Alan Folmsbee

The last speaker of Session 1 was Alan Folmsbee of Sun Microsystems, Inc. There were three main components to his analysis.First, he presented his "fracstel number," a measure he invented to try to normalize the concept of a round, and applied it to each candidate. Second, for each candidate, he determined the minimal number of rounds at which the avalanche was nearly ideal, in his estimation, and then measured the "excess avalanche."Third, he presented some Java
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RC6, and also E2; those of Folmsbee and Vaudenay were more in line

Alan Folmsbee and his exaggerated seafloor globe. (Dan Coyro / Sentinel)
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SANTA CRUZ , Boulder Creek globe maker Alan Folmsbee claims his products are capable of exploding myths.

Folmsbee's new seafloor relief globe, for example, makes it clear that the Monterey Bay Canyon is shallow compared with other underwater features around the world.

"It's so small and insignificant," he said Thursday, pointing to his miniature model of the underwater chasm."You can see that it's not an unusual depth at all."

Folmsbee, a former Sun Microsystems electrical engineer, employs satellite technology and mathematical exaggeration in the design of his multicolored and very bumpy globes.

His newest land and seafloor examples were on display at the University Inn and Conference Center.

The trenches on Seafloor Globe 150X are magnified, depth-wise, 150 times.
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"A guy in Minnesota," Folmsbee said, bought one as a Christmas gift.

The venture began because Folmsbee could find no globes on the market that met his own standards for detail.

"I went to Toys R Us," he said."They were selling the same globe as the one I looked at when I was 8 years old."

For ,50, he bought a CD-ROM with all the satellite data he needed to create an updated, accurate model of the earth's surface.

When determining the degree of exaggeration he should apply to the earth's features, Folmsbee used an admittedly unscientific method.

"It's how they looked best," he says.

Folmsbee is hoping to sell his globes to libraries and museums, and to a segment of the general population.His globes are currently on display at six retail stores, including Buck's World in Capitola and Apple Hill Furniture in Santa Cruz.

He admits the ,1,200 and ,1,000 price tags seem forbidding.

The globes, he said, cost a lot to make.He's hoping large future orders will allow help him to lower the per-globe price.

To produce the globes, laser beams are shot into a tank of liquid plastic.This is done at a manufacturing plant in Orange County.Folmsbee then spraypaints the globes, and hand-paints the features.

Alan Folmsbee creates relief globes unlike any others in the world. (Shmuel Thaler / Sentinel)
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said Folmsbee.

His disappointing search was the incentive for starting the business he'd been considering.In January he formed the Relief Globe Co., which makes contoured globes using the latest scientific data.

To start his business, Folmsbee, who holds a master's in electrical engineering, drew a picture of what he wanted - a spiky globe.

Once he completed some research and discovered the modern 3D printer, he wrote a computer program that would take the geographical data he was using - public domain information - and turn it into plastics data.

"It turns out nobody else in the world is doing this, that I know of," he said.
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Folmsbee has produced a seafloor globe.Other globes in the pipeline include Mars, Venus and what Folmsbee calls "unearthly products" - simulated globes of fantasy planets that he plans to market to motion picture and animation companies.

Besides the globes, the company will offer other products, ranging from a $2 paper map to a $100,000 moon globe product, which includes all copyrights.

"It takes time for the human mind to comprehend what it's seeing," said Folmsbee of the benefit of using his globe.
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Owner: Alan Folmsbee.

Location: 13266 Highway 9, Unit D, Boulder Creek.

According to Alan Folmsbee, founder of The Relief Globe Company, "Science and art have been melded together to define the shapes of these globes.
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In addition, Folmsbee donated three of his Earth Globes with 300-times exaggeration to the California School for the Blind so that students could feel the Earth's topography and the differences in the globes' lowlands and peaks.
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The Relief Globe Company was founded by Alan Folmsbee in June, 2004.A former Sun Microsystems executive, Folmsbee holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut.He has patents on 15 inventions and developed all of the engineering tasks for the designs of the shapes of the globes using public domain geographical information.In addition, Folmsbee can design custom globes for oceanographers and geophysicists.

Alan Folmsbee of Boulder Creek left Sun Microsystems to bring the world a better high-relief globe.
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The cardboard-and-plastic globe that gathered dust in your elementary school classrooms is obsolete, as far as Alan Folmsbee is concerned."Stagnant.
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Folmsbee is the first to employ satellite-collected data about the Earth's surface to turn out globes that are positively spiky with mountains.

The current version of his land globe is exaggerated 250 times; the sea-floor globe is exaggerated 150 times.Exaggeration is what relief globes are all about.Without it, said Folmsbee, "If you had an 18-inch globe of the Earth and the Himalayas were in proportion to that without exaggeration, they'd only be as tall as three pieces of paper are thick."A typical relief globe, the kind with the gentle bumps, is exaggerated about 15 times, he said.

Why 250 times?"Artistic judgment," he said.

It's hard to keep one's hands off them.Look how the California mountains tower over the long Central Valley.Check out that vast desert in the heart of the Himalayas -- who knew?India and Florida are barely above sea level; Greenland and Antarctica are massive -- "puffy," says Folmsbee.
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Folmsbee gave one of his globes, an early model with 300-times exaggeration, to the California School for the Blind on Wednesday.The school already owned a 50-year-old relief globe as well as a collection of relief maps.But on his, said Folmsbee, they can "feel the subtleties of the lowlands and the giant heights."
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Folmsbee, 53, works out of a small studio, where he designs the globes using public-domain data, using a computer program that tells an ultraviolet laser at Spectrum 3-D in Orange County where to focus.
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Each is hand-painted by Folmsbee, back in Boulder Creek.
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Folmsbee, in turn, hopes to be able to increase the detail.The current globes use a 20-mile grid of "data points" or measurements; that is, the points are 20 miles apart.He'd like to be able to get that down to two miles.

But then Folmsbee, having graduated from the micro world of chip architecture, is thinking big.You should see his computer simulation of a Mars relief globe. (In fact, you can: See www.reliefglobe.com.) Unimpeded by gravity and unshaven by erosion, the volcanoes of Mars look like handles at one end of the misshapen planet.Very cool.

Written by Alan Folmsbee, Founder of The Relief Globe Company