Sunday, October 09, 2005

Dettifoss

"This is how everything becomes a robot, small processes are automated and optimized bit by bit, not all at once. You don't make the entire crane automatic and then push a button and walk away, you throw a little algorithm in there that tests the heft of each container and swings it across just so. You don't let all the harvesters run around blind, you bury wires in the tarmac under the yellow lines to help the drivers drop the boxes accurately and swiftly. Kybernetes, just like on the ship, you keep humans riding along doing what humans are good at: dealing with unexpected conditions and unintended consequences: the stuff that falls through the grid of the software world map. Thinking of how graffiti artists paint freight cars, which then travel around the country, I can imagine some kind of future scenario where, once the ports are entirely automated, artists can break in and paint the containers as pixels, so that they'll make different patterns and shapes when they're stacked on ships and carried around the world."

link

7 comments:

ryan said...

What a post! What a journey! So I have two questions. How much does it cost to send one container from Hamburg to Iceland? And, why did you take this trip instead of just flying from Finland to Iceland?

sevensixfive said...

I just looked at Eimskip's website, and I couldn't find a clear rate per container. Probably it depends on a lot of things.

I took this trip because a friend advised me to "travel on the surface of the earth" as much as possible, to see the places in between other places. Good advice.

Also, the only flights in or out of Iceland are run by Iceland Air, and a one way ticket from Helsinki to Reykjavik would have been more expensive than the boat trip, even with the Ryanair flight to Hamburg and Ferry ride back to Stockholm included. Iceland Air will give out great deals on round trip tickets, or long stopovers, but if you're flying one way you're at their mercy, and like everything else Icelandic, plane tickets from them are mercilessly expensive. So I got a trip to Iceland with 6 nights accomodation and meals, a ferry ride to Stockholm, and a flight to Hamburg, all for less than a simple flight from Helsinki to Reykjavik from Iceland Air.

sevensixfive said...

I wonder if Linda realizes that she's just a robot ...

ryan said...

These ads are driving me nuts. I just posted a blog of my own and I had 4 of them within a couple of hours. Unbelievable.

sevensixfive said...

I just figured it out: go into the dashboard and look at settings> comments and turn on word verification. No more Bot Spam until someone solves the vision problem

ryan said...

ah-ha! That's fantastic. Thanks for the tip.

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