Man (Re)Builds Mexican Island Paradise on 250,000 Recycled Floating Bottles

Almost everyone wants to live on a tropical island, but who can afford it? Well start saving up your empty plastic water and soda bottles (and caps) because you can follow the example of Richie Sowa and simply build your own. Mr. Sowa has taken over a quarter million empty bottles (for floatation), lashed bamboo and plywood together for the foundation and put a mangrove, a composting toilet, solar oven, house and multiple beaches to create his own little floating paradise. It looks like he's encouraging others to follow his example. Here's a little video, have a look.

Travel Photo of the Week

Aogashima, Phillipine Sea

Bach's Goldberg Variations - FREE!

Pianist Kimiko Ishizaka and MuseScore, an open source music notation editor have released this beautiful new recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, recorded on a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial at the Teldex Studios, Berlin. This is another successfully funded Kickstarter project. Free to listen and download.

12 "Damn Fabulous" Tiny House Interiors

Here's a nice little photo spread from Relaxshacks.com. Twelve really beautiful, tiny home interiors.

I really like the one to the right. Lots of wood. Plenty of bookshelf space.

Earth Ponds

Water fascinates people.  Beaches, rivers, lakes, ponds, even streams and babbling brooks. Here's a website that gives guidance on the art of creating man-made bodies of water.

Earthponds.com offers books, videos and consulting and in the words of author and site creator Tim Matson, "Earth Ponds is an aquacultural education, design, and consulting service with more than twenty years experience. We offer a best selling series of books and videos on various aspects of ponds, ponds design, construction, maintenance, and ponds restoration."

Fun Time! A Prairie Home Companion

Last night my wife and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary (a couple weeks late) by taking in the dress rehearsal of today's Prairie Home Companion show at Wolf Trap here in Vienna, VA. I've listened to the show, on-air, for almost thirty years and this is the first time I've seen it live.

What fun! It started with Garrison and the audience singing "The Star Spangled Banner" before the show's opening song "Tishomingo Blues". So much good music! Shawn Colvin, Heather Masse and Sara Watkins were the guests. A great Guy Noir story and of course the news from Lake Wobegon.

If you get the chance, see the show live, but hurry. It seems that Mr. Keillor has announced his retirement next year.

Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?

One of the problems that humans face, cognitively speaking, is the impulse to deny the existence of something they don't like or believe in until it overwhelms them . Cultures that have endured collapse set the example. Generally anyone sounding an alarm in these cultures would be ignored, marginalized and sometimes killed to preserve the illusion that everyone agreed that everything was alright.

Well chicken little has been raising the alarm about severe environmental consequences if we don't change our ways for some time now and a new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, is putting forward the proposition that it's too late.

The book's author, Jorgen Randers of the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, argues that in the second half of the 21st century that our culture will collapse due to severe global warming.

From the Scientific American review: "Most worrisome, Randers notes, greenhouse gases are being emitted twice as fast as oceans and forests can absorb them. Whereas in 1972 humans were using 85 percent of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere to support economic activities such as growing food, producing goods and assimilating pollutants, the figure is now at 150 percent—and growing."

Heads up. Sky IS falling. Scientific American reviews the book here.

31 More Ways To Use A Pallet!

I've seen plenty of info on pallet gardens (gardens that make use of vertical space), but here is a great article, from the brightnest blog, on the clever use these ubiquitous urban/suburban items. Here's a picture to pique your interest.

Many more great pics at the article. I especially like the outdoor shelves and the kitchen rack. The patio deck table is also nice. I'm intrigued with use of hardware style swivel wheels on some of the pieces.

Travel Photo of the Week

Bali, Indonesia Photo by Valentino Lumanto

Why Great Ideas Come When You Aren’t Trying

This is a little something that I've known forever. As an artist, I've have found down-time to be one of the most important things I can do to remain creative. Now it looks like this is one of the things ALL of us can do to work through problems and find answers.

In this Nature article, psychologists Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave 145 undergraduate students two 'unusual uses' tasks that gave them two minutes to list as many uses as possible for common, everyday objects such as toothpicks, clothes hangers and bricks.

"After the two minutes were over, participants were given a 12-minute break, during which they rested, undertook a demanding memory activity that required their full attention or engaged in an undemanding reaction-time activity known to elicit mind-wandering. A fourth group of students had no break. All participants were then given four unusual-uses tasks, including the two that they had completed earlier. Those students who had done the undemanding activity performed an average of 41% better at the repeated tasks the second time they tried them. By contrast, students in the other three groups showed no improvement. The work will be published shortly in Psychological Science."

So there you have it. Now we know for sure that keeping your nose to the grindstone will only result in big cosmetic surgery bills. Instead kick back, take that break and be more resourceful AND creative.

Arcosanti

Out in the Arizona desert about halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff is an ambitious project in city planning that, for over forty years, has been the brainchild and lifework of architect Poalo Soleri.

Arcosanti is an experiment in combining architecture and ecology designed to show the possibilities of improving urban conditions without degrading the natural world surrounding the city environment.

If you are interested in exploring Arcosanti, visitors are welcome and if you are interested in helping to build it, workshops, seminars and internships are also available. Just contact them.

Bright-sided - How Positive Thinking is Undermining America

This new book by Barbara Ehrenriech chronicles America's obsession with "positive thinking" and the bad outcomes that it has produced. I have long thought that this idea, that positive thinking will always deliver good outcomes, is part of why we keep having to confront disasters that we were unprepared for: Vietnam, Katrina, the banking and Wall Street meltdown, the mortgage and foreclosure debacle and on and on.

When critical thinking and worst-case scenario considerations are ignored, the door is opened for all kinds of chaos. With this being a Presidential election year, it might be a really good idea for both sides supporters to consider the respective downsides that their candidates present and what well-intentioned blunders might follow.

Fun Time!

Here's a cool Kickstarter project that I think is worth investigating. Kinetic Creatures are a set of three walking cardboard animal sculptures. The Creatures, Elly the Elephant, Rory the Rhino, and Geno the Giraffe, are each made up of cardboard pieces that you assemble using tabs and slots. There's a hand crank version and a windup version of each.

The team that devised these are raising money to go big time and have a cardboard company mass-manufacture them so they can be inexpensively produced for schools, makers and art students. Donate to the project and you get one (or more) of the cardboard creatures. Check out the cool video below.

WBCN The Rock of Boston is Back!

I lived in Boston from 1979 to 1988 and all through my time there I enjoyed the best radio in America. WMBR, WBUR, WGBH were just a few of the excellent stations that I had access to. But at the top of the heap was WBCN, the Rock of Boston. Free form with the DJs providing the programming instead of some "consultant."

Well somehow, after I moved back to Virginia, the station switched over to talk and then lost its audience. And then, after many other senseless changes, at 12:05 a.m. on August 12, 2009, the sound went to static and 'BCN was no more.

Now it's back, on the internet, broadcasting from a converted school bus and we can all enjoy great radio. Have a listen. WBCN - Free Form Radio.

15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy

This comes from a lovely little blog called Purpose Fairy - Ideas and Suggestions About Life. Here are fifteen  things to give up to be happy. These particular things aren't worth the effort to keep anyway. I won't offer the explanatory text that the site does. You can give them some traffic if you feel like you need a deeper explantion.

1. GIVE UP YOUR NEED TO ALWAYS BE RIGHT
2. GIVE UP YOUR NEED FOR CONTROL
3. GIVE UP ON BLAME
4. GIVE UP YOUR SELF-DEFEATING SELF-TALK
5. GIVE UP YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS
6. GIVE UP COMPLAINING
7. GIVE UP THE LUXURY OF CRITICISM
8. GIVE UP YOUR NEED TO IMPRESS OTHERS
9. GIVE UP YOUR RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
10. GIVE UP LABELS
11. GIVE UP ON YOUR FEARS
12. GIVE UP YOUR EXCUSES
13. GIVE UP THE PAST
14. GIVE UP ATTACHMENT
15. GIVE UP LIVING YOUR LIFE TO OTHER PEOPLE’S EXPECTATIONS

Yep, I think that about covers it. I think #14 is probably the best place to start. If you can get rid of attachment, usually the others follow soon afterward.

Travel Photo of the Week

Pelican Bar, Treasure Beach, Jamaica

Did You Know Kodak Had Its Own Nuclear Reactor?

For more than 30 years, Kodak Park was home to a a small nuclear research reactor, one of the few of its kind in the world.

Starting decades ago, Kodak had an interest in neutrons, subatomic particles that can be used to determine the makeup of a given material or to create an image of it without damaging it. In 1974 it acquired a californium neutron flux multiplier, known as a CFX. Small plates of highly enriched uranium multiplied the neutron flow from a tiny californium core.

The device was not much larger than a refrigerator and, in the one available photo, looked vaguely like Robby the Robot from a 1950s science fiction movie. To house it, Kodak dug a cavity below the basement level of Building 82, part of the company’s research complex along Lake Avenue.

Eastman Kodak Co.'s californium
neutron flux multiplier, known as a
CFX. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

It wasn’t a power plant, and carried no risk of explosion. Nothing ever leaked. Still, the reactor was locked down, remotely surveilled and tightly regulated — mainly because it contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched uranium.

That’s the material that nuclear bombs are made of.  When Kodak decided six years ago to close down the device, federal regulators made them submit detailed plans for removing the substance. The highly enriched uranium was packaged into protective containers and spirited away in November 2007, armed guards were surely on hand.

All of this was done pretty much without anyone in the Rochester community having a clue. The existence of the device was not, strictly speaking, a secret. It had been mentioned many years ago in research papers, and was referred to obliquely in a half-dozen public documents on a federal website, though none hinted where it was located.

“I’ve never heard of it at Kodak,” said Miles Pomper, senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. “It’s such an odd situation because private companies just don’t have this material.”

Documents made public on the NRC website after the Kodak shipment took place indicate it went to a federal facility in South Carolina. “The federal authorities oversaw the process and we deferred to them on all matters related to it,” Veronda said. “Clearly the decision was that it was best not to publicize it.”

Haberdash Vintage

In addition to my interest in small habitation, I am also interested in small business. The smaller, the more interesting.

Haberdash Vintage is one such small business. Operated from a travel trailer and moving to different open markets in the Boston area, it offers vintage and gently used clothing and assessories.

In an age when big business is sucking the life blood of everyone and everything, perhaps this is the way to go. Oh and just in case you're not in the Boston area, you can also order online.

FreeSound.org

I often need sound effects for various projects that I work on. FreeSound is a website that provides free, open source sound samples. It is membership based, so to download you must sign up. Lots of cool stuff here.

http://www.freesound.org/

Fun Time! Turning Kids' Art Into Plush Toys

I saw this on BoingBoing.net. At Child's Own Studio you can have your child's artwork turned into a stuffed toy. Here are a couple of examples................

Encyclopedia of Life Exceeds 1 Million Pages

From slashdot.org...

"The Encyclopedia of Life project, an online resource aggregating information about all life on Earth, now has over 1 million taxon pages with content. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons license and includes text, over 1.5 million images, video, and sounds. It's an amazing resource for educators since the information is curated and rated. EOL also develops tools to make the content even more accessible, like the field guide tool that lets you build a customized online (and printable) field guide about any group of species or higher taxa."

Small Prefabs As Backyard Offices

Here's a great little article and photo essay of prefabs that have been set up as personal offices.

Travel Photo of the Week

A Buddhist monk prays by candlelight in a
temple in the ancient city of Bagan, Myanmar.

Low-Tech Magazine

This on-line blog/magazine offers low-tech solutions to problems that we pour untold amounts of money and sweat into to solve. Its current front page is entitled: The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels. That sounds pretty useful to me. I often joke that in 50k years archaeologists will discover that air conditioning caused global warming.

The magazine covers all  kinds of low road tech from basketry to distribution networks to hand powered tools and machines. It's quite a fun read. We tend to think modern technology can solve all our current problems when perhaps old-time, low-tech already has.

Its brother publication, No Tech Magazine takes you even further towards the stone age.

Harvard and MIT Educate A Billion People Online

Since this blog is ostensibly about ideas I thought I'd let everyone know about the latest trend in education. Large universities are making their curriculum available online, for free.

Last December, MIT announced the launch of MITx and now has joined with Harvard to create edX.  As this article on Good.is states, "Representatives from both schools say edX is a work in progress but it will retain the core components of MITx: Anyone in the world with an internet connection will be able to sign up for a class. The classes won't be MIT or Harvard-lite—they'll have the same academic quality as classes taught on campus. And, if a student if completes all assignments and exams and is able to demonstrate mastery of the material, for a fee they’ll receive a certificate of completion."

So now if you want to be a rocket scientist or Harvard educated lawyer, you have no excuse.

Guerrilla Enlightenment: Defending Science Online

It looks like the defense of science (necessitated by folks like Michele Bachmann and the rest of the anti-science crowd) has been taken up by members of the general public who are blogging their disgust with those who propose that the world is just 6000 years old and other such nonsense. This article in New Scientist describes an underground social movement of "angry nerds" and "guerrilla bloggers", dedicated to defending evidence-based medicine and challenging quackery. Good ideas, I think. It seems it also works to defeat anti-science attitudes.

Fun Time!

This is almost too good to be true, but Roland Sledge, who is an energy lawyer running for a seat on the Texas state commission that regulates the oil and gas industries, has minted an ad that features a guy peeing on an electric fence. No foolin'. Take a look.

Friday Bonus: Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein Discuss Hyper-Partisanship on the News Hour

Watch Is Washington's Partisanship 'Even Worse Than it Looks?' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity

The title of this post is also the title of the article that it refers to. I often read Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times. Krugman is an economist more people should be familiar with. During the current and ongoing financial crisis that we are facing, I have found his thoughts to be illuminating. I'm not going to give you a list of his accomplishments and qualifications, but I am going to give you a link to his article and I hope you read it. Here's a quote to prime the pump.....

On partisanship: "The Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been making waves with a new book acknowledging a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles. They say our political dysfunction is largely because of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist force that is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” You can’t get cooperation to serve the national interest when one side of the divide sees no distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph."

The Higgs Boson Explained

(Almost) Everyone has now heard of the Higgs Boson. It is the predicted particle that gives everything in the universe its mass. But what IS this elusive particle? Here is an animated explanation.

Travel Photo of the Week

Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti Plain, Tanzania

The Math Formula That Lead To The Financial Crash

"It's not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world."

So goes the saga of the stock market. This is a lesson in hubris. It is also a warning: Never think that a correct, clever answer will always be correct or that a practice based on theory will always work.

This excellent article on BBC News' website describes the equation that may have been at least partially responsible for the financial meltdown. I won't go into a polemic on this subject. I will invite you to read the article and make your own decision.

But remember, the year after Myron Scholes won the Nobel prize, his hedge fund crashed.