...because my day was once (temporarily) made when a stranger clandestinely sent me their vCard via bluetooth while cruising under the east river on the E train. I surfaced, called the number, and immediately realized I had been spammed by some Korean barbeque place. henceforth, no device of mine will ever be 'discoverable.' -jw

...because it's important to ask questions. -jw

UK architecture website BD online asked Austin Williams, author of new book The Enemies of Progress, and Pooran Desai of BioRegional Quintain. We excerpt a bit:

Austin Williams says YES: "The mantra “less is more” has gone from being a defining moment in modernist thought to the unquestioned orthodoxy of our environmental age. Unfortunately, its progressive content has been stripped away.

Efficiency used to encourage us to design creatively in order to, as Buckminster Fuller implied, do more and more. Now, environmental efficiency states that using less is an end in itself. Sustainability is a moral injunction for restraint. Architecture has become a car...

...because I sometimes have trouble with the distinction between Gary Busey and Nick Nolte, and perhaps this will help me tell the difference. Also, one wonders under what circumstances an 11-year-old gets to interview Gary Busey.

Eyebeam Winter 2008 Resident Joe Winter makes sculptures that re-purpose familiar technological systems and undermine their functional sense. Past works have targeted sound-related technologies and objects, and have included: a cassette tape that draws three-dimensional moving images; pianos driving in endless circles; and telephones that talk only to each other. Recent work revolves around contemporary technologies of image production. Joe is currently assembling a subjective astrophotographic archive using an office photocopier as an observational instrument with which to catalog fake stars.

http://www.severalprojects.com

At This happened in March, Jack from Schulze & Webb gave a presentation on the development of Olinda, a prototype commissioned by BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D. Olinda has now arrived and it looks fantastic…

“Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.”

“Six lights on Olinda show when a close friend is listening to the radio, using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC’s website for sharing ‘now playing’ information. Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network.”

Additional hardware modules can be snapped on to the base unit . This allows further expansion of the radio through purchased modules or possibly consumer created hardware. Examples of possibly modules included in the pdf.

“The hardware interface is made a feature with sprung copper connectors, and magnets mounted in rounded guides pull the modules together to a solid whole. It’s kept visible behind a clear, orange cap, and begs to be used.”

Olinda has two dials to tune: the outer scroll stations alphabetically; the inner one scrolls only your most listened.

The process of research, design and development that Olinda went through is a really interesting story. Soon we will put up a video of the This happened talk, but additional information & design detail can be found in the pdf pamphlet.

Unfortunately they are not for sale as the BBC don’t sell consumer hardware, however…

“Olinda is a design prototype. Conventionally, the implementations of and protocols behind concepts like the hardware API, social sharing of listening and other novelties developed for this radio might attract intellectual property protection.

To encourage development of these ideas, the BBC has agreed to waive certain rights, following a pattern which has proved successful on the Web, there called the ‘Creative Commons Attribution License’. This licence allows for sharing and remixing of a work, provided the original author is credited in the derivative work. It means remixing is supported without requiring any lengthy negotiations or discussion.”

I’m really pleased that the BBC commissioned this work as S&W have done a really fine job. Creating it under a more open licence is even better.

View from a grain elevator in Greensburg. Nearly all of the town's buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged by the May 4, 2007 tornado.
The middle of nowhere and the center of everything. That is how it feels in Greeensburg, Kansas right now. May 4 (Sunday) is the anniversary of the storm that destroyed the town. It is a bit surreal all that has occurred in the past year. And this week just seems reflective of that year. A multitude of media outlets from around the world is in town and the President is coming to speak and acknowledge the success of the recovery. There are over 30 buildings being rebuilt to exemplary levels of energy efficiency and green buildi...

We've blogged before about tools for visualising social networks, for instance who met who at a conference and this tool to visualise election donations, and written about analyses of whole country's social networks. It was only a matter of time before these technologies made their way onto sites like Facebook and MySpace, and sure enough there's now a piece of software called Nexus which draws network graphs of your Facebook friends.Each friend is represented by a black dot, and the software draws lines showing who is friends with who, then darkens the lines when people also have interests in common. Another app called Visualiser does something similar, but with a far less useful display and fewer options.Baring my soul, here are Nexus' representations of my friendset:I find the second style much more intuitive, but the first one throws up some interesting results. You can see that there are several big clusters, which are unsurprising: schoolfriends, university friends and so forth.However it splits my university friends into several clusters, which as far as I can see don't correspond to their real-life groupings. In other words it's good at pinning down which groups of people all know each other, but despite taking loads of data on activities and interests it can't spot the strong friendship groups within those clusters.I would really like to apply this sort of network analysis to a Facebook group (the New Scientist group for instance). I'm interested to find out how linked the members are, and what shape the network takes.Is the group spreading by word of mouth (and thus strongly linked) or just by people searching for us? Unfortunately none of the apps I've found can be applied to a group, so I'm thwarted (FriendWebs claims to, but I can't get it to work). If anyone knows a way to do this, let us know!Lastly, while playing with these applications I discovered one that should appeal to scientists everywhere. MyTypicalFriend runs through your list of friends, their interests and so forth, and calculates your average friend, simplifying the whole complicated socialising thing no end. This is apparently my typical friend:Michael Marshall has reduced friendship to a list of middle-of-the-road attributes

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The world's first billion-dollar home, commissioned for a petrochemical tycoon (surprise!) from India, will be a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai. Forbes mentions that hanging hydroponic gardens that "lower the energy footprint" of the house by absorbing heat and sunlight will dot the exterior of the first six floors. All of which, incidentally, are devoted to parking.

There's a slideshow here and an article here.

Via Archinect.

A young Canadian inventor named Ben Gulak has created an innovative new electric motorbike that takes some of the lessons learned from the Segway device, but implements them in cooler package. The bike, called the Uno, looks from its profile like a strange powered unicycle but actually employs two wheels side-by-side. Riders lean forward to accelerate -- a feature used by the Segway, and can hit a top speed of 25 mph in its current configuration. The Uno also makes use of a set of gyros to enhance ease of balance, and the wheels are independently operated making turning much more precise. ...

Not to be outdone by the Time 100, the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect have together released a list of the Top 100 public intellectuals -- with voting. Many TEDTalks favorites appear on the list, and you can help choose the eventual top 20 by voting for your very own top 5. From Foreign Policy's site:

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg -- and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about "the bottom billion."

See the full list of 100 >>

This striking modern structure cuts a profile every bit as sleek as it is streamlined for efficiency. It is composed of four single family units joined by a flowing fusion of glass and “smog-eating” photo-catalytic concrete, creating a series of separate yet structurally connected spaces. Italian architects Iosa Ghini Associati designed the residence to integrate seamlessly into its sweeping Mediterranean landscape, and its airy day-lit interiors benefit from a slick set of green features including adjustable solar panels, rainwater recycling, and a heat storage system.

(more…)

A new model of Europe's Earth's crust has been made. The Earth's crust is, on global average around 40 kilometers deep. In relation to the total diameter of the Earth with approx. 12800 kilometers this appears to be rather shallow, but precisely these upper kilometers of the crust, the human habitat, is of special interest for us. Europe's crust shows an astonishing diversity: for example the crust under Finland is as deep as one only expects for crust under a mountain range such as the Alps.

The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary boasts 22,000 pages of definitions. While that may seem far from succinct, new research suggests the reference manual is meticulously organized to be as concise as possible -- a format that mirrors the way our brains make sense of and categorize the countless words in our vast vocabulary.

The Final Jeopardy blog posts a video each day's Final Jeopardy question. (thx, daniel)

(link)

Thursday night at Town Hall, the Natural Resources Defense Council presented E.O. Wilson interviewed by the author and New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert. Father of biodiversity, "Darwin's Natural Heir", Pulitzer Prize winner, author of 25 books, ecologist, and humanist...

Lucas123 writes "The same Xerox lab that brought us Ethernet, the GUI and the mouse has demonstrated paper that can be reused after printed text automatically deletes itself from its surface in a day. Instead of trashing or recycling after one use, a single piece of paper can be reused up to 100 times. 'The paper contains specially coded molecules that create a print after being exposed to ultraviolet light emitted from a thin bar in a printer. The ultraviolet bar itself is very small, so it can be used in mobile printers. The technology could also be useful for network printing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A while back we posted about the Texas-sized "island" of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, and marveled that there weren't pictures of the monstrosity. Now we have them, thanks to the folks at Vice. They hired a boat and struck out for the North Pacific Gyre, the vortex of currents where the trash apparently accumulates. Check out the 12-part "Garbage Island" video series. In episode nine they enter the gyre. What they encounter is an "unfathomable bummer." The trash hasn't gathered in a huge, amalgamated mass (this rumor was always a little suspect). That would have been a big problem, but one with clear boundaries. Instead, limitless volumes of plastic scraps are dispersed throughout the ocean, hopelessly entangled with the natural environment. It's bad news, we know, but worth confronting. Via PSFK.

For his 30th birthday last month, New Yorker Scott Ballum embarked on the Consume®econnection Project, a year-long effort to meet the people who make the stuff he buys. For everything he consumes, Scott wants to establish a personal connection with someone along the production chain, be it a designer, a factory worker, or even a trucker. He's chronicling the experience online. Barely two months in, Scott has already encountered some obstacles, but a recent trip to the Maker's Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky was rewarding. We'll be following the project with interest. The Maker's Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky When we finally snuck away from the pimento cheese finger sandwiches and headed towards some buildings not on the tour, we found ourselves approaching a tall, burly fellow in a brown MM sweatshirt, work boots, and well-worn cowboy hat. A Godsend. Jude is a barrel-roller. He is one of about 18 guys who rolls empty barrels off trucks from the warehouse into the cistern, where they are filled with whiskey ready to become bourbon, and then rolls the full barrels back onto another truck to go back to the warehouse. 360 barrels a day, each one 150 pounds empty, 500+ pounds full. But as Jude put it, "It's not so bad, you let the whiskey do the work." Given that all of the Maker's Mark Bourbon in the world is distilled in Loretto, and that Jude is one of only eighteen people who move these barrels, there's a high likelihood that much of the Maker's I've consumed in bars or at home, and will continue to consume, was aged in barrels he's rolled. Vats of bourbon

In "The Tuymans Experiment," the acclaimed Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and some art-world collaborators punk the plebes. The painter—whose work sells for millions at auction and whose importance is, we're assured, beyond dispute—paints a mural on a busy Antwerp street. A hidden camera records whether passersby stop to appreciate the work of a master. It's a thought-provoking video. We're all for public art, and the modest Tuymans is a good sport. But, when only 4% of passersby stop, the narrator hopes that "these numbers will wake people up...[to] take more interest in art." We're a little uncomfortable with the suggestion that a busy student, or surgeon, or postal worker, is obligated to stop just because a Tuymans painting is there. After all, people routinely walk past entire museums full of art for perfectly good reasons. Just for fun, we'd be curious to try the opposite experiment: take a painter without critical credentials, put them in a respected gallery, and secretly tape the praise of the aesthetes. Thanks, Noella.