Recently, the GCCDS has been researching a variety of building systems and their applications to architecture on the coast. We have looked at everything from whole-building systems (such as structural insulated panels or insulated concrete forms) to individual components (floor finishes, insulation types, etc). For each system, we attempt to analyze its advantages and disadvantages in many areas, including strength, thermal performance, ease of construction, environmental impact, and affordability.
Even when we are finished, our research will only partially cover the vast number of building systems and products that are available. With our guide, we hope to compare a variety of the most common and most promising systems in a way that is useful and easy to understand. If you have experience with any building technologies that we should include, or have ideas for useful ways to present and share this information, let me know.
Information about building systems is not always easily accessible. ToolBase is one site that does a great job collecting information about different systems, but if superior building technologies are to become more widespread, we need more tools for sharing that information. In particular, we need ways of sharing information on the regional level. Throughout the Gulf Coast and the deep South, there are major climate factors and other issues that affect buildings. These include long summers with high temperatures and humidity, seasonal threats from hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding, mold and insects, expansive wetlands and other environmentally sensitive areas, high levels of poverty and inequality, and more. The GCCDS is committed to seeking regionally appropriate design solutions for the Gulf Coast.
I know that it's been a while since I wrote and I should say why. I miss my Dad a lot and on today of all days I feel that it's important to write a post and tell you how I feel and just why I've had a hard time writing these past few months.
I guess that I never thought something could change my life so dramatically. It doesn't really hit you all the way until you need someone for something and you realize just how interdependent we all are. It doesn't have to be anything of great importance but you pick up that phone and you realize that the person you want to hear on the other line isn't going to pick up no matter how much you wish they could.
One of my good friend's on the coast who's father was also battling cancer was rushed to the hospital Monday and just couldn't hold on any longer. In a response to an e.mail I sent expressing to her my condolences she responded and said the following:
"My Dad was the best man I have ever had the privilege to know. I can't say enough about the man he was and he fought the cancer so freakin hard. I am so proud of him. Can't imagine not talking to him several times each day. My brain can't process any of this yet."
It's been six months since my Dad passed and this is something I've come to realize you just don't process. You can go over it again and again, but it never feels better, it just hurts less sometimes. I never thought it would hurt so much to lose someone but it does and I don't really know how to explain it except to say that I have such a huge chasm inside of me that was my Father. His love and generosity filled me with so much strength that it's almost impossible to function sometimes thinking about the fact that he's gone.
I think of how happy he was when my sister got married and when she and her husband started to have kids, his grandchildren and how much he loved them and the pride he took in them. I feel so horrid because all I can think is how unfair that he never got a chance to see any of that with me, or to make it to my brother's graduation, or see our grandchildren.
I hope that one day when I have children of my own this day can be filled with happiness instead of sorrow but it's hard to imagine that right now. I want to thank everyone of my friends and family who are going through this with me and are there every step of the way. I've been working a lot both at my job and on a number of other projects that I'll try to showcase this week in individual posts as well as laying out what is next for upyourarchitecture.com and the blog.
Happy Fathers Day to all the fathers out there and for those of you out there that haven't called your fathers, do it. Tell them how much you love them or just thank them for what they've done for you. It's more than you can ever know.
This is Your Downtown:
The Future of Downtown Moss Point
An exhibition from May 7th to June 1st, 2009
Institute for Compatible Development at the Scruggs Center
4836 Main Street, Moss Point (click here for directions)
Moss Point’s downtown is your downtown.
Come celebrate the improvements that are on the way.
The vision for downtown is clear: a place where people can enjoy the beauty of the Escatawpa River, where locals and visitors can live, shop, and dine, and where modern facilities host the center of civic life and public services.
The people of Moss Point, its leaders, and teams of architects, planners, and engineers have been working to make that vision a reality by improving waterfront parks, creating public buildings to make the city proud, and laying the infrastructure for new business opportunities.
The Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, the City of Moss Point, the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, and the Tulane University Regional Urban Design Center invite you to see and talk about the shape this work is taking.
Opening Presentation and Celebration
Thursday, May 7th, 2009 7:00 PM. Scruggs Center
For additional information, e-mail scrim (at) gccds.msstate.edu
Chapter 542: Science Friday! Entry 20: Separation of Church, Science, and State
Photo by Ron Edmonds President Barack Obama signs an executive order on stem cells and a presidential memorandum on scientific integrity, Monday, March 9, 2009, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. AP
NPR.org, March 9, 2009 · President Barack Obama removed restrictions on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research put in place by the Bush administration, fulfilling a controversial campaign promise. He also issued on Monday a presidential memorandum intended to further separate politics and science.
"Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident," Obama said Monday. "They result from painstaking and costly research; from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit; and from a government willing to support that work," he said.
New Momentum For Stem Cell Research
The stem cell restrictions, imposed by former President George W. Bush, limited federal spending for embryonic stem cell research to a small number of cell lines created before Aug. 9, 2001.
Bush's restrictions were strongly supported by the anti-abortion community, which contends that destroying human embryos is morally wrong. But researchers say many of the early cell lines have major drawbacks. Scientists have created hundreds of other cell lines since then, which have been off-limits to researchers who receive federal dollars.
Embryonic stem cell research is believed to hold the key for better treatments and possible cures for diseases, including diabetes and paralysis. The cells have the potential to turn into any cell in the human body, which is what makes them so promising to researchers. Proponents, from former first lady Nancy Reagan to the late actor Christopher Reeve, have long called for ending the limits on federal spending.
But the research is highly controversial because embryonic cells are derived from human embryos, which are destroyed in the process.
And while the new order will allow researchers to use federal funds to work with new cell lines, a legislative ban on the use of federal dollars to create new stem cell lines remains in place.
The president said that he could not guarantee more research would lead to new treatments and cures, but that opening up new research was worth the gamble to "make up for lost ground."
The National Institute of Health now has 120 days to come up with new guidelines for the use of stem cells, which Obama said will include prohibiting the use of cloning for human reproduction.
Most research institutes are likely to wait to allow researchers to use federal funds for new stem cells until the federal guidelines are announced. Researchers will also still be subject to state regulations and the guidelines of their individual research institutions, which may be stricter than the federal requirements.
A Controversial Decision
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) has been working to overturn the Bush administration restrictions since they were first imposed. The next step, she said, is for Congress to write federal standards for the research funding into law, "in large part because we don't want to see this become a pingpong ball between different administrations like the international family planning issues and other issues have become." Those policies have switched back and forth depending on which party is in control of the White House.
Opponents of embryonic stem cell research funding are already crying foul. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) issued a statement asking Obama to "re-evaluate" his decision. "The president has rolled back important protections for innocent life, further dividing our nation at a time when we need greater unity to tackle the challenges before us," Rep. Boehner said.
Virginia Republican Rep. Eric Cantor said on CNN that "federal funding of embryonic stem cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning."
'Restoring Scientific Integrity'
Obama also signed a presidential memorandum on Monday directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to "develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making." The memorandum, Obama explained, would ensure that his administration's policies would be based on "the soundest science," and that scientific advisers be appointed "based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology."
DeGette says that during the Bush administration, scientific policy was often dictated by things other than scientific evidence. "It started with global climate change, where the Bush administration announced they really didn't believe it was true, contrary to the scientific evidence. And then it moved all the way through (to) abstinence-only sex education, stem cell research and many other issues," she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Also, here's audio via NPR regarding the last section and Obama's promise to "restore scientific integrity":
*click* The 'Obama Effect' On Technology
For further listening on the topic, here's a great piece from last February on NPR regarding stem cells:
Talk of the Nation, February 22, 2008 · *click* What Makes a Stem Cell a Stem Cell?
Both stem cells and cancer cells have the unusual ability to renew themselves. In tumor formation, formerly specialized tissue cells become "reprogrammed" to form tumor tissue. A similar reprogramming takes place in the creation of stem cells. So what lets a stem cell know it's a stem cell, and not a cancer cell?
Stem cell researcher George Daley talks about the discovery of a protein that may help give stem cells their unusual multi-function abilities. The protein, named Lin-28, appears to help regulate the activity of certain small RNA molecules found in both stem cells and cancer.
Following up on last week's Science Friday we're in ur space peepin' ur planets! For the next several years over 100,000 planets are going to be surveyed through a space initiative to find other planets similar to earth
Spacecraft blasts off in search of 'Earths'
(CNN) -- NASA launched its Kepler spacecraft just before 11 p.m. Friday in a mission that the agency says may fundamentally change humanity's view of itself.
This image shows part of the Milky Way region of the sky where the Kepler spacecraft will be pointing.
The Kepler spacecraft blasted into space on top of a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The telescope will search our corner of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-like planets.
"This is a historical mission. It's not just a science mission," NASA Associate Administrator Ed Weiler said during a prelaunch news conference.
"It really attacks some very basic human questions that have been part of our genetic code since that first man or woman looked up in the sky and asked the question: Are we alone?" Watch iReport video of launch
Kepler contains a special telescope that will stare at 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years as it trails Earth's orbit around the Sun.
The spacecraft will look for tiny dips in a star's brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front of it -- an event called a transit. Video Watch how astronomers will try to find 'Earths' »
The instrument is so precise that it can register changes in brightness of 20 parts per million in stars that are thousands of light years away.
"Being able to make that kind of a sensitive measurement over a very large number of stars was extremely challenging," Kepler project manager James Fanson said.
"So we're very proud of the vehicle we have built. This is a crowning achievement for NASA and a monumental step in our search for other worlds around other stars." See what the telescope looks like and which part of the galaxy it will monitor »
Are we alone?
The $600 million mission is named after Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German astronomer who was the first to correctly explain planetary motion. His discoveries combined with modern technology may soon help to answer whether we are alone in the universe or whether Earth-like worlds inhabited by some type of life are common.
"We won't find E.T., but we might find E.T.'s home," said William Borucki, science principal investigator for the Kepler mission.
About 330 "exoplanets" -- those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system -- have been discovered since the first was confirmed in 1995.
Most are gas giants like Jupiter, but some have been classified as "super earths," or worlds several times the mass of our planet, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution who serves on the Kepler Science Council. They are too hot to support life, he added, calling them "steam worlds."
Europe's COROT space telescope caused a stir last month when it spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice that of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.
Scientists have marveled how strange some of the alien worlds are.
"The density of these planets has been astounding," Borucki said. "We're finding planets that float like a piece of foam on water, [with] very, very low densities. We're finding some planets where the densities are heavier than that of lead."
The Kepler telescope, however, is seeking something much more familiar: Earth-like planets with rocky surfaces, orbiting in their stars' habitable, or "Goldilocks," zones -- not too hot or too cold, but just right for liquid water to exist. Video Watch a NASA scientist explain where life could exist »
Quest for a 'pale blue dot'
Once Kepler spots a planet, scientists will be able to calculate its size, mass, orbital period, distance from star and surface temperature, Boss said. He called the mission a "step one" that will tell astronomers how hard it is to find nearby habitable worlds.
"Once we know how many there really are ... then NASA will be able to build space telescopes that can actually go out and take a picture of that nearby 'Earth' and measure the elements and compounds in its atmosphere of the planet and give us some hint as to whether or not it's got life," Boss said.
Boss believes that there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy. He said scientists should know by 2013 -- the end of Kepler's mission -- whether life in the universe could be widespread.
The 20-year goal is to someday take a picture of a pale blue dot orbiting a nearby star, said Debra Fischer, an astronomy professor at San Francisco State University, during a NASA news conference.
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Boss called it a potentially unprecedented time of discovery for scientists.
"Sometimes, people call this the golden age of astronomy. I think it's more like the platinum age of astronomy. It's beyond gold," Boss said.
Bre Pettis is a founder of NYCResistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn. Besides being a TV host and Video Podcast producer, he's created new media for Etsy.com, hosted Make: Magazine's Weekend Projects podcast, and has been a schoolteacher, artist, and puppeteer. Bre is passionate about invention, innovation, and all things DIY. He developed a really amazing manifesto of accomplishing things called The Cult of Done. Here are the 13 principles of the Cult and a visualization of the principles via James Provost. I think that this is an amazing way of looking at the power of confidence and intention. I am totally loving the visualization utilizing the Rubik's cubes as well. Dyno-mite.
Dear Members of the Cult of Done,
I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
Also, we're ready to break ground on the Design/Build studio for Mary Pat + Tony's house and we're just waiting on the permit. This is exactly what I wanted the studio to be and I can't be more excited about what we're doing right now. There are some other students down with their professor doing work near the new Walmart in Pass Christian and we invited them to join us for our seminar last night which was a great experience for everyone involved. I love our weekly Wednesday evening seminar but having new energy and fresh ideas and perspectives as part of the conversation helps us to evaluate what we are doing and take stock of things we may have forgotten and we value in making decisions in our practice.
Welcome to the fourth edition of *click*itecture. Each week (or so), I'll be wrapping up some of the most notable news items I've stumbled across while surfing the waves of the internets. These may be related to either end of the Mississippi, cross-disciplinary work, student or competition based info, or anything that may suit my fancy. Occasionally there will intentionally, or unintentionally, be themes for the week.The main stories will be in the headlines and then at the end of the column there will be "Quick Clicks".
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAUHAUS!
The legendary Bauhaus movement turns 90 this year and the anniversary is being marked by exhibitions from Tokyo to New York. The school was founded by a young architect, Walter Gropius, who wanted to shape products for the future and create a more just society.
*click* http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,610283,00.html
NO RESPAWNING IN REAL LIFE
Conex containers are rugged and durable enough to stand up to the rigors of troop training. MOUT structures made from containers are re-locatable, reconfigurable, and deployable via standard means of national and international transportation, namely truck, rail, and ship. - via Subtopia
*click* http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2009/03/galleries-for-art-of-war-play.html
The exhibition, titled The State of Affairs: A New Architecture for a New Education, is based on a show presented in Zurich in 2004 that culled prime examples (largely from Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia) of how architects can provide the best—which also means most flexible and adaptive—environment for learning."
From the blog Uptown Musings (which I recommend checking out):
Ah, the good old days. In this case, for some of us, anyway, that means the 1980s. The decade of tight zipper-legged jeans, leg warmers, big hair, and Thriller. In Uptown it was the decade of the McPunks.
The McPunks were the mostly teenage punks with mohawks and piercings who used the Uptown McDonald's as their primary hangout. McDonald's had a different building back then, with a small patio separating the restaurant from Hennepin. At the time they were a highly visible, as well as controversial, part of the Uptown street scene. Some people thought they were scary: bad kids who meant trouble, and who undoubtedly would run amok in the neighborhood as soon as they got bored with nursing a Coke or cold fries on the patio. Others didn't have a problem with the McPunks themselves, but worried that they would scare away more conventional customers. Still others just saw them as kids with a different style who didn't hurt anyone, and in some ways might even help the neighborhood avoid becoming too tarnished with the gentrification brush. Calhoun Square was still brand new after all, and the neighborhood was starting to regain its position as a regional draw, and a bunch of teenagers with spikes on their head and safety pins in their noses might not fly with visitors of Edina. On the other hand, conventional visitors from the 'burbs didn't agree with all of the locals, many of whom were still bitter about the new urban mall in their midst.
The reality, of course, was that many of the McPunks were themselves from Edina. Or, if not Edina, then at least southwest Minneapolis. While there were some examples of vandalism and other crimes possibly attributed to some of the McPunks, for the most part they were good kids who simply chose to express themselves through the radical hairstyles and clothing of the time.
What does this mean, if anything, for those of us in Uptown today? I think a lot of people look back to the 1980s as the last decade in which Uptown had any claim to "weirdness," the last hoorah before national chains moved in in the 1990s and rents and housing prices began to escalate at even faster rates. The McPunks were a symbol that Uptown was an eccentric place and somehow different from other city (or suburban) neighborhoods. They were also a sign of the tensions of the neighborhood; did Uptown want to be weird? And where did the balance tip between weird-exotic and weird-scary? It wasn't an easy question, and was in some ways the neighborhood's clash-of-cultures of its time.
I'm pretty conventional in a lot of ways. My hair's its natural color, and I'm too cheap and lazy to get a cut that would involve too much maintenance, let alone put in the kind of time that must have been necessary to maintain one of those elaborate spiked 'dos. But even as a kid I was never bothered by the McPunks. They were just part of the landscape, just like the old people at McDonald's - who also hung around for hours, nursing a coffee or doing crossword puzzles - and the rest of the Uptown regulars. And while I'm not not a McDonald's regular myself, I do miss that old patio and its place in Uptown's cultural history.
Amid the economic woes that are forcing retail stores and arts organizations alike to shut their doors, I'm excited to share some good news: the heart of Northeast Minneapolis' arts district is getting a new record store. Shuga Records, currently among the top three sellers of vintage vinyl on eBay, is leasing the former site of the Minnesota Center for Photography on 13th Avenue NE -- and opening a retail store in late May or early June. Run by my friends Adam Rosen and Danielle Nester, the shop will sell records and CDs, editioned art, books and more. Look for their new website to launch soon, with information about all they're planning, including a music-and-art blog, in-store performances and, hopefully, a Shuga Twitter account that can alert vinyl junkies about new rarities Adam's finding. Also, Shuga is talking to a local artist about commissioning the first in an annually refreshed mural for the building's west wall.
Also, I just have to give a quick shout out to Penny Arcade. They're the big boys on the block, but consistently produce some of the funniest stuff out there. There's a reason why it's stuck around so long and here's one from today...
The Whedonite's Dilemma: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/2/27/
So we've finally made it to Friday and here we are kicking back off in grand style with a mega-block of Science pertaining to the Earth and it's resources. Check it out!
(CNN) -- As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.
Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.
There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."
He made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.
Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.
"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.
"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."
Putting a number on alien worlds
Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.
Galaxy Quest
• The Milky Way is believed to be more than 13 billion years old.
• It is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe.
• The Milky Way has a circumference of about 250,000-300,000 light years.
• It is about 100,000 light years in diameter.
• There are three types of galaxies: ellipticals, spirals and irregulars.
• The Milky Way is a large disk-shaped barred spiral galaxy. (A barred galaxy has a bar-shaped structure in its middle.)
Source: Space.com
In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.
Duncan Forgan, a doctoral candidate at the university who led the study, said he was surprised by the hardiness of life on these other worlds.
"The computer model takes into account what we refer to as resetting or extinction events. The classic example is the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs," Forgan said.
"I half-expected these events to disallow the rise of intelligence, and yet civilizations seemed to flourish."
Forgan readily admits the results are an educated guess at best, since there are still many unanswered questions about how life formed on Earth and only limited information about the 330 "exoplanets" -- those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system -- discovered so far.
The first was confirmed in 1995 and the latest just this month when Europe's COROT space telescope spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice the size of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.
Hunt for habitable planets
NASA is hoping to find much more habitable worlds with the help of the upcoming Kepler mission. The spacecraft, set to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida next week, will search for Earth-size planets in our part of the galaxy.
Kepler contains a special telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years. It will look for small dips in a star's brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front of it -- an event called a transit.
"It's akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night," said Kepler project manager James Fanson during a during a NASA news conference.
The focus of the mission is finding planets in a star's habitable zone, an orbit that would ensure temperatures in which life could exist. Video Watch a NASA scientist explain the search for habitable planets »
Boss, who serves on the Kepler Science Council, said scientists should know by 2013 -- the end of Kepler's mission -- whether life in the universe could be widespread.
Finding intelligent life is a very different matter. For all the speculation about the possibility of other civilizations in the universe, the question remains: If the rise of life on Earth isn't unique and aliens are common, why haven't they shown up or contacted us? The contradiction was famously summed up by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in what became known as the Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?"
The answer may be the vastness of time and space, scientists explained.
"Civilizations come and go," Boss said. "Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it's not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it's not going to form for another billion years."
Even if intelligent civilizations did exist at the same time, they probably would be be separated by tens of thousands of light years, Forgan said. If aliens have just switched on their transmitter to communicate, it could take us hundreds of centuries to receive their message, he added.
As for interstellar travel, the huge distances virtually rule out any extraterrestrial visitors. iReport.com: Share your view of the universe
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To illustrate, Boss said the fastest rockets available to us right now are those being used in NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even going at that rate of speed, it would take 100,000 years to get from Earth to the closest star outside the solar system, he added.
"So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn't be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon," Boss said.
Acting as a segue we'll use that video to transfer into green technologies and this great (anti) Clean Coal spot put together by the Coen Brothers:
The SunCat Batteries - DIY prototypes- Rechargeable Batteries with Solar Cells
Project by Knut Karlsen http://blog.bareknut.no/2009/02/rechargeable-batteries-with-solar-cells.html
A little DIY exploration of the ability to toss those batteries out on the window sill to charge up while you're at work. Really simple solutions to really simple problems
Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?
By John Cloud http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879593,00.html
A brief but stimulating text laying out a number of theories and theorists that have engaged in the debate and a humorous anecdotal finish.
That's it for the scavenger hunt. Expect posts on a regular basis and then a site relaunch with regular features in late March. Crawfish and Karaoke tonight. I'll bring my camera.
Oh, and I totally forgot about Multiplex when going through webcomics I love. Here's a LINK and a comic:
I'm in the process of listening to it and also reading Bobby Jindal's rebuttal (which I'm finding to be somewhat hard to swallow) but here is the wordle of the President's speech and the link to the larger version on their site.
Well, as we embark on the second day of scavenging through my life we make our way to Arts and Hobbies. I'm going to break this down into a couple of different categories and just roll on with links from there. So here's the update on what's going on in the world of comics, webcomics, and movies.
COMICS/MOVIES
Obviously there's a lot more I could talk about in terms of comics and movies both but I'll hit on the biggest thing to hit since the first X-Men movie and that's 03.06.09. Watchmen. Now I've heard a couple of uber-geeks that I trust vouch for it. Wil Wheaton loved it. Ain't-It-Cool was buzzing about it. I just hope that it's all I hope it can be. The good news is that it's getting a lot of attention for comics in general and if it can make just a couple of hundred people go out and read the amazing set of books that make up Watchmen it's worth it.
Speaking of reading watchmen Comic Book Resource has an great set of articles they're running by Atom Freeman & Carr D'Angelo as guest writers that is called Re-reading Watchmen that goes through issue by issue talking about the books in depth which I have found really fantastic.
Also, if you check out this article, you'll see that Zack Snyder is already talking about a director's cut to be released IN THEATRES if Watchmen does well enough to warrant it. So go and see Watchmen four or five times in theaters like me and we'll be just fine.
One other quick note in comics, if you love to read comics, especially if you love Marvel you have to check out their digital comic archive. It's only 60 bucks for a year's subscription (which works out to $5 a month) and it's totally worth it. There's more stuff up every day and it's an invaluable artists resource. I bought a subscription for my brother for his birthday and I poke around every once in a while and couldn't say more about it. A.Maz.Ing.
WEBCOMICS
It's strange how you get into different webcomics. Sometimes I get them recommended to me. Other times I ask the brodukes for something new. Occasionally I just happen to stumble upon one and that makes me pretty happy. No matter how I get to them, here's some comics of varying styles and seriousness that I like to read with a little commentary. This list by no means supersedes my links on the site. In fact, I should probably add a couple of these and give them props they rightfully have earned.
The Perry Bible Fellowship
An Eisner-winning comic strip drawn by Nicholas Gurewitch that used to be a weekly but stopped being so in February of 2008. Word on the street is it's coming back this month. I can't wait. Effing hilarious. LINK
Amazing Superpowers
Description from the blog: "These posts were found strapped to vampire bats ascending from the bowels of Hell and were notarized by the devil himself. Apparently, they tell the tales of the puppetmasters of AmazingSuperPowers, Wes and Tony." A dark humor romp every Monday and Thursday. LINK
Botched Spot
This is one that my brother loves as he's still a big wrestling fan. While I like the stuff that focuses on the characters created for the comic more than the WWE/TNA stuff it does give me a chuckle every Monday/Wednesday/Friday. While it's almost always about wrestling the comic above is from a small storyline where the main character was going to train for MMA. Also, they're nearing their 1 year anniversary in March so give 'em a bump! LINK
The Daily Odyssey
Here's one by Brett Muller, a classmate of my brothers and the Ladies to Pranas' (of Ink Dick fame) Peanut Butter. The art style is always wonderfully playful and the anecdotes well conveyed and humorous. Plus, every once in a while, the brodukes makes an appearance :) LINK
Dude-A-Day/Atomic Toy
Here's a set of a couple of comics drawn by Andy Helms (and Nathan Avery on the Buttlord stuff) that I really enjoy. Essentially Andy draws a different set of characters over the span of a week, one a day from October of 2008 to October 2009. Pictured above is the Ghostbusters span as well as a great picture of all he's done so far this year on his wall. LINK
Freak Angels
In the English tradition of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield deliver a weekly 6 pages of canned awesome. I had a chance to catch up to this one and did it in a day. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't because every week I crave Friday and another installment of Freak Angels. This is a must read. LINK
That about does it for today. Stay tuned for tomorrow: ARCHITECTURE!
