Dem Uwe sind Schmetterlinge aufgefallen, die aus Zeitungspapier geschnitten an verschiedenen Stellen in Magdeburg angebracht sind. Sie erinnern mich an die äuszerst charmanten Schablonengraffitis, auf die ich in den ersten Tagen in Santiago gestoszen bin, und an den gänsehauterregenden Song El arado vom hier zuvor erwähnten Víctor Jara, den es in verschiedenen Coverversionen auf YouTube zu hören gibt.
In the major Chilean newspaper La Nación Domingo Alejandro Kirk argues (machine translation) that a new type of cyclists arises choosing the bike as a principal way of getting around as a positive decision – instead of a sign of resignation before ill or too warily implemented transportation policies. A good friend of mine i got to know on a bicycle ralley in Santiago is mentioned as a model citizen of the “bicivilización” where the bicycle poses a way to improve health, autonomy, and self-esteem. The bicycle is described as an ingenious invention since you neither need to be an athlete nor a mechanic to ride it. And of course: you are much more beautiful on a bicycle.
I have spent the last six months in Santiago de Chile at the Web Research Center doing an internship about distributed social software with Javier Velasco as one of my supervisors. Both of us are aficionados of photography while being also interested in usability and social aspects of the web. With Javier’s support i have designed and developed a software that enables photo sharing via groups in a decentralized and distributed manner. This is an attempt to create a decentral, open source alternative to sites like Flickr and Fotolog trying to create open standards and protocols for social interaction on the web. This approach will be covered in more detail in the internship thesis i am about to write during the next weeks and months.
While Atomique is still pre-alpha it has already some basic functionalities like tagging, comments, RSS, and the mentioned groups feature. Check out the demo sites of Andrea and Lisa. If you also wish to login acting as a host you need to enter the subdomain as the user and test as the password. Please don’t try to break it. It still is very edgy.
As there is still a long way to go you are happily invited to help out. In the next days i will setup the necessary infrastructure to turn Atomique into an open source project and continue development. You can find more information in the wiki and via this weblog all news regarding Atomique will be published. Stay tuned and please share your opinion.
Thanks to anybody who already has helped a lot by giving advice or interviews, doing paper prototype tests or listening to presentations in poor Spanish.
Last week i returned to Magdeburg from Santiago de Chile where i have spent six months to do an internship at the Web Research Center of the Universidad de Chile and also to improve my Spanish. While almost everybody told me that Chile wouldn’t necessarily be considered the best place to learn proper Spanish i was delighted by the patience i was granted with my poor pronounciation – still don’t get the r’s right – as well as my limited comprehension. I have made quite a few very good friends among them: Carolina, mosaic artist and cyclist comrade, José Ricardo, intellectual and tandem friend, Carla and Daniel, actor couple and flatmates, Claudio, computer graphics pro and temporary office peer, Javier, information architect and supervisor. Furthermore i had the chance to travel in Chile up north with the Ente and to the south with my brother and his girlfriend. Thanks to anybody who has helped making it a very cool half-year – including my family and girlfriend who have always supported me in that endeavor.
I really enjoy doing nightshots these days. In fact, i have used my camera (canon ixus 400, sometimes also sold as powershot or elph) almost exclusively with the extended exposure feature lately. I am sure other digicams have it, too. So instead of walking my camera during the day, i get her out during night. The colors are so much different. If you have a (digital) camera at hand you should really try it out. The ‘technique’ is dead simple:
Wait until it’s dark outside. You could read a book or talk to your flatmates in the meanwhile.
Walk around your neighborhood and find a nice scene to take a picture of.
Extend the exposure time according to need or gusto.
Place your camera on a steady surface, e.g. the ground. Tripods are also great, but not always at hand.
Do it. Take the picture.
Too easy. It is all about experimenting with your photographic device. But just a few more notes, to get you kick started:
Color the sky. Cool effects are possible with the sky being almost black. With extended exposure it will turn red, purple and/or blue.
Let it rain. Wet surfaces will make your result far more colorful.
Cars suck. But when it comes to nightshots they add the essential effect of red and yellow light lines.
Do it often. Take more than one picture of a given scene with different exposure levels. This way you decide later what suits you best.
Money, money. Use some coins to adjust the angle, especially if you put the camera on the ground.
Those nightshots that i’ve uploaded to Flickr have not been edited in any way. It’s just extra long exposure goodness. If anybody reading this has some results, please leave a link. I reeaally like nightshots. Ooops, its getting dark outside. Gotta go.
Thanks again to the Ente who has prodded me to the night mode feature of my camera and to ClobS who has ignited my appreciation of nightshots a few months ago by showing his nocturnal view on Santiago.
While the Ente was visiting me here in Chile we have travelled up north to see La Serena and Valley Elqui, the Atacama desert and El Tatio, and inbetween Valparaiso. I must say that i really like Valpo – especially now that i found the nightshoot option on my camera – thanks to the Ente. We have had a wonderful time during the last 3 weeks.
Intuitively this seems odd, but a whole range of studies ’suggest’ that car-drivers are exposed to much more traffic-related air pollution. Exemplary is the research of Kingham, Meaton, et al. from 1998 with the following findings neatly compiled at the Sprawl and Health blog:
The car driver had the highest mean exposure to benzene (108.3 micrograms/m^3) a factor of at least 4 and also the highest mean exposure to particulates (7.6 absorbance), but by a much smaller margin.
Train riders had the lowest benzene exposure (12.9) and path cyclists had the lowest particulate exposure (2.7).
The bus was slightly better than the road bike
The exposure ratios for the car driver to the road cyclist were 4.05 for benzene and 1.26 for particulates.
The exposure ratios for the road cyclist to the path cyclist were 1.73 for benzene and 2.41 for particulates.
While i am taking the bike here in Santiago – not necessarily the friendliest place for bicyclists – i am exposed to a lot of fumes, but this counts just as well for every Santiaguino. Motorists surely are worsening the situation for everybody, yet they hurt themselves even more. When i am preaching that more people should take the bike relieving the local air situation and doing exercise at the same time i often got the respond that one would breath too much air pollutants. Now i can counter that cheap excuse with tough, scientifically backed research. Watcha say now?!
For a list of studies related to urban living, transport and health check out the bibliography of the Sightline Institute. It is a rich set of all kind of research questions ranging from health problems to absence of community correlated by sprawl and suburbanism.
In Chile – as in the rest of the world – we see a growing discomfort among motorists about the rising gas prices. Here in Santiago this translates also to demonstrations by people that are either relying on or are plainly used to take the car. This seems to me a bit ironical. Every other day we have air pollution warnings by the government limiting the (legal) use of special kinds of vehicles so that the smog level doesn’t get ‘too unhealthy’. On the contrary the demonstrating motorists are asking for lowering the gas taxes arguing that a great part of the economy relies on this very combustion based transport. The government should help out since those transcendent causes hit the economy and the middle class – which both ought to be protected. In fact Chile is seeing price increases in different product categories ranging from bread to bus transit because of higher gas prices. While this argument surely has some basis, i would argue that the decline of fossil fuels is not that unforeseen. Peak Oil is not a myth. People know that fossil fuels neither last forever nor are ubiquitously found. In fact there are people dying everday in conflicts related to oil.
Therefore i think economy and society needs to develop and adopt new ways of undertaking transport. As capitalist economy is rather interested in making a quick buck than investing in long term goals it is probably up to governments to encourage (read: subsidize) change. But than politicians are rather in it for the next election and not the welfare of future generations. Which leads me to the conclusion that true environmental change can only happen from below, from the people choosing whether they take the SUV or the metro to get to work. Furthermore there is a need for a broad social movement for environmental change to demand more alternative transport and energy.
Here in Chile the beginning of such movements can be seen: ranging from objecting Pascua Lama to demanding urban cycle tracks. It is very promising to see an increasing number of people challenging car and combustion culture. Chile has just experienced one of the greatest social movements in a long time. The students demanding profound change in education had and still have broad support in Chilean society. Change is possible - but it is unlikely to be initiated by politics nor economy.
Some Chilean environmental groups / individuals devoted to alternative transport (read: use of bicycle):
The Ente has been in Venice for presenting a paper at a conference. While she was there she has taken marvellous photos (the last 9 galleries). I would especially like to point the reader’s attention to the streetart set which i enjoyed quite much.
If you haven’t noticed yet: the penguins are plotting and doing the world revolution. Here in Chile we have seen the greatest social movement in 30 years undertaken by high school students – colloquially referred to penguins due to their school uniforms – demanding an education accessible to everyone. Furthermore the open source community – with the famous penguin Tux as its charismatic leader – proofs that the production of value and knowledge needs to be open and accessible. And ultimately we have penguins showing up on walls all over to underline the greatest revolution of mankind – undertaken by their black-and-white counterparts. Besides stepping into their claw steps we finally need to stop global warming to acknowledge these magnificient deeds.
Dem Uwe sind Schmetterlinge aufgefallen, die aus Zeitungspapier geschnitten an verschiedenen Stellen in Magdeburg angebracht sind. Sie erinnern mich an die äuszerst charmanten Schablonengraffitis, auf die ich in den ersten Tagen in Santiago gestoszen bin, und an den gänsehauterregenden Song El arado vom hier zuvor erwähnten Víctor Jara, den es in verschiedenen Coverversionen auf YouTube zu hören gibt.
In Chile – as in the rest of the world – we see a growing discomfort among motorists about the rising gas prices. Here in Santiago this translates also to demonstrations by people that are either relying on or are plainly used to take the car. This seems to me a bit ironical. Every other day we have air pollution warnings by the government limiting the (legal) use of special kinds of vehicles so that the smog level doesn’t get ‘too unhealthy’. On the contrary the demonstrating motorists are asking for lowering the gas taxes arguing that a great part of the economy relies on this very combustion based transport. The government should help out since those transcendent causes hit the economy and the middle class – which both ought to be protected. In fact Chile is seeing price increases in different product categories ranging from bread to bus transit because of higher gas prices. While this argument surely has some basis, i would argue that the decline of fossil fuels is not that unforeseen. 
Therefore i think economy and society needs to develop and adopt new ways of undertaking transport. As capitalist economy is rather interested in making a quick buck than investing in long term goals it is probably up to governments to encourage (read: subsidize) change. But than politicians are rather in it for the next election and not the welfare of future generations. Which leads me to the conclusion that true environmental change can only happen from below, from the people choosing whether they take the SUV or the metro to get to work. Furthermore there is a need for a broad social movement for environmental change to demand more alternative transport and energy.
If you haven’t noticed yet: the penguins are plotting and doing the world revolution. Here in Chile we have seen the greatest social movement in 30 years undertaken by high school students – colloquially referred to penguins due to their school uniforms – demanding an education accessible to everyone. Furthermore the open source community – with the famous penguin Tux as its charismatic leader – proofs that the production of value and knowledge needs to be open and accessible. And ultimately we have penguins showing up on walls all over to underline the greatest revolution of mankind – undertaken by their black-and-white counterparts. Besides stepping into their claw steps we finally need to stop global warming to acknowledge these magnificient deeds.
