Just rediscovered the Data is Nature blog which has a really interesting post about origami. The author of one of the websites mentioned and the person responsible for this incredible piece of paper dropped a comment on the Data is Nature blog…

I have always been deeply fascinated by self-organizing structures, and the chaotic reality of nature; personally, I’m only beginning on my journey of discovery, so I haven’t moved past basic geometry yet. I feel I need to be grounded in what I know, and take small steps forward. Time is an ally, not an enemy.

Pretty cool huh? Oh, if this has peaked your interest check out Origami Tessellations and be sure to have a look in the diagrams section where you can find patterns to make yourself.

Just spotted this on Slashdot this morning, “MTV, Microsoft band together for music service”:http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5993125.html.

bq. “As with everything we do at MTV Networks, every element of URGE will be developed with our audience in mind,” said Jason Hirschhorn, MTV Networks’ chief digital officer, in a statement. “Beyond providing a simple transactional service, Urge will provide a musical playground where fans can experiment, customize, discover and download new music.”

_Experiment, customize, discover_? That cant be the same “MTV”:http://www.mtv.com that I’m thinking about? Well, from a business is a really good move and I’m sure it will do well. It’s just such an evil paring don’t you think? The “Evil Monopolist”:http://www.microsoft.com meets “Ritalin for the Masses”:http://www.mtv.com.

It’s wierd, I’ve never been able to understand traffic and why we have traffic jams. It just seems well silly you know. What really used to boggle me was how 10 minutes could make a world of difference. Maybe it was just because those ten minutes were the last ten before schools would start. The most annoying thing about traffic jams was when it was caused by people slowing look at something on the side of the road, especially when it it’s nothing particular interest. All it took was one car to slow down. It’s like a sort of herd effect.

Well, Shanghai is “on the case”:http://www.shanghaidaily.com/art/2005/12/10/225542/Traffic_system_would_send_info_to_computer.htm

THE city is looking at plans to build a traffic information center that would send up-to-the-minute reports on road congestion to a computer screen installed in cars or a portable device cyclists and pedestrians could use.

The center will integrate information from the current three road condition monitoring departments — traffic police, the urban transport bureau and the urban project management bureau — and install more information collecting devices such as monitors along or beneath roads.

Once applied, the Intelligent Transportation System will help drivers find the best routes to avoid congested roads, or suggest they use the subway or buses depending on traffic conditions, said Yang Dongyuan, vice president of Tongji University.

“Location aware”:http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/2005/12/08/perfect-example-of-a-location-aware-system technology put to use. And it’s already showing promise…

bq. According to Yang, a trial project that sent information to outdoor signal billboards along the Yang’an Elevated Road and several intersection roads saw overall traffic efficiency improve by up to 20 percent.

Coming soon to a road near you…

“Reinventing 911″:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/warning.html?pg=1&topic=warning&topic_set, over at “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/, is a great look into how some the emergency response networks have been re-engineered to leverage the “network effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect in distributing information:

bq. To understand the true nature of warnings, it helps to see them not as single events, like an air-raid siren, but rather as swarms of messages racing through overlapping social networks, like the buzz of gossip.

It’s the intergration of location information that makes this system really interesting…

bq. The model is simple and elegant, and because warnings can be tagged with geographical coordinates, users can customize their cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, or other devices to get only those relevant to their precise locale.

So you have all this information out there buzzing around. Individuals can choose to recieve only the information relevant to them. In this case it’s alerts for their specific area but that could also include specific types of alerts, priority alerts, etc.

This system was created for emergency services so it’s the global view that they’re interested in and that translates into something like this…

A little before 6 pm on this ordinary Saturday evening, there is a hit-and-run in the city’s western suburbs. A moment later, a silent alarm goes off in a building near downtown. At 6:03, there’s trouble with a drunk on the north side, and at almost the same time there’s a report of a disturbance at a Home Depot. Three quiet minutes go by, and then at 6:07 comes news of another hit-and-run.

From a room on the 10th floor of the old Heathman Hotel downtown, I follow the action as it scrolls across the screen of my laptop, little exclamation points popping up on a detailed satellite photo of the town. Each alert is attached to a short bit of text. I can zoom out, watching multiple traumas light up across the whole metropolitan area of 1.7 million people, or zoom in, finding nearly silent places where nothing that requires attention from the police happens for a long time. The resolution is so good, I can pick out individual buildings.

But imagine the system was not limited to public safety information and that it was open to everyone. People could share all kinds of information, all linked to a specific place. They also choose what kind of information they would like to recieve.

Thats where all the buzzword technologies like _social software_, _location aware_, _semantic web_ come into play. Those technologies will help people filter and find information of interest and relevance to them. And the promise is that it will all be done automagically.

The article gives us a glimpse of a what a Location Aware world would look like.