？因為成功─甚或只是暫時表面的成功─帶來豐厚報酬，就算搞垮公司，照樣領走上億美元。

　到底出了什麼狀況？為何銀行從業人員的待遇又往上飆？一種說法是只有這種待遇才能留住最好的人才，但此說站不住腳，現在金融業的就業機會劇減，這些人能去哪裡？

　金融企業再度發高薪，只是因為他們有這個能力。他們又開始賺錢，而且怎麼會不賺錢？畢竟拜聯邦政府保證之賜，他們可以低利借錢，再以高利借出。銀行樂得夜夜笙歌，因為不久後可能遭到管制。但也可能不會。從金融媒體可感受到風暴已經過去，股市上漲，經濟開始回穩，歐巴馬政府可能放這些銀行家一馬，頂多只是嚴詞譴責。錯對姑且不論，銀行家似乎相信馬上又可回到以往的好日子。

　我們只能指望領導人能證明他們錯了，並真正貫徹改革。二○○八年，報酬過高的銀行家拿別人的錢冒險，導致世界經濟趴到地上。我們最不需要的就是，再給他們一次惡整的機會。

　（克魯曼為美國普林斯頓大學教授，《紐約時報》專欄作家。）

Michael Fox

2009-04-05T16:30:00.003+08:00

另一位有關動態建築的建築師。下面是一段訪談：

Excerpt of an interview with Brian Reynolds of Ohio State University for documentation of the "Meta Media Hyper Culture" symposium held at the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio in February 2002.

Brian: First, could you tell me a little bit about what you do and how you became interested in this work? Also, how do you see your work and research impacting your own practice and the field in general?

Michael: In a nutshell, the idea is to create spaces and objects that can physically re-configure themselves to meet changing needs. The central issues in making these types of systems are human and environmental interaction (the changes) embedded computational infrastructures (intelligence) and the physical control mechanisms (kinetics). In retrospect I came about these ideas in somewhat of an opposite way than one might expect today. I first became interested in kinetic solutions in architecture with a focus on looking at how such systems can facilitate adaptability. The kinetics then are generally either transformable objects that can dynamically occupy predefined physical space or moving physical objects that can share a common physical space to create adaptable spatial configurations. After exploring numerous kinetic projects with this focus on adaptability it became an obvious next step that such spaces and object should be coupled with some sort of brain that can allow them to reconfigure themselves.

I say I came about this topic in a roundabout way because today there is a great interest in academia, and even the corporate and commercial sectors in intelligent environments. Everywhere we turn there is a smart house or smart office etc. etc. and so the obvious route would be to say that we have this space that is really smart, that understands the environment inside and outside and understands various data about the users including behavioral patterns but what is it doing? This is where I think the kinetics become important; to really extend the notion of enhancing everyday activities to creating spaces and objects that can extend everyday activities and do things that we cannot do or that are very difficult or inconvenient to do. In other words I like to think of the building as a body with bones and muscles and a brain that can control their behaviors, an intelligent environment without the kinetics is like a brain with a body that is incapable of moving and without the brain we can have of course the kinetics but no behaviors. When they are combined to what I call “intelligent kinetic systems” (IKS) they begin to have implications on the profession that are not negligible especially in terms of things like safety, security, spatial efficiency and energy efficiency (such as when coupled with traditional passive sustainable solutions).

Brian: Full scale kinetic architecture is one that embeds computational subsystems into a system capable of transformation through motion. This requires the architect to be fully engaged in the methods of fabrication as well as the programming of the computational subsystems. Does kinetic architecture suggest that architects respond with an equally kinetic process? Does this change the traditional role of the
architect?

Michael: Also I think it is good to point out that nothing I am saying is really new to the field of architecture on a theoretical level but we are really at a point in the profession where such systems are possible and even feasible from an economic standpoint. Architects really need to take a more active role in directing the development of this area of design. To do this we need to have at least a superficial knowledge base of both the engineering in terms of mechanics and fabrication and also the computational substructures. It is typical for architectural students to take courses on structures and HVAC systems etc. that provide the superficial knowledge necessary for design. In professional practice specialists take on these roles. Architects then should also be taking courses on simple mechanics and computation in order to develop the skills necessary to explore, think about, and design intelligently responsive kinetic structures and systems. As architects we are not doing structural calculations on a building and we should not be programming so, in short, no the traditional role of the architect will not change, but we will have new roles of engineering and consultancy.

Brian: Many architects are finding that the increased access to CNC fabrication technologies is allowing them to realize their designs with increased efficiency as well as permitting them to realize designs that would otherwise be impossible or certainly too difficult to construct using traditional methods of construction. How do these technologies, which could be seen as forms of kinetic architecture themselves, influence your process of design?

Michael: I think that the importance of CNC relative to kinetic designs lies more in the design process rather than in terms of fabrication processes. Basically I think that what you are talking about is more referential to form-making. Ironically, CNC was invented in engineering to increase design and manufacturing process performance and was adopted by architects as being useful for presentation models and was considered inappropriate for early stages of design. Only later did architects come to understand that processes such as rapid prototyping could be useful in the design process. This is where I think CNC does have an influence in particular with the design of complex three-dimensional parts and parts that will be set to motion. I think that what CNC has recently afforded architects in terms of realizing (design-to-fabrication) forms is rather profound. Again this was basically adopted from other fields of design (both product and aerospace I believe). Mechanical design also is extremely well developed both in terms of design and fabrication, and it is up to architects to adopt the processes.

Brian: CNC fabrication processes provide dimensional tolerances in material manipulation which are unattainable or at the very least unreasonable to be consistently expected by more traditional methods of fabrication. Does the nature of kinetic architecture require this increased precision?

Michael: This is really a continuation of the above question but I want to point out that it is important to see such systems in kinetic architecture as subsystems. A very smart building should mechanically adopt the paradigm of ubiquitous computing. The autonomous mechanics will prove important for making things that are robust in terms of failure. In getting to your question though, the idea of discrete mechanics has an effect on the dimensional tolerances. In other words the individual parts do have to be precise but not necessarily the larger building as a whole. Think of examples that already exist such as rotating sensor activated doors and escalators etc. These do need to be quite precise in their own operational way but not in terms of their tolerance with the larger architectural whole.

Brian: There is currently reluctance on the part of the automotive industry and the general public to accept “drive by wire” technologies which replace the direct mechanical link between the driver and vehicle with sophisticated sensor systems and a computational subsystem which processes input from the driver. The concern being that if a malfunction, either hardware or software, disrupts the flow of information, the result could be life-threatening. Traveling in a car at 90 mph and a kinetic architecture that responds to conditions of its surrounding environment do not have the same safety concerns, but it does suggest that systems that rely on embedded computational subsystems are only as good as the programs that are processing the information they receive. Could you discuss some of the challenges that face kinetic architecture from a reliability and dependability standpoint?

Michael: Well this is a very important question especially in terms of acceptance. The safety issues are really not comparable however and already have precedent in things like automatic garage doors etc that can be tackled with simple IR shields that detect obstacles in the path of motion. I think however the question of robustness is more important than that of safety. I have story of being in a car in Boston during a snowstorm with power windows that would not roll up. I was furious that there were no manual handles to roll up the windows. There should always be a manual means of controlling the motion or in cases of the objects being too large or heavy to manually move then there must be a means of egress considered such as in elevators. Also related to the notion of robustness is again that the intelligent kinetic systems should be considered discretely. If a rotating wall with a bed on it will not fold up for some reason, it will not prohibit other systems such as partition walls from sliding or rotating etc. In terms of large buildings an automated adaptive kinetic system could be very valuable in terms of energy efficiency as for instance coupled with HVAC systems. Where not only are rooms specifically heated or cooled that are being occupied but the doors and venting systems are physically controlled to manage the inefficiencies. If they are automated discretely, if one door does not close then they system of doors is still operational. In automotive terms, if the windshield wipers do not operate, you will still have headlights. Also I think that the automotive, aerospace and even maritime industries are far more developed in terms of being both intelligent and mechanical than that of architecture. Architecture is really in it’s infancy from an application standpoint and there are many lessons to be learned. The point is we spend most of our lives in buildings and only use cars and airplanes to get from one building to another. I think the second most likely candidate for failure lies not in the computational subsystem (software) but rather in the sensing subsystem (from a hardware standpoint). If a system performs not as expected, it is more likely the result of clouded data input: something is blocking the sensor or providing conflicting data input. When I used to work late at night I would always notice the lights coming on and off in a neighboring office although no one was inside the office. The problem was that the professor had piles of loose papers that were constantly blowing around as a result of the automated ventilation system and the motion of the papers moving would turn on the lights. The remedy was to redirect the motion sensor to only look at the door but I think it is another good lesson.

Brian: From E.J. Marey’s chronophotographic studies to the motion and efficiency studies of the Gilbreth’s and numerous examples in modern art such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, there has been and continues to be a history of exploration into how to describe and capture motion. In your elevator studies for the Porsche collector there is a cinematic nature to the motion of the doors that reminds one
of the opening sequences of a James Bond film or to the aperture of a camera’s lens. The responsive awning project traces the flows of passersby in a fluid wave-like description. Could you comment on the inspirations or ambitions of these seemingly different types of motion description? What are the differences in the computational subsystems of these two projects?

Michael: I suppose that the conceptual link lies in the fact that they are both relative to motion in the part of a third party. In both of these cases it is the spatial conceptualizer (if we get academic). The point is that the motion in architecture is prescribed by a responsive and adaptive behavior. A layer on top of this might be a building shade that tracks the sunlight and also supplies shade relative to the spatial conceptualizer. The door studies were intentionally cinematic to be choreographed when the person drives in and exits. The studies were getting at a complexity that could be inherent in a very simple system. I am a bit disappointed with the end result of the elevator in the sense that it is too straightforward without the complexity/simplicity but it is a real project with a real client and that is a great thing. The saving grace is the layering of the wire mesh that still provides the illusion of complexity with the simplicity of four choreographed doors. The complexity then is really more visual than mechanical is the point. With the façade, I had already designed several responsive awnings prior to this project each dealing with many discrete parts that followed the motion of the pedestrians as they walked along the sidewalk below. This project was conceptualized with my partner Ran Oron when he had the idea of a sand dune on a particular building on 47th and Lexington in New York. The idea of many discrete parts then was translated to a scale where the individual parts become pixilated to the extent of having negligible entities. Upon prototyping and understanding how it would actually be constructed we came to the idea of individual points being articulated enough to be recognizable but still recognizable as a whole. With the help of Axel Killian we began studies in Java to find a motion that would be simple enough to make overall patterns with discrete elements and not loose the essence of the whole. In this project then the actual mechanics played a much more important role in the conceptual development. The computational subsystem is actually quite simple as a means to imbed certain robustness into the façade as a whole. The bars are in vertical strips of 10 both mechanically and computationally. Each vertical strip moves as a whole and only understands what it has sensed and the motion of its neighbor and it’s neighbor’s neighbor on each side. In this sense if any one vertical strip malfunctions the system as a whole will still function and the vertical strip of 10 bars can be removed and repaired.

Brian: What are some of the goals of your kinetic architecture? Is there the potential that kinetic architecture can increase efficiency? Do the methods by which these kinetic systems and computational subsystems are produced lend themselves to mass production or do they remain unique responses to unique situations?

Michael: Most of this I have answered in the first additional question, but I will answer in response to mass production vs. unique situational use. Probably the most innovative designs will always arise from unique situational use, and a driving force lies in the changing patterns of human interaction with the built environment. The ability to not only monitor but also physically control remote environments may have consequentially important implications. I think there is a great potential for applications that arise from understanding what an architectural space or object is currently doing and how it can do it better:

How can issues of privacy and public be dynamically responded to? How can thermal, visual, and acoustic conditions be dynamically responded to? How can spatial sharing be optimized, and natural daylight articulated? And how can architecture extend the notion of enhancing our everyday activities by doing things that are impossible or very difficult for us to do. We should really ask not what architecture is, but what can it do.

Friedman, Yona

2009-04-05T15:57:00.003+08:00

整理一些動態建築的資料，發現這位前輩，轉載一些他的資料。雖然他的可動性，是針對使用者出發，強調使用者可自主性地改變自身的空間，但或多或少也影響了後面的可動式(kinetic)建築。

original webpage:
http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A8109&page_number=1&template_id=6&sort_order=1

Source: Oxford University Press
French architect of Hungarian birth. He studied architecture at the Technical University, Budapest (1943), but he left Hungary in 1945, completed his training at the Technion, Haifa (Dip. Arch., 1948) and subsequently taught. In 1956 he attended CIAM X in Dubrovnik, which confirmed his belief that requirements generated by technological progress and demographic growth were too great to be solved by traditional social, urban and architectural values and structures. In 1957 he settled in Paris and founded the Groupe d’Etude d’Architecture Mobile (GEAM) with Paul Maymont, Frei Otto, Eckard Schultze-Fielitz, Werner Runhau and D. G. Emmerich. The group’s manifesto was Friedman’s L’Architecture mobile (1958), in which he rejected the idea of a static city. In contrast he developed the principle of ‘infrastructure’, a skeletal metal ‘space-frame grid’ of several levels, on which mobile lightweight ‘space-defining elements’ would be placed. He proposed to adapt these ideas for large cities by superimposing this grid on the existing fabric of London, Tunis and New York, or by allowing commercial facilities to be built over the network of high speed roads in Los Angeles.

Friedman’s ambition was ‘to help the inhabitant to become master of his own design’, the sub-title of L’Architecture mobile, and to encourage architects to become less self-important and to gain an awareness of how they could be useful to their client. Applications of his participatory concepts were used in an unexecuted project for the CDC headquarters in Ivry-sur-Seine (1976) and the Lycée David d’Angers, Angers (1978–80). His ideas, conveyed by simple diagrams and cartoons, gained a significant popular appeal. His exhibition Une Utopie réalisée drew a record attendance at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1975 and it later toured Latin America, sponsored by the French government.

A gifted self-promoter, Friedman wrote and lectured extensively, and in the early 1960s his ideas began to be discussed worldwide, especially in Japan where they were adopted by Kenzo Tange and exponents of ‘metabolist’ architecture. Many urban planners, architects and critics found his concepts too simplistic and objected that occupants would never accept the state of being disconnected from ground level. In Pour une architecture scientifique (1970), Friedman attempted to prove that his visions were based on careful reasoning. After 1976 he enlarged the scope of his activities, adapting his theories to the needs of developing countries. In 1981 he began work with Eda Schaur (b 1945) on a museum where techniques and methods for self-reliance would be demonstrated to disadvantaged people, resulting in the Museum of Basic Technology, Madras, India.

Isabelle Gournay
From Grove Art Online

© 2009 Oxford University Press

robotic architecture

2009-03-31T01:44:00.003+08:00

深夜兩點，以前學生傳來這個影片，很棒！

Biomimetics: Design by Nature

2009-03-29T21:53:00.003+08:00

What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering.

By Tom Mueller
Photograph by Robert Clark

One cloudless midsummer day in February, Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian outback just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a thorny devil into a dish of water. The maneuver was not as risky as it sounds: Though covered with sharp spines, the lizard stood only about an inch high at the shoulder, and it looked up at Parker apprehensively, like a baby dinosaur that had lost its mother. It seemed too cute for its harsh surroundings, home to an alarmingly high percentage of the world's most venomous snakes, including the inland taipan, which can kill a hundred people with an ounce of its venom, and the desert death adder, whose name pretty well says it all. Fierce too is the landscape itself, where the wind hissing through the mulga trees feels like a blow dryer on max, and the sun seems three times its size in temperate climes. Constant reminders that here, in the driest part of the world's driest inhabited continent, you'd better have a good plan for where your next drink is coming from.

This the thorny devil knows, with an elegance and certainty that fascinated Parker beyond all thought of snakebite or sunstroke. "Look, look!" he exclaimed. "Its back is completely drenched!" Sure enough, after 30 seconds, water from the dish had wicked up the lizard's leg and was glistening all over its prickly hide. In a few seconds more the water reached its mouth, and the lizard began to smack its jaws with evident satisfaction. It was, in essence, drinking through its foot. Given more time, the thorny devil can perform this same conjuring trick on a patch of damp sand—a vital competitive advantage in the desert. Parker had come here to discover precisely how it does this, not from purely biological interest, but with a concrete purpose in mind: to make a thorny-devil-inspired device that will help people collect lifesaving water in the desert.

A slender English academic with wavy, honey-blond hair beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat, Parker busied himself with eyedroppers, misters, and various colored powders, the better to understand the thorny devil's water-collecting alchemy. Now and then he made soft, bell-like, English-academic sounds of surprise and delight. "The water's spreading out incredibly fast!" he said, as drops from his eyedropper fell onto the lizard's back and vanished, like magic. "Its skin is far more hydrophobic than I thought. There may well be hidden capillaries, channeling the water into the mouth." After completing his last experiment, we gathered up his equipment and walked back to our Land Cruiser. The lizard watched us leave with a faint look of bereavement. "Seeing the devil in its natural environment was crucial to understanding the nature of its adaptations—the texture of the sand, the amount of shade, the quality of the light," Parker said as we drove back to camp. "We've done the macro work. Now I'm ready to look at the microstructure of its skin."

A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of biomimetics—applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes—studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can't say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature's past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.

Parker's work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito's proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.

"Biomimetics brings in a whole different set of tools and ideas you wouldn't otherwise have," says materials scientist Michael Rubner of MIT, where biomimetics has entered the curriculum. "It's now built into our group culture."

Shortly after our trip to the Australian desert, I met up with Andrew Parker again, in London, to watch the next phase of his research into the thorny devil. Walking from the Natural History Museum's entrance to his laboratory on the sixth floor, we traversed warehouse-size halls filled with preserved organisms of the most exuberant variety. In one room were waist-high alcohol jars of grimacing sea otters, pythons, spiny echidnas, and wallabies, and one 65-foot-long case containing a giant squid. Other rooms held displays of gaudy hummingbirds, over-the-top toucans and majestic bowerbirds, and shelf after shelf filled with beetles as bright as gemstones: emerald-green scarabs, sapphire-blue Cyphogastras, and opalescent weevils.

To Parker this was not a mere collection of specimens, but "a treasure-trove of brilliant design." Every species, even those that have gone extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection. Why not learn from what evolution has wrought? As we walked, Parker explained how the metallic sheen and dazzling colors of tropical birds and beetles derive not from pigments, but from optical features: neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural color, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint, cosmetics, and those little holograms on credit cards. Toucan bills are a model of lightweight strength (they can crack nuts, yet are light enough not to seriously impede the bird's flight), while hedgehog spines and porcupine quills are marvels of structural economy and resilience. Spider silk is five times stronger by weight and vastly more ductile than high-grade steel. Insects offer an embarrassment of design riches. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss (a normal incandescent bulb wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat), and bombardier beetles have a high-efficiency combustion chamber in their posterior that shoots boiling-hot chemicals at would-be predators. The Melanophila beetle, which lays its eggs in freshly burned wood, has evolved a structure that can detect the precise infrared radiation produced by a forest fire, allowing it to sense a blaze a hundred kilometers away. This talent is currently being explored by the United States Air Force.

"I could look through here and find 50 biomimetics projects in half an hour," Parker said. "I try not to walk here in the evening, because I end up getting carried away and working until midnight."

In one such late-night creative burst eight years ago, Parker decided to investigate the water-gathering skills of a desert beetle by building an enormous sand dune in his laboratory. This tenebrionid beetle flourishes in the Namib Desert in southwestern Africa, one of the world's hottest, driest environments. The beetle drinks by harvesting morning fogs, facing into the wind and hoisting its behind, where hydrophilic bumps capture the fog and cause it to coalesce into larger droplets, which then roll down the waxy, hydrophobic troughs between the bumps, reaching the beetle's mouth. Parker imported several dozen beetles from Namibia, which promptly scampered all over the lab when he opened the box, but eventually settled contentedly on the dune. There, using a hair dryer and various misters and spray bottles, Parker simulated the conditions in the Namib Desert well enough to understand the beetle's mechanism. He then replicated it on a microscope slide, using tiny glass beads for the bumps and wax for the troughs.

For all nature's sophistication, many of its clever devices are made from simple materials like keratin, calcium carbonate, and silica, which nature manipulates into structures of fantastic complexity, strength, and toughness. The abalone, for example, makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this material into walls of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armor as tough as Kevlar —3,000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living material's exceptional properties is critical to re-creating it synthetically. So today Andrew Parker had arranged to view the skin of a thorny devil museum specimen under a scanning electron microscope, hoping to find the hidden structures that allow it to absorb and channel water so effectively.

With a microscopist at the helm, we soared over the surface of the thorny devil's skin like a deep-space probe orbiting a distant planet, dipping down now and then at Parker's request to explore some curious feature of the terrain. There seemed to be little of interest in the Matterhornlike macrostructure of an individual thorn, though Parker speculated that it might wick away heat from the lizard's body or perhaps help capture the morning dew. Halfway down the thorn, however, he noticed a series of nodules set in rows, which seemed to grade down to a larger water-collection structure. Finally we dove into a crevasse at the base of the thorn and encountered a honeycomb-like field of indentations, each 25 microns across.

"Ah-ha!" Parker exclaimed, like Sherlock Holmes alighting upon a clue. "This is clearly a superhydrophobic surface for channeling water between the scales." A subsequent examination of the thorny devil's skin with an instrument called a micro-CT scanner confirmed his theory, revealing tiny capillaries between the scales evidently designed to guide water toward the lizard's mouth. "I think we've pretty well cracked the thorny devil structure," he said. "We're ready to make a prototype."

Enter the engineers. As the next phase in his quest to create a water-collection device inspired by the lizard, Parker sent his observations and experimental results to Michael Rubner and his MIT colleague Robert Cohen, a chemical engineer with whom he has worked on several biomimetics projects in the past. Rubner and Cohen are neatly groomed gentlemen who speak in clipped phrases and look frequently at their watches. While Parker likes to explain his work via a stroll through a botanic garden or by pulling out drawerfuls of bright beetles in a museum, they are more likely to draw a tidy graph of force over time, or flip through a PowerPoint presentation on their laptop. But a pooling of biological insight and engineering pragmatism is vital to success in biomimetics, and in the case of Parker, Cohen, and Rubner, it has led to several promising applications inspired by the Namib beetle and other insects. Using a robotic arm that, in a predetermined sequence, dips slides into a series of nanoparticle suspensions and other exotic ingredients, they have assembled materials layer by layer that have the same special properties as the organisms. Soon they hope to apply the method to create a synthetic surface inspired by thorny devil skin.

Though impressed by biological structures, Cohen and Rubner consider nature merely a starting point for innovation. "You don't have to reproduce a lizard skin to make a watercollection device, or a moth eye to make an antireflective coating," Cohen says. "The natural structure provides a clue to what is useful in a mechanism. But maybe you can do it better." Lessons from the thorny devil may enhance the water-collection technology they have developed based on the microstructure of the Namib beetle, which they're working to make into water-harvesting materials, graffiti-proof paints, and self-decontaminating surfaces for kitchens and hospitals. Or the work may take them in entirely new directions. Ultimately they consider a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. "Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient," says Cohen. "What I want to know is, Can we actually transform these structures into an embodiment with true utility in the real world?"

Which, of course, is the tricky bit. Potentially one of the most useful embodiments of natural design is the bio-inspired robot, which could be deployed in places where people would be too conspicuous, bored to tears, or killed. But such robots are notoriously difficult to build. Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on one of the biggest challenges of all: to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and maneuverable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations.

If a blowfly had buzzed into Fearing's office when we first sat down on a warm March afternoon, the windows flung wide to the garden-like Berkeley campus, I would have swatted it away without a second thought. By the time Fearing finished explaining why he had chosen it as the model for his miniature aircraft, I would have fallen on bended knee in admiration. With wings beating 150 times per second, it hovers, soars, and dives with uncanny agility. From straight-line flight it can turn 90 degrees in under 50 milliseconds —a maneuver that would rip the Stealth fighter to shreds.

The key to making his micromechanical flying insect (MFI) work, Fearing said, isn't to attempt to copy the fly, but to isolate the structures crucial to its feats of flying, while keeping a sharp eye out for simpler—and perhaps better—ways to perform its highly complex operations. "The fly's wing is driven by 20 muscles, some of which only fire every fifth wing beat, and all you can do is wonder, What on Earth just happened there?" says Fearing. "Some things are just too mysterious and complicated to be able to replicate."

After CalTech neurobiologist Michael Dickinson used foot-long plastic wings flapping in two tons of mineral oil to demonstrate how the fly's U-shaped beat kept it aloft, Fearing whittled the complexity of the wing joint down to something he could manufacture. What he came up with resembles a tiny automobile differential; though lacking the fly's mystical 20-muscle poetry, it can still bang out U-shaped beats at high speed. To drive the wing, he needed piezoelectric actuators, which at high frequencies can generate more power than fly muscle can. Yet when he asked machinists to manufacture a ten-milligram actuator, he got blank stares. "People told me, 'Holy cow! I can do a ten-gram actuator,' which was bigger than our whole fly."

So Fearing made his own, one of which he held up with tweezers for me to see, a gossamer wand some 11 millimeters long and not much thicker than a cat's whisker. Fearing has been forced to manufacture many of the other minute components of his fly in the same way, using a micromachining laser and a rapid prototyping system that allows him to design his minuscule parts in a computer, automatically cut and cure them overnight, and assemble them by hand the next day under a microscope.

With the microlaser he cuts the fly's wings out of a two-micron polyester sheet so delicate that it crumples if you breathe on it and must be reinforced with carbon-fiber spars. The wings on his current model flap at 275 times per second—faster than the insect's own wings—and make the blowfly's signature buzz. "Carbon fiber outperforms fly chitin," he said, with a trace of self-satisfaction. He pointed out a protective plastic box on the lab bench, which contained the fly-bot itself, a delicate, origami-like framework of black carbon-fiber struts and hairlike wires that, not surprisingly, looks nothing like a real fly. A month later it achieved liftoff in a controlled flight on a boom. Fearing expects the fly-bot to hover in two or three years, and eventually to bank and dive with flylike virtuosity.

To find a biomimetic bot already up and running—or at least ambling—one need only cross the bay to Palo Alto. Ever since the fifth century B.C., when Aristotle marveled at how a gecko "can run up and down a tree in any way, even with the head downward," people have wondered how the lizard manages its gravity-defying locomotion. Two years ago Stanford University roboticist Mark Cutkosky set out to solve this age-old conundrum, with a gecko-inspired climber that he christened Stickybot.

In reality, gecko feet aren't sticky—they're dry and smooth to the touch—and owe their remarkable adhesion to some two billion spatula-tipped filaments per square centimeter on their toe pads, each filament only a hundred nanometers thick. These filaments are so small, in fact, that they interact at the molecular level with the surface on which the gecko walks, tapping into the low-level van der Waals forces generated by molecules' fleeting positive and negative charges, which pull any two adjacent objects together. To make the toe pads for Stickybot, Cutkosky and doctoral student Sangbae Kim, the robot's lead designer, produced a urethane fabric with tiny bristles that end in 30-micrometer points. Though not as flexible or adherent as the gecko itself, they hold the 500-gram robot on a vertical surface.

But adhesion, Cutkosky found, is only part of the gecko's game. In order to move swiftly—and geckos can scamper up a vertical surface at one meter per second—its feet must also unstick effortlessly and instantly. To understand how the lizard does this, Cutkosky sought the aid of biologists Bob Full, an expert in animal locomotion, and Kellar Autumn, probably the world's foremost authority on gecko adhesion. Through painstaking anatomical studies, force tests on individual gecko hairlets, and slow-motion analysis of lizards running on vertical treadmills, Full and Autumn discovered that gecko adhesion is highly directional: Its toes stick only when dragged downward, and they release when the direction of pull is reversed.

With this in mind, Cutkosky endowed his robot with seven-segmented toes that drag and release just like the lizard's, and a gecko-like stride that snugs it to the wall. He also crafted Stickybot's legs and feet with a process he calls shape deposition manufacturing (SDM), which combines a range of metals, polymers, and fabrics to create the same smooth gradation from stiff to flexible that is present in the lizard's limbs and absent in most man-made materials. SDM also allows him to embed actuators, sensors, and other specialized structures that make Stickybot climb better. Then he noticed in a paper on gecko anatomy that the lizard had branching tendons to distribute its weight evenly across the entire surface of its toes. Eureka. "When I saw that, I thought, Wow, that's great!" He subsequently embedded a branching polyester cloth "tendon" in his robot's limbs to distribute its load in the same way.

Stickybot now walks up vertical surfaces of glass, plastic, and glazed ceramic tile, though it will be some time before it can keep up with a gecko. For the moment it can walk only on smooth surfaces, at a mere four centimeters per second, a fraction of the speed of its biological role model. The dry adhesive on Stickybot's toes isn't self-cleaning like the lizard's either, so it rapidly clogs with dirt. "There are a lot of things about the gecko that we simply had to ignore," Cutkosky says. Still, a number of real-world applications are in the offing. The Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funds the project, has it in mind for surveillance: an automaton that could slink up a building and perch there for hours or days, monitoring the terrain below. Cutkosky hypothesizes a range of civilian uses. "I'm trying to get robots to go places where they've never gone before," he told me. "I would like to see Stickybot have a real-world function, whether it's a toy or another application. Sure, it would be great if it eventually has a lifesaving or humanitarian role.…"

His voice trailed off, in a wistful, almost apologetic tone I had heard undercutting the optimism of several other biomimeticists. For all their differences in background, temperament, and ultimate aims, most practitioners conclude their enthusiastic discourses on their bio-inspired invention with a few halfhearted theories on how it may someday make its way into the real world. Often it sounds like wishful thinking.

For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, and the brilliant people who practice it, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products and arguably only one household word—Velcro, which was invented in 1948 by Swiss chemist George de Mestral, by copying the way cockleburs clung to his dog's coat. In addition to Cutkosky's lab, five other high-powered research teams are currently trying to mimic gecko adhesion, and so far none has come close to matching the lizard's strong, directional, self-cleaning grip. Likewise, scientists have yet to meaningfully re-create the abalone nanostructure that accounts for the strength of its shell, and several well-funded biotech companies have gone bankrupt trying to make artificial spider silk. Why?

Some biomimeticists blame industry, whose short-term expectations about how soon a project should be completed and become profitable clash with the time-consuming nature of biomimetics research. Others lament the difficulty in coordinating joint work among diverse academic and industrial disciplines, which is required to understand natural structures and mimic what they do. But the main reason biomimetics hasn't yet come of age is that from an engineering standpoint, nature is famously, fabulously, wantonly complex. Evolution doesn't "design" a fly's wing or a lizard's foot by working toward a final goal, as an engineer would—it blindly cobbles together myriad random experiments over thousands of generations, resulting in wonderfully inelegant organisms whose goal is to stay alive long enough to produce the next generation and launch the next round of random experiments. To make the abalone's shell so hard, 15 different proteins perform a carefully choreographed dance that several teams of top scientists have yet to comprehend. The power of spider silk lies not just in the cocktail of proteins that it is composed of, but in the mysteries of the creature's spinnerets, where 600 spinning nozzles weave seven different kinds of silk into highly resilient configurations.

The multilayered character of much natural engineering makes it particularly difficult to penetrate and pluck apart. The gecko's feet work so well not just because of their billions of tiny nanohairs, but also because those hairs grow on larger hairs, which in turn grow on toe ridges that are part of bigger toe pads, and so on up to the centimeter scale, creating a seven-part hierarchy that maximizes the lizard's cling to all climbing surfaces. For the present, people cannot hope to reproduce such intricate nanopuzzles. Nature, however, assembles them effortlessly, molecule by molecule, following the recipe for complexity encoded in DNA. As engineer Mark Cutkosky says, "The price that we pay for complexity at small scales is vastly higher than the price nature pays."

Nonetheless the gap with nature is gradually closing. Researchers are using electron- and atomic-force microscopes, microtomography, and high-speed computers to peer ever deeper into nature's microscale and nanoscale secrets, and a growing array of advanced materials to mimic them more accurately than ever before. And even before biomimetics matures into a commercial industry, it has itself developed into a powerful new tool for understanding life. Berkeley animal locomotion expert Bob Full uses what he learns to build running, climbing, and crawling robots—and they in turn have taught him certain fundamental rules of animal movement. He has discovered, for example, that every land animal, from centipedes to kangaroos to humans, has precisely the same springiness in its legs and generates the same relative energy when it runs. Kellar Autumn, the gecko-adhesion specialist and a former student of Full's, regularly borrows bits of Cutkosky's Stickybot to compare them with the animal's natural structures and to test central assumptions about gecko biology that cannot be learned from the geckos themselves.

"It's no problem to apply a 0.2 Newton preload to a patch of gecko adhesive and drag it in a distal direction at one micron per second," Autumn says. "But try asking a gecko to do the same thing with its foot. It'll probably just bite you."

amphibious amphicoach tourist bus

2009-03-23T10:24:00.003+08:00

網上看到水陸兩用的遊覽車，想到跨界的設計，設計原型的意義。曾經聽到有人說，原型是根本、本質、不可在減少的性質之類的說法，應該是基本型的意思。我對於原型，不是抱持這樣的想法。相反地，原型不是事物基本的性質，而是打破事物既有性質的方式，藉此重夠事物的秩序。而這輛車是一個小小的示範，如何重構我們對事物的認知。

i browsed the internet and found this interesting amphibious tourist bus which reminds me the meaning of a "prototype", a crossing boundary design. i heard some people defined a prototype as an essensial, unreduceable object which means "Being basic!". as for me, i disagree this aspect. In the opposite, a prototype is a way by which we break the existing organizational structure and redefine its texture order. this amiphicoach is an example which shows how we re-construct our definition towards a "tourist bus" or the boundary between land and water.

Rotating Tower in Dubai

2009-03-16T16:08:00.004+08:00

可動的建築在我當學生的時候，是不太會做設計的把戲。「建築是永恆的！」會動是褻瀆建築的神聖性。奇怪的是時間總是拿真理開玩笑，嘻！在我後來的設計中，也把可動的特質納入設計的思考。不過在建築教育的環境裡，會動仍被視為是低階的設計手法。相信kinetic, transformable, adaptive, interactive, 你們的光榮的日子快到了！再撐一下喔！

不過杜拜這個大樓倒是有點邪惡！只有動感，權勢，不太有「可變式」的精神。

Flare Facade

2009-03-16T15:31:00.001+08:00

上網查資料，無意間找到的資料。

Darwin 200 (4)

2009-03-04T10:39:00.004+08:00

03/01國家地理頻道播出紀念達爾文200週年紀念專輯第四篇─熊族崛起。

裡面提到歐亞與美洲之間的白令海峽因為地球氣候變化而結冰，造成原本源於亞洲的熊類遷徙到美洲，而白令因氣候變化造成隔絕產生後來的新種。白令海峽的陸地化或海洋化，造就了一個平台，一個閘口，控制著各式生物的交流與影響，而熊族是其中之一。我深深地被白令海峽的開與關，結冰與溶解，升與降之間的控制，造就生物物種的變化生死與滅絕而感到震撼。

而近來北極冰的溶解，造成北極熊數目減少，它們因而試著與灰熊交配，產生灰白熊，尚還未確定是否為新種，但白令的控制是以前的資料，灰白熊是當下正進行的演化！

相關資料
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hybrid
http://xk.cn.yahoo.com/articles/080109/1/7nmc.html

【轉載】儲蓄過剩反撲引爆全球崩盤

2009-03-03T10:43:00.002+08:00

2009-03-03 中國時報【保羅．克魯曼專欄】
　還記得昔日美好的日子？那時我們習慣談論「次貸危機」，有些人甚至認為那次危機能予以「遏制」。噢！真令人懷念！

　今天我們曉得，次級房貸不過是問題一小部分。就連整體不良房貸，也只是出狀況的一部分。我們活在一個充斥麻煩借貸者的世界，從大型購物中心開發商，到創造「奇蹟」的歐洲經濟體。新的債務問題不斷湧現。

　這場全球債務危機是怎麼發生的？為何範圍如此廣闊？答案可在聯邦準備理事會主席柏南克四年前的演講中找到。當時他試圖安撫人心，但話語卻暗示了日後的崩盤。

　這場《全球儲蓄過剩和美國經常帳赤字》演講，對廿一世紀初美國貿易赤字飆升提出新奇的解釋。柏南克認為，原因不在美國，而是在亞洲。九○年代中期，亞洲新興經濟體是資金主要輸入國，它們從國外借貸資助開發。但九七年亞洲金融危機之後，這些國家開始藉屯積大量海外資產來保護自己，實際上是把資金出口到世界其它地方。

　結果世界被低息資金所淹沒，只得尋找出路。

　那些資金大部分來到美國，造成我們巨大的貿易赤字，因為資金流入的反面就是貿易赤字。不過柏南克講的雖然正確，錢卻也流到其它國家，尤其許多較小的歐洲經濟體，按金額來說，流量比美國小得多，若對照其經濟規模，卻又大得多。

　然而，全球過剩的儲蓄大多仍落腳美國。為什麼？

　柏南克提到「我國金融市場的深厚和老練（外加其它因素，使美國家庭很容易取得房產財富）」。深厚？的確，但老練？您可以說美國銀行家被長達四分之一世紀解除管制的熱情所驅動，在尋求老練手法隱藏風險和愚弄投資人來自肥方面，可謂領先全球。

　其它接受大筆資金流入的國家，其金融體系許多也是門戶洞開，管制鬆散。這或許能解釋兩、三年前保守派的歌功頌德和今日經濟災難之間幾近怪誕的相互關係。卡圖研究所（Cato Institute）的報紙寫道：「改革使冰島成為北歐之虎」。傳統基金會一篇文章的標題是「愛爾蘭如何成為凱爾特之虎」；另一個標題則是「愛沙尼亞經濟奇蹟」。如今這三國都深陷危機。

　有段時間，資金的湧入在這些國家創造出財富的假象，就如同這類資金帶給美國屋主假象：資產價格上揚，幣值堅挺，一切看來都很好。然而泡泡遲早會破，昨天的經濟奇蹟，今天成了殘廢，那些國家的資產蒸發殆盡，債務卻如假包換。由於大部分貸款是以其它國家貨幣計價，這類債務負擔特別沉重。

　傷害不限於原借貸者。在美國，房市泡泡主要出現在沿海，但泡泡破裂時，工業製成品的需求、特別是汽車，也跟著垮掉，這對美國工業心臟地區傷害尤重。歐洲的泡泡主要也出現在外圍地帶，但從未有過金融泡泡，歐洲製造業核心的德國，工業生產因仍出口劇降而下滑。

　假如您想知道這場全球危機從何而來，不妨這麼想：我們正在目睹過剩的反撲。

　儲蓄過剩依然存在，且更甚於已往，突然變窮的消費者如今重回節儉，過去為過度儲蓄提供宣洩口的全球房地產榮景，已演變成全球崩盤。

　我們正被一場全球節約弔詭所苦：世界各地對儲蓄的渴望，已超過企業有意投資的金額。其結果是一場令每個人景況愈來愈糟的全球性衰退。

　我們就是這樣陷入眼前的亂局，而我們仍然在尋找出路。

　（克魯曼為美國普林斯頓大學教授，《紐約時報》專欄作家。本報國際新聞中心楊明暐摘譯）

sliding house

2009-02-27T09:51:00.004+08:00

這是jimmy特別推薦的可移動房子。
詳細的內容可以到jimmy的部落格(幸福研究院)，他有更詳盡的介紹。

Rhino Script Excise09

2009-02-25T00:07:00.001+08:00

aim: add one new vertex in the middle position of every two continuous existing vertices of a polyline.

Option Explicit
'Script written by Jeong-der ho, based on Robert McNeel & Associates Rhino script tutorial
'Script copylefted by de place
'Script version 2009年2月18日上午 11:25:38

Call DividePolyline()
Sub DividePolyline()
Dim strOriPolyline
strOriPolyline = Rhino.GetObject("Select a Polyline sample", 4, True, True)
If IsNull(strOriPolyline) Then Exit Sub

Dim arrPolyVertices
arrPolyVertices = Rhino.PolylineVertices(strOriPolyline)

Dim arrNewVertices
arrNewVertices = SubDividePolyline(arrPolyVertices)

Dim strNewPolyline
Dim arrStart : arrStart = Array(0,0,0)
Dim arrEnd : arrEnd = Array(10,0,0)

strNewPolyline = Rhino.AddPolyline (arrNewVertices)
Call Rhino.MoveObject(strNewPolyline, arrStart, arrEnd)
End Sub

Function SubDividePolyline(ByRef arrV)
Dim arrSubD() : ReDim arrSubD(2 * UBound(arrV))
Dim i

For i = 0 To UBound(arrV)-1
'copy the original vertex location
arrSubD(i * 2) = arrV(i)
'compute the average of the current vertex and the next one
arrSubD(i * 2 + 1) = Array( (arrV(i)(0) + arrV(i+1)(0)) / 2.0, _
(arrV(i)(1) + arrV(i+1)(1)) / 2.0, _
(arrV(i)(2) + arrV(i+1)(2)) / 2.0)
Next

'copy the last vertex (this is skipped by the loop)
arrSubD(UBound(arrSubD)) = arrV(UBound(arrV))
SubDividePolyline = arrSubD
End Function

Darwin 200 (2, 3)

2009-02-23T20:22:00.005+08:00

今年是達爾文200週年冥誕，國家地理頻道每週日晚上九點會播紀念「達爾文200週年紀念特輯」。
第一週02/08 達爾文的演化遠征(如之前文章提及)

第二週02/15 演化足跡：路上行鯨
主要是由鯨魚的演化歷程，讓觀者熟悉演化的實例發展。因為鯨魚體型夠大，易於觀察。又因為鯨魚的演化是反其道的，因為陸上生物是由海洋演化而來，而鯨魚又再度演化回歸海洋，是有趣的例子，成為許多生物演化專家喜歡舉例的對象。鯨魚在若干年前，是在陸地上類似狼的生物，礙於環境變化，食物缺乏，逐步慢慢演化成在淺水灘游水的兩棲動物，又逐步變成完全生活在水中的哺乳動物。很多細節節目中會詳盡說明。

第三週02/22 演化足跡：迅猛火雞
透過一連串化石推論與拼湊，論證火雞是遠古時期恐龍的親戚。恐龍其一支脈如何演變成始祖鳥，鳥類的祖先，為何長羽毛，棲息在何處，為何嘗試飛行等等有趣的問題，一一描述理論的輪廓。

Rhino Script Excise08

2009-02-18T12:06:00.002+08:00

Option Explicit
'Script written by
'Script copyrighted by
'Script version 2009年2月18日上午 11:14:27
'Script function 選取隨意繪製的polyline，電腦回饋長度。'

Call CalPolylineLength
Sub CalPolylineLength
Dim strPolyline
strPolyline = Rhino.GetObject("select a polyline sample", 4, True, True)

Dim arrPolyVertices
arrPolyVertices = Rhino.PolylineVertices(strPolyline)

Dim dblPolylineLength
dblPolylineLength = PolylineLength(arrPolyVertices)
Call Rhino.print("PolylineLength = " & dblPolylineLength)
End Sub

Function PolylineLength(ByRef arrVertices)
PolylineLength = 0.0
Dim i
For i = 0 To UBound(arrVertices) - 1
PolylineLength = PolylineLength + Rhino.Distance(arrVertices(i), arrVertices(i+1))
Next
End Function

Rhino Script Excise07

2009-02-14T00:56:00.001+08:00

Call Main()
Sub Main()
Dim strSurfaceID
strSurfaceID = Rhino.GetObject("Select a surface to sample", 8, True)
If IsNull(strSurfaceID) Then Exit Sub

Dim strCurveID
strCurveID = Rhino.GetObject("Select a curve to measure", 4, True, True)
If IsNull(strCurveID) Then Exit Sub

Dim arrPts : arrPts = Rhino.DivideCurve(strCurveID, 500)
Dim i

Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(False)
For i = 0 To UBound(arrPts)
Call EvaluateDeviation(strSurfaceID, 5.0, arrPts(i))
Next
Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(True)
End Sub

Function EvaluateDeviation(strSurfaceID, dblThreshold, arrSample)
EvaluateDeviation = Null

Dim arrR2Point
arrR2Point = Rhino.SurfaceClosestPoint(strSurfaceID, arrSample)
If IsNull(arrR2Point) Then Exit Function

Dim arrR3Point : arrR3Point =Rhino.EvaluateSurface(strSurfaceID, arrR2Point)
If IsNull(arrR3Point) Then Exit Function

Dim dblDeviation : dblDeviation = Rhino.Distance(arrR3Point, arrSample)
If dblDeviation <= dblThreshold Then
EvaluateDeviation = True
Exit Function
End If

Call Rhino.AddPoint(arrSample)
Call Rhino.AddLine(arrSample, arrR3Point)
EvaluateDeviation = False
End Function

Rhino Script Excise06

2009-02-12T18:23:00.003+08:00

This is a script which adds points according to a specific interval from R1 parameters to R3 spatial positions.

Call Main()
Sub Main()
Dim strCurveID
strCurveID = Rhino.GetObject("select a curve to sample", 4, True,True)
If IsNull(strCurveID) Then Exit Sub

Dim t
Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(False)
For t = 0.0 To 1.0 Step 0.002
Call AddPointAtR1Parameter(strCurveID, t)
Next
Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(True)
End Sub

Function AddPointAtR1Parameter(strCurveID, dblUnitParameter)
AddPointAtR1Parameter = Null

Dim crvDomain : crvDomain = Rhino.CurveDomain(strCurveID)
If IsNull(crvDomain) Then Exit Function

Dim dblR1Param
dblR1Param = crvDomain(0) + dblUnitParameter * (crvDomain(1) - crvDomain(0))
Dim arrR3Point : arrR3Point = Rhino.EvaluateCurve(strCurveID, dblR1Param)
If Not IsArray(arrR3Point) Then Exit Function

Dim strPointId : strPointID = Rhino.AddPoint(arrR3Point)
Call Rhino.ObjectColor(strPointID, ParameterColour(dblUnitParameter))
AddPointAtR1Parameter = strPointID
End Function

Function ParameterColour(dblParam)
Dim RedComponent : RedComponent = 255 * dblParam
If (RedComponent < 0) Then RedComponent = 0
If (RedComponent > 255) Then RedComponent = 255

ParameterColour = RGB(RedComponent, 0, 255 - RedComponent)
End Function

Phase space 相空間

2009-02-09T22:58:00.003+08:00

「相空間」描述系統狀態的變化，原使用在物理、數學、化學等領域，後來也被其他領域借用，做為描述系統動態的工具。其實也跟整個電腦興起後所談的非線性空間相關，非線性空間也是一個相空間。這也是有關達爾文的後續生物學家的研究，用相空間來解釋演化的趨勢。

以下是維基的解釋

相空間 From Wikipedia

在數學與物理學中，相空間(phase space)是一個用以表示出一系統所有可能狀態的空間；系統每個可能的狀態都有一相對應的相空間的點。以力學系統來說，相空間通常是由位置變數以及動量變數所有可能值所組成。將位置變數與動量變數畫成時間的函數有時稱為相空間圖，簡稱「相圖」(phase diagram)。然而在物質科學(physical sciences)中，「相圖」這詞更常是留給一化學系統用以表示其熱力學相態多種穩定性區域的圖表，為壓力、溫度及化學組成等等之函數。

在一相空間中，系統的每個自由度或參數可以用多維空間中的一軸來代表。對於系統每個可能的狀態，或系統參數值允許的組合，可以在多維空間描繪成一個點。通常這樣的描繪點連接而成的線可以類比於系統狀態隨著時間的演化。最後相圖可以代表系統可以存在的狀態，而它的外型可以輕易地闡述系統的性質，這在其他的表示方法則不那麼顯明。一相空間可有非常多的維度。舉例來說，一氣體包含許多分子，每個分子在x、y、z方向上就要有3個維度給位置與3個維度給速度，可能還需要額外的維度給其他的性質。

在古典力學中，相空間坐標由廣義坐標qi以及其共軛的廣義動量pi所組成。研究由許多系統所構成的系綜在此空間中的運動是屬於古典統計力學的範疇。

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Phase space of a dynamical system with focal stability.In mathematics and physics, a phase space, introduced by Willard Gibbs in 1901, is a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space. For mechanical systems, the phase space usually consists of all possible values of position and momentum variables. A plot of position and momentum variables as a function of time is sometimes called a phase plot or a phase diagram. Phase diagram, however, is more usually reserved in the physical sciences for a diagram showing the various regions of stability of the thermodynamic phases of a chemical system, which consists of pressure, temperature, and composition.

In a phase space, every degree of freedom or parameter of the system is represented as an axis of a multidimensional space. For every possible state of the system, or allowed combination of values of the system's parameters, a point is plotted in the multidimensional space. Often this succession of plotted points is analogous to the system's state evolving over time. In the end, the phase diagram represents all that the system can be, and its shape can easily elucidate qualities of the system that might not be obvious otherwise. A phase space may contain very many dimensions. For instance, a gas containing many molecules may require a separate dimension for each particle's x, y and z positions and velocities as well as any number of other properties.

In classical mechanics the phase space co-ordinates are the generalized coordinates qi and their conjugate generalized momenta pi. The motion of an ensemble of systems in this space is studied by classical statistical mechanics. The local density of points in such systems obeys Liouville's Theorem, and so can be taken as constant. Within the context of a model system in classical mechanics, the phase space coordinates of the system at any given time are composed of all of the system's dynamical variables. Because of this, it is possible to calculate the state of the system at any given time in the future or the past, through integration of Hamilton's or Lagrange's equations of motion. Furthermore, because each point in phase space lies on exactly one phase trajectory, no two phase trajectories can intersect.

For simple systems, such as a single particle moving in one dimension for example, there may be as few as two degrees of freedom, (typically, position and velocity), and a sketch of the phase portrait may give qualitative information about the dynamics of the system, such as the limit-cycle of the Van der Pol oscillator shown in the diagram.

Phase portrait of the Van der Pol oscillatorHere, the horizontal axis gives the position and vertical axis the velocity. As the system evolves, its state follows one of the lines (trajectories) on the phase diagram.

Classic examples of phase diagrams from chaos theory are the Lorenz attractor and Mandelbrot set.

Darwin 200

2009-02-08T22:48:00.003+08:00

今年2/12是達爾文200歲冥旦，世界各地都有慶祝活動，為這位十九世紀的先驅者所帶來的先知卓見致意。

關於達爾文的進化論，物競天擇，幾年前讀過中時出版社翻譯的「演化論」(好像叫這個書名)，大約有涉略一二。今晚National Geographic Channel也播了達爾文的特別企劃，順便複習了一些所讀過的事物。再一次從記憶裡翻閱達爾文的事蹟，其實還是不禁對於他的成就由心底油然地肅然起敬。

整個進化論的重點，不外乎把生物物種的創造，由宗教造物主創造的觀念，物種恆久不變的觀念，轉變成物種會隨與環境的互動中改變，進而產生新物種或絕種。這在當時的社會與知識界裡都還算是相當激進的想法，由此看他一路由小獵犬號航行世界，逐步從各地的所見所聞，經過多年的思考與研究，才一一拼湊出這樣重大人類的發現，確實是很大的成就。

生物與建築的關係，是目前研究的方向，三不五時總會被人問到為何這二者有關係(包括學生的家長....)，其實我確信很有關係，而且在很多方面，每次想到這些白日夢的細節都叫人特別興奮。它會是一種建築的論述，也會是一種建築的實踐，更會是一種生命的宇宙觀，我自己是這樣期待著。

mobile living

2009-02-05T17:32:00.003+08:00

詳細資料：
http://chinese.autoblog.com/2009/02/04/japan-guts/

收到之前學生小黑寄來的網路資訊，關於三個日本年輕人，改裝一輛toyota卡車，成為一輛環遊日本、五臟俱全的生活車。一方面聯繫到小湘的畢業設計，同樣是做移動式的車輛/建築；另一方面讓我回想到多年前，我利用我的pickup車廂後斗加遮棚，在東海睡過好幾個晚上，那種游牧式的生活是一種體驗。

RP model 2

2009-01-23T19:42:00.003+08:00

這是第二次使用RP製作模型。造價不斐！學校使用粉狀材質加黏劑膠合，報價五六百。但無法做到1mm，而且做完自己還要加塗硬化劑。業界貴的嚇人，要價一萬多元！但可作到1mm，而且算是漂亮。只能說被有技術的搶匪搶吧！嗚嗚嗚....

tobacco mosaic virus

2009-01-14T17:39:00.003+08:00

模擬菸草嵌紋病毒在酸鹼性不同的濃度時，表面蛋白質單元打開壁體，讓病毒RNA捲體進入結合。

嘗試用rhino script撰寫完成。

Option Explicit
'Script written by
'Script copyrighted by
'Script version 2009年01月13日下午 08:28

Call TMV()
Sub TMV()

Dim z, a
Dim x, y
Dim pi, dblTwistAngle
pi = Rhino.Pi()
dblTwistAngle = 0.0

Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(False)

For z = 0.0 To 12.0 Step 0.5

If (z >= 0 And z < 2) Or (z >= 6 And z < 8) Or (z >= 10 And z < 12) Then

dblTwistAngle = dblTwistAngle + (pi/30)

For a = 0.0 To 2*pi Step (pi/15)
x = 5 * Sin(a + dblTwistAngle)
y = 5 * Cos(a + dblTwistAngle)
Call Rhino.AddSphere(Array(x,y,z), 0.5)
Next

End If

Next

Dim t
For t = 2 To 10 Step 0.05
If (t >= 2 And t < 6) Then

x = 5 * Sin(3*t)
y = 5 * Cos(3*t)
z = t
Call Rhino.AddSphere(Array(x,y,z), 0.5)

End If

If (t >=8 And t < 10) Then

x = 5 * Cos(3*t)
y = 5 * Sin(3*t)
z = t
Call Rhino.AddSphere(Array(x,y,z), 0.5)

End If

Next

Dim u
For t = 0 To 12 Step 0.05

x = 2 * Cos(3*t)
y = 2 * Sin(3*t)
z = t
Call Rhino.AddSphere(Array(x,y,z), 0.5)

Next

Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(True)
End Sub

A Theo Jansen´s mechanism

2009-01-05T01:02:00.003+08:00

隔了一整個月沒寫部落格，現在已是過了一年！汗顏！
這是"去年"我東海一個學生傳給我的可動機械youtube影片。
關於Theo Jansen's mechanism。創作者Theo Jansen荷蘭人，一位藝術家以及動態雕刻家。

wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen

his website
http://www.strandbeest.com/

Fibonacci Number(2), 兔子繁殖

2008-11-13T17:32:00.002+08:00

<節錄自網路http://home.educities.edu.tw/mario123/problems/fibonacci.htm>
1202年，義大利數學家斐波那契出版了他的「算盤全書」。他在書中提出了一個關於兔子繁殖的問題：

如果一對兔子每月能生一對小兔（一雄一雌），而每對小兔在牠出生後的第三個月裡，又能開始生一對小兔，假定在不發生死亡的情況下，由一對出生的小兔開始，50個月後會有多少對兔子？

在第一個月時，只有一對小兔子，過了一個月，那對兔子成熟了，在第三個月時便生下一對小兔子，這時有兩對兔子。再過多一個月，成熟的兔子再生一對小兔子，而另一對小兔子長大，有三對小兔子。如此推算下去，我們便發現一個規律(如上圖，請點擊見大圖)
----------------------------------------------------------

上一篇貼出了費氏數列的成形方式。這篇列出費氏數列可對應的具體事物(雖然兔子的生育繁殖還是一種推論模型)，讓費氏數列脫離冰冷的數理邏輯，似乎指涉一種「真實的」生物繁殖，讓我對於數字玄妙與生物形態之間的關係，不再是兩個分離的世界，數字運作好比繁殖運作般工作，在執行生物任務。

第一次我看到數字在繁殖，真奇妙！

Fibonacci Number(1), 斐波那契數列(費氏數列)

2008-11-12T23:03:00.004+08:00

[pic02] A tiling with squares whose sides are successive Fibonacci numbers in length

[pic03] A Fibonacci spiral created by drawing arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling; this one uses squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34; see Golden spiral

節錄自wikipedia

斐波那契數列（Fibonacci Sequence），台灣譯為費氏數列。

在數學上，斐波那契數列是以遞歸的方法來定義：

F0 = 0
F1 = 1
Fn = (Fn - 1) + (Fn - 2)
用文字來說，就是斐波那契數列由0和1開始，之後的斐波那契數就由之前的兩數相加。首幾個斐波那契數是（OEIS A000045）：

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946，………………

特別指出：0不是第一項，而是第零項。

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. Fibonacci's 1202 book Liber Abaci introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics, although the sequence had been previously described in Indian mathematics.

The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself, yielding the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. In mathematical terms, it is defined by the [pic01] recurrence relation:

That is, after two starting values, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The first Fibonacci numbers also denoted as Fn, for n = 0, 1, 2, … ,20 are:

[F0]0, [F1]1, [F2]1, [F3]2, [F4]3, [F5]5, [F6]8, [F7]13, [F8]21, [F9]34, [F10]55, [F11]89, [F12]144, [F13]233, [F14]377, [F15]610, [F16]987, [F17]1597, [F18]2584, [F19]4181, [F20]6765

Rhino Script Excise05

2008-11-10T22:39:00.001+08:00

Option Explicit
'Script written by David Rutten
'Script copyrighted by Robert McNeel & Associates
'Script version 2008年11月10日下午 09:50:44

Call IterativeShortenCurve()
Sub IterativeShortenCurve()
Dim strCurveID : strCurveID = Rhino.GetObject("Open curve to smooth", 4, True)
If IsNull(strCurveID) Then Exit Sub
If Rhino.IsCurveClosed(strCurveID) Then Exit Sub

Dim dblMin, dblMax, dblGoal
dblMin = Rhino.Distance(Rhino.CurveStartPoint(strCurveID), Rhino.CurveEndPoint(strCurveID))
dblMax = Rhino.CurveLength(strCurveID)
dblGoal = Rhino.GetReal("Goal Length", 0.5*(dblMin + dblMax), dblMin, dblMax)
If IsNull(dblGoal) Then Exit Sub

Do Until Rhino.CurveLength(strCurveID) < dblGoal
Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(False)
strCurveID = SmoothCurve(StrCurveID, 0.1)
If IsNull(strCurveID) Then Exit Do
Call Rhino.EnableRedraw(True)
Loop
End Sub

Responsive Volatility 活潑建築

女性的堅毅

Rachel Armstrong: Architecture that repairs itself?

d3 space org

領導方式

【轉載】THE CITY 2.0 – EVOLVED (NOT MADE) BY ECOLOGICAL HUMANS

THE CITY 2.0 – EVOLVED (NOT MADE) BY ECOLOGICAL HUMANS

[新書預告]仿生微生系 運作中

do it for you (die for u)

snake robot

sth about computing

fution evolution

養肝丸 ●「 養肝」&「玩」

ideas about what living conditions we are dealing with

作者修養與作品

自我建構 self-assembly

social behaviors effect body fat

ring finger

可動式藝術

responsive bio-mimetic tutorial

flowing rain trace as an adjustable formation

【轉載】男性食指比無名指長 易是同性戀

【轉載】控制基因

蝴蝶、斑馬與胚胎之摘錄3

蝴蝶、斑馬與胚胎之摘錄2

蝴蝶、斑馬與胚胎之摘錄1

珊瑚練習

張大春真敢講，讓人臉紅心跳

【轉貼】Google研發自動駕駛車 反應比人靈敏 ； Google tests cars that drive themselves

是是是視覺藝術 MV

coral reef man

LED triggered by LDR

button to control LED's ON/OFF & its brightness

arduino gogogo

生命體建築

cellbot

與楚米對話

wiimode玩樂器

機械人幫你畫人像

MIT Flyfire

bio-texture in food

玩具機械人

我看艋舺

【轉載】 拍電影，不該廉價到只用商業包裝

三則生物機制新聞

da issue9 out on shelves 夯9上架

tenga 原型設計、包裝、銷售 ─ 太屌了

生物機械

iphone driving a car!

half human half robot

bioloid robot kit

bioloid robot climbing up!!

就是愛動

arthur ganson's moving sculpture

【轉貼】 染色體研究 三人共獲諾貝爾醫學獎

芋頭蕃薯與拓樸

【轉貼】超級奈米紙 韌性比鋁強三倍

原型 prototype II

原型 prototype

【轉貼】冰層消覓食難北極熊軀體縮小

【轉載】DNA電腦晶片 更小更強更省電

Flâneur

Golan Levin's artwork

robot cooking noodles

【轉載TED】Bonnie Bassler: how bacteria talk

responsive form

【轉貼】葉綠素電池發功 尿布救生衣遇溼主動求救

活潑建築大陸版─新仿生建築

基因屏障與新種

【轉貼】5個脾 肝錯置 英女孩內臟如拼圖

【轉載】克魯曼:靠出口？除非銷外星球

機場還是公園？

【轉貼】日本已淪為「貧窮大國」

Frontier exploration

【轉貼】Tata Nano

笛卡兒 v.s. 萊布尼茲

流感、都市、建築思潮

【轉載】保羅．克魯曼專欄－銀行家的報酬又漲回來了

Michael Fox

Friedman, Yona

[新書預告]仿生微生系運作中

養肝丸 ●「養肝」&「玩」

【轉載】男性食指比無名指長易是同性戀

【轉貼】Google研發自動駕駛車反應比人靈敏； Google tests cars that drive themselves

【轉載】拍電影，不該廉價到只用商業包裝

【轉貼】染色體研究三人共獲諾貝爾醫學獎

【轉貼】超級奈米紙韌性比鋁強三倍

【轉載】DNA電腦晶片更小更強更省電

【轉貼】葉綠素電池發功尿布救生衣遇溼主動求救

【轉貼】5個脾肝錯置英女孩內臟如拼圖

【轉載】儲蓄過剩反撲引爆全球崩盤