time is funny

“The Two Minutes of Eclipse”, a travel blog by Nenad Morača, Mario Janković-Romano, and me, about a 23 day eclipse chasing trip to Siberian and Mongolian never lands — is finished! All texts (unfortunately, still in Serbian) and 500+ photos, both geotagged on the interactive map, and more — could be found at:

http://sibir.krcadinac.com

So far (during last month and a half), blog had 20.000+ overall visits, or 350+ visits per day! Thank you all for reading!

Nenadov, Mario i moj putopisni blog o dvadesettrodnevnoj avanturi jurenja pomračenja Sunca po nedođijama Sibira i Mongolije je završen! Sve tekstove, više od 500 geotagovanih fotografija, interaktivnu mapu sa rutama i još svašta možete naći na:

http://sibir.krcadinac.com

Blog “Dva Minuta Pomračenja” je do sada (za oko mesec i po dana) imao preko 20.000 poseta, tj. preko 350 poseta po danu. Hvala vam svima na interesovanju!

I was in a bus, sweating, a bit nervous, late for a discussion about the future of Web, about formal semantics, ontologies, and knowledge representation in general (my friends and colleagues from the Good Old AI research group organised it) and not prepared for it at all. The night before, I was reading (again!) a wonderful travelogue from Central Asia and it just didn’t seem important to gather information about microformats and RDFs and Tim Berners-Lee viewpoints…

So, the only thing left for me was to take out a book – Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – and at least try to enjoy my bus ride. Feeling several different skins touching my skin, I managed to get lost in stories about cities and cities about stories, imaginably told to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo; one of those cities was Zora.

Marco (or Calvino) told Kublai (or me) that „beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city no one, having seen it, can forget. (…) Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that lead to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary infinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.”

A small eyelid-like pattern of dust on the bus window overlapped the stone eye of Dimitrije Tucović’s statue at the Slavija square, spontaneously forming a meaningful new portrait, and I realized that Zora was nothing but a semantic network, an upper ontology, with rigidly defined structure between concepts – just like an armature or a honeycomb; an objective formal representation of the world which could be processed by a machine (e.g. an intelligent agent on the Semantic Web) and which would make the programme understand the meaning, which would, in a way, make it think. In other words: Zora’s map is a gigantic RDF graph.

The dream held by AI researchers was similar to the one of Zora; by seeing what happened to this town (“Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”) one can ponder, as I did: Could it be that Tim Berners-Lee’s dream is just another Kublai Khan’s empire, tempting, yet evasive, ambiguous, impossible to posses, doomed to be forgotten?..

The bus, then, stopped.

ASCII portrait of my J.

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# (@«
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# (@«
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“Code is poetry.”

– wordpress.org

Our frisbee club has a good old tradition of writing frisbee-philosophy oriented haiku poems. (See one of the earlier posts, in Serbian.) But, using words is just one way to write it. You can also draw, film, compose or even program your haikus. Draw and film OK, you say, but program – it just sounds weird. Well, wait till you hear about Processing, a beautiful programming tool for visual artists and designers. But first, let me say something about these little drawings in grayscale, my visual frisbee haiku.

Seeing your dear flying disc getting entangled in the branches and leaves can be painful sometimes. Yet, sometimes it can strangely become a game of it’s own, enjoyable for you and hopefully the tree. Imagine your friends and you throwing discs through some old grapevine, laughing, running, climbing, again and again… I’ve tried to capture the contours of such an adventure on my first helloworldish Processing sketch, also making a haiku wordplay with an old soul classic.

And HERE it is.

As you can see, these digital drawings are computer generated: shapes and shades are nothing more then a plain old Java code. A little random number here, a little ellipse function there, and – here you have a little applet-based visual haiku poem: haikapplet! I must admit I watched it for about half an hour, being hypnotized by it’s ever-changing pictures and generative design that is always different.

Yet, this little haikapplet is nothing compared to what can you create with Processing. In short, it is a tool for programming visual art. An open project initiated by two great designers, programmers and MIT students, Ben Fry and Casey Reas. See some of the projects made by Processing here. Personally, I was always being skeptical about computer generated art – it just looked too cold, precise and non-human to me. But seeing certain personal, warm, even touching works by some brilliant artists, such as Jared Tarbell or Jonathan Harris, made me change my mind and give Processing a chance.

Besides the art making, I believe it could make a revolution in science education. Imagine elementary school girls and boys using basic physics laws and mathematical functions to create marvelous, colorful and inspirational drawings, animations, and interactive graphics! I see some pretty artworks as presents, new teenage loves and well-deserved first kisses. If teachers could see the potential of Processing and alike, in twenty years we may have more scientists and artists then Big Brother fans…

Yes, I know, but let me dream…

“Imali smo par frizbi seansi koje su bile otprilike kao zen.”

– Erlend Lu

Neki ovaj sport nazivaju Ultimate Frisbee. Greše. Pravo ime mu je Razbi, kovanica koja spaja Ragbi i Frizbi! Nastao je davnih devedesetih u Petnici, i to nezavisno od igre Ultimate Frisbee, bar kako urbana legenda kaže. A razlike su neznatne i svode se na to da su pravila Razbija neformalnija. Pogledajte i stranicu na Wikipediji. Ako ste do sada verovali da ne volite ekipne sportove, Razbi će vas uveriti da ono što ste zapravo prezirali jeste – lopta!

Od prošlog leta postoji i mali neformalni klub pančevačkih razbista i prijatelja. Možete ih videti svake nedelje ispred Doma vojske, pri ulazu u Pančevo, kako u popodnevnim časovima bacaju frizbi, a ponekad pevaju ili prave skulpture od snega. Naravno, pozvani ste da im se pridružite: svratite do Razbišta, poljane na ulazu u Pančevo, ili se priključite Google Razbi Grupi. Pogledajte i Lukine fotografije sa utakmica, ovde i ovde.

Ali, da vas upozorim na vreme, bez pesničkog duha biće vam teško – glavna je aktivnost mejling nam liste pisanje frizbi haikua, tzv. frizbaikua, ogranka ove tradicionalne japanske veštine rečima koji za temu mora imati frizbi. Dozvoljavamo i haiku crteže ili kakve treće umetnine za retke skribofobe.

Izvol’te i nekoliko, meni najdražih:

igramo. gore
sunce je, te mesec već.
okruglo leti.

u skok po uhvat,
i korak, bang o zonu,
pa stati. tango.

božic. tajiri,
pogača, oreol… a
zaleđen tamiš.

– uro ki