Bonus Halloween Fun Time! Mickey Mouse in Ghoul Friend!

Travel Photo of the Week

Bamboo home at Green Village, Bali

For more photos and a little backstory on this home, click HERE.
To see where it is located, click HERE.

The Deep by PES

This beautiful stop motion animated film by PES uses old hand tools, nut crackers and other items to tell the story of an underwater world.

Dome House In Thailand Constructed In Six Weeks For Just $8000!

Steve Areen built this dome house for just $8000. Click here for more and pictures!

Savannah Container Home

Here's a beautiful container home in Savannah, Georgia. At least the interior is beautiful. Click here for more pictures.

Halloween Fun Time! Patrick Stewart reading The Nightmare Before Christmas Poem

And now, Part Two.

A 540-Degree Photo Rig Made Of 130 Smartphones

To promote their Snapdragon mobile processor, Qualcomm created Snapdragon Booth, a “bullet time”-style 540-degree photo rig made out of 130 HTC One smartphones. The Snapdragon Booth was in New York City yesterday, October 24, 2013.

Silicon Super Capacitors Could Replace Batteries

Silicon chip with porous surface
 being coated with graphene to
 create a supercapacitor electrode.

It seems that researchers at Vanderbilt University have discovered a way to make silicon supercapacitors that would allow the creation of batteries that charge in minutes and work for weeks before needing to be recharged.

The researchers said in a paper that instead of storing energy in chemical reactions the way batteries do, silicon supercapacitors store electricity by assembling ions on the surface of a porous material. As a result, they charge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for a few million cycles, instead of a few thousand cycles like batteries.

For more, here is a link to their research paper published in the October 22nd issue of Scientific Reports.

Travel Photo of the Week

Shaharah Bridge, Yemen

Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?

“This course will change your life.” This is the claim that Michael Pruett makes to his classes at Harvard.

Pruett teaches a class called Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory and students are flocking to it. One student said, “The class absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I view the world.”

The core idea of Pruett's class is that we all think of ourselves as rational, reasonable creatures, but if we use that as the basis of our decision making process, we wall ourselves off to all the other, sometimes more enriching, parts of life. He teaches that the smallest actions can have the most profound consequences and urges his students to become more self-aware.

In Chinese, the word for heart and mind are the same and they believed that the two are inextricably linked. They also believed that when making a decision, the integration of head and heart would give the best result.

Adam Mitchell, one of Pruett's students, summed it up this way, “We’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at.'”

 He added that this was the path of little risk and little reward.

Here's a link to the Atlantic article where I found this.