It's silly, but it's phun!

Some lunaticEmil Ernerfeldt at Umeå University (we hang out in the same IRC channel) has created the game2d physics sandbox Phun, and the introduction video for it says it all. I once heard my nephew speak about building an automatic popcorn popper involving a conveyor belt through an oven and a robotic hand to put the popped corn into a bowl - I wonder what Phun would become in his hands. You can download it here. I don't dare to try it, I will get addicted, I'll just stick to Transport Tycoon when I need my fix.

PS. Unless I manage to pry my PS2 back from the hands of my other nephew and niece...

(Update: Now we're just wanting programmable PID-controller functions, then it could be cool to be able to script things like you do in Colobot. Please?)

(Update 2: While I'm at it, let's suggest games like Totem Destroyer and the Orisinal games. Happy waste of time :-P )

Amazing inventions of art - the Telectroscope tunnel between New York and London

As I read recently in Framtidsbloggen (in Swedish), someone has dug a tunnel between New York and London! Or well, that's only how it seems - someone had the idea of the Telectroscope:


Very simple - the tunnel is of course too long to walk through, but it should be possible to point telescopes towards each other in the US and England, and have people see each other, right?

Well, through the wonders of telepresence and Internet, it's been made possible in a real-life installation! Go to London (well, that's far enough for me, but that's beside the point...) and wave to your family in New York! Or maybe we'll see meeting places which exist in several places, connected with telepresence walls? Fiction so far, but telepresence is still my hobbyhorse...

(Update: Even before I published this piece, Sven Paulus managed to send me this touching piece about telepresence between Israel and Palestine... cool!

Also, an acquaintance of mine has visited the Telectroscope in London, and says the simple things were fascinating, like that it was day in New York... and that the news telling of the scope didn't mention it as fake or a piece of art, just that it was a relative of the creator who came up with the idea for the secret optics to accomplish the thing)

(Update 2: Erik Starck sent me the strange Greyworld World Bench which enables school kids in different parts of the world to share a park bench and a chat with each other. Without 3d-screen though, this doesn't become as charmingly accurate as the Telectroscope)

(Update 3: There would be no island in the middle, as the sketches claim :-)


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