Update (2018): Fotonauts is long gone, note of the links to fotonauts below work anymore.

Fotonauts (still in private beta for more information see here) has just made their widget functionality public. I really like these widgets and especially the way they are handling the Attribution and license information (which of course is much more relevant on collaborative albums like this one from the isummit). Here is a widget with the pictures from the Keirin race that i saw in august as a fotonauts widget:

So on my last day in Japan i ventured out to see a Keirin race somewhere on the finges of the Tokyo metropolis (big thanks to Fumi for figuring this out for me). Apparently Keirin has made it to become an olympic discipline a while ago, which is kind of interesting insofar that keirin in not really a sport but a form of gambling. it is like horse racing but then the horses are substituted with bicycles and since bicycles do not move by themselves the jockeys (not the similarities in headgear and outfit) have to do the pedalling. so in essence you can place bets on humans and then watch them race against each other.

The race format (at least on thursday in Ōmiya) is fairly straightforward: 4 laps on a concrete race track, the first three of them behind a pacer and when the bell rings for the final lap the 9 riders battle it out between them (sometimes using elbows). you can either place bets on first second third combinations or you can place bets on fist and second combinations.

4 rounds of 400m or so may not seem like much but if you consider that this spectacle takes place in early afternoon in august in an open air stadium (with 35 degrees celsius and more in the shadows), then you got to admire these riders for even making it to the finish (plus this makes those american track cyclists who arrived in peking wearing face masks look like complete sissies)

Not that anybody in the public really cares about the riders, for the public they are just the numbers that they wear on their brightly colored jerseys. Most of the gamblers dont even care enough to actually watch the race, instead they stay in a giant air conditioned hall where they can chovienenltly place their bets and watch – without much display of emotion – the race results on overhead screens.

The gamblers are a strangely interesting mix, especially when contrasted with the teenager and salarymen dominated insanity of central Tokyo: 99% male (i think i saw three women that did not work at the racetrack), at any given point in time half of them have a cigarette in their mouth and literally nobody carries a mobile-phone. The whole place felt like some kind of retired male working class heaven complete with 100yen entry fee, an endless supply of cold green tea from machines, cheap and good (at least the teppanyaki) food and the promise of placing a winning bet and going home rich. From that point of view Keirin makes much more sense than that other japanese ‘gambling’ obsession Pachinko (which is simply insane and completely lacks the social interaction taking place around the keirin track).

More pictures in this set on my flickr account.

Turns out I am in the Netherlands for quite a while now (almost eleven years to be exact) and in that period I have managed to start something which has become a tradition of some sorts: the Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race. today is the 10th edition of this alley cat race in the memory of 19 year old messenger (of the resistance against the german occupiers) Anniek van Hardeveld, who was shot by the Germans on the last day of the occupation of Amsterdam in 1945.

I had organized the first race (as a surprise) in May 1999 after Jur had used the memorial stone for Anniek as a checkpoint in an earlier ally cat race. The race itself tends to be fairly short (the first edition had only 3 checkpoints) as it needs to start after work and be finished before 20:00h when there are two minutes of silence in commemoration of the dead all over Holland. there is one simple rule which says that the winner of the race has to organize it the next year, which has proven to be a robust enough rule to ensure that the tonight will see the 10th edition. Not sure if i expected this to go on for this long (or even expected to stay in the Netherlands for this long but i digress) although my report from the 1999 (last millennium!) race ends with by stating that:

With the silence gone we spilled some sips of beer in tribute and decided that this had to become and annual event from now on.

Update [5 May 2008]: 35 participants, perfect weather & Michael won. pictures on my flickr account. thanks to all those who came out to race or help!

Geoff at BLDGBLOG has a post about elevators, which reminds me of the first and only time i have been inside the empire state building: in 2000 during metropoloco one of the checkpoints of during the main race was suite 6172 (or something like that) in the Empire State Building. Never having been in a building with more than 10 floors before i somehow assumed that this meant that the suit would be on the 6th floor (taking a clue from the leading 6 ignoring that the first two characters might indicate the floor number). In the end this meant that i lost a lot of time (most of it spend in elevators):

On an only vaguely related note, meanwhile, I’d be curious to see if you could invert the expected volumetric relationship between stationary floors and moving elevators in a high-rise.

In other words, if elevators usually take up, say, one-twentieth of a building’s internal space, could you flip that ratio and end up with just one stationary floor somewhere hanging out up there inside a labyrinth of elevators?

You have a job interview on that one, lone floor in a half an hour’s time but you can’t find the place. You’re moving from elevator to elevator, going down again and stopping, then stepping across into another lift that takes you up four floors higher than you’d expected to be before you’re going down again, confused. You hear other elevators when you’re not moving, and it’s impossible to locate yourself amidst that system of moving rooms. The only floors you ever exit onto are simply other elevators.

read the rest of his post here

The New York Times runs an article with fantastic photos about a bunch of teenagers in Queens that build ‘Bicycles That Carry Powerful Beats, and Even a Rider or Two. One of the is being quoted saying: “People say, it’s the next best thing to having a system in a car”. But it’s better because you don’t even have to roll down the windows. I could not agree more with that…

[via boingboing]

Was watching the live stream of the tagesthemen (the late edition of the main news show of the ARD) earlier this evening. after a rather helpless interview with the german foreign minister again avoided to tell the Israelis their completely unjustified attacks on Lebanese civilians) they had a bit about the final of this years Tour de France which had the potential to cheer up my mood a little bit, but instead of seeing images of champagne-drinking cyclists i got this:

Bunch of stupid wankers! Not showing a news report about the tour de france on the final day of the event pretty much unacceptable. Does not really matter if they do not have the internet rights or if they do not have the rights to broadcast outside of germany. This is news-reporting and they shoudl get a better lawyer.

So i got stopped for running a red light today while on the way from the dentist to work. The cop who struggled with reading my (dutch government issued!!) id card asked me at some point if i wanted to make a statement regarding the reasons for running the red light, to which i replied that id do run every second red light and that this happened to be one of them. She politely asked if i wanted her to write this down in the incident report which i confirmed. Unfortunately it turns out that my statement was a bit of a twisted description of my actual behavior: on the rest of mty rout e to work i actually ran all 8 red traffic lights that i came across…

[btw can someone explain me why the price for running a red light has suddenly doubled from €25 to €50]

Check out this video [mp4 file – 20mb] of me and my bike having fun in Shivaji Nager / Russel Market in central Bangalore. Traffic has gotten worse every time i have come here. cycling is actually the fastest (and probably most dangerous) way to get around town even though one cannot run red lights like at home. In fact most of the time you do not even get to the red light as even cycles can’t navigate through the snarls of vehicles that pile up in front of traffic lights…