MuseClouds

This is a very important post for me personally. Gombby is a new 3D animated series developed in my home country, Portugal. I’ve been involved in this project with my colleague Emanuel Grácio since January 2009, composing music and doing audio post-production for the series. Yesterday, our first milestone was achieved with the video clip “Chegou o Soninho” (in English: Soninho has arrived), which aired for the first time on national television.

“Chegou o Soninho” will be broadcast every day around 20:20 on RTP 2, calling children to bed. I’m very happy to see this project come to light, and it gives me the kind of emotions I felt in the 80s as a child. Gombby tries to bring back those days when children were fed with kind feelings and righteous values.

Kudos to the amazing team committed to making this dream come true. Let’s hope Gombby and his friends have a long and prosperous life!

At first, they look like rooms in a palace. However, they are simply stations of the subway network in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Moscow’s metro system is the second busiest in the world (the first being Tokyo), so for a lot of people that means that a part of their daily lives is spent on luxury spaces, underground.

Oddee, the oddities blog, has an excellent aptly named “10 Homes that Defy Gravity“. If you’re an architect and you’re running out of ideas, this may be a refreshment. Every single entry on the post is far from what we are used to, but my favorite one is the second: the floating castle in Ukraine. The blogger comment on the entry is also spot on.

American gymnast Kerri Strug took major decision at the early age of 13 in order to follow her life’s dream. She left home and family to be coached by Bela Karolyi (who also coached Nadia Comăneci some years before). With only an age of 18, at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, the first team gold medal for USA was finally within reach, but in the end it all fell down on the shoulders of young Kerri, as she was the last to compete on the vault and she needed to score high for her team to win. On her first attempt landing, she fell short injuring her ankle. Despite this, she knew it was vital to go there and jump again, so she courageously did a second attempt, this time flawless, but landing with just one leg. She eventually collapsed in pain, but her decision and persistence got her and her team the gold medal. A truly inspiring moment.

In 1992, former British athlete Derek Redmond gave us one of the most beautiful and moving moments in the history of modern times Olympics. Back in 1988, during the Games at Seoul, he had to withdraw just a few moments before the 400 meters competition start, due to an injury. He set all hopes for Barcelona in 1992, where everything was running smooth for Redmond, as he made the best time for the first round and won his quarter-final. However, in the semi-final, about 150 meters into the race, an injury on his right hamstring halted his dream of winning, as he fell on the track in tears. But it didn’t halt him from finishing. He got up and started to hobble on the track, with his face clearly showing his agonizing pain. Jim Redmond, his father, jumped out from the stands diverting security, and joined his son on the field, helping him out until the finish line, only to be greeted by 65,000 impressed people in a standing ovation. He may have not won a medal, but his feat together with his father will always be remembered.

During the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics diving preliminaries, the American diver Greg Louganis, considered by many the greatest of all time, suffered a head concussion when doing a reverse 2 1/2 spike, as the back of his head hit the spring board. However, even with the injury he suffered, and pressured by the fact that he was HIV-positive at the time, he went on to finish the preliminaries and qualified. During the finals and to everyone’s amazement, he repeated the same dive, earning him the gold medal.

Here’s a video remembering those 1988 Olympic moments at Seoul.

In 1976, at the Montreal Summer Olympics, history was made. Nadia Comăneci, a Romanian gymnast with only an age of 14, scored a perfect 10 on the uneven parallel bars during the team part of the competition. This was the first time the score of 10 had been awarded. However, she would get another 6 perfect tens until the end of the Games, taking the gold medals for individual all-around, balance beams and uneven bars.

She holds the record for the youngest Olympic gymnastics all-around champion, a record poised to stay forever as the minimum age for gymnastics was later changed to 16.

Here is a video of her first perfect 10, followed by another perfect uneven bars performance at the same 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Well, it still is! At least when I want to fill the gas tank on my car. This is an interesting graph comparing the relative price of some well-known liquids. I found it on this blog. It’s probably a bit old, but still funny to look at anyway.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a photographer born in Finland, who moved to the USA with his family, where he grew and studied. I’m posting about him because I found some of his work by chance, and found it to be both unusual and, at the same time, beautiful. His photos combine bodies (usually his own) with landscapes or urban settings. But this small explanation goes a long way to define the almost unreal pictures he gets without any post manipulation. I got the photos for this post from his exhibition page at Galerie Anhava, but you can also check his own website to see a more complete portfolio.

One of the interesting things about looking at new ideas others have is the way they can influence and inspire us for the creation of our own new ideas. This happens because every mind is a different mind, and the way we interpret and process information may be different from person to person. That’s why so many ideas were left in the dark for so long until they were caught by the right guy who made them a breakthrough.

Out of many ways to gather for new ideas, innovation awards are one of my favorites. Why? Besides the innovation factor every entry is supposed to have, as it’s open to everyone to vote, they’ll be voting on what they use and find helpful in their everyday lives. So, it somehow represents the public perception of innovation and how they are using and interacting with it.

The Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards 2008 are divided into 10 categories and you can check every entry on their website. I parsed them all and found a lot of new products and services I never heard of before. Check it out! You’re sure to find some great new ideas.