The video finally completed

This video ranks cities by the visual impact of their skyline. You'll probably only like it if you're into that kind of stuff anyway. I enjoyed making it, now let's see how it does :)

iMovie Obsession 2.0

I am nothing short of honored, after over 20.000 people watched my YouTube "Skyscrapers" video. Making it, almost exactly one year ago, was as fun as playing a computer game for me, and I never planned for anyone, except for a few friends, to see it. I enjoy the comments, and I thank anyone who watched it. It got me motivated to produce more content, and in past few days I indeed half finished the new video. Like the original one, it's going to be a collection of enhanced YouTube clips, but with a cool twist. All of them will be either amateur or pro footage from airplanes, helicopters & other vertical moving vehicles/objects, and will be covering the official ten greatest skylines in the World. It is planned to be released within the next few weeks.

Cities will be listed as follows (and here is the official ranking on emporis.com):

10. Dubai

9. Bangkok

8. Tokyo

7. Shanghai

6. Seoul

5. Sao Paulo

4. Chicago

3. Singapore

2. New York City

1. Hong Kong

This listing ranks cities by the visual impact of their skylines. Each building with 12 or more floors in the city proper is assigned points based on its floor count (see the table on emporis.com). The point total for each city is calculated automatically. Calculation does not include TV towers, masts, bridges, or other structures. The listing actually puts Guangzhou on the tenth position, and Dubai on eleventh, but this will change shortly, after Burj Dubai's official completion.

I set much higher standards for this project, because I want it to look professional. Here are a few highlights:

• It is going to be in HD, but obviously not all required footage was available in such extremely high resolution. Sections about Dubai, Tokyo, Chicago, and New York City will be mostly, if not all in HD.
• Video will be exported in a widescreen format 16:9.
• No titles or watermarks whatsoever are allowed to be visible in the final version of the video.
• Not a single frame should be shoot from a static viewpoint.
• Not a single frame should be shoot from the ground level. It is all about looking down on the skyscrapers.
• All footage must have been recorded during daylight.
• A vast majority of clips will be enhanced with the iMovie technology called "video stabilization", which smoothens the camera motion, and stills the picture shaking. When needed, functions like "playback speed control", "reverse video" and picture enhancement will be used.
• There will be an animated world maps, as a smooth introductions to the individual city sections.
• There is a small chance that two versions of video will be released. The compact one, fitting within YouTube's 10 minute time cap, and an uncut one, divided in the half on two episodes.

Here is a brief preview of what it's going to be, focusing on using new technologies in iMovie 09:

If anyone knows where to get more footage of Bangkok, Shanghai, Seoul, and mostly Singapore (!), please share. It's almost as all flights around those cities were banned.

This will be a dynamite for every skyscraper lover.

Bizarre facts about future of our civilization

Are you up for some heavy stuff? Like You all know I'm a huge geek by heart, and that includes hours and hours of wiki-reading late at night every few days when I feel like it. Last night I was all into futurism and was reading about these wicked ideas about not so distant future. The pace that we live in is unbelievable, and was never nearly as fast.

Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of some technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution. The new agricultural economy began to double every 900 years, a remarkable increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the world’s economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times faster than in the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligences causes a similar revolution, one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.

Most theoretics think a so called "Technological singularity" will take place in a few decades. What is it?

... if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

Mmmmm. Even better, this is going to happen in our lifetime, futurists agree, most of them setting the date somewhere between 2030 and 2045. Read the whole article if You find this even slightly interesting, there is much more unbelievable ideas and concepts, like for example post scarcity, which is an inevitable future of our civilization and economy, where everything will be practically free, and there will be no human labor necessary at all.

I don't know how very weird is the fact that I honestly find stuff like that interesting, but I do, and considering that idea of technological singularity is often used in popular culture (Matrix, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica ...), I'm not the only one.

I am excited about the future, I just hope we all live to see it, and not nuke ourselves before our society can progress to higher levels.

Catching Up

I don't have a better explanation for my long absence, except that I didn't feel like blogging, and for some reason distanced myself from my creative internet activities, and rather resort to consuming web activities. I have more home-time lately, and consequently spend considerably more time online, and I really started to miss blogging.

So to quickly catch up with what I've been impressed with during this time of absence, let me present you with some (mostly very geeky) photos:

Boston Big Dig is a gorgeous example of what difference a thought-out city planning and urbanism can do:

Black Eyed Peas and their "Boom Boom Pow" is a huge hit, and I got infected with the video and sound. Getting over it by now though.

Fool's Day prank, which I fell for and thought it's amazing. World's first flying hotel! (shamed)

Very enjoyable movie, I love it, but even more so it's soundtrack, which is very different to what I usually listen to - it might become my gateway album to modern jazz and such.

How can I post anything after such long time, without including some skyscraper. Well I can't! The spectacular, unbelievably tall Burj Dubai is about to be overshadowed by another mammoth project in the same city. It's called Nakheel Harbour Tower, and it's gonna be !!1400!! meters tall - almost 4x WTC or 2x Burj Dubai.

The Stanford torus is a proposed design for a space habitat capable of housing up to 140,000 permanent residents. Build it in my lifetime please.

Apparently the next big thing in home design - Office Pod, home office-cubicle for the garden. SO cute I want one.

I joined Star Trek Mania, the movie is a very cool, fresh and a successful reset of the franchise. Don't even get me started on Chris Pine ...

Okay, this is weird, but I have a thing for elegant traffic solutions like this. It's the most elegant highway junction I've ever seen. Situated in Bergen, Norway.

Saint Etienne don't have one song, that I could particularly expose, but their greatest hits album as a whole is as nice as a road trip across Spain at summer with friends, in a convertible.

Speaking of Spain - this is one of only handful real IMAX cinemas in the world, and the architecture is stunning! Located in Valencia, Spain, the Hemispheric is a part of the "City of the Arts and the Sciences".

The new model of Boeing's biggest airliner 747 "Jumbo Jet" is the biggest yet. I just love its design, it looks much prettier than "fatter" european Airbus A380.

So much for now, more to come soon. Thank you for visiting again.

Waterworld, China

Asians and Arabs are leading in progressive architecture, and this is just one more proof. Waterworld, about to be built near Shanghai, will be a resort hotel with strong ecological highlights. Set in the water filled quarry, this is a fine example of an ultra modern facility co-existing amongst its natural environment.

What are they building in Shanghai?

This is one of the most impressive skyscraper projects I've seen. If I only think about the architecture of the Olympics, China is crazy enough o actually build it. I hope they do, it's called Superstar. This is the gallery of the building renderings in different environments and places, just in case if the project fails to be realized in Shanghai.

That's something new ...

... but I'm sure it won't move that fast, and so it won't be as impressive. BTW, I have to do something about my obsession with skyscrapers, I dreamed Burj Dubai last night - I was going on top of it, where the airport was located. Stupid futuristic dreams, then u wake up sad in present reality in a place u live.