just me

Here’s the original Washington Post article: The Devil Is in the Digits

And here’s a good, if terse, synopsis of the article from Cognitive Daily: Nice analysis of why the Iranian election is probably fraudulent

As Bob Dylan so famously sang, These Times They Are a-Changin’…

More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops

If one guy can do this in his spare time (and $500,000) then why can’t big corporations and/or the government do something half as useful? Democrats tell us the the government can solve all of our problems, while Republicans claim that it’s big corporations and the free market that will come to our rescue. Personally, I think both camps are full of shit. I prefer to believe in people.

Read more about Mike and his home at Scientific American.

This is such a freaking cool idea. Sure, it’s a concept and is largely untested, but it combines brilliant architecture and design with sound science. If I had gobs of money I would throw millions at Mexican-born designer Agustin Otegui and get this on the market. We’re dependent on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine at the moment, but we won’t always be. Nature is constantly evolving and improving, and so should humanity.

From CNN…

Organic by Design
As a product designer, Agustin Otegui’s has to “think big” about the objects he creates. From novel portable chairs made out of shovels to chrome radiators that look like modern works of art, he recasts the mundane in a modernist and functional new light.

The Nano Vent Skin forms an organic skin around a building providing its energy needs.

Yet when he got thinking about how he could help with solutions to mitigate climate change he started thinking small. Very small, in fact.

His futuristic concept is called the Nano Vent-Skin (NVS) and the design — to wrap buildings in an organic lattice skin made up of micro wind turbines — is radical… read the rest of the article…

His blog & his portfolio site

My wife and I took a chance the other night and rented a movie that we had never heard of before — “King of California.” It stars Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood and was released in 2007. Both my wife and I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up, and I highly suggest that you rent it from somewhere and watch it very soon. If you’re a Netflix junky, you can find it here.