Archive for June, 2011

Giant OLED Globe

TokyoTek has uploaded this video of the very awesome OLED globe that is now on display at Tokyo’s Miraikan museum:

The “Geo-Cosmos” is made from over ten thousand Mitsubishi OLED panels:

Hanging 18 meters from the floor, the globe is an aluminum sphere covered with 10,362 OLED panels, each measuring 96 x 96 millimeters. Mitsubishi Electric used its scalable OLED technologies to create the globe, which replaces a globe comprising light emitting diodes (LEDs) to commemorate the museum’s 10th anniversary. The globe will display scenes of clouds and other visions of the earth taken from a meteorological satellite. Projections will feature resolution of more than 10 million pixels, about 10 times greater than that of the LED display.

You can read more about the project on the Miraikan Tsunagari Project homepage.

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Sega Urinal Video Game: Rank Your Pee!

Sega has created what is sure to be one of the strangest video games ever invented. It is – quite literally – a pissing contest:

“First, an infrared sensor detects when a person approaches, and changes the screen to the game ready display. Next, microwaves hit the stream of urine when the person urinates, and it reads the reflected microwaves to detect the speed of the urine stream. The volume is then calculated by the speed and duration of the urination.”

Since the volume of urine is calculated from the speed, the average amount can also be calculated. In this demonstration the volume is measured for a game to display individual rankings, and Sega are now developing a game for players to compete against people who have used the toilet before.

“We are looking to drinking and eating establishments to install this game first. The advertising screen in it can be refreshed if it is JPEG data, for example, if the bar is being used for a party after a wedding it could show the faces of the bride and groom. That would be pretty funny if the faces of the bride and groom appeared in the toilet. Customers are coming up with quite a few interesting ways to use it.”

Hopefully, within a year, half the bars in Tokyo will be equipped with this amazing device.

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Tokyo Man Collected Spit From Hundreds of Little Girls

This is one of the most weird and creepy news stories I’ve seen in a while:

A 55-year-old unemployed man was arrested in Tokyo because he had a very strange hobby. He would approach elementary school girls on the street and ask them to provide him with saliva samples for his “research.” If girls agreed, he would film them as they spit into cups.

Since 2005, Tokyo police had received 125 complaints from residents who were disturbed by the man’s behavior. According to police sources, the man told them that he collected to spit for his own sexual gratification. The man said he’d been doing this for 17 years and had collected spit from 500 little girls.

The local kids had a nickname for him: “Mister Give-Me-Spit” (つばくれおじさん).

While the guy may have been creepy, was he really committing a crime? He didn’t force girls to give him spit. An article on J-Cast notes that a lot of Japanese netizens reacted to the news by questioning the legal grounds under which police arrested the man. A police spokesman explained that the man was violating the following section Tokyo’s Nuisance Prevention Ordinance:

• (「公共の場所又は公共の乗物において、人を著しくしゆう恥させ、又は人に不安を覚えさせるような卑わいな言動をしてはならない」- 迷惑防止条例の5条1項)

The ordinance bans vulgar speech or actions in public that cause unease and anxiety to other people. Although many of the girls initially consented to his polite requests for saliva samples, they were apparently not prepared for the creepy “research” video-taping.

If the case goes to trial and he is convicted, he could face up to 1 year in prison and a fine of up to 1,000,000 yen.

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Photos: Tohoku 3 Months After the Tsunami

Three months have passed since the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and people have made incredible efforts to clean up and prepare for rebuilding:

See more in this set of 29 high quality photos: Japan: three months after the quake (Boston Globe)

[hat tip to Cory T.]

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Garage Shaped Like Japanese Train

A retired man in Hyogo prefecture has built a miniature replica of a Hankyu Railway train car:

He is using it as a garage for his motorcycle. When he uses a remote control to open the garage door, it plays a railroad crossing sound.

The man says his next project will be a miniature Sky Tree.

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Interview With Fukushima Daiichi Worker

A man who worked for two months as part of the emergency clean-up crew at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant talks about his experience (to protect his identity, his face is not shown and his voice is altered):

Some of the things he says:

• All of the workers are under an enormous amount of stress. Everybody is high-strung and are few conversations between workers.
• He wasn’t ordered to work for a specific number of hours. He just worked until he ran out of energy. For most people, about 2 hours was the physical limit. However, in some cases, people have had to work for about 8 hours straight.
• It is oppressively hot inside the radiation suits. Everyone is sweating like crazy. They try to drink a lot of water and sports drinks, but they are still exhausted by the heat. So far, 12 workers have undergone medical treatment for heatstroke or heat exhaustion.
• He doesn’t understand why Tepco isn’t significantly revising its clean-up schedule when workers are making almost no progress with the disposal of contaminated water. He feels like there is a breakdown in the communication chain between the workers, Tepco executives, and the Japanese government.

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