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Its a kind of Disneyland of science … Hemispheric Planetarium in the City of the Arts and Science located in Valencia, Spain. Designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Aka “the giant eye”, the “eye of wisdom”, “big human eye” etc. Clever to design a planetarium in the shape of an eye looking up at the heavens. Complete with an eyeball, which is the planetarium dome. Reminiscent of Geordi’s visor.

Good for Spanish tourism, great for Calatrava’s reputation, but maybe not so good for science itself. Like many planetaria, its been reduced to showing nature flicks and IMAX movies to make $ eg March Of The Penguins. Maybe its just us, but there seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of planetariums in a country and the level of science…perhaps due to something such as over-exposure breeds indifference.

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The New York Times just had another go at the question: Which is the best TV technology; is it LCD or is it plasma? They had a look at usual factors such as color, contrast, response time and picture quality, and concluded that plasma continues to best LCD as a TV display technology.

Two of the TV sets that they used to form their conclusion were the Sony 40-inch LCD model KDL-40XBR2, and the Pioneer 50-inch plasma model 5070HD. After the aforementioned evaluation criteria were tallied, there was a small “advantage for plasma”, and presumably the Pioneer model (depicted) as well.

At least the NY Times is consistent – a similar article from about a year and-a-half ago, also declared plasma TV’s to be better than LCD…and, it’ll (eventually) be interesting to see how these 2 approaches stack up against the much-touted SED TV.

Picking a Picture – New York Times, September 14, 2006

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The Microsoft-specified and Toshiba-built Zune digital media player was launched today. The Zune comes with a 30 GB disk, a 3 inch QVGA screen, an FM tuner as well as WiFi for sharing tracks with other Zuneys. The device will handle anything in the following formats: music in WMA or MP3 or AAC; images encoded in JPEG or video in WMV, MPEG-4 H.264 formats. You can get the Zune in any color you want provided it’s black, white or brown.

There does not seem to be much official info regarding availability, pricing, size or weight – but chances are that the Zune will be marginally bigger & heavier than the Apple iPod in order to accomodate both the larger screen (the iPod screen comes in at 2.5 inches) and a beefier battery to drive that same screen and the radios.

Music & videos can be purchased from the Zune Marketplace, presumably at prices that are competitive with iTunes.

Zune Virtual Pressroom – Microsoft PressPass site, September 14, 2006

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The Samsung YP-K5 digital music player was announced back on Sept 1, 2006 and is now becoming available. The player itself is somewhat standard in that it has a capacity of up to 4GB, supports MP3 ASF and WMA music formats, has a photo viewer, and an FM radio. The K5 also has a 1.7 inch OLED display, plays for up to 30 hours on a charge, and most unusually, comes with built-in slide-out dual speakers.

CNet had a look at it and decided that they liked the sound quality and the ’stunning’ interface, but that the girth added by the onboard speakers was a negative. Overall, they gave the K5 a rating of 8.3 out of ten, and a rank of excellent.

CNet’s best overall MP3 player continues to be the iRiver Clix, which comes in at 8.7/10.

Samsung YP-K5 – CNet Reviews, 9/1/06

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