Renzon Piano's Micro-Home

About ten years ago architect Renzon Piano begin working on a idea many architectural students shared: a living space six and a half feet square containing the essentials, a bed, a chair and a table. After many prototypes he developed the final version, dubbed Diogene, named for the philosopher Diogenes.

The home is completely off-the-grid and independent of its environment with photovoltaic cells and solar modules, a rainwater tank, a biological toilet, natural ventilation and triple glazing. There is a pull-out sofa, a folding table under the window, a shower and toilet as well as a kitchen.

Looks like something you might see on Mars, right?

Fun Time! Childrens Drawings Of Chairs Made Real!

Children draw the most wonderful things. They have no need to portray reality accurately, so anything can happen on the page.

Two Kingston University students, Jack Beveridge and Joshua Lake, held an art class for seven and eight years olds at a local school. They had the kids draw chairs. Then they picked two and had them made. Here are the results.

I especially like the goldfish tank on the yellow one. Click HERE to see all the drawings.

A Gravity Map Of The Moon

From the NASA website.....

"If the Moon were a perfectly smooth sphere of uniform density, the gravity map would be a single, featureless color, indicating that the force of gravity at a given elevation was the same everywhere. But like other rocky bodies in the solar system, including Earth, the Moon has both a bumpy surface and a lumpy interior. Spacecraft in orbit around the Moon experience slight variations in gravity caused by both of these irregularities. The free-air gravity map shows deviations from the mean, the gravity that a cueball Moon would have. The deviations are measured in milliGals, a unit of acceleration. On the map, dark purple is at the low end of the range, at around -400 mGals, and red is at the high end near +400 mGals. Yellow denotes the mean."

Just what you needed, right?

This is what gravity looks like on the far side of the Moon.

Cardboard Bike Project Goes Live

I've written twice about Izhar Gafni and his cardboard bicycle (here and here). His project has now gone live on Indiegogo.

Travel Photo of the Week

Galicia, Spain

McDowell County, W.Va Has Lost 80% Of Its Population Since 1950

Read the accompanying New York Times article here.

NSA Reading Your Mail? Use This Font!

How cool is this?

In this age of suspicion and distrust it's good to know that there are simple ways of stopping the security state from reading your mail.

Sang Mun, a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), has created  ZXX—which he calls "a disruptive typeface". It is designed to be more difficult for snoops like the NSA to decrypt. It's free to download on his website.

How Money Makes You Lie and Cheat

Here's some research we should all be aware of. According to Kristen Smith-Crowe, associate professor of management at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, "Our moral behavior may be affected by things in the environment that we have no idea are affecting us."

Her team conducted a group of experiments in which ethical behavior was tested just after participants read sentences about money. A control group participation did not include such exposure. It seems that "that small and unnoticeable reminders of money can produce lying, cheating, and essentially stealing 10 minutes later."

If you want to read more about this, here's a link to the rest of the article in Time's Health and Family blog.

Looks like money really does corrupt.

Fun Time! Photoshop Live At The Busstop!

Jaron Lanier On The Future

Jaron Lanier practically created virtual reality. In this video clip he talks with The News Hour's Paul Solman about technology, the future and his new book, "Who Owns The Future?"