It's a small world...

I am constantly shocked by our shrinking world, technology and communication techniques being much responsible for this shrinking, but also the ease at which we can just hop around the world such as this upcoming trip for the Nokia Urbanista Diaries. But you know what, it was smaller than I thought!

This recently came to my attention via a close friend Jason, who enjoys using his academic login to search for random things in Google Scholar. Sitting at the cafe he thought it would be fun to search for "Camera Toss" to see if there have been any mentions of it in academic literature.

There had, exactly one relevant entry. If things keep up there will surely be more but it's WHO was responsible for the publication of that ONE, and how random and coincidental it seemed that really caused me to sit back and marvel at the way these things pan out.

The mention came in the form of a documented interview response in an academic research paper/thesis on journaling and mobile devices. The interviewee was John Braine, a fellow candidate for a degree in Design and Multimedia Systems at Trinity College, Dublin.

Here's the excerpt:

Question: 10) What is the most creative or most innovative use of a mobile device that you have done or seen or heard of someone else doing?
Answer: Camera tossing!

The paper was entitled Moleskine to Mobile, How Creative Professionals are Using Their Mobile Phones, written in 05/06 by none other than JENIFER HANEN. Who's that? Well she also goes by Ms. Jen, and I know her only as a fellow invited participant of the Urbanista Diaries, the one who I'll in fact be meeting in person in Vienna, Austria... as her journey ends and mine begins! Whacky! Small world indeed! I'm not even sure if Jenifer realized the connection?


One organization however, has been performing "ultimate camera tosses" long before this blog , and that would be NASA. The small world visual at the beginning of this post was in fact just such a toss, combined footage of the earth as seen from the Mercury Messenger Probe as it performed an earth fly-by on August 2nd, 2005.

Approximately two weeks ago, Messanger made a historic fly-by of the dark side of Mercury, never before observed by humans. This image was taken on it's approach to Mercury.



I look forward to it's continued journey and the beginning of a year long orbit around Mercury which begins March 8th 2011. Coincidentally, 3 years to the day of the conclusion of my Urbanista trip!