Balloon Fiesta in USA

Willy Kaemena took this 360° panorama of the 2009 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Hot air Balloons have certainly gone a long way in terms of shapes. Oh, and as far as I know, no Balloon boy hoax is involved in this event

The embed is nice, but the panorama is meant to be exprienced at full screen so head on over to 360 Cities for a much better view: Link – Thanks Jeffrey!

Last year, the Jiangsu Head Investment Group and the government of Nanjing, China held a competition for designing a museum for the automobile’s history and achievements.  Italian architect Francesco Gatti and his team won with this entry featuring an interactive element: you drive into the museum.

The architect describes the museum as a “movie sequence in which the principal actor is the car”, a building where two car-related panorama go hand in hand:   on the one hand the architect’s conscious attention to motorway aestheticism and urban scale – the structures and materials remind one of a viaduct – and on the other, his transportation into the museum of the ergonomics of the interior of a car.  The furbishing and details within the edifice are related to and on a scale with its specific functions and it is not difficult for the visitor to imagine that he is in a car on a highway, rather than in a museum.

Link (rendering courtesy of 3GATTI.)

If you look at his paintings, Bill Guffey may seem like the well-traveled artist. There are paintings of the landscape of Saint Martin la Plaine in France, houses in Anchorage, Alaska, and other far away places – but Bill have never set foot in any of them. Instead, he simply fired up his trusty Google Street View to find vistas to paint!

Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News Technology & Science has the story of how Google offered views of the world to a Kentucky artist:

To reach the closest Wal-Mart, Guffey said he needs at least 30 minutes in the car. But with 30 seconds on his computer, he can fly around the world with Google Street View and paint any place his cursor lands.

Not only does the mapping tool give Guffey and other users a street-level window to many places in the world, it lets them navigate 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical unbroken panoramas.

"I live in a very rural area," the 45-year-old said of the Burkesville, Ky. home he shares with his wife and two daughters. "Here, I can go out and I can paint cows all day, barns all day … With Street View, I can find things I normally wouldn’t see here."

Link to ABC News article | Bill’s Gallery of Google Street View Paintings | Bill’s Blog

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), the starship in the original Star Trek TV series

To boldly go where no man has gone before, you'd need a really good starship - and to launch Star Trek, the pop culture phenomenon that entertained and inspired millions, you'd need a pretty darned good one! And that is exactly what the United Space Starship Enterprise delivered. Here are 8 Starship Enterprise facts every Trekker should know:

1. Meet the REAL Enterprise (Several of Them, Actually)

(L) The tenth HMS Enterprise, an Arctic survey sloop (1848), painting by WH Browne from the National Maritime Museum online collection;
(R) USS Enterprise at Valcour Island, Lake Champlain, New York (1776) from Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships

Before Star Trek, there have been many actual ships named Enterprise. The very first one of note was a French frigate L'Enterprise, which was captured by the British Royal Navy in 1705 and renamed as HMS Enterprise. It served as a British gun ship until it was wrecked just two years later. After this ship, there were 14 other HMS also named Enterprise (sometimes spelled Enterprize).

The United States have 8 battleships named Enterprise, including the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier in the world. The very first one (before the US became a country, so technically it was a ship of the Continental Navy) was an armed sloop on Lake Champlain in 1775 named the United States Ship (USS) Enterprise.

During the American Civil War, aeronaut and scientist Thaddeus S.C. Lowe built a balloon named Enterprise, to be used by the Union Army to perform aerial recon on Confederate troops.

(L) Enterprise, a gas inflated aerostat (1858); (M) Space Shuttle Enterprise; (R) Artist rendering of VSS Enterprise

And who can forget the Space Shuttle Enterprise? It was the very first Space Shuttle orbiter, built for NASA in 1976. The Shuttle was supposed to be named Constitution, but a write-in campaign successfully persuaded NASA to name it after the Star Trek starship. (Interestingly, the fictional Starship Enterprise was a Constitution-class vessel - coincidence? Hm....)

The last actual Enterprise hasn't been built yet but it already has a name: Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise and yes, it's an homage to Star Trek. It's a suborbital spaceplane being built by Sir Richard Branson of Virgin for the purposes of space tourism.

Ironically, when Sir Richard offered the first flight to William Shatner, the actor declined and revealed that he's actually afraid of space travel, "I'm interested in man's march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me." Shatner added that he's not entirely against the idea - he just needed some reassurance. "I do want to go up but I need guarantees I'll definitely come back." (Source)

2. No Rockets, Jets or Firestreams

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who pitched the TV show as "Wagon Train to the Stars," didn't tell art director Matt Jefferies what Starship Enterprise should look like, instead he told the bewildered art director what he did not want to see. Starship Concept Art has reprint of a nifty article in Star Trek: The Magazine by Jefferies about the design process:

"In my approach to Star Trek I wanted to be as practical as possible," Jefferies says. "I could tell Gene was serious enough, but I really didn't know where to start. I knew the Enterprise was going to be on the cutting edge of the future, but essentially he gave me the job of finding a shape, and I didn't know what the shape looked like." Although Roddenberry knew a lot about his ship, he had never visualized it, and consequently made the situation more complicated since he couldn't give Jefferies a detailed sense of direction. According to Jefferies, Roddenberry was absolutely clear to avoid any resemblance to a 1960's rocket ship. "Gene described the 100-150 man crew, outer space, fantastic, unheard-of speed, and that we didn't have to worry about gravity. He had emphasized that there were to be no fins, no wings, no smoke trails, no flames, no rocket.

After hundreds of drawings, Jefferies came up with this:

Image via Starship Concept Art

In his honor, the crawl spaces on all of the Starfleet starships on Star Trek are called Jefferies tubes.

3. The Original Name of USS Enterprise

That's right - the iconic starship wasn't always named USS Enterprise ... in the original draft, Roddenberry named it USS Yorktown after a World War II aircraft carrier. The starship was commanded by Captain Robert April, then Christopher Pike, before Roddenberry settled on James Tiberius Kirk.

By the way, William Shatner was the third choice for Kirk. The role was offered to Lloyd Bridges and Jack Lord, both of whom declined it.

4. The Origin of NCC-1701

How did the famous USS Enterprise get its registration number NCC-1701 is the stuff of legend. There are conflicting stories, including one where 1701 is a tribute to Roddenberry's childhood neighbor's house number or that Jefferies got it from the registration number of his airplane.

Here's Matt Jefferies' explanation when he was asked during a BBC Interview:

NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It’d been pretty much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with NCC.

The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused. I don’t think anyone’ll confuse a one and a seven, or the zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one, the first bird.

5. Land the Ship? Too Expensive, Let's Teleport Everybody Instead!

Photo: Rex Features

Originally, Roddenberry envisioned the USS Enterprise to land on various planets, but it turned out to be too expensive as it would require them to build expensive sets. The next idea was to use shuttles - but when filming began, the full-sized shooting model wasn't ready. So, they came up with the idea of "beaming down" the crew via a teleportation device and thus the transporter was born! (Source)

In 1994, TIME Magazine interviewed Star Trek technical expert Michael Okuda about the intricacies of the transporter:

"It should be possible if we decompile the pattern buffer."

Transporters can send people instantly from one location to another by converting their molecules into energy, then reassembling them. Every living being has a distinct pattern of molecules; the pattern buffer fixes the configuration by adjusting for the Doppler effect -- the apparent change in the frequency of the energy waves caused by motion.

"I'll verify the Heisenberg compensators."

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you cannot know a subatomic particle's exact position and its exact direction and velocity at the same time. To transport people you have to know all those things, so the Heisenberg compensator was devised to overcome that problem. It's an attempt by the Trek writers to signal that they are at least aware of the issue. And how does the Heisenberg compensator work? "It works very well, thank you," says Okuda.

6. The Next Gen Enterprise: Hilton in Space

Jefferies designed the bridge in the original USS Enterprise in the style of a Navy battleship, with specialized workstations for its crew. When set designer Richard James updated the bridge for Star Trek: The Next Generation (restriction: no purple!), Jefferies was asked about the new look. To which he replied:

Gene asked me how I liked the show, and I said that he had taken the bridge of my ship and turned it into the lobby of the Hilton. And I have just never watched any of them since. I’m lost.

Ironically, Star Trek and Hilton actually did come together to create a theme attraction. Star Trek: The Experience opened in 1998 at the Las Vegas Hilton. It closed in 2008 due to low attendance (though it is due to re-open in a different location in 2010).

7. The Original Star Trek Enterprise Prop

Photo: Carolyn Russo / Smithsonian

If you visit the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian, definitely check out the actual model of the Starship Enterprise used in the filming of the original Star Trek TV show.

The hull and one nacelle of the original Star Trek Starship Enterprise model as it was received by the National Air and Space Museum from Paramount Studios on March 1, 1974. Image WEB11192-2009. Photo: Smithsonian (with permission)

The model of the Enterprise was sent to the museum in crates, donated by Paramount Studios five years after the series ended.

Enterprise during its first Smithsonian restoration. SI Neg #74-3977. Photo: Smithsonian (with permission)

The Smithsonian performed extensive restoration to put the starship model back together, and for the first time ever, the photos of the restoration process are available to the public at the museum's blog.

The Museum Registrar Gregory K.H. Bryant has more on this behind the scenes look at the icon science fiction model: Link - Thanks Llori!

8. The Hot-Rod Starship Enterprise

For his movie Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams decided that the USS Enterprise could use a face-lift and worked with artists at Industrial Light & Magic to update the starship - like Roddenberry, he gave a simple directive:

"He wanted a hot-rod type of vehicle, but they also wanted to preserve the Enterprise kind of look," model maker John Goodson said in a presentation at ILM's San Francisco headquarters earlier this month.

"J.J. Abrams kept saying, 'Make it a bigger movie. Make it a bigger shot,'" creative director David Nakabayashi added. "I think that's one thing you see in this film, at least: The stuff I've seen is just everything is big."

SCI FI Wire has the interview with model maker John Goodson and visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett about the new Enterprise: Link

The official website for JJ Abram's Star Trek movie has a nifty 360° panorama of the bridge of the new starship:

Prague Skyline from Petrin Tower – Gigapixel in Prague

Panoramic photographer Jeffrey Martin of 360 Cities took this 2 gigapixel panorama stitched together from "a few hundreds shots" taken with a camera with a 70 mm zoom lens, handheld from the windows of the Petrin Tower in Prague.

To get a full appreciation of the panorama, first zoom out by pressing CTRL on your keyboard, then zoom back in by pressing SHIFT – Thanks Jeffrey!

Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).

Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.

What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Impressive, eh?

Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.

But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.

Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).

Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).

At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.

Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:

Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.

But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.

If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...

Ever wonder how a fish sees its environment? It’s probably pretty close to this panorama by Richard Chesher over at 360 Cities. Be sure to right click and select "stereographic projection" (it’s nearly 360 degree field of view all at the same time).

The photo really doesn’t do it justice – definitely check out the larger version here: Link – Thanks Jeffrey Martin!

Seeing the moais at Ahu Tongariki, Rapa Nui (better known as Easter Island) should be on everyone’s bucket list. But if you can’t make the trip to the Polynesian island – it is, after all, one of the most isolated inhabited island in the world – you can still view the awesome panorama of the statues at 360 Cities: Link – Thanks Jeffrey!

This week, we’ve started to feature another layer in the Google Earth Gallery, showing several thousand panoramic views provided by 360cities.net. This layer contains exciting 360 degree panoramas from a variety of great photographs taken all over the world!

This screengrab is from the Synagogue of Dohány Street in Budapest, which does NOT do justice to the panorama. Link to story. Link to website. -Thanks, Jeffrey Martin!

There are fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill lounging with George Bernard Shaw — and the TV squirrel Rocky and his less adroit moose pal Bullwinkle.

Says Kratzer of his cartoon of a cartoon: “You appreciate the cleverness more as an adult.”

There’s Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There is Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and the Cornell Law School, of which Kratzer is an alumnus. There is Kratzer’s dad. There is the harlequin pattern — alluded to in culinary culture today by the Panera bread bag — and a fake fireplace facing a real one.

There are both The Walrus and the Carpenter (from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There), and William Shakespeare. The Marx Brothers peer around a corner. A flip-top garbage can is transformed via marker art into Star Wars’ plucky little beeper R2D2.

The Herald-Leader has a 360 degree panorama of the finished basement. Link -via reddit

Sometimes the most amazing abilities of the human brain are revealed exactly when things go wrong with it. Take, for example, savants - people who have mental abilities that could only be characterized as superhuman (like having photographic memory, playing music perfectly after hearing it just once, or doing complex mathematical calculations in one's head) but otherwise severely disabled in every day cognitive functions and social interaction.

Does the human brain have latent savant-like abilities? Does our higher cognitive functions somehow block these abilities, and why? And can we have savant-like abilities without the accompanying autism and/or developmental disabilities? One intriguing study by Dr. Allan Snyder of the Centre for the Mind suggested that temporarily impairing the left fronto-temporal lobe in healthy subjects by low-frequency magnetic pulses could result in savant-like mental abilities (see, for example: article in New York Times "Savant for a Day")

Most savants are born with their abilities (and unfortunately, their developmental disorders), but not all: severe brain injuries can, in very rare instances, cause savant-like abilities to surface (see, for example: The Case of the "Sudden" Savant). One noted savant (Daniel Tammet, see below) is a highly functioning autistic savant who can perform amazing mental feats but does not have significant developmental disabilities.

There are a few savants in the world (called "prodigious savants") whose abilities are so exceptional that they would've been classified as phenomenal with or without cognitive disabilities. Let's take a look at 10 savants with superhuman mental skills:

1. Kim Peek, the Real Rain Man

Even though you've never heard of Kim Peek, chances are you've heard the movie Rain Man. Kim was the inspiration for the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie.

Kim Peek was born with severe brain damage. His childhood doctor told Kim's father to put him in an institution and forget about the boy. Kim's severe developmental disabilities, according to the doctor, would not let him walk let alone learn. Kim's father disregarded the doctor's advice.

Till this day, Kim struggles with ordinary motor skills and has difficulty walking. He is severely disabled, cannot button his shirt and tests well below average on a general IQ test.

But what Kim can do is astounding: he has read some 12,000 books and remembers everything about them. "Kimputer," as he is lovingly known to many, reads two pages at once - his left eye reads the left page, and his right eye reads the right page. It takes him about 3 seconds to read through two pages - and he remember everything on 'em. Kim can recall facts and trivia from 15 subject areas from history to geography to sports. Tell him a date, and Kim can tell you what day of the week it is. He also remembers every music he has ever heard.

Since the movie Rain Man came out, Kim and his father have been traveling across the country for appearances. The interaction turns out to be beneficial for him, as he becomes less shy and more confident.

Further reading about Kim Peek:

• Kim Peek [wikipedia]
• Kim Peek - The Real Rain Man
• On YouTube: Kim Peek - The Real Rain Man (a series of 5 clips)

(Photo: Kim Peek courtesy of Darold A. Treffert / Wisconsin Medical Society)

2. Leslie Lemke

[YouTube clip]

Leslie Lemke didn't have a great start in life. He was born with severe birth defects that required doctors to remove his eyes. His own mother gave him up for adoption, and a nurse named May Lemke (who at the time was 52 and was raising 5 children of her own) adopted him when he was six months old.

As a young child, Leslie had to be force-fed to teach him how to swallow. He could not stand until he was 12. At 15, Leslie finally learned how to walk (May had to strap his fragile body to hers to teach him, step by step, how to walk).

At 16 years of age, Leslie Lemke bloomed. In the middle of one night, May woke up to find Leslie playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. Leslie, who has no classical music training, was playing the piece flawlessly after hearing it just once earlier on the television.

From then on, Leslie began playing all styles of music from ragtime to classical. Like the Tchaikovsky piece, he only has to hear the music once in order to play it again perfectly. He became famous after being portrayed in national television shows. Before his health started to deteriorate, Leslie gave many concerts around the world.

More info about Leslie Lemke:

• Leslie Lemke - An Inspirational Performance
• Leslie Lemke in concert (April 29, 1986) [YouTube]
• A DVD of Leslie Lemke performing live at the Performing Art Center in Pittsville, Wisconsin can be ordered from:
  
  Miracle of Love Ministries
  8099 Grant Road
  Arpin, WI 54410
  Cost: $20.00

3. Alonzo Clemons

As a toddler, Alonzo suffered a head injury in an accident that changed his life. He can't feed himself or tie his shoelaces, but he can sculpt.

And boy, can he sculpt: after seeing only a fleeting image of an animal on a TV screen, Alonzo could sculpt a perfect 3D figure of it, correct in each and every detail right down to the muscle fibers.

Check out Alonzo's official website, where you can purchase his sculptures: Link

4. Gottfried Mind: Cat's Raphael

Gottfried Mind's cats (For more, check out Art Prints on Demand)

Gottfried Mind was one of the earliest savants in history. In 1776, the eight-year-old Gottfried was placed in an art academy, where his teachers noted that he was "very weak, incapable of hard work, full of talent for drawing, a strange creature, full of artist-caprices, along with a certain roguishness."

One day, Gottfried's mentor, a painter named Sigmund Hendenberger, was drawing a cat when Gottfried exclaimed "That is no cat!" The teacher asked whether he could do better and sent the child to a corner to draw. The cat that Gottfried drew was so lifelike that since then he became known as the Cat's Raphael:

In the course of his narrow, indoors life, he had worked himself into an almost paternal relation with domestic animals, especially with cats. While he sat painting, a cat might generally be seen sitting on his back or on his shoulder; many times he kept, for hours, the most awkward postures, that he might not disturb it. Frequently there was a second cat sitting by him on the table, watching how the work went on; sometimes a kitten or two lay in his lap under the table. Frogs (in bottle) floated beside his easel; and with all these creatures he kept up a most playful, loving style of conversation; though, often enough, any human beings about him, or such even as came to see him, were growled or grunted at in no social fashion. (Source)

5. Gilles Tréhin

[YouTube Link: Art Savant: The City Inside My Head]

Gilles Tréhin lives part-time in the city of Urville, in an island off the Côte d'Azur, between Cannes and St. Tropez. Never heard of it? That's because Urville exists only in his mind.

Since he was 5, Gilles taught himself to draw three dimensional objects. By 12, he started building a city he called "Urville" (after Dumont d'Urville, a French scientific base in the Antarctic). At first he used LEGO, but shortly thereafter, he realized that he could expand his imaginary city much easier with drawings.

Abbaye Sainte Marguerite des Tégartines, in Urville

Urville isn't just an idle idea - Gilles has 250 detailed drawings, complete "history" of the founding the the city, and has even published a book detailing it (Sneak peak at Google Books)

Visit Urville at Gilles' official website here: Link

6. Jedediah Buxton

Jedediah Buxton, born in Derbyshire, England, in 1707, couldn't write. By all accounts, he has no knowledge of science or history or anything else for that matter except for numbers. Jedediah, as it turned out, was one of the world's earliest mental calculators and savants.

Everything was numbers to Jedediah - in fact, he associated everything he saw or experienced with numbers. He measured the area of the village he was born in simply by walking around it. When he saw a dance, his whole attention was to count the number of steps of the dancers. At a play, Jedediah was consumed with counting the number of words uttered by the actors.

The mental feat of Jedediah Buxton was tested by the Royal Society in 1754 - his mathematical brain was able to calculate numbers up to 39 figures.

7. Orlando Serrell

Orlando Serrell wasn't born autistic - indeed, his savant skills only came about after a brain injury. In 1979, then ten-year-old Orlando was playing baseball when the ball struck him hard on the left side of his head. He fell to the ground but eventually got up to continue playing.

For a while, Orlando had headaches. When they went away, he realized he had new abilities: he could perform complex calendar calculations and remember the weather every day from the day of the accident.

From Orlando's official website:

What makes Orlando Serrell so unique is that he may indeed hold the key that unlocks the genius in us all. Orlando Serrell did not possess any special skills until he was struck in the head by a baseball when he was 10. And his extraordinary gifts seem to be his only side effect. Could this mean once a key hemisphere in the brain is stimulated, we can all attain the level of genius Orlando posses and beyond? Only time and research will tell. Until then we will do well to keep our eyes on Orlando and learn what we can from his experience.

8. Stephen Wiltshire, the Human Camera

As a young child, Stephen Wiltshire was a mute - he was diagnosed as autistic and was sent to a school for special needs children. There, he discovered a passion for drawing - first of animals, then London buses, then buildings and the city's landmarks. Throughout his childhood, Stephen communicated through his drawings. Slowly, aided by his teachers, he learned to speak by the age of nine (his first word was "paper.")

Stephen has a particularly striking talent: he can draw an accurate and detailed landscape of a city after seeing it just once! He drew a 10 meter (~33 ft) long panorama of Tokyo following a short helicopter ride.

[YouTube Link: Stephen Wiltshire Draws Tokyo from Memory, fun starts at 3:20]

More info about Stephen Wiltshire:

• Official Website
• Wikipedia Entry

9. Ellen Boudreaux

Like Leslie Lemke, Ellen Boudreaux is a blind autistic savant with exceptional musical abilities. She can play music perfectly after hearing it just once, and has a such a huge repertoire of songs in her head that a newspaper reporter once tried to "stump Ellen" by requesting that she played some obscure songs - and failed. Ellen knew them all.

Ellen has two other savant skills that are unusual. First, despite her blindness, she is able to walk around without ever running into things. As she walks, Ellen makes little chirping sounds that seems to act like a human sonar (See also our post on Ben Underwood, a blind teen who uses echolocation to "see").

Second, Ellen has an extremely precise digital clock ticking in her mind. To help overcome her fear of the telephone, Ellen's mom coaxed her to listen to the automatic time recording (the "time lady") when she was 8. From then on, Ellen knows the exact hour and minute, any time of the day without ever having seen a clock nor have the concept of the passing of time explained to her.

For more info on Ellen, see:

• Ellen - "With a Song in Her Heart"

10. Daniel Tammet: Brainman

YouTube Clip: Daniel Tammet - The Boy With the Incredible Brain [1/5]

At first glance, you won't be able to tell that Daniel Tammet is anything but normal. Daniel, 29, is a highly functioning autistic savant with exceptional mathematical and language abilities.

Daniel first became famous when he recited from memory Pi to 22,514 decimal places (on 3/14, the International Pi Day, of course) to raise funds for the National Society for Epilepsy.

Numbers, according to Daniel, are special to him. He has a rare form of synesthesia and sees each integers up to 10,000 as having their own unique shapes, color, texture and feel. He can "see" the result of a math calculation, and he can "sense" whether a number is prime. Daniel has since drawn what pi looks like: a rolling landscape full of different shapes and colors.

Daniel speaks 11 languages, one of which is Icelandic. In 2007, Channel Five documentary challenged him to learn the language in a week. Seven days later, Daniel was successfully interviewed on Icelandic television (in Icelandic, of course!).

When he was four years old, Daniel had bouts of epilepsy that, along with his autism, seemed to have brought about his savant abilities. Though he appears normal, Daniel contends that he actually had to will himself to learn how to talk to and behave around people:

As he describes in his newly published memoir, “Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant” (Free Press), he has willed himself to learn what to do. Offer a visitor a drink; look her in the eye; don’t stand in someone else’s space. These are all conscious decisions.

Recently, some friends warned him that in his eagerness to make eye contact, he tended to stare too intently. “It’s like being on a tightrope,” he said. “If you try too hard, you’ll come off. But you have to try.” (Source)

There is a big difference between Daniel Tammet and all the other prodigious savants in the world: Daniel can tell you how he does it and that makes him invaluable to scientists trying to understand the savant syndrome:

Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. "Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do," says Snyder. "It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone." (Source)

More info about Daniel Tammet:

• Official website and blog
• 60 Minutes Interview
• Born on a Blue Day, Daniel's autobiography (Daniel was born on a Wednesday, a day he perceived as blue).
• Daniel Tammet - The Boy with the Incredible Brain (5 clips)

I'll be the first to admit that we have only scratched the surface of the fascinating topic of savant syndrome. If you are interested, here are some suggested websites by Darold A. Treffert, the world's foremost expert on savant syndrome, for further reading:

• Savant Syndrome, Darold Treffert's website at the Wisconsin Medical Society
• Islands of Genius [PDF], a Scientific American article by Darold Treffert and Gregory Wallace

We’ve featured a panorama of Mars before (taken by the rover Opportunity), but here’s a new one from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander: Link [Quicktime]- Thanks Jeffrey Martin!

We posted a whole bunch of panorama photography on Neatorama but never a video one (Ooops, apparently we had! I don’t even know what’s been on my own blog … Thanks Neatorama Fan!). Here’s a technical tour de force, a video panorama of a street in Prague, by our pal and panorama guru Jeffrey Martin of 360cities.

After the clip starts, click your mouse anywhere in the video and drag it left and right and you’ll see what I mean.

Link – Thanks Jeffrey!

Biggify here: kidicarus222 [Flickr]

Drew Mackie of Back of the Cereal Box blog did something so amazingly genius that I was surprised that it was never done before. He took the intro of The Simpsons and stitched the scenes into one continuous panorama:

Technically, in every episode of The Simpsons that begins with the un-abbreviated intro, Milhouse appears. So too does Nelson, Dr. Hibbert, and even Maude Flanders, who overcomes the considerable handicap of being dead.

I speak of a brief section of the intro that occurs directly between Marge and Maggie’s simultaneous horn-honking and the arrival at Casa de Simpson that segues into the weekly couch gag. The camera pans away from Marge’s car and, if only for a few seconds, over a Springfield panorama, featuring various characters. It’s pretty hard to see the whole of it with the naked eye, and it wasn’t until the arrival of the Simpsons DVDs a few years back that I could actually see who was there by scanning frame-by-frame. For whatever reason, I was suddenly motivated last week by the urge to reproduce this scene in full in a way other people could see by Photoshopping the frames together.

Link – Thanks Drew (great job!)

The panorama guy (that’s what I call him) Jeffrey Martin of 360cities made something so wonderful it’s literally out-of-this-world: a fully spherical, interactive view from inside the Victoria Crater in Mars, from photos taken by the Mars rover Opportunity.

Link [Flash 9/Quicktime]- Thanks Jeffrey!

The little humanoid of Mars is nowhere to be seen, though.

Our pal Jeffrey Martin of 360cities sent us this panorama that is not to be missed. It’s not officially launched yet, but should be accessible on this preview for Neatorama readers:

Taken from the top of the Twin Towers on June 17th, 2000, this rare VR is a window into the past. The view from the top was spectacular, especially on that particular Saturday morning. We were a different country then.

Link – Thanks Jeffrey!

Singapore Airlines, by many counts the best airline in the world, just unveiled its ultra-luxurious Airbus A380 jetliner.

Most of the seats on the maiden flight of the double-decker plane were auctioned for charity on eBay, and some people really paid a lot of money for ‘em. Like Singaporean businessman William Leong, who bought a seat for his 91-year-old father to fulfill a promise:

"When we were young, we went through hardship and my father had to work extra hard to support us and send us to school," said Singaporean businessman William Leong, who had promised his father, Leong Lou Teck, 91, that he would be on the A380’s first flight.

"He took care of us then, and now it’s our turn to take care of him," Leong said in an interview before the seven-hour flight that will carry 12 first-class passengers in enclosed suites which the airline calls "A Class Beyond First."

Promising total privacy, each suite — created by French luxury yacht designer Jean-Jacques Coste — is fitted with a leather upholstered seat, a bed, a table and a 23-inch TV screen, plus laptop connections and a range of office software.

Leong is particularly impressed by the suite’s sliding doors — "When I snore, it won’t disturb my neighbors."

Leong paid $60,000 for eight seats, including three suites for his father, elder brother and himself, as well as four in business class and economy for other relatives.

Link to story

The first-class fare for a ticket from Singapore to Sydney is $7,000 but you can take a look at some neat panorama photos of the planes at photographer Gilles Vidal’s website: Link – Thanks mikolka!

Özi created a comic panel drawn in style of a single continuous camera-shot without cuts to tell a story. Kind of like a 360° panorama, but for comics (indeed, he called it the "panocomic").

Link – Thanks Özi!

Jeffrey Martin of the panorama-photography portal 360cities.net wrote to us that they’ve put 19 more cities to the database.

They’re also converting the entire network into PhotoOverlays format on Google Earth (he assured me that this is exciting – I dunno, because I’ve never had the time to play around with the software, but I’ll take his word for it).

Link (The pic above is from Marshall Islands) – Thanks Jeffrey and David Martin!

Previously on Neatorama: 360 Cities: Panoramic VR Portal

Hyde Park, photo by Will Pearson

London Skyline, photo by Will Pearson

Will Pearson, a London-based photographer has an excellent gallery of panoramas: Link

panoramas.dk enables you to view 360° VR panoramas of the new 7 wonders of the world – Great Wall China, Colosseum, Petra, Machu Picchu, Taj Mahal, Rio De Jainero, and Chichén Itzá.

Link – via Andy’s Blog

The P̬re-Lachaise Cemetery [wiki] is one of the most famous in the world. It is the final resting place for many historical figures Рfor example, take a look at the tomb above: the much-kissed grave of Oscar Wilde.

There are also a lot of monuments depicting the history of France and commemorating their heroes, for example this one for those who came to Spain to fight the fascists in 1936 as part of the International Brigades [wiki].

Go to the page to find the tombs of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas and others. There are a lot of panoramas, photos and a map in this virtual visit.

Link

Mouse over image to start rotating. Click and drag to turn the image any way you like. Use mouse wheel to zoom.

Not just any panorama – it’s an embeddable panorama! How cool is that? You can view high resolution panorama on Prague 360 – Thanks Jeff!

Peter McCready took this neat VR panorama photo of the Large Hadron Collider [wiki] at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Impressive! Link

From Hans Nyberg’s Panoramas.dk, here is a fantastic night shot of Yokohama, Japan by Takashi Sugiura: Link – via Hemmy

A survey of the Bootes constellation by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory revealed thousands of supermassive blackholes!

A new wide-field panorama reveals more than a thousand supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, some up to several billion times more massive than the sun.

Link

The “Genbaku dome” was the closest building to the Hiroshima bomb’s ground zero to keep standing after the blast. The explosion epicenter was only 150 meters from this building. All the surrounding constructions were blasted away and only these walls were still standing.

For the most part, the building is ruined, but the authorities wanted it to stay that way as a museum to commemorate the horror. In this panoramic view, we can visit it without going to Japan.

Link [Quicktime needed] – via Kirai

Junko Mizuno [wiki] is a Japanese artist. She debuted in 1996 with a booklet called MINA animal DX. Her drawing style mixes childish sweetness and cuteness with blood and terror -a so-called kawaii noir style-. She describes her artwork as “The Powerpuff Girls on acid.”. Besides her comics, sometimes published in color, she designs T-shirts, calendars, postcards, and other collectibles. Mizuno has participated at Angoulême International Comics Festival. In the U.S., Viz Comics has published some of her work.

In this video, Jonathan Ross interviews Junko Mizuno for the Japanorama BBC series.

Click Play or go to Link [YouTube].