Gems Sty

In the current train system design, the train has to accelerate/decelerate to a complete stop for every station to pick up passengers. The video above shows a very interesting concept for an alternative solution to mass commuter trains - it is a train that doesn’t stop.

Instead of stopping, it’d have a slider carriage on the top of the train. The slider carriage serves as an intermediary ‘pod’ where boarding and alighting passengers transit (before diffusing into the main train carriages). Commuters at the station wishing to board the train would enter the carriage (and presumably at some point before the train actually arrives, the doors are shut). The train seamlessly picks up this carriage, while depositing its own carriage to drop commuters wishing to alight.

Without having to stop for stations, train journeys can be drastically reduced without sacrificing passenger convenience - it is the best of both worlds! I’m definitely not an expert in locomotion engineering, but on the surface it does seem like a possible concept (hey, we’ve sent people onto the Moon!).

A small (social) concern for me might be how effective/efficient can passengers diffuse from the pod into the rest of the carriages. In a system like this, there is even more inertia to venture away from the sliding pod if you’re just hanging on for a few stops, and people are likely to gather in the few carriages nearest the pod. This could however probably be solved by having multiple sliding pods instead of the singular one as visualized in the video.

If you can read Chinese, here’s a more detailed explanation by the inventor Chen Jian Jun. It seems like he’s been working hard trying to pitch his ideas to various agencies (including government, rail etc), but hasn’t been particularly successful.

What are your thoughts on this?

It almost looks like just another video of cute birds and nature - though this one has an interesting moment towards the end of the video. Without giving too much away, I’d say the bird looked a whole lot cuter - and almost like something coming out of a computer game.

Alright, if you’re that impatient, push the bar to the 2:10 mark.

[Edit]

Added another video below at Linyou’s recommendation - another bird called the Lyre Bird with amazing talents in imitating sounds: from bird chirps to decidedly more…man-made sounds like machines and sirens. The first case of music piracy in bird-land:

BMW has just unveiled their latest concept called GINA Light Visionary - GINA being an acronym for their design philosophy behind: Geometry and Functions In ‘N’ Adaptations (I suppose GINA sounds cooler than GIFNA?). At my first glance, I thought it was not too radical - the initial impression was a concept that was probably a sportier extension of the Mille Miglia concept unveiled back in 2006.

But after going through the video (in Youtube above), I realized it was a rather radical and refreshing perspective of automotive design - this may yet be a watershed in automotive styling. BMW has always been experts in dealing with expressive surfaces (that are often sharply ‘clipped’), with one of their master strokes being the iconic negative curvature found along the sides of many of its sportier cars. But I think in GINA they re-thought the whole tradition of car body designs.

In typical automotive designs, you have a certain structure on which you add metallic panels on. You can style these panels in as many ways as there are cars on market now - but they are generally all seen as panels. The associated possible actions are linked to traditional metal sheet forming technologies - bending, rolling, cutting, etc., as the automotive designers think of themselves as sculptors, adding or coring away extra ‘clay’.

In GINA, instead of hard panels, the body is conceived more like a soft skin wrapping against a skeleton body. While it may very well be made of metal panels eventually just like any other cars, the important thing is at the design level, the ’skin’ metaphor brings out a whole set of different analogies and thus designs - you’re thinking about creases, pinching, pricking, etc. Design is thus by growing and subtracting the inner skeleton (which then defines the creases). I particularly liked the quote by Chris Bangle in the video: “…let’s let material talk in a different manner; and let the tooling be a different issue, instead of just a way to give us form.“

There are some other interesting features enabled by such a skin too: for example, there can be a continuous line on the sides, with the door creasing and folding away rather than opening/lifting. It could also consume less resources to build and drive, since the fabric would probably be lighter and require less manufacturing energy. Imagine also the possibility of changing the profile of your car exterior at a whim - in a fabric concept, it may be as simple as pressing a knob to rotate or shift the underlying skeleton.

It reminds me of Gehry’s Guggenheim too - which was for architecture another conceptual breakthrough: where technology has grown to such sophistication that we can in fact produce a building not by ‘ground-up’, ‘level-by-level’ structure which is then clad by facade. Instead, the building was defined much by its skin itself, its transformations and its refreshing organic lines.

In a way, I also felt it made the car more organic - it’s almost like a silent…monster. As it lifts it eyelid, the head lamps project its vision menacingly ahead; the unveiling of the bonnet reminds me of open-heart surgery; makes me think about Toyota’s ‘Human Touch’ ad too (haha both are somewhat creepy).

Overall, I must say this is one of the most refreshing and innovative concept cars that I’ve come across these years. There are many concept cars that are wild, interesting, etc. but I thought the GINA managed to tackle car design in a whole new perspective, while inheriting the qualities that make it a BMW.

Bravo to the design team!

(And if you’re the essay type, here’s their philosophy (wall-of-text!))

Here’s a rather inspiring commencement speech from J.K. Rowling delivered at Harvard this year - a mixture of one part Harry Potter jokes, one part serious message and three parts earnest advice like that from a mother:

Part 1:

Part 2:

If you’re a math geek, you might like this song by Bo Burnham. The tune’s perhaps not particularly catchy, but the lyrics are golden. Some excerpt:

…whats a bag of chips divided by five, thats a nike worker’s meal
and santa clause mutliplied by “i” well i guess that makes him real…

…if theres a fat guy in a pastry shop with a twenty dollar bill and he’s ready to buy,
in order to predict his volume change you need to know the value of pi (pie)…

…cause havin sex is like quadratic expansion if it cant be split then its time to stop,
and havin sex is like doing fractions, its improper for the larger one to be on top…

Head on to the Youtube site for the full lyrics!

Made me smile - in many parts of the world, a great football (soccer, or actually any good sports game) match can unite fans in cheering for their nation (or their favorite team). Coca Cola wants you to think that they’re a big part of this fan-camaraderie spirit through this humorous clip. The ad was put together for the upcoming Euro 2008.

This is quite an interesting video (or perhaps more accurately, audio) clip of a scenario in a barber shop. Now what’s so fancy about that? Not too much, though it does show the stereo sound property quite well - if you close your eyes and listen to it, give it a little imagination and voila, you’d find yourself thinking someone’s really working on your hair in the shop (perhaps a little creepy due to its ‘realness’).

Listening to it, you feel as though you are in a barber’s chair, with the barber moving around you, clipping away at your hair. As the barber “moves” to your right, the volume increases slightly in the right channel and decreases in the left. Similarly, increases in the volume of sound from the clippers give the impression that he is bringing them closer and closer to each ear. The illusion demonstrates our ability to locate sounds in space; by comparing the inputs to the two ears, we can work out where a sound is coming from.

Honda has quite a good history in creating sincere, original and amazing ads - from the classic “Cog” where a sequence of car-parts fall in domino-style, to the choir singing the sound of a Honda, and now, another breathtaking advertisement that again redefines the scene.

With the tagline “Difficult is worth doing”, Honda’s latest advertisement involves skydiving - 19 of them exited a plane and form the letters H, O, N, D ,A sequentially in free fall - no computer effects or stuff like that. The entire clip was telecast live on UK television too - here’s the video of that jump:

Their blog ‘Difficult is worth doing’ also has some documentation of the effort and some of the behind-the-scenes preparation and action. I find it quite cool for Honda to portray the ’stick-your-head-down and really solve the problems on the ground’ sorta attitude - from the series of ad (as well as the tagline of the current one), you could feel Honda’s inherent desire to really face the challenge head-on and not try to get shortcuts (e.g. the “Cog” advertisement was repeated 600 times to get that perfect one-take; no computer effects that would’ve easily visually accomplished what they’ve set out to do physically).

And here’s Honda’s “Jump” ad, the final, produced version of this endeavor:

The old adage goes - ‘laziness is the mother of all invention’. Typically when a new invention comes up, it meets resistance for people who are used to the status quo, and denounce the new effort or time-saving invention as a farce, a device for the lazy. For instance, the automatic gear was once condemned as a luxury device for the lazy - “if you can’t even be bothered to stick out a leg and change your gear, why drive a car?”.

Of course, history has proven otherwise - automatic gear sticks are now very much the default in new cars. People get used to it, prefer it for the time and effort saved, and after a (short) while, the chorus of condemnation are all but forgotten.

That said, what’s your take on this?

Something to get inspired for the weekend - carpe diem!