Monthly Archives: June 2010

Asides, Shanghai

“Peasant Da Vincis” at Shanghai Rockbund

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Chinese Farmer Sub

Chinese Farmer Built Submarine

From ArtObserved:

On May 4, the exhibition titled “Peasant da Vincis” curated by the renowned American-Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang opened in Shanghai. “Peasant da Vincis,” featuring a combination of inventions by Chinese peasants and works by the artist that explore the subject of human creativity. It is also the inaugural show for Rockbund Art Museum, the first contemporary art museum in the historic riverfront area of Shanghai, known as the Bund.

Read the full article on ArtObserved.

Over the weekend I visited the new Rockbund Museum to see “Peasant Da Vincis” – a exhibit featuring an array of awesome hand-made inventions created by peasant/farmers from around China. I’d previously read with great interest of home-built inventions like the walking, talking rickshaw-pulling robot, fully functional submarine, homemade airplane and helicopter – but I never thought I’d get a chance to see them up close… much less RIDE ON THEM!

The exhibit allows direct interaction with some of the devices – you can actually ride the robot rickshaw. Other inventions like submarines and airplanes are on display inside an open-air atrium filled with birds. The ingenuity and creativity exhibited in the design, construction and function of these devices is truly inspiring.

If you’re interested in checking it out visit the Rockbund Museum website for more details.

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Asides, Shanghai

Wind Power to Blow Strongly

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From Shanghai Daily: Wind power to blow strongly

CHINA is expected to increase its total offshore wind-power capacity from 5,000 megawatts in 2015 to 30,000MW by 2020, a senior official at a hydropower institute said.

“Shanghai as well as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong and Fujian provinces have already submitted their offshore wind-power blueprints. Their combined off-shore wind power capacity could reach 22,800 megawatts by 2020,” said Wang Minghao, vice president of Hydropower Planning Research Institute, who spoke at the Offshore Wind China Conference yesterday.

Read more on Shanghai Daily.

Every time I read a story like this about energy in China it gives me a little bit of hope. While the world reels from oil-related catastrophes (see Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, Singapore) China continues to push aggressively towards meaningful renewable energy goals:

China is aggressively expanding its renewable energy consumption to reduce reliance on polluting fuels like coal and oil, and plans to increase the proportion of renewable energy to 15 percent of the country’s overall energy mix.

That, combined with Chinese consumer/manufacture awareness of energy efficiency and resource scarcity, means China could become a beacon for sustainability – that is if they aren’t pushed to consume the world first.

Asides

Super Computer to Simulate Life

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Headline from Science Daily on May 28th:

ScienceDaily (May 28, 2010) — Scientists are planning to use the largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies and whole societies. The project is called “Living Earth Simulator” and part of a huge EU research initiative named FuturIcT.

Full article @ Science Daily.

This plays neatly into one of my favorite science fiction themes – the universe as we know it is a simulation running on a giant computer. In short, The Matrix. It’s a thought that comes to mind frequently as I’ve observed the steady increases in realism achieved in gaming. As the march towards a “perfect simulation of reality” continues, one has to wonder when we’ll see people leaving this reality forever for another, simulated one. And one has to wonder how many times previously that same transition might have been made.

We could all be a simulation running inside a simulation, inside another simulation.