Discarded Christmas Trees

It's time.

From a Magnum Photo photo essay.

Sun vs. Coal

Electricity from the grid is getting more expensive. Electricity from photovoltaics is getting cheaper. At what point does solar become less expensive than the power coming from our existing grid?

There's a app for that. Or rather a chart. But it's animated!

The nice folks at Energy Self-Reliant States have created an animated chart that shows you when solar will be cheaper that the existing electricity sources in your area, but in the meantime here are some fun facts...

1. The cost of solar decreases by 7% per year.
2. The grid electricity price increases by 2% per year.

Here's a link to the chart.

William O'Brien Jr's Allandale House

Here's a beautiful house. Three connected A-frames, each with a different roof pitch.

Travel Photo of the Week - How The World Fishes

A fisherman arranges a fishing net as his wife paddles their boat in the waters
of the Periyar river on the outskirts of the southern Indian city of Kochi.

10 Best Places to Experience Music

Love live music? Lonely Planet has a list of the 10 best place to experience live music performances. Three of the locations are in the good ol' USA. What's number one? The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. Of course.

Flying Robots Build Building

Yep, you heard it right. Here's a swarm of flying robots making a building. Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler have released this video showing semi-autonomous flying robots assembling a structure of foam bricks. Sure, now it's only foam, but just wait untill they have flying robots the size of a car. (finally, flying [robot] cars!)

And we think the building trades are under-employed now.

Happy Christmas

Oh, Christmas Tree!

Here's a wonderful photo essay from Magnum Photos on the tradition of Christmas trees. Happy Christmas Eve!

Chanukah Fun Time!

Make your own dreidel! Makerbot lets you 3-D print your own!

Christmas Fun Time!

Need a last minute present for a do-it-yourselfer musician? Here's a great book on making your own string instruments, Handmade Music Factory. In it you'll get instructions for projects such as a washtub bass, a soup can diddley bow, an electrified stomp box and washboard, a variety of cigar box guitars, an ironing board lap steel guitar, and an upcycled tape deck amplifier.

Get out the tools. Here's some real fun.

Christmas Fun Time!

From the Irish Times, here is a 100 year-old letter from Alfred and Hannah Howard to Santa Claus found in a chimney. In it they ask for "a baby doll and a waterproof with a hood and a pair of gloves and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee.”

Don't you wonder if they got the things they wished for?

Christmas Fun Time!

Need kitchen help for the holidays?

Christmas Fun Time!

I think for Christmas week I'll do a bunch of Fun Time!s. Here's a lovely annimated film for those of us who miss Calvin and Hobbes. Remember all the violence and snowmen themed strips? Well then, you'll certainly enjoy this.



Oh and in case you want to do your own C&H tribute, here's a link to the video creator's site so you can see how it was done.

Old School Bus Becomes A Tiny House

Here is a link to a tiny house blog that has some great pictures of a school bus that's been tranformed into a tiny home. All the wood makes it really look cozy. The couple that bought it made it their home in the North Cascades.

Happy Christmas Music

MOOG, my favorite synthesizer manufacturer, is sponsoring a contest and to enter you must submit Christmas music done on their new Animoog app for the iPad.

I entered three times and here are my entries.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Jeff Bragg

Silent night by Jeff Bragg

Jingle bells by  Jeff Bragg

Merry Christmas!

Fun Time!

Creative Review Magazine had this great contest. The December issue of CR included a blank, paper toy template, and they set their readers the challenge of cutting out and customising their very own toy. Check out some of the results here.

Farmers Occupy Wall Street

After all the hype that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was just a bunch for college educated losers, whose laziness has not produced riches, whining about good upright Americans who've earned their $100 billion nestegg, here comes a bit about American farmers joining the ranks of protesters.

One Hudson Valley farmer carries a sign that says: “Civilization was built on Agriculture, not a Trading Floor!”

My sentiments exactly. As one website states:

"Over the past three decades, the U.S. has adopted economic policies promoted by Wall Street investment banks and agribusiness monopolies that have led to massive concentration in food and agriculture. Today market concentration is so great that only four firms control 84% of beef packing and 66% of pork production, which has resulted in forcing more than 1.1 million independent livestock producers out of business since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980."

Here's a little video from the Farmers Occupy Wall Street protest.

Travel Photo of the Week

Beach at Trunk Bay - St. John, USVI

Hacking the Farm Bill

Computer hackers are mostly feared and misunderstood individuals. But the vast majority aren't trying to get to your bank accounts or steal your identity. Here's new about a group who are trying to make things better.

Every five years, The Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation that shapes our food and farming landscape, comes up for authorization and a "hackathon" - a gathering of computer programmers who lock themselves in a room to tackle epic projects - brought together sustainable food advocates with computer programmers interested in helping them build tools to make this complex bill "digestible" for the average individual.

Various tools came out of the gathering. First prize went to the "FARM BILL of Health," a series of visualizations about the difference in support for fruit and vegetable crops versus commodities in the bill. Second place went to Meatlessly, a mobile app to promote Meatless Monday by allowing people to find, share, and submit recipes, places, and feedback about their progress.

Although only a honorable mention, here's one of my favorites below; a graphic designed to illuminate meat production and industry consolidation.

Tiny House Saga

New American Gothic. Tammy
and Logan with their tiny home.

I post a lot about tiny homes, but I do not live in one. Yet. I'm looking forward to making this life change, so I'm doing lots of research about it.

Tammy Strobel does and here is a blog with her insights, if you're interested in what life in a tiny home is really like.

Seems like it's everything I've dreamed and less!

I especially liked the five questions you should ask yourself about your true needs when determining the size of home you need.

There's An App For That

Seems like everyone has the cool idea to become an app developer.  Seems like there's a chart for that.

Can You Tell Me How To Get, How To Get To...Pakistan?

Seems that American foreign policy just added a new weapon to its arsenal: Elmo. The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, has committed $10 million to the four-year project to create a Pakistani version of Sesame Street. The US government is hoping that as well as providing basic literacy and numeracy skills, the show, called Sim Sim Hamara, will teach lessons in tolerance, and mutual respect.
Ah yes, this is the title of a new Sesame Street movie: Elmo Saves the World.

Hey, it could happen.

Children's Artwork Reimagined

Artist Dave Devries has taken children's artwork and given it a professional do-over. In his book "The Monster Engine," he renders kids art as if if were done realistically.

Below is a video about his inspiration for the project and its conception and execution.

In Milan There Grows A Vertical Forest

Milan, Italy is one of the most polluted cities in the worl, but architect Stefano Boeri has designed a building that will help offset its poor air quality.

This artists rendering of the design show an apartment building with balconies covered in greenery. Although Harvard Design Magazine has dismissed it as "dreamily utopian,” that hasn't stopped it from being built as the photos in the article here on The Creator Project Blog show.

Boeri calls the project Bosco Verticale, which is Italian for “Vertical Forest” and the promotional materials state that...

"The diversity of the plants and their characteristics produce humidity, absorb carbon dioxide and dust particles, producing oxygen and protect from radiation and acoustic pollution, improving the quality of living spaces and saving energy. Plant irrigation will be produced to great extent through the filtering and reuse of the grey waters produced by the building. Additionally Aeolian and photovoltaic energy systems will contribute, together with the aforementioned microclimate to increase the degree of energetic self sufficiency of the two towers."

Sign me up, it sounds good to me.

War Is Still Over, If You Want It

On this day, the 31st anniversary of the death of Beatle John Lennon, I am still given to thinking that we can fix things and make them work; that we can end poverty, we can end warfare, that we can afford to help the weakest and smallest among us, that we can play fair.

For quite awhile there has been a sense that our problems are intractable and that they are part of the fabric of our makeup as fallible creatures. So therefore we should not try to fix what 'aint broke.

The song "God Bless The Child" puts this idea well.

"Them that's got shall get. Them that's not shall lose."

If this isn't the theme behind much of what passes for our political discourse, I do not know what is.

The 1% says, "twas ever thus" and that justifies their behavior. The 99% decries the injustice and demands change from those in power.

All overlook their own power to make the world a better place for all.

"There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. It's easy."

Travel Photo of the Week

The European Alps

Kepler 22-B

Looks like we may have found one. Another Earth, that is. 290 day year. About 2.5 time our size, orbiting a star very much like our own and in the habitable zone. Some scientists are saying there's likely to be land and oceans and the temperature a balmy 72 degrees. Only 600 light years away.

Sign me up.

Here's the article from Science News.

Anatomy Of A Tantrum

Parents often feel helpless as a young child explodes into a tantrum. They feel like somehow they've failed as parents when they can't keep the offspring from meltsdown.

Now research indicates that these events are not inevitable and that there is a rhythm to a childs seemingly uncontrollable outbursts. Key to this research is analysis of the sounds they make during a tantrum. In a paper published in the journal Emotion, scientists found that different toddler sounds – or "vocalizations" – emerge and fade in a definite pattern in the course of a tantrum.

"We have the most quantitative theory of tantrums that has ever been developed," said study co-author Michael Potegal of the University of Minnesota. First they devised a method to collect tantrum sounds, says co-author James A. Green of the University of Connecticut.

"We developed a onesie that toddlers can wear that has a high-quality wireless microphone sewn into it," Green said. "Parents put this onesie on the child and press a go button." Green and Potegal collected more than a hundred tantrums in high-fidelity audio. The scientists then analyzed the audio. They found that different tantrum sounds had very distinct audio signatures. When the sounds were laid down on a graph, the researchers found that different sounds emerged and faded in a definite pattern. Unsurprisingly, sounds like yelling and screaming usually came together.

Here's a video from the research. And here's a link to the abstract.

See Through Church

This church in Limburg/Belgium is a collaboration between young Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh. They've built a see-through church in the Belgian region of Haspengouw.

The church is 10 meters high and is made of 100 layers and 2000 columns of steel. Depending on the perspective of the viewer, the church is either perceived as a massive building or seems to dissolve – partly or entirely – in the landscape.

Don't we wish all religious expression was as transparent?

Fun Time!

For more funny bent-object photos click here.

The End of the World.......Wait For It!

What with all the 2012 world will end hysteria I think it's a good idea to get back to those crazy folks who started this whole mess: the Mayans.

But wait a minute. Did they really predict the end of the world in 2012? Let's ask people that know something about them.

"We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012," said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "It's a marketing fallacy."

Hmm...selling books and t-shirts, I bet.

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has weighed in on the pending apocalypse, too. "The West's messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans," the institute said in a statement.

Yeah, they got that right. I've been hearing about the imminent end of the world since I've been a kid.  It's been a big theme in "Magic Jesusland." Oh and let's not forget that every generation has thought that their's would be the last to see the sunshine.

And finally, "The Maya did not think about humanity, global warming or predict the poles would fuse together," said Alfonso Ladena, a professor from the Complutense University of Madrid. "We project our worries on them."

Hmm...sounds a lot like people I know.

Autism's Hidden Potential

Humans tend toward thinking very small when it comes to recognizing each others talents and abilities.  Sort of like, "If you can't do what I want, the way I want it done, then you're stupid."

No group I know of suffers more from this stigma than people with autism. This article from Scientific American shows that autism can also be seen as a kind of gift with great advantages; the gift of being able to see the world differently.

In my experience, being able to think outside-the-box is very useful.