Floating Home/Compound

Here's a video of a little floating compound on Clayoquot Sound off of the coast of British Columbia. Totally off the grid, three greenhouses with a group of people calling it home. Low impact, composting toilets. These folks have pretty much thought of it all.

Here's a link to an article that explains it all.

Reclamation Road - Recycling Small Towns USA

At Heritage Salvage the past comes back to live in the present, if you are old building materials. Flooring, windows, doors and other recycled items are available for re-incorporation into an existing or new building. Now Michael Bug and crew have decided to light out across the country to small towns that are going bust and do what they can to keep that from happening. Here's a video of their new reality show, Reclamation Road.

Father's Day Bonus - Groucho Singing

Smile, Yoko!

Yoko has a project we can all participate in. She has created an app that posts a picture of your smile into a world map and she wants to have every person in the world's smile included. Foolish you say? I say ambitious and wonderful. Here's a link to the app on iTunes and here's a link to the twitter website.

Smile. It makes everyone feel better.

Fun Time - Kermit the Frog and Pepe the King Prawn in London

Bionic Men

As the art of prosthetics has advanced, we've finally come to the point were the art is a science and we are ever so so close to the point where we are able to craft limbs that behave and function like the original body part that has been replaced. This video from CBS news is proof. Here is a link to the accompanying article.

One Minute Vacation by Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly (kk.org) is one of my favorite sources for interesting things. Here's a video he made of his recent two month long trip in Asia. He took a one-second clip each day on his Lumix still camera (sometimes two) and it edited on iMovie.

Travel Photo of the Week

Palau's Rock Islands

Food From Your Backyard - Meadows And More

Here's great site for information on foraging: Meadows and More. What's foraging you ask?

Foraging is the art of looking for food in the wild or even just in your back yard. Many of the plants we pull up and discard as weeds are edible and have more nutritive value than what we're buying at the store (big surprise there, right?)

What's for dinner? How about stinging nettles?

American Kids Should Be Building Rockets and Robots, Not Taking Standardized Tests

I have long been critical of the way we're doing education in America. We spend more and more time and money on testing kids and therefore less and less time teaching the things they actually need to know. My personal belief is that this is mostly driven by the "privatize education" crowd in an attempt to show that public schools fail our kids so they can get their hands on that money. I won't go into an in depth explantion of this point because I believe that we need to abandon testing and get back to teaching.

I'll let this article in Slate do the arguing for me. The author shows a text of instruction in the use of a microscope and then test questions supposedly based on that text. He couldn't figure out the correct answer based on the text. 60% of kids couldn't either.

The author then goes on to explain: "This is what test designers want. As an educator once told me, if the question was such that everyone got the right answer, then it wouldn’t be a good question"

Okay, I'll only ask this once: This is want we want education to do? Fail almost 60% of our children? The point here is that we should be engaging our children instead of finding ways to make them and our schools, look like they're are failing.

Enter Maker Faires. If you don't know what these are then you are missing one of the most vital ways to gets kids to learn: get them to MAKE something. Remember Science Fairs? Maker faires get kids to make something.

Read the article. If you have young kids, get involved.

Caine Monroy, whose homemade cardboard arcade recently became a viral Internet sensation, hosted a

workshop at Maker Faire, where he invited young makers to build alongside him, sharing his materials,

construction techniques, and spirit.