martinwinter.com/blog

I’m very busy right now and need to focus on a few things. I plan to continue this blog in March 2007. Until then, you might like to have a look at some photos.

Added on December 14, 2006:

• ProChrist 2006

Added on December 13, 2006:

• Savants and Asperger Syndrome

Added on December 6, 2006:

• Powers of Ten

Added on December 4, 2006:

• Arca Musurgica

Added on December 2, 2006:

• KrazyDad

This year saw another iteration of the one-week, European evangelization campaign »ProChrist«. This is of particular interest to me since I was involved in the design work for ProChrist when I was at Buttgereit und Heidenreich three years ago. The office managed to realize unconventional ideas for this project once again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Watched an interesting documentary about so-called savants on German public TV today. These are (in this case autistic) people with extreme mental abilities. It was fascinating to see Stephen Wiltshire, for example, fly over Rome for 45 minutes and then draw everything in minute detail, down to the number of windows on buildings.

In this context I heard of a condition related to autism, called Asperger syndrome (AS), which is much milder than “classic” autism and is also called “Little Professor Syndrome” or “Geek Syndrome” in English. This online test poses interesting questions for a self-evaluation. (Disclaimer: Of course, this must never replace a professional diagnosis, if needed.)

Made in 1977, this is still a fascinating project about the relative scale of things (I’ve seen the book):

http://www.powersof10.com/

Athanasius Kircher was a Jesuit universal genius who, among many other things, wrote the book Musurgia Universalis, which influenced the music of Bach and Beethoven. Particularly interesting to me is the Arca Musurgica described in the book, a kind of automatic, programmable organ that allowed anyone to compose music. It would certainly be intriguing to recreate this on a modern computer.

Here’s an interesting website that concerns itself with LEGO robots, mosaics and diagrams made of Flickr photos and other “krazy” stuff:

http://krazydad.com/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/sets/140323/

A very comprehensive overview of the Cocoa text system and how to customize it:

http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html

I have had to figure out a lot of this myself when developing JobTimer X (an in-house time keeping tool for Buttgereit und Heidenreich) and Kaleidotype. But this is also the fun in programming – bending the system to your needs.

Watched the documentary film “Born Into Brothels” on 3sat today (more info: http://www.kids-with-cameras.org). It is about the children of the prostitutes in the red light district of Calcutta. While watching, I took a couple of notes about what impressed me most, which I would like to share here briefly.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://itotd.com/