You look around. Almost everything is in a blur. Life moves fast. “Why just yesterday, I was a child. Life’s shorter than a blink.”
And then you say, “I don’t mind the activity, constant as it is, but I would like, on occasion, to stop, even if just for a moment or two. Catch my breath, so to speak. Find my peaceful quiet place where I can just sit still.”
Two stories; I’ll connect them in a bit. First one: Jaguar Land Rover developed a shape-shifting car seat that simulates walking, a “morphable” seat that uses “a series of micro-adjustable actuators” to move the pelvic area, “making occupants feel like they’re walking.”* Ah! Modern technology; We can sit still and walk simultaneously! Second one: Lihong Wang of Caltech has developed a camera that can take ten trillion pictures per second.** And now he has developed a newer version of the camera that can take one trillion pictures of transparent objects like glass. It’s an ingenious system Wang calls “lossless encoding compressed ultrafast technology.” And here’s how it works: His system takes a single shot, capturing all the motion that occurs during the time that shot takes to complete. If that means what I think it means (and you can see a demonstration of it online), then Wang has enabled us to capture in an instant what we know takes time. Think of it as the reverse of the Jaguar Land Rover morphable seat. Motion that appears to the camera to be one unit, kind of like being in motion and being still simultaneously.
Which technology fits your lifestyle and needs? Would you like to capture all that motion that’s passed since you were a child in a single photo that still shows the motion? Would you like to know that in all those moments when nothing seemed to occur, such as in sitting in traffic, waiting in the doctor’s office or DMV line, or standing in the queue at Disney World’s Splash Mountain, that in those moments, you could impose motion?
Or, given the choice, how would you choose between not moving while moving or moving while not moving?
Of course, you and I know that even in stillness, we are restless creatures of contradiction. We could argue that we are victims of both physiology and culture, that flowing blood and neurotransmitters plus economic and social pressures don’t allow us a moment of complete stillness. I can’t do more than guess your thoughts on stillness and motion, but I know that for curiosity’s sake, I want to take a Selfie with Wang’s camera while I sit on a morphable Jaguar seat during a traffic jam.
*Aamir, Humza. 16 Jan 2020. Jaguar develops a shape-shifting car seat that simulates walking. Techspot.com https://www.techspot.com/news/83577-jaguar-develops-shape-shifting-car-seat-simulates-walking.html Accessed January 20, 2020.
**California Institute of Technology. 20 Jan 2020. Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-ultrafast-camera-trillion-transparent-phenomena.html Accessed January 20, 2020.
And then you say, “I don’t mind the activity, constant as it is, but I would like, on occasion, to stop, even if just for a moment or two. Catch my breath, so to speak. Find my peaceful quiet place where I can just sit still.”
Two stories; I’ll connect them in a bit. First one: Jaguar Land Rover developed a shape-shifting car seat that simulates walking, a “morphable” seat that uses “a series of micro-adjustable actuators” to move the pelvic area, “making occupants feel like they’re walking.”* Ah! Modern technology; We can sit still and walk simultaneously! Second one: Lihong Wang of Caltech has developed a camera that can take ten trillion pictures per second.** And now he has developed a newer version of the camera that can take one trillion pictures of transparent objects like glass. It’s an ingenious system Wang calls “lossless encoding compressed ultrafast technology.” And here’s how it works: His system takes a single shot, capturing all the motion that occurs during the time that shot takes to complete. If that means what I think it means (and you can see a demonstration of it online), then Wang has enabled us to capture in an instant what we know takes time. Think of it as the reverse of the Jaguar Land Rover morphable seat. Motion that appears to the camera to be one unit, kind of like being in motion and being still simultaneously.
Which technology fits your lifestyle and needs? Would you like to capture all that motion that’s passed since you were a child in a single photo that still shows the motion? Would you like to know that in all those moments when nothing seemed to occur, such as in sitting in traffic, waiting in the doctor’s office or DMV line, or standing in the queue at Disney World’s Splash Mountain, that in those moments, you could impose motion?
Or, given the choice, how would you choose between not moving while moving or moving while not moving?
Of course, you and I know that even in stillness, we are restless creatures of contradiction. We could argue that we are victims of both physiology and culture, that flowing blood and neurotransmitters plus economic and social pressures don’t allow us a moment of complete stillness. I can’t do more than guess your thoughts on stillness and motion, but I know that for curiosity’s sake, I want to take a Selfie with Wang’s camera while I sit on a morphable Jaguar seat during a traffic jam.
*Aamir, Humza. 16 Jan 2020. Jaguar develops a shape-shifting car seat that simulates walking. Techspot.com https://www.techspot.com/news/83577-jaguar-develops-shape-shifting-car-seat-simulates-walking.html Accessed January 20, 2020.
**California Institute of Technology. 20 Jan 2020. Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-ultrafast-camera-trillion-transparent-phenomena.html Accessed January 20, 2020.
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