A few weeks ago I found an article on Nature News about a man who was able to navigate through a course of obstacles without falling or hitting himself. Scientists had persuaded the blind man to set his stick aside and walk down a corridor strewn with lab equipment. He was able to do so flawlessly, despite being unable to consciously see any of the obstacles. Head down and hands loose by his side, he twisted his body to slalom slowly but surely between a camera tripod and a swingbin, and neatly stepped around a random series of smaller items. The results of the study are reported in Current Biology. When I watched the TED presentation of Bruno Bowden, I remembered the article again. I have this vague feeling that the two cases have something in common. Their eyes are blind, but not their brain. They rely on their sensomotor abilities that are so powerful that they can compensate for their vision. Bruno Bowden folds one of Lang's astonishingly complicated origami figures, blindfolded, in under 2 minutes. He's accompanied by the cellist Rufus Cappadocia. In our world we are so used to images, things seem to be made for the eyes only. The eye dominates interpretation of content, it is seen by so many of us as the gate to the world. But is this really true. We should be allowed to ask this question. Is sight an overestimated sense? Blindness I think is obviously something very different compared to what we who are able to see think it is. Isn't it the sense of touch that makes the world available to us in the first place. Babies know about what I am talking here ;-) ...

Everyday we are confronted with explosions of outrageous dimensions. When I received this wonderful catalogue of Dutch countryside paintings from the 17th century today, I found the depiction of a dynamite depot explosion in Delft, Netherlands, on Monday, October 12, 1654. 80.000 to 90.000 pounds of gunpowder exploded and huge areas of the town got destroyed. The explosion could be heard on the island of Texel 130 km away. Hundreds of people lost their lives. Is this explosion so different from the one that took place in Enschede, Netherlands in 2000? And so many others we hear about almost everyday. I think, it is only the speed of the news that makes us aware of all the catastrophes around the globe everyday so incredible fast that has changed, the tragic of the disasters remains the same. And the speed of the spreading news makes us numb. This may have changed too during the past centuries. On May 13 about 100 tonnes of fireworks and other explosives detonated after a fire in the factory of S.E. Fireworks in the northern Dutch city of Enschede. The blast was felt up to 30 kilometres away. In a split second almost 400 houses were reduced to their foundations and another 1,000 damaged.

Here some of the beauty of fireworks, while we have been bombarded with its dangers through the media during the last days before New Year's Eve. These wonderful pictures from fireworks are from Vivien Tsuto-Oelberg. She emigrated to Japan and is married to Japanese guy. She is the talented daughter of my dear friend Fritz. I want to post her picts as a memory of a night that was over so fast and pushed us into a new year. Wondering what is going to be different to last year?