The Joker's Fun House Constructed From LEGOS

I would usually wait until Saturday (Fun Time!) to post something like this, but it's too good to wait. Vancouver-based LEGO artist Paul Hetherington (aka “Brickbaron“) made this proving once again that LEGO is the coolest toy ever.

A Fresh Food Movement On Wheels In Boston

Food trucks are all over the Washington D.C. area where I live and delectable, healthy food choices abound both indoors and out. But in Roxbury, a section of Boston, not so much. Thirty percent of the population there, which is mostly black and Hispanic, live below the poverty line and many choose either the low nutrition fast food options available or travel to other neighborhoods to buy food.

That's beginning to change. Cassandria Campbell and her friend Jackson Renshaw have created Fresh Food Generation, a Kickstarter campaign, to bring healty, affordable food options to Roxbury and beyond.

Check out the video below and click HERE for the Grist article I sourced this from to learn more.

Trash Men on Strike? Take It To The Bank!

The trash collectors are on strike in Portugal. Portugal has been hard hit by recession and the government of President Aníbal Cavaco Silva is intending to privatize public services in return for a financial bailout from international banking interests.

What has the public been doing with it's trash? Taking it to the bank.

For more click HERE.

Fun Time! Amazing Street Art!

To see more click HERE.

Now This Is Natural Food

Wes Jackson is attempting to revolutionize agriculture by looking into the past.

Artist Carves Mountainous Landscape From Encyclopedia

Travel Photo of the Week

North Pole

Peanuts Christmas Dance Recreated By Flashmob In NYC

Placemats With Engineering Blueprints For Different Foods

Just in time for Christmas! If you'd like to encourage your child's engineering and culinary skills at the same time, the website Awkward Engineer is offering a series of placemats that feature blueprints for making various easy-to-fix foods.

Included are: peanut butter and jelly sandwich, banana split, ants-on-a-log and s'more. If you lead a busy life, now you can just spread out the ingredients and the placemat in front of your child and they can do the rest.

Only $19.50 for a set of four, but I'm holding out for a set that include crêpes and chicken cordon blue.

Device Translates Animal Thought Into Human Language

Do you wonder what your dog is thinking? Find out with No More Woof.

The head-worn device picks up your dogs brain impulses and "translates" them into short phrases.

Bow wow becomes, "What's for lunch?"

Fun Time! Claymation AND Les Claypool!

What could be better than claymation? Claymation featuring Les Claypool.

Living Wage For Families Campaign In Canada

A few days ago I posted about a website where you could find out what a living wage was in your area. Today I'm posting about a Canadian campaign to raise the minimum wage there to a "living wage".

From the website...

"The Living Wage for Families Campaign raises awareness about the negative impact of low-wage poverty on families and communities throughout BC. It also advocates for what poverty researchers believe is a key solution to the province’s rising poverty rates – regional living wages that ensure basic living expenses such as food, clothing, shelter, transportation and child care can be met.

"Without living wage standards, parents and other caregivers who work for low wages in BC face impossible choices: buy food or heat the house, feed the children or pay the rent. The result is often spiralling debt, constant anxiety and long-term health problems. For many more parents it also means working long hours, often at two or three jobs, just to pay for basic necessities. All of which means little time is spent at home, let alone helping children with school work or participating in community activities."

How long will it take in America for us to realize that we are creating the very poverty that is killing the American Dream?

Again, in the words of the website, "Work should lift you out of poverty, not keep you there."

Sign Painters Documentary

Sign painting is dying art. Almost all signage is created by machines these days and use standardized fonts.

"Sign Painters" is a documentary by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon that chronicles the lives and work of a group of sign painters who still do it the "old way". It is also a cautionary tale about what is lost in the technology-driven rush to compete for work.

Travel Photo of the Week

Boudhanath Temple, Kathmandu, Nepal

Manhattan Micro Home

Derek ‘Deek’ Diedricksen, from Relax Shacks, tours this elegant, beautiful and extremely functional micro-home in Manhattan.

State By State Living Wage Calculator

The briliiant folks at MIT have devised and published a state by state living wage calculator. It starts you at the state level and then lets you zero-in on the county or city are you are interested in. It gives you the threshold amounts for minimum, poverty and living wage for a single adult and then a single adult with one, two or three children and then gives you the same information for two adults.

Very eye-opening.

Cool Tools: The Book!

As a younger man I used the Whole Earth Catalog like folks use the internet today. I would "surf" the pages looking at this tool or that book and the experience really opened up my world. I always hoped that one day I would be able to contribute to its trove of information and wisdom. Alas, they went caput in 1996.

Well one Mr. Kevin Kelly (who once was an editor for Whole Earth Review, a magazine spun off the catalog) has continued that spirit with his online "Cool Tools" and I have had the good fortune to contribute several tool reviews to it.

Now Mr. Kelly has condensed the best tools to book form. And I'm in it. Twice. Below is a photo of the page that my review of the Arturia Moog Modular V is on. You can hunt for my Roland MicroCube review on your own.

Fun Time! Inside The Book: The Art Of Rube Goldberg!

Should The US Consider A 'Maximum Wage' Ratio?

Income disparity is destroying our democracy and our nation. I'm not going to go into how the ratio of top income to bottom income earners has drastically changed since 1950. We all know that.

But now there is a nascent movement afoot to change this. The Swiss are considering action. They are considering capping executive pay at 12 times what the lowest-paid worker at a company makes and they are voting on it this Sunday.

But in America we have a mythology of no limits. No limits to the maximum someone can earn. But we have overlooked that to deliver that myth there must also be no limits to the minimum someone can earn.

I have always said that a nation's mythology will determine it's success or failure and that the inability to change or alter a mythology in the face of failure will guarantee that failure. Doubling down does not work.

In 1950 the average ratio was approximately 9 to 1. Now the average ratio of earnings in America is 354 to 1. For every dollar that the lowest paid worker in America gets the highest paid gets $354. That's the average. We were wildly successful as a nation in 1950. Now, not so much. How can we think there is not a connection here? The greatest disparity is found at J.C. Penny, a failing company. The ratio there is 1795 to 1. Why is the failing CEO of a failing J.C. Penny making 1795 times more than a successful employee at the company?

I think that it is high-time that we answered that question. Maybe it's time to take our heads out of the sand in this country and change our mythology of success before it causes the ultimate failure: national collapse.

Here's are some links to the story about what the Swiss are up to.

NPR story. CNN story. Bloomberg News story.

My KORG Littlebits Synth Has Arrived!

And it sure is fun! This particular patch involves a sequencer going into an oscillator into a second oscillator into a filter (being modulated by the envelope generator triggered by the sequencer!) that feeds a delay that goes into the amp.

Check out more here at littlebits.

Travel Photo of the Week

Kopepe beach, Ogasawara, Japan

Triangular House In Japan

From Small House Bliss comes this unique, two story, 595 square foot triangular house with a mezzanine loft. Downstairs bedroom, complete kitchen.

There are loads of windows and sightlines that extend the length of the house and spaces that borrow from adjacent spaces to make the interior seem bigger.

Wedged between a road and a river channel in west Tokyo, the interior space has been maximized by pushing the walls and roof to the limits of the permitted building envelope.

A Beginning To Fixing Our Schools?

Clintondale High School, north of Detroit, has changed the way they are teaching. With more than half of their ninth graders failing math, science and English, principal Greg Green knew something had to be done and decided to use a flipped approach, where teachers record their lectures for the students to watch at home and the students do their "homework" in class.  It's also relies heavily on outside videos like the popular Khan Academy and Ted Talks.

For more watch this video from The News Hour.

Build A DIY Space Capsule!

Just what you've always wanted to do, right? Here is a visual guide to the construction of space capsule TDS80 which is headed to space in the summer of 2014 on the HEAT2X launch vehicle.

With detailed photos and easy to follow drawings like this, what could go wrong?

Fun Time! Dad Colors In His Kids Drawings!

Tatsputin is a traveling dad and his kids give him a pile of drawings every time he travels for work. This is what he does with them.

Here's his imgur page if you want to see more. Here's his reddit page if you want to know more.

A Backyard Library

This pre-fab library was designed by 3rdSpace for a literature professor to house her collection of books. Click here for more pictures and info.

Artist Converts Her Tiny Studio Into Dreamscapes

Artist JeeYoung Lee uses her entire studio space to create surreal dreamscapes. Click here for more.

Travel Photo of the Week

Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Temple and Monastery, Woodstock, New York

The World's Most Exquisite Libraries

Take a look. Click HERE.

Fear Can Be Inherited

The title of the article featured in Nature Neuroscience is "Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations," but the bottom line is a fear reaction in your parents (especially your father) can be genetically transmitted to you.

From the abstract: "we examined the inheritance of parental traumatic exposure, a phenomenon that has been frequently observed, but not understood. We subjected F0 mice to odor fear conditioning before conception and found that subsequently conceived F1 and F2 generations had an increased behavioral sensitivity to the F0-conditioned odor, but not to other odors. When an odor (acetophenone) that activates a known odorant receptor (Olfr151) was used to condition F0 mice, the behavioral sensitivity of the F1 and F2 generations to acetophenone was complemented by an enhanced neuroanatomical representation of the Olfr151 pathway. Bisulfite sequencing of sperm DNA from conditioned F0 males and F1 naive offspring revealed CpG hypomethylation in the Olfr151 gene. In addition, in vitro fertilization, F2 inheritance and cross-fostering revealed that these transgenerational effects are inherited via parental gametes."

Be careful what you fear. You could be passing that on to your kids.

The Yurt Foundation

Bill Coperthwaite has dedicated his life to the study of the tech of ancient people and applying the lessons learned to modern materials and design.

His organization, The Yurt Foundation, is "a nonprofit educational organization established to gather folk knowledge from the cultures of the world and place it in a contemporary framework, thereby creating a reservoir of ideas for designing ways of living that are simpler, more beautiful and more just." The website is a trove of information on this beautiful building design that, in other cultures, is quite traditional.

His handbuilt homestead (below) in Maine was made entirely from hand tools and house the Foundation and it's library and archives.