BBC:
How does Dyson make water go uphill? A very cool hack from
a Dyson engineer for the Chelsea Flower Show — an M. C. Escher-influenced
water feature which gives the illusion that the water is flowing
uphill.
A set of four glass ramps positioned in a square clearly show water
travelling up each of them before it pours off the top, only to start
again at the bottom of the next ramp.
It is a sight which defies logic, and has become probably the most
memorable image of this year’s show.
Mr Dyson says his inspiration was a drawing by the Dutch artist MC Escher
(he of Gothic palaces where soldiers are eternally walking upstairs, and
of patterns where birds turn into fish).
Privacy: Danny forwards this
post which discusses
what the poster calls the ‘little elves’ problem. Very good point
and contains this great real-world example:
Peter Wright in ‘Spycatcher’ … describes one of the problems arising
out of the Berlin Tunnel Operation thus: ‘So much raw intelligence was
flowing out from the East that it was literally swamping the resources
available to transcribe (and translate) and analyse it. MI6 had a
special transcription center set up in Earl’s Court, but they were still
transcribing material seven years later when they discovered that George
Blake had betrayed the Tunnel to the Russians from the outset’.
Funnily enough, I have the same problem — a lack of processing power to
deal with the raw incoming volume — with my spamtraps from time
to time. Now I can describe it in terms of ‘little elves’.
Patents: W3C
announce patent policy. They’ve decided on Royalty-Free as a
requirement, good news.
TimBL’s comments on the decision:
Many participants in the original development of the Web knew that they
might have sought patents on the work they contributed to W3C, and that
they might have tried to secure exclusive access to these innovations or
charge licensing fees for their use. However, those who contributed to
building the Web in its first decade made the business decision that they,
and the entire world, would benefit most by contributing to standards that
could be implemented ubiquitously, without royalty payments.
This decision on the W3C Patent Policy coincides almost exactly with the
tenth anniversary of CERN’s decision to provide unencumbered access to the
basic Web protocols and software developed there, even before the creation
of W3C. In fact, the success of technical work at the World Wide Web
Consortium depended significantly on that decision by CERN. The decision
to base the Web on royalty-free standards from the beginning has been
vital to its success until now. The open platform of royalty-free
standards enabled software companies to profit by selling new products
with powerful features, enabled e-commerce companies to profit from
services that on this foundation, and brought social benefits in the
non-commercial realm beyond simple economic valuation. By adopting this
Patent Policy with its commitment to royalty-free standards for the
future, we are laying the foundation for another decade of technical
innovation, economic growth, and social advancement.
Quite. I remember seeing Mosaic for the first time — my first thought
was ‘wow, it’s like those commercial hypertext systems, but it’s
free’. Initially, the free-ness was a lot more important than the
network transparency it also offered.
There had already been several commercial hypertext systems, with
expensive licensing terms. I’d only ever seen them bundled with other
products (like the AIX documentation viewer) or used in kiosk systems.
They pretty much foundered when HTTP and HTML became available. But
there’s no question to my mind that if CERN had made HTTP/HTML a
commercial, licensed, or royalty-paying proposition, we wouldn’t even be
talking about the web (or should I say the ‘WWW’?) nowadays.
Tags: bbc, engineer, escher-influenced, feature, problem, show, time, tunnel, water, web
