you can't get closer to Van Eyck than this

Last weekend De Standaard wrote about an incredible, 100 billion pixel, project sponsored by The Getty Foundation. Amazing stuff and nobody, as far as I know, bothered picking it up. Check out http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/#home and be blown off your feet by the rendering of the famous Ghent Altarpiece now available online.

The project itself consisted of 3 elements: urgent renovation,an assessment of the state this masterpiece is in today and an exercise in technical documentation. The result is a truly amazing website, offering the Ghent Altarpiece in all its detail. You get macrophotograpy, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectograpy and x-radiography views. No stuff for simple devices: loading images can take quite some time but boy, is it worth it! The site also contains reports on the restauration work, statistics, information on dendrochronology, analysis, ... But it's the images that are magic. Impressive!

Remembrance day

On February 15, two years ago, we lost a colleague in a train crash. I wrote about it then and I'm remembering Sebastien now, being shocked at how much time has past and how quickly it did. Sebastien is never very far away: his name still pops up regularly in meetings or on work events ...

Tomorrow morning a small ceremony will be held at the location of the accident in Buizingen. I'm not attending but my thoughts are with my colleagues who are and of course with Sebastien's family.

Weird Google Stuff

Interesting article on Huffington yesterday: Google Earth's 'Atlantis' has disappeared after an upgrade. Google has been quality checking their 3D Ocean tool and now claims to have 15% of the ocean floor visible at a resolution of 1 km. Before the upgrade, images existed that were rumored to be images of the long lost city of Atlantis. 


Fake Atlantis isn't the only strange image recorded on Google earth; in the same article Huffington refers to 36 different weird ones. Google Maps finds some pretty weird things too. 


More importantly Google Earth itself is up for an extensive upgrade later this year which is said to result in twice the accuracy it has today.


Still, removing these images: they do have a censorship reflex, don't they?

Photographer is Modern-day Hopper

It's not that Hopper painted poverty and desolate Americana. We all know (and some of us love) his play with light, his choice of subject, his point of view. Personally I also like Sheeler, exponent of what they call the Precisionist Movement: cities, machines.

But look at these incredible pictures, on exhibition (alas) @ the MOMA. In A New American Picture, photographer Doug Rickard takes viewers on a tour of the run-down, the derelict, and the economically depressed using ... Google. Rickard scouted out specific locations on Google Maps that show crippling economic devastation—boarded-up buildings in Camden, N.J., overgrown sidewalks in Detroit, and neglected lots in New Orleans. He snapped digital photographs of the scene playing out on his computer monitor. The effect is impressive and not just for the use of light and colour. The anonymity of the people in these pictures is a harsh metaphor for the anonymity of poverty.

With thanks to www.thedailybeast.com.

#BGGD49 was a long time coming

It's been a while so we welcome back with open arms the next #BGGD49 on Children's Internet Safety, with main speaker Simone van Zuylen (@Norton_be). There's room for a 100 interested parties and when I last checked, the list wasn't full yet. So join the BGG's next week on February 8th in Mechelen. Should be an interesting topic. I for one do not believe in technical solutions for things like safe chat or controled environments; I can only talk for my teenage son who, as a rule, only uses his laptop in the living room and is fairly smart in the way he uses the web. Should be an interesting discussion, next week.

Naive? Zuckerberg's Registration Statement to the SEC

"We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services." You'd wipe away a tear reading that if it weren't Zuckerberg explaining his personal philosophy in the official Registration Statement to the SEC on the eve of the Facebook IPO. His future shareholders are going to looooove that. Going public not to make money but to make the world a better place, help people create relationships, connect to each other and fulfilling a social mission. But I'm probably too cynical: if you want to change the world, you'd best do it from within the establishment. What better place to undermine boundless capitalism than from inside the NYSE? What better place to launch social entrepreneurism? Go, Mark, Go. And if you do end up earning money, do a Bill Gates.