What music looks like

Amon Tobin has been one of my favorite artists, always part of my playlists, since my step-father introduced me to him about 6 years ago, when the Chaos Theory soundtrack was released. However, his first album (as Amon Tobin), Bricolage might have been the album I loved the most.
What a great surprise when I discovered that his new album ISAM was coming out. The surprise was even greater when I saw the preview of what had been built for the tour, this incredible 3D video montage of which you can get a preview in the video at the bottom of the article. I had to show it to my step-father, and literally a few seconds after it ended, he was on the "Roundhouse" website, buying 2 tickets for us.

This show blew my brain apart, and I could bet that I will still be in recovery mode by the time you read this. The montage merges perfectly with the music, really giving you the feeling that what you see is what you hear, which is quite a mind bogging experience. It appears that I am not the only one who appreciated it ("ISAM's live show looks like a mindfuck to the highest order", says a Wired reporter, and I couldn't have put it better). The tour might be extended. If you have a chance to see it, go for it, be one of the few thousands of people who will remember what this show sounded, looked and felt like. Seeing Amon live is a once in a lifetime experience, and the stage is just unbelievable.

I want to applaud once more Amon Tobin for his great works and V squared labs for their work on this show.

Chuck's movies #1

Directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son), who brought us, earlier this year, "Source Code". Starring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell and Kevin Spacey as GERTY, an AI, and a few other actors, but these two are the main (and almost only) characters.

As you might have guessed, the movie takes place on our good old Moon, where Sam is an employee of Lunar Industries. He's been alone on a lunar base for the last 3 years. His job is to oversee the machines harvesting Helium-3 from the Moon's surface. He then has to periodically send full canisters to Earth, where the helium is needed for fusion reactors, apparently providing for a big part of Earth's consumption of energy. He is, at the beginning of the movie, two weeks away from returning home to his wife and daughter.

This is a great movie, you can clearly see the influence of movies like 2001 or Alien. The plot is great, as you never really know what to think, but unlike the space odyssey, it does not leave you with the feeling of not having a clue of what just happened.

The Flying Train!

This is a project presented by a Chinese team at the 2011 edition of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IRCA), in Shanghai. It really caught my eye when I saw it, but there is not a lot to say about it, since they just unveiled it, and I'm not able to understand their website (click here to see it).
The Aero Train uses the aerodynamic interaction between its wings and the ground for its propulsion. It should be able to go at speeds around 200 km/h, about half the speed of other high-speed trains we have nowadays. However, as the presentation picture shows, it is a green train, as there is no energy loss in friction with the rails. There are other trains that do not rely on rails to move, because of this energy loss, maglev trains, that allow travel up to 430 km/h, quite a lot faster, but the use of high-power electromagnets to make the train levitate above the track consumes a lot of energy.
It is tricky to control - it moves a lot because there is no friction, and one would have less control over its movement, therefore, the prototype is controlled by computers for now, and it will be kept stabilized in a U-shaped channel.
I hope to see one of these flying trains one day, maybe in the next few decades.

Here is a video of the prototype: