Photos shot on my 40 years birthday

Hunting for a Life meaning. I am 40 years old now. And still I dont think Life has a meaning. Life is just living. Living is just being here in this moment. If life has no meaning this does not imply that Life is not worthwhile living it. The point is, we as human beings are experiencing pain and sorrow, and pleasure and joy. All we do in our life is to find a way to have pleasure and be happy. That's exactly what I was looking for and I had with my party... Toast!

40ties

Today, May 27th, it's my birthday. And I am now 40 years old. When you look back at your life, you see what you have done till now. That 's not a good idea, cause even if you have done much, you could have done more or differently and better. So what to do when you are 40yo? Probably just keep doing what you were doing before. Time goes by so slowly or so fast..., the point is: time goes and never turns back. We do and do and do, and forget to seek what we are here for. Either we hunt for food or we have fun for distraction, or we work to pay the rent. All these actions are quite necessary, but they don't give any meaning to our lifes, they just keep our mind busy...

Approaching the Forties

17,18,35,11: ages, faces that change as time goes by

The freak Tulip

I grew this Tulip taking care of it a lot. I planted it. I watered it. And I admired its blooming beauty. After a while something WEIRD happened. A leaf came that was half green leaf and half red petal.

Knowledge accumulation or substitution?

Can you retain all you have learnt from your first day of life till today? I don't think so.
At least I cannot. I know many people who have an extraordinary memory. This helps them so much, as we are living in the era of over information. They can access to such a huge quantity of memories. My assumption here is that you cannot accumulate knowledge, and that while learning new concepts or notions you will finally substitute pre-existing ones in our memory with the fresher ones.
I would refer to this phenomena as the enlightening of knowledge, as if knowledge were something available outside of ourselfs. I like to use this metaphor because it reminds me of the Vattimo's philosophical theory. Gianni Vattimo says (and I apologize not being a philosopher and thus not being able to discuss this topic in a proper way) that history is not a linear evolution of events, but the collection of illuminations of the very being, while outside the light there is no continuity. Now from my perspective, a similar thing happens to each of us while talking about knowledge. If knowledge is the history of our life, we can enlight just some part of it, but not the totality of it. This is because our brain has limits in retaining and retrieving information. Those people who are blessed with this gift of retaining little memories, have the power of concentrate on their senses. This is something that I would like to demonstrate. I have always been convinced that Art has its strenght not in the technique itself but in the ability of listenning and interpreting our senses, that some artists do have. Knowledge accumulates itself outside of our brain in books, pictures, electronics devices, etc. Anyway this is of little relevance, as we cannot retain all this information at the same time. Those people who understand this would have much more creative power than those trying to repeat by heart what they have learnt.

Do we feel free to write everything we like on the Internet?

I was in a meeting last month in Spain. Mostly researchers, people from the academic world, and familiar with the Internet. We were discussing about virtual lifes and their boundaries, ethics in it, privacy and so on. You know SecondLife and things like that... like blogs for instance ;-). One guy told that when he started to use blogs he was quite unaware of some aspects of the power of the Internet and of search engines. Because that tool was virtual, he did feel like writing his own diary, knowing that just some friends of him or some "smart" people would have read it. Then search engines started to duplicate this virtual world, making a picture that eventually would last in time. This picture is there and searchable even if you delete your record, because you do not feel confortable with it any more. This was the point made by that guy: he started noting down his own considerations in the blog, signing with his real name in the unreal virtual world, and after that he decided that it was not a good idea to share that with other unknown people. But the search engines had already done their jobs: making a copy of the virtual world and associate it to his name. So anyone today can easily find this material simply searching for content associated to him.
Today most people use a nickname in their virtual lifes. But maybe they associate photos to it, or videos. In the next future searching engine will be capable of scanning those photos and videos and recognize people in it. Should we put a nickphoto of us? Or just do not trust the Internet and simply discuss about how weather is today? (quite clowdy and cold I would say....)

News from the ITU Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong

This article is part of my job. Sometimes you just forget about life meaning and start playing the game of your life.

The ITU Telecom World 2006 event sent a clear message: Asia, or China, wants to dominate the telecommunications future. Since 1971 the ITU Telecom World 2006 has been hosted in Genéve, but last year they moved it to Hong Kong. At the event there were 600 exhibitors, 30% less of the 900 who attended the last edition in 2003, but with 57% more participation of companies from China and Taiwan.

Huawei and ZTE booths

The Exhibition was hosted in the new AsiaWorld-Expo, an innovative building close to Hong Kong airport. You got a first impression of the chinese tast for innovation getting on the Airport Express, connecting Central to the Expo: the confortable seats have LCD touch-screens with several TV channels available.

The Hong Kong's Airport Express interior

The most interesting section of the exhibition in terms of new products or ideas was the Asian one, especially Japanise and South Korean. The western companies - except a few ones, like Motorola - were more concentrated on showing commercial products than demonstrating prototypes, probably under pressure to survive. A similar attention to the business were around the chinese booths, Hauwei, ZTE, China Telecom, China Mobile, where the feeling was that of conquerors more than survivals. Wandering at night around the Honk Kong streets, sorrounded by fancy skyscrapers, which were decorated with Christmas lights that NYC's Time Square could just dream of, gave you the feeling of a population competing to succeed.

Hong Kong's skyline from The Peak

Let's now see some of the interesting devices that I found in the Exhibition.
Transmitting emotions is what a pen invented by NEC could do: the device, named Kotohana, was flower-like shaped, and changes its colour according to the voice intonation.

Most people agree that the user-machine interface is one of the most important things to build easy to use devices: NEC was showing for the first time a Latticekey, an innovative keyboard for mobile phones. The Latticekey had 21 sensors that interacts with icons on the screen of the phone: you just have to move seamlessly your finger on the sensors to activate all the phone's features.

The Latticekey Interface by NEC

If you dont speak Japanise it's not a problem anymore: NEC was providing you with a prototype of a software interpreter installed on a mobile phone. You just needed to pronounce a sentence in English, check the text on the screen, and the application was taking care of translating in spoken Japanize to the counterpart, all this done in 2 seconds.

It's a few year that we read about the new e-paper screens: those are screens that instead of using a backlight to illuminate its pixels, reflect light like ordinary paper and are capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity or using processor power, while allowing the paper to be changed. Hitachi was showing a few B/W and colour screens, 13" wide: I swear they give a completely different experience than a LCD or a CRT.

Hitachi e-paper screens

Broadband is how we today connect to the Internet, usually using the telephone copper wires and an ADSL modem. The future of Broadband is optical fibers reaching our houses. This will enable to see TV channels with High Definition resolution (1980 x 1080 pixel instead of the traditional 720 x 480 of PAL system) and experience a revolutionary way to interact with TV. The Japanize operator NTT was showing many solutions for optical fiber systems and High Definition TV. One issue is that while copper wires can be tightly belt without loosing data, fiber optics cannot: NEC was proposing a new fiber which can be belt and thus easily installed inside an apartment to deliver.

The South Korean area had a nice multimedia projected carpet at the entrance: a sort of interactive seaworld with fishes running away from the visitors steps.

Interactive seaworld carpet at the South Koearan booth

I said interfaces are a key part of successful devices. A motion sensor bracelet was demonstrated at the S. Korean industry booth, capable to control the wireless connected devices in the vicinity. And in the future probably we will connect the headset to our phone using a system transmitting over our skin, thanks to skin conduction: we will really say that some sentences will make us shiver!

Wearable bracelet controller

Anyway wearable computers are just around the corner: Motorola was showing a nice pink jacket with a keyboard and a couple of speakers integrated in it: you could connect your mobile phone to the jacket. This garment is what I dream of when I drop it in my some pocket of my winter coat and I cant find it anymore...

Wearable PC garment by Motorola

To read more:

www.itu.int/WORLD2006/
www.nec-design.co.jp/showcase