Pictured Fences 1 from Mntl Gassi on Vimeo.
Posts archived in Buildings and Food
The video below is footage of the gushing well head at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico before and after BP’s latest attempt to stem the tide (switch occurs around 2:30)
I wonder if anyone knows how long the spill would have to continue at this rate for the reserve the well is spilling from to dry up?
Coming out of the streets of Columbus, Ohio:
The question becomes, what ignorant “neighborhood watch” group will paint over these?
Hailing from Belgium is Roa, and this is a rabbit:
A special treat for my 100th post – 30 seconds worth of 16mm video footage from 1969. Sit back and enjoy:
Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.
For those of you who dig all that wide angle angle photography has to offer, but don’t want to go out and drop a few hundred dollars on a new lens (and maybe those of you with some extra time on your hands) – check out this <20$ homemade fisheye lens from Bhautik Joshi.
Or, perhaps you are slightly less inclined to fabricate a lens from a peephole, soda can, and packing foam – never worry, for about twice as much as the do-it-yourself-ers you can grab yourself a 170 degree, fixed focus, 35 mm camera made by Lomography:
Fisheyes are great for any occasion, especially while traveling. Though with the Lomo fisheye 1 (above), beware low lighting (if you want that extra versatility there are slightly higher priced, but still less than fisheye lens, Lomos with an external flash). The results are always unexpected and show you things you’d never see otherwise.
For any bike enthusiast, be you a commuter, trail-rider, cyclist, fixed gearer or young one, the Independent has your Wednesday gawk-a-thon:
With a sleeker geometry and cleaner aesthetic than most folding commuters, this American-made, single speed, folding ride by Dahon caught my eye.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is going to be blogging about the restoration process of one of Van Gogh’s most popular works, “The Bedroom”.
The above photo is how everyone would like to remember this painting of Van Gogh’s, but as is inevitable in nearly any work of art more than 110 years old, some unsightly things are to be found when looked at more closely. The following is an image obtained by using a light microscope (see below for a diagram of how this microscope functions):
The folks at MIT bring us the latest in electricity production, heavily endowed with nanotechnology. The discovery, of a previously unknown phenomenon, is yet to be harnessed into a practical application, though its potential is great for changing the way electronic devices are powered.
The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering…
…the key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.
In the new experiments, each of these electrically and thermally conductive nanotubes was coated with a layer of a reactive fuel that can produce heat by decomposing. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse. Heat from the fuel goes into the nanotube, where it travels thousands of times faster than in the fuel itself. As the heat feeds back to the fuel coating, a thermal wave is created that is guided along the nanotube. With a temperature of 3,000 kelvins, this ring of heat speeds along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction. The heating produced by that combustion, it turns out, also pushes electrons along the tube, creating a substantial electrical current.
In the group’s initial experiments, Strano says, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire.
After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.
The amount of power released, he says, is much greater than that predicted by thermoelectric calculations. While many semiconductor materials can produce an electric potential when heated, through something called the Seebeck effect, that effect is very weak in carbon. “There’s something else happening here,” he says. “We call it electron entrainment, since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity.”
The thermal wave, he explains, appears to be entraining the electrical charge carriers (either electrons or electron holes) just as an ocean wave can pick up and carry a collection of debris along the surface. This important property is responsible for the high power produced by the system, Strano says. (3/8/10 MIT News)
Since this is such a new discovery, the practical implementation of it is probably still a little ways off. Among the possible uses, as envisioned at this young stage of research, include “enabling new kinds of ultra-small electronic devices — for example, devices the size of grains of rice, perhaps with sensors or treatment devices that could be injected into the body. Or it could lead to “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air’,” says the Strano.
Today Organizing for America (the folks who brought you the epic campaign that elected America’s first black president) announced their final push to pass Health Care Reform. Check out the Final March for Reform here.
If you happen to have access to a copier and a printer, and know of store fronts and blank walls that could be more persuasive, print up those fliers and paste them up. Its a Presidentially sponsored mass printing, distributing, and posting campaign!
Now is the time – not only for health reform, but with this latest action by Obama’s organizing arm I think it is prime time to push for decriminalizing public art. Vandalism is its codename, but underneath those messy scrawlings of co-opted identities lies an opportunity for vibrant renewal of drab urban and suburban environments, and Obama’s tentative endorsement of graffiti-based public information campaign vindicates the notion that the acres of prime real estate that are street walls and blank building edges can serve a larger purpose than the owner’s wish for a spotless gray concrete block wall.
Tags will succumb to aesthetically appealing, publicly accepted art in only a matter of time. Those just dipping their toes in the water, tagging this, tagging that, will drop it quickly as the novel thrill of breaking a law fades away. For the few whom this becomes an outlet for self-expression and creative exploration, they will no longer be forced to live an underground life and will be able to practice their art in the open and in the daylight.
It is this suppressing of self-expression that defined the last century. Moving forward we as a nation should encourage self-expression and halt the criminalization of these acts (graffiti, censorship of broadcast networks, gay marriage, etc.). Obama seems like a pretty liberal guy; is he liberal enough though, to tackle the stigmas that have made graffiti synonymous with gangs and urban decay?
..Start-up MTPV, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is seeking to commercialize a technology for converting heat into electricity. The idea is to use waste heat from industrial processes, such as making glass or steel, to make electricity, according to company executives. Pictured here is a prototype thermophotovoltaic system that uses a chip sandwiched with a traditional solar cell. Heat makes one layer “glow” electromagnetic energy that is then converted into electricity using a photovoltaic cell, according to the company. (CNET Mar. 4, 2010)
This is just one of the many new technologies that are being used to try and obtain some of the 400$ million in grant funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (min. 500,000$, max 20,000,000$ awards) that was created by Congress in 2007 and finally funded in 2009.
Much of the logic for such an investment is that based upon past periods of gross, radical technological advance, there is reason to think it could happen again with energy technologies. I buy it. And the logic for our government to prod our country in that direction is basically that we want to be the ones who capitalize off this technology the most. It sounds kinda rough when I put it like that, but that is definitely the common wisdom in political circles. Environmentalists will tell you about larger issues of ecosystems, habitat destruction, climate change, and pollution. But the point where something actually starts to happen with clean energy that benefits us and our neighbor’s lives is the point where it becomes a better business decision to develop clean, renewable, carbon-free energy technologies than it is to continue to develop dirty, finite, pure carbon energy. The promise of refillable coffers of investment, start-up, development, manufacturing, and implementation funds for new clean energy technologies starts to make it a good decision.
ARPA-E this week announced its grant solicitations for grid storage to complement wind and solar power, for energy-efficient air conditioning, and for efficient power electronics for wind turbines or LED lighting. The agency has already awarded $151 million to researchers developing methods for storing carbon dioxide underground and improving electric vehicle energy storage…[and is evaluating] everything from a Velkess flywheel energy storage system to an Algaeventure Systems plan for extracting algae from water. Entrepreneurs are also pursuing nuclear fusion and the conversion of carbon dioxide and methane gas into a low-carbon liquid fuel. (CNET)
News To (Me)dia
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