These images of the bridge—called the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge—were shot in September 2009, as the 1,060-foot twin-rib concrete arch advances towards its late 2010 opening. The $240 million, 2,000-foot bridge is part of a larger project, a 3.5-mile corridor that begins in Clark County, Nevada, and ends in Mohave County, Arizona. [Hoover Dam Bypass via Industrial Interface via DRB]

I'm glad to see that it's finally open for business because the way the Kurilpa Bridge was designed definitely enforces the green "Hey you! This bridge is made for walking" attitude:

The energy-saving lighting system will be powered by 84 solar panels that collectively generate a daily output of about 100KWh and an average yearly output of 38MWh. The solar energy generates supplies 75% of the power required to run the LED setup in the fully lit mode, but in most lighting configurations, 100% of the energy required will come from the solar panels. Surplus electricity generated by the solar array will be returned to the main grid.

How green and pretty it is aside, does that criss-cross design remind anyone else of pick-up sticks? [Ecofiend via kTreehugger]

Somewhat adorably named the Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Causeway, this massive bridge is expected to take around 4.5 years to complete and cost somewhere between $2.3 and $3 billion, but should be a great help for travel between Qatar and Bahrain. The trip currently takes more than four hours and will be reduced to 30 minutes on the bridge, and those in charge expect 10,000 to 20,000 vehicles per day to use it.

For a sense of scale, here's a chart that compares the bridge to other very large things. Of course, I need a scale chart to tell how big a blue whale is, which sort of defeats the purpose of measuring this bridge in blue whales, but still: This is one large bridge. [Mena Infrastructure via Reddit]

Take this bridge in Guangzhou China for example:

Government officials in Guangzhou in south east China ordered workers to smear butter on all of the climbable surfaces of the 1,000 foot long steel bridge.

Government spokesman Shiu Liang said: "We tried employing guards at both ends but that didn't work - and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked - and so now we have put butter over the bridge and it has worked very well. Nobody can get up there and anybody who tries either falls"

Apparently, they were fed up with traffic jams caused by motorists slowing down to watch people jump (or threaten to jump) to their deaths. Mmm...suicide butter jam. [Metro]

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

[Perth Lego via Brothers Brick]

$11 million of the $36 million bridge is going to be paid for by federal stimulus, whereas the other 17.5 will be paid by Microsoft. In Microsoft's defense, they say that the bridge will be open to the public. On the other hand, who in the public is going to use a bridge that takes you from Microsoft's technical buildings to its retail buildings?

As some dude from the Taxpayers for Common Sense says:

"Let's face it. Microsoft is one of the most lucrative companies in the country," Ellis says. "They could have easily funded this out of pocket change. This is really about getting while the getting is good. Uncle Sam has a big wallet that's there for the taking, and Redmond wanted to take it — and Microsoft was happy to let them pick up that part of the tab."

[CNN]

BusinessWeek uses the new bridge as its case study for the future of smart infrastructure, marrying concrete and silicon in major construction projects—which are where big dollars are going as part of Obama's stimulus plan, to provide jobs through "shovel ready" projects. Apparently, there's some debate as to how "smart" these projects need to be: smart, smarter or smartest, as BW puts it. Bleeding edge tech obviously costs more, so striking a balance is key.

Less than one percent of the cost of the St. Anthony Falls bridge was spent on the sensor system, which tracks weather, stresses and even traffic, and it'll save money in the long run, with its automatic de-icing system cutting "weather management" costs by 10 to 50 percent. It's the incorporation of the smart sensor tech that actually won the contract to build the bridge for the FIGG team. The next step will be wireless sensors that are even cheaper, so it'll be loaded up with thousands of them, not hundreds.

You'd think they coulda made it a little less ugly though.
[BW]

Developed by Kansas State University engineers, the working prototypes use humble calculator solar panels to power a NASA/KSU-developed "Mars Chip" radio transmitter. The transmitter sends data every five seconds, allowing constant updates of bridge stability in real time.

As of now, the team has to do more testing as to which frequencies are most reliable through various external interferences while keeping in mind other ways of powering the device (like thermal and mechanical energy). But it seems like a pretty simple way to upgrade our infrastructure for the all-around better. [K-State via Treehugger]

Apart from using a text editor, I spend most of my work time in Facebook Illustrator and Photoshop, which I've been using since I was in college back in 1748 or 1994—I can't remember. Until a month ago, I was happy with both programs in their Creative Suite 3 incarnation. Sure, they aren't perfect, but they are fast in my 24-inch iMac, and they have all the features I wanted. Or so I thought. I didn't find myself wanting anything more than a few fixes here and there, maybe just enhancements to this or that other tool, like transparent gradients in Illustrator.

I thought that CS3 was pretty much unbeatable for most of the bread-and-butter stuff that I or any other illustrator or photographer can do. As it turns out, CS4 adds enough feature punch to make the upgrade worth it.

The damn tabs

Let's get this one out of the way now. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of the programs in CS4 except for one thing: The new absolutely horrible tabbed user interface, an idea full of good intentions but poorly executed, to the point of being bad for your workflow.

How Adobe engineers thought this was going to be useful to anyone, I don't know. Every person I've seen working in Photoshop has different windows open, at different sizes, in different places and even spawned across multiple monitors. This is needed to move things around from one document to another, to clone, or just compare images. Sometimes I end up having ten or twenty different documents open because I keep working with several projects at the same time. If you look at my workspace, it may seem anarchic to you, but it's not for me. Mentally, I organize things how I like them to be, optimized for my workflow. And then, I surf through all of this windows melee at lightning speed using Exposé on the Mac.

The new tabbed interface—which is similar to the tabs in programs like Firefox or Safari—screws all this. Sure, they try to provide tools to emulate the anarchy described above. You can even drag and drop objects using spring-loaded tabs. But when you have a lot of documents open and you run out of tab space, the thing stops working well, giving you a useless chevron pop-up to the left of the tabs (like it does in web browsers). It does a bad job with tiling too—although I don't use tiling—since it will split the image in whichever way it wants, leaving some images grouped with others if the number of tiles is shorter than the number of documents.

And then, on top of it being a mess in both Windows and Mac OS X, there's an extra problem for Mac users: Photoshop doesn't respect Exposé, which allows me to change work documents in a fraction of a second in the clearest and most instinctive way possible. So why try to fix what didn't need to be fixed? Simply put, you can't organize images in the same way that you organize linear web pages. The fact is that the tabbed interface doesn't work well and, in the Macintosh, it doesn't solve any problem that wasn't already solved with the Mac OS X interface.

Fortunately, this complaint has an easy solution: You can turn the tab feature off. In Illustrator CS4 too, which suffers from exactly the same problem. I exclaimed "So long, sucker!" after twenty minutes of using it and, quite frankly, I don't know why the hell it comes turned on by default—specially for people with previous versions of the Creative Suite.

Deep changes

I love Photoshop. I know that newbies get pale at the sheer enormity of this program, but it has grown with me during more than a decade and using it is like breathing—even while there are aspects of it I never touch. The new Photoshop CS4 tries to make things a little bit simpler by reorganizing the menus a bit, cleaning house and making them neater. It also provides new palettes, like the masks and adjustments palette. All the little changes will make sense to the experts and make it a little bit easier to those who are not so experienced.

But the changes in Photoshop CS4 go deeper than this. To start with, the Windows version has full 64-bit support. For many users this won't provide any big performance advantage (although any second saved counts when it comes to image editing). But for anyone using really big images for print, the 64-bit support will bring a clear performance advantage because of the larger memory space CS4 provides on Windows. If you just work with images out of professional DSLR cameras, however, don't worry much about this. All the benchmarks I've seen only show a performance advantage with extremely large images.

The other deep change, one that will be noticed by everyone, is the OpenGL support in Photoshop. Everyone with any decent video card, that is. I don't mean a 1GB monster GPU. The humble 256MB ATI Radeon HD2600 included in my 24-inch iMac does an amazing job at keeping things smooth as hot butter. The bigger and more badass your graphic card is, however, the more documents you will be able to keep accelerated in OpenGL. In my iMac, the limit is seven images.

New pixel magic

The GPU acceleration results in some nice tricks. When you zoom deep in an image you now get a pixel overlay—which oddly reminds me of the old school programs like the old PC Paintbrush. The panning is animated, so when you use the hand to move the image, accelerating and lifting your finger from the mouse, the image will sightly hover with the inertia until it stops. But the coolest thing is rotating the image for painting. If you have used Painter, you know that the canvas can be rotated to adjust the image to your drawing angle, much like you do with a piece of paper.

The rotating is not a real rotate command. You just do it as you need it, on screen. When you invoke it, a compass appears on the screen. Since OpenGL treats the image as a texture on a 2D plane, the rotation is non-destructive and the image quality is amazingly good, as nice as a real rotate. I wish this rotate view feature was also available in Illustrator.

Both Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4 offer new ways to access old things in a more streamlined way.

In Photoshop, new tool palettes give access to adjustment layers and masks functionality. The new "save to web" is good too, with a refreshed, more condensed interface. There are also new options for old tools that would be very useful in day-to-day operations, like the localized cluster option when you make a color range selection. This allows you to select areas in an image not only by hue similarity but also taking into account the distance from the place in which you click to sample the color. Or the quick and dirty Vibrance tool, which will allow Dick Tracy-lovers like me to boost the punch of every single image without having to go through a playing with levels, saturation fiddling in selected areas and color curves.

However, perhaps the most spectacular of the new Photoshop tools is the content-aware scale, which will be a great timesaver, especially when you have to modify images to fit a particular layout and you don't have a lot of room to play at cropping. This tool is simple: Make a selection you want to protect, select the image, scale in any direction you want (vertical, horizontal, or both axis) and watch as the image scales leaving the protected area (almost) intact. Here's an example:

Original image, 763 x 463 pixels

Scaled image, 1026 x 463 pixels.

As you can see, the furniture is left untouched, while the rest of the image scales horizontally. Everything is smoothed out and looks good. At least, good enough to only require a few retouches and, certainly, good enough to fit into your layout. Previously, you had to make a selection, scale the background as good as you can, carefully fill in the blanks with the clone stamp tool, fix the artifact with more cloning, and lose some hair in the process. With the content scaling, you'll be able to save a lot of time, only requiring a bit of retouching to make things look great.

3D painting

This part is completely new to Photoshop. 3D painting is nice. In fact, it's fun. While it's not as sophisticated as other tools I remember (it has been a long time since my Maya and Bodypaint days), it's easy and straightforward. The 3D rendering engine, on the other side, is bad. Very bad. Horrible. There's no way anyone can use this to include 3D graphics in your 2D work. So if you are looking to render anything in 3D with Photoshop CS4, look elsewhere.

New vector voodoo

In Illustrator CS4, the changes are also many and worth the upgrade, at least for me. There are small ones—like the clean-up program's interface has been cleaned up. Things that bothered me before, like the filter menus with duplicated personality, are gone, all merged into one neat Effect menu—to the big ones, like the new Blob tool (a godsend for anyone who likes to draw, rather than pull and push vector lines), the transparent gradients (oh yes!), and the long-awaited (but old Freehand trick) multiple artboards (YES! YES! YES!).

All these are extremely useful and will save a lot of time to any Illustrator user. Actually, the transparent gradients are a fundamental element to create more complex artwork more easily. They basically allow you to treat vector gradients as you treat them in Photoshop, including transparency. In fact, they are better than Photoshop because the interface allows you to change them on the art itself, without having to use a panel.

The Blob tool is great too. It's basically a brush that unifies all strokes as one single object. Previously, using the normal brush, if you tried to draw freehand you will end with a huge spaghetti monster. This was almost impossible to manage, requiring you to either make groups or outline strokes and then merge them—which obviously is a pain in the ass. With the Blob brush, however, Illustrator CS4 will automagically outline and join all brush strokes into a single, easy to manipulate object.

I would buy this upgrade for the gradients and the blob tool alone. But the final touch that makes this worth it to me is the support for multiple artboards, perhaps the most awaited Illustrator feature of all time. I still remember Freehand fans telling me how they hated Illustrator because it didn't support multiple pages like Freehand did. I wouldn't go as far as "hating" but I felt the pain every time I had to do a multiple-page layout, having to jump to Quark (argh) or PageMaker (the horror). This is not needed with the new artboards feature. You can create up to one hundred pages, which is more than enough to manage any brochure or multiple-page art you can imagine.

The icing on the cake is the new smart guides and alignment, which basically allows you to precisely set the position of objects in relation to other objects and any of their elements, without having to set guides manually. Paraphrasing Alice, the new guides are intelligenter and intelligenter than the previous ones.

Verdict

I can't try the rest of the applications in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection with the depth I can use both Photoshop and Illustrator, but if these two—and Bridge CS4—are any sign of what to expect from the other ten apps in the package—and from what I've been able to read in reviews of After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, or Flash, it seems they are as good—the collection is completely worth the $2,500 it costs. And definitely worth the $900 of the upgrade. If you are a Photoshop and Illustrator maverick, go for the Design Collection upgrade. If you use these programs professionally, the investment will returned very quickly on saved time alone.

They erected huge towers on either side of the valley to anchor the bridge, first off. Next, they attached 3,200-foot cables to rockets, accurately firing them across the valley to the other side. While other large bridges took care of this process using helicopters or kites, that was just too practical for these guys.

But hey, it worked perfectly, so who am I to judge? The bridge is still under construction, but at this point the really hard part is done. You know, the part with the rockets. Who wants to be the first to drive across it? Anyone?

[DeputyDog via Dvice]

The sensors will also work together with a camera system that will monitor and collect data on traffic flow. There are even sensors that can activate a de-icing system when necessary. All of this data will feed into a control room near the bridge where it can be analyzed by DOT workers and researchers. While these efforts do not make up for the negligence that lead to last year's tragedy, getting such a sophisticated system up so quickly is still an admirable accomplishment. [CNN Photo via AP]

The lightbulb of London studio Heatherwick, this innovative rolling bridge can be found in the city's Paddington Basin development. Constructed from wood and steel, the 12-meter-long structure curls itself into a ball to let water traffic through. It would be fun to see it in action, rising up rather like a rampant fighting caterpillar from its original postition, lying over the water. Hmmm, nice imagery, even though I say it myself. – Ad Dugdale

The Rolling Bridge [UberReview]

The DMA will network through a 802.11g or the upcoming 802.11n or Ethernet cable and should cost below $150 on its own. Philips is working on this device with Mediabolic and hopes it will add very little extra cost to any product it may be integrated with.

Slick idea, but hardly new. It'll sink or swim depending on the openness of the platform, which knowing Philips could go either way.

Philips Develops Media Bridge Device [TWICE]