Common Paradox Tech Blog

Water-scraper is a concept piece entered into the eVoIo Skyscraper Competition which shows a future where people live and work underwater. Harnessing wave, wind and solar power to generate electricity, it’s a future world I’d be thrilled to live in.

We’d also be able to grow food using aquaculture and hydroponic ways—though if it just tastes like algae I might stick with city-living for a while longer. [Water-scraper via Inhabitat]

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This is Danvers State Insane Asylum, the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium “which in turn was the inspiration for Arkham Asylum in the Batman comic book series.” Today, the building is part of Avalon Danvers, a pleasant residential community.

Right now, those buildings stand surrounded by a swimming pool, fitness center, basketball court, and whatever other amenities an apartment community might have:

Still spooky looking, no? Doesn’t seem surprising that there’s been all sorts of supernatural activity reported by residents and visitors.

I just hope they hand out free Proton Packs with every new lease. [WIkipedia via Fast Company]

“It’s like, you know man, you know. People like us were meant for something important, something different than this whole fucked up society. Oh, that? That’s the rocket facade left over from our last house party.” [flickr/sfist via io9]

“It’s like, you know man, you know. People like us were meant for something important, something different than this whole fucked up society. Oh, that? That’s the rocket facade left over from our last house party.” [flickr/sfist via io9]

Looking like an English hedgehog with over 60,000 7.5m-long transparent acrylic rods shooting out of the building, the United Kingdom Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo is costing the equivalent of $38.6m to construct. [MSN]

Vitra, a Swiss furniture manufacturer, recently completed the Vitrahaus, a presentation space for their collection. Designed by Herzog and de Meuron, its comprised of 12 stacked “houses,” and if you can believe it, the inside is no less stunning.

The Vitrahaus’s large, house-shaped windows provide various views of the surrounding area during the day—it is located on the border of Germany and Switzerland, in the town of Weil am Rhein—but at night the focus flips, with the windows becoming glowing portals into which passersby can peer.

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The inside is clean and minimalist which lets Vitra’s colorful furniture take center stage. Each room has a touch screen, on which visitors can browse through Vitra’s catalog, learn more about particular pieces, or purchase furniture right there on the spot. High design and high tech.

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We’ve oogled some of the company’s chairs before, but I must say I’d rather be standing in the Vitrahaus than sitting in a Vitra.

DesignBoom, who headed out to Vitra’s campus to take these photographs, has posts with a lot more information and pictures of the exterior and interior on their site. [DesignBoom]

Shipping containers in my mind are forever associated with grim situations seen in TV shows like Dexter or The Wire, but in South Korea they can also be observatories for viewing sunsets.

Erected on the harbor of Songdo New City in Incheon, five shipping containers were recycled and placed together aiming sky-wards for the best possible glimpse of the close of daylight. They’re angled at either 10, 30 or 50 degrees, offering various views across the water, with stairs and ramps inside so people can walk through them. [ANL Studio via Deezen via Inhabitat]

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Wayne Coyne, frontman of the acclaimed rock band The Flaming Lips, recently renovated his Oklahoma compound, and the new space gives the group’s music a run for its money in terms of psychedelic flair, playful construction, and sheer imagination.

The last we saw of Coyne, he was, naturally, sitting in a bathtub on Google Street View. If you thought that was the weirdest place he bathes, wait until you see his bathroom. Its Gaudiesque drip-castle design—Coyne refers to it as the “drug damaged, artist element of [his] home”—is certainly one of the highlights of his new pad, realized by FitzSimmons Architects.

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An adjoining alcove, accessed by a glittering circular passageway, scores serious bonus points for including the Giz-featured world’s most beautiful object: the Gyrofocus fireplace.

Having seen Coyne’s appropriately trippy poop cave, it’s got me wondering if other musicians’ homes reflect their sensibilities as closely. Is John Mayer’s house ordinary and forgettable on the outside but chaotically and impenetrably decorated on the inside? Does Prince’s Minneapolis home have a bunch of sex swings? Yes, yes, I’m sure it does. [Fitzsimmons Architects via Design Milk via Geekosystem]

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Zinnnng!

It’s been nearly a week since I last reported about Apple’s reluctance to allow its users access to the Flash platform. Apple–and Steve Jobs himself–has reportedly claimed that the instability of Flash was the driving factor behind Apple’s ripping of this app straight off of its mobile devices (including the brand-new iPad) in favor of an HTML5-based solution for interactive content.

Although Adobe seemed to be letting Jobs’ alleged tirade against Flash earlier this week go unanswered, ‘twas not meant to be. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has since responded in the company’s official "Executive Perspectives" blog. I’m not much of a betting man (nightmares of CES losses haunt me to this day), but perhaps you are: Just which way do you think Lynch points the finger of blame for Flash’s absence on–quote unquote–"a recent magical device."

Here we go again!

Everyone Loves Flash

For what it’s worth, Lynch does correctly address the big watershed moment that Flash adoption currently faces. This almost seems like an contradiction in itself–if Lynch is to be believed, Flash currently runs on 98 percent of connected computers and powers the whiz-bang content of more than 85 percent of the Web’s top sites. Obviously, Flash is big.

Keep in mind, however, that these statistics are primarily concerned with computers accessing the Web. Call them what you will, but devices like the iPad and the iPhone don’t fit this description. Unlike a computer, you can’t exactly go installing new frameworks and architectures on a closed device like the iPhone. Depending on the manufacturer and/or the limits of the underlying technology, you simply don’t have the kind of support to freely download and install executables to expand your core functionality. These closed products aren’t thumbing their nose at the open-source world. It’s just how they’re built.

To Adobe, it’s not up to them to create a more open framework–that already exists by virtue of Flash’s extraordinarily wide audience. Flash is the standard for video. Nobody’s arguing about Flash, yet everyone seems to be split into camps supporting either the Ogg Theora or H.264 formats of HTML5. This still isn’t sufficient of enough cause to kill either format in favor of the other. Lynch sees a concurrent future for both Flash and HTML5, provided other companies do their part to make the Web an "open environment," as he phrases it.

"We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash. In fact, some of these apps are already available in the Apple App Store such as FickleBlox and Chroma Circuit. This same solution will work on the iPad as well. We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen."

Them’s fightin’ words.

Steve Jobs Does Not Love Flash

Will Steve Jobs ultimately care? No. Will Apple let an allegedly buggy application ruin the performance of its devices, when the very marketing behind said devices relates to their impressive usability? No. Will Flash open up its player for anyone to fork at will? No–nor can they, given that they can’t openly distribute the codices the player uses.

Is there a solution? Well… no. In fact, many believe that this is the dying argument, the last puff of exhaust hanging in the air after the HTML5 van has sped off into the sunset. If the Flash player is truly as convoluted and buggy as Apple claims, why would the company want to step back and reinvent the wheel if it can instead pave the way forward with a truly open framework for content delivery?

Flash might exist throughout the future of the Web, but I don’t forsee a future where Apple and Adobe go prancing around 1 Infinite Loop hand-in-hand. But when it comes to other devices–especially the true "computers" I talked about earlier–Flash has gained enough of a head start to keep it as the prevailing protocol for years to come. And if the company was to opt to phase out the closed Flash player out in favor of an HTML5/Javascript solution… well, that’d be a real zinger indeed.

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you’re dying to recommend!