Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
If you’ve ever been wondering where this tilde character on your keyboard came from or why somebody thought that curly brackets are a must have on computers… check out the Character Histories on Jukka Korpela’s site.
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With all the amazing images coming in on a daily basis from Mars now, it is easy to forget that other planet close-by… Venus.
The Soviet robotic missions to Venus have never been covered very well in the West, and even nowadays it is hard to get solid information or good pictures from these expeditions.
Via Slashdot I found this site where Don P. Mitchell is featuring some great reconstructions of the original image data sent back from Venus.
Don’s site also contains a nice history of the Soviet exploration of Venus, complete with many pictures of the space craft.
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…now in German!
If you’ve ever been to the other side of this site, you know that I like to write about China travel.
An old friend of mine back in Germany is currently in the process of launching Travelpak, a travel portal site, and I am now writing a series of articles about China travel for the site.
It’s a lot of fun to re-visit some of my old travel notes and to work in my mother tongue for a change… but it’s actually quite hard to fall back into a mode of writing in German that sounds natural.
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After three weeks I’m now finally able again to take part in normal activities without checking the latest news from Mars every hour…
What a thrill! Sometimes it just blows me away in what times we live – there are two robots moving around on Mars, delivering fresh pictures and scientific findings back to Earth daily.
And not just that! Everybody with a $10/month Internet connection can just go and download the latest images at pretty much the same time that the mission scientists see them for the first time.
Amazing times!
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The Triplets of Belleville is one of those delightful surprises that happens only every now and then – it’s a quirky, crazy and almost unexplainable movie experience so very different than the standard fare that we get fed from old and boring Hollywood.
It is an animation movie, but certainly not for kids and it tells a rather complicated story with almost no words at all. The animation looks sometimes old-fashioned but at the same time some state-of-the-art computer effects must have been used to make the complicated scenes work.
And I’m not even trying to explain the story – let’s just say that it involves a hijacking, an ocean crossing, betting, the French mafia, a grandma and some ruthles killers. Go and see for yourself!
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