Bear Attack

From news.timtech.com

Kris Rowley, Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Vermont was hiking along vermont’s woodlands when she noticed that a bear was following her. Being well aware that she was not carrying any weapon to use to defend herself or fight back, she threw her iPhone at the bear in the hope of distracting it. Fortunately the bear got distracted and so Rowley was able to escape. She returned to the scene later on hoping to retrieve her iPhone and found that her precious smartphone was chewed and mauled by the bear beyond repair. Unsurprisingly, Apple would not agree to replace the phone for free. Although devastated by what happened to her phone, she said she was happy that she wais safe and would be willing to buy another iPhone again.

The moral: have your water bottle handy so that you don't need to throw your precious iPhone at the bear.

The Impossible Project inspires Polaroid to re-launch Instant Cameras

The Polaroid licensee - The Summit Global Group - announced at a press conference on October 13th in Hongkong that they will re-launch some of the most famous Polaroid Instant Cameras.

Therefore they are commissioning The Impossible Project to develop and produce a limited edition of Polaroid branded Instant Films in the middle of 2010.

Large-scale production and worldwide sale of The Impossible Project's new integral film materials under its own brand will already start in the beginning of 2010 - with a brand new and astonishing black and white Instant Film and the first color films to follow in the course of the year.

Random thought

2009 Nobel Prize

This year's Nobel winners come so close to me.

I had a brief collaboration with Thomas Steitz but the project didn't go anywhere; I had seriously considered applying for a post-doc opening at Elizabeth Blackburn's lab for telemere research back in 2000; and of course, Charles Gao was the vice-chancellor of my university when I was an undergraduate. Weird.

Chiura Obata

I was watching PBS's National Parks series these days. Today has an episode about artists. Chiura Obata was a painter who came from Japan and fell in love in the nature of the American west coast. He became a professor of UC Berkerly and painted hundreds of paintings of Yosemite, the High Sierra and sequoia. Days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Obata like hundreds of thousand Japanese immigrants are thrown into internment camps. He taught fellow Japanese children and adults painting and sketching along with his own painting and sketching in the camp. Art becomes an antidote for the harsh endurance.

Tapaz war relocation center by moonlight (1943)

Tapaz Mountains (1943)

Glorious Struggle (1965) Sumi on Silk, 36 X 22 in

His grand daughter compile his works resulted from his days in the internment camps and published this Tapaz Moon. Paperback available in Amazon.com.