Terraforming in Holland

...while I’m at it: Here’s another amazing landscape. It’s just north of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The area is known as Glaslaan; the glass region.
What you see are greenhouse, massive stretches of enormous greenhouses. I spent a whole day photographing the surrealism of the place a few years back.

That giant sucking sound

I am working on a presentation about water and I was looking for images that would illustrate how much water is used for irrigation – often in areas that basically are not suited for intensive agriculture at all.
(fact: 70% of global water consumption is for irrigation).

I heard that Garden City in Kansas was a place that used pivot irrigation a lot, and sure enough: if you have a look from the Google Earth satellite, you see this massive example of terraforming.
I can't help wondering what the view will be in a few decades.

Freedom and responsibility

Come to think of it it’s actually very simple:
Freedom and responsibility are intertwined in the sense that the more freedom you have in choosing your actions, the more those actions will be your responsibility.

Weird World War

What drives me nuts about this war is: What are we fighting about?
I'd love to see some demands for change, something concrete to get a discussion going.
Have I overlooked something?

Freestyle computing - tell your kids

At Danfoss Universe, we just launched a pet project of mine, the freestyle computing competition – alas only in Denmark.
The competition is open for kids below 16. They can submit any creation that has computing involved in it – animation, websites, photoshop stuff, ring tones for phones, robots, whatever...
The jury will find the coolest production, emphasizing originality, technical skill, and the ability to combine several media.
We have two age brackets; up to 11, and 11-15 years. The winner in each bracket gets an i-pod – but every entrant recieves an evaluation from the jury.
The concept is heavily inspired by the u19 contest that is part of Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and the Ars Electronica folks have been very helpful in discussing their experiences with us – they rock!

Our ambitions are to build this into a broadcast event, it seems obvious, considering the succes of the many current TV shows where young untried talents get a chance to show off.

For Danfoss Universe, it’s part of our mission to stimulate the interest and understanding of natural science and technology. We believe that encouraging selfexpression and communication through new uses of digital technology is as good a way to learn about technology as any.

We will post some of the works on our online gallery as we recieve them. I’m really looking forward to see what will come, I have a feeling it will be amazing.

A chilled experience

It’s a scorching summers’ day outside in Toronto, but I’m shivering in the airconditioning of the cinema where I’m finally watching Al Gore’s ”An inconvenient truth”.
They’ve done a great job in my opinion. Gore tells that he has given his climate presentation at least a thousand times, and a good part of the film shows him polishing and editing the show.
There’s a lot of pictures of Gore staring pensively out windows into the distance and, to me, some of the personal stuff gets a bit thick – but maybe that’s what you need in order to make it more compelling, and less like a lecture. Basically, if this movie can’t get the message across, I can’t imagine what will – apart from dire necessity, of course.
Still, it’s not exactly a blockbuster movie: I shared the cold theater with 4 others, but of course it’s been a couple of months since release by now.
So, now I’ve heard the podcast, read the book, seen the movie – It’s time to try to invite the man over to Denmark to spread the gospel.