Book Of Norm

Swedish architect  Torsten Ottesjö    has recently created a a damn cool little house.   It is a 270 square foot dwelling that can accommodate two people and contains a kitchen, sleeping quarters,  dining table and windows that look like the surface of a leaf. The whole idea is that it fits well into the natural environment - and I have to say I think it is really cool, and would make for a great weekend cabin which would look at home in any woodland/hilly area. Ottesjö says that “block-shaped” buildings are not a suitable environment for humans and that integrating nature’s variety of form into a home will create a space that feels unconstructed. He also says that it is more common to hear a person express more love for a car than for a house since a car is more in scale with a human body. Homes should be sized smaller and adapted the same way to the movement  and mechanics of the body. He is inspired, not only by nature, but by airpl...

Fridtjof Nansen If you can look at this picture and tell me that this isn't one of the sweetest photos of a dude with a 'stache that you've ever seen, then you obviously need to learn a little something about facial hair and being awesome.  This picture alone makes the guy badass, even if you didn't know the story behind it.  You will be pleased to learn, no doubt, that the man behind this vicious strip of solidified testosterone is sufficiently badass to pull off a soup strainer that epically righteous.  It can be no other way. Fridtjof Nansen was a tough-as-nails Norwegian psychopath with an impossible-to-spell first name and an unstoppable desire to constantly freeze his balls off and risk his life in the name of science and kickassery.  Born in 1861 in a town near Oslo, as a teenager this super-brilliant, ultra-hardcore crazy person constantly went outside into the frostbite-inducing snow-covered wilderness  Bear Grylls -style to test himself against th...

Another Look at an Unorthodox Hurricane-Prevention Idea Using tires to prevent hurricanes? Bill Gates thinks it's a good idea. I'm intrigued. All of the focus right now is on trying to limit the impact of mankind on the environment. Why not go the other way? Why not take charge of the environment and engineer it for our needs? Yes, Hollywood tells you the world will come to an end either slowly (using up all the resources) or quickly (The Day After Tomorrow). But really, we could do it. And why not? We eliminated smallpox and polio, we are working on eliminating malaria. Why not hurricanes? Or global warming? These are problems with engineering solutions and we should embrace those solutions instead of be scared of them.

Kind of hilarious, turns out that with Windows 8's improved driver support, it can print to... well pretty much anything Microsoft News » Ultimate compatibility: Microsoft Surface printing to a parallel port dot matrix printer

A small Chinese company has shown off a e-ink phone and everyone is super excited about it. It's easy to understand why... the battery will last a week of real use, the phone is silly thin and light... but I can also tell you it won't sell well. You see, we all complain about the crappy battery life on our phones. But you know what had great battery life? My old flip Samsung. It also made great calls and was way easier to use as a phone. But you know what it didn't do? Anything else. Ok, it had tetris... and a stopwatch. Sure - I miss my old flip phones now and then, but you would have to pay me quite a lot to go back to using one. This e-ink phone runs Android 2.3 sure, but the screen is still e-ink which means a very low refresh rate (no games or movies) and of course, no color. So yes - it is a smartphone in that you can get your email and run apps, but the vast majority of apps and websites will looks like crap. This is one of those internet things that everyon...

Remember back when cellulosic ethanol was just around the corner? Yeah - it's been "just around the corner" for 20 years. Like a lot of these fuel sources (which true believers and a shockingly high percentage of the uninformed "I get my opinions from Hollywood movies" general population) will tell you only don't exist because the big oil companies won't support them - cellulosic ethanol is in fact limited by market economics... also known as common fucking sense. The problem is this: the economics behind the EPA mandate (thank Bush and Obama for that one) to produce 500 million gallons this year and 1 billion next year are a complete joke. The cost of feedstock is 500% or so higher than "planned," no commercial plant has ever come on line and most test plants produce uneven results. The latest to pull out is BP (see article below), but they are only one in a long list of companies who have backed away from commercializing this technology...

To put it simply... why do we let so many idiots be elected? Anyway - this is an interesting a brief history of the US congress in graphical terms, from xkcd. Click to em-biggen.