Technological solution to remove driver's blind spot mimics nature

Awoke at 6am, roused at 7am and then tumbled out of bed at 9:30am, so an unexpectedly delayed start to the day.

The morning was directed to correspondence on international assistance. The afternoon followed with the completion of the flyer design for Mr McArthurs book. This included a foray to the post office to establish the postal fees for a book of similar dimensions despatched within the United Kingdom and abroad.

The early evening devoted to editing the images taken at Caldecote's church of St Michael and All Saints and integrating them into the articles written late last night. The most difficult was the fusion of several photographs of the church together to create a panorama. Because the camera lens was set to a very wide angle, this resulted in distortion which was minimised when only two photographs were combined.

Collected Mrs T upon her return from Hereford to Cambridge.

A brief immersion into the Twitter feed directed me to an interesting article at
http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/how-to-overcome-the-blind-spot-while-driving/. It illustrated a system envisaged by Ho-Tzu Cheng, where three cameras are placed in the rear of a vehicle and their combined signal is used to project an image in the upper half of the front windscreen. The driver effectively has 360 degree visibility, thus removing the blind spots of a vehicle.

This caused me to ponder on the prevalence of 360 degree vision in the natural world. Amongst the insects, dragonflies come close with compound eyes almost encircling the entire head, their vision is quoted as being between 358 and 360 degrees. Apparently the american woodcock (avian), hammerhead shark (pisces) and the hare (mammal) all have 360 degree vision.

Two items of Spanish news; The funeral of the much loved golfer Seve Ballesteros, who died of a brain tumour; the earthquake at Lorca in Murcia, which killed ten people and was registered at 5.2 on the Richter Scale.

Whilst writing this article, I found Fred Dibnah, the Bolton Steeplejack and later industrial archaeology presenter, presenting one of his programs. It brought back memories of watching his original series in the eighties, where he removed tall chimneys using traditional methods, often working at horrendous heights. He died in 2004 and it was moving to see his heritage continued as a visual recording.