The Trees That Miss The Mammoths | American Forests

“But the trees have been slow to catch on; a natural consequence of the pace of evolution. For a tree that lives, say, 250 years, 13,000 years represents only 52 generations. In an evolutionary sense, the trees don’t yet realize that the megafauna are gone.”

SROs, flophouses, microapartments: Smart cities are finally allowing the right kind of housing for the poor, young, and single. - Slate Magazine

Imagine a continuum of such choices, extending downward from today’s studio apartments. Along this continuum, we’d have complete studios smaller than those currently permitted, followed by tiny units with private baths but without full kitchens, then updated rooming houses with shared baths and kitchens, then capsule hotels. A few brave developers have been trying to reverse a century of policies on a small scale by building neo-SROs and microapartments in cities. They’re responding to the strong demand, especially among millennials, for small, inexpensive units in popular, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods such as Seattle’s Capitol Hill and Portland’s Pearl District.

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Therefore Simplicio, come either with arguments and demonstrations and bring us no more Texts and authorities, for our disputes are about the Sensible World, and not one of Paper.”

Concrete Ships: McCloskey Ships of WWII

Just as steel had become scarce during the First World War, the Second World War was again consuming the country’s steel resources. In 1942, the United States Maritime Commission contracted McCloskey and Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to build a new fleet of 24 concrete ships. Three decades of improvements in concrete technology made this new fleet lighter and stronger than its WWI predecessors.

Open Mic Poetry @ Espresso News!!!
Public · By Bear Brown

[Time]
8:30pm until 9:30pm

[Description]
Read Poetry or Prose or Not

Sign up to read at the beginning or jump in for the round robin at the end.

Or just kick back and listen, Drink Coffee & snap your fingers

Original or stuff you ripped off from your favorite Poets

See you there, upstairs.

O, Miami: Poetry Festival Innovates with the Unexpected - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly

Archiving your events is nice, but no one wants to watch a static video of a performance. All it does is remind the viewer that he or she wasn’t there. Think about what travels on the web: short videos that are entertaining and self-explanatory. As we’re planning the actual events for O, Miami, we treat web-only content as its own event that we budget for just like any other. For example, in 2011 we did a project with an artist named Agustina Woodgate in which she went into Miami thrift stores and sewed poems into random items of clothing. The video we made from that project, below, got picked up by The Guardian  and TIME Magazine and communicates the spirit of the festival in a way we could never explain in an interview.

How to Design an Iconic NY Fast Food Joint: Observatory: Design Observer

We wanted to “measure” other New York standbys, to know what the experience was as a consumer from a quantitative as well as a qualitative standpoint. We’ve all been to these simply to order and eat, but we don’t actually measure them. Two people from the office did a lot of the field work, Alexandra Burr and Matthew Storrie, in compressed fashion.

Museum 2.0: Guest Post: Oh Snap! Experimenting with Open Authority in the Gallery

The biggest difference between Oh Snap! and other crowd-sourced photography projects is the physical manifestation of tactile objects in the gallery. Too often, projects like this live exclusively on the web and have no “real-world” presence. We knew from the beginning that this project needed to effectively marry the digital with the real-world, with the goal of blurring lines between the two.

“In the real world we were kidding ourselves” - Salon.com

Do you believe long-term that the demographics are the biggest threat to the Republican Party?

No, I think the lack of ideas is the biggest threat. Look at what’s gone on with the sequester, OK? The fact that they haven’t held hearing after hearing for better ideas, that they haven’t told everybody in risk of being furloughed, “Show us the ways to save money,” that were just sort of – cut, to me, is not exactly a battle cry around which you build a majority. Saving, to some extent, is, but breaking out with better ideas, a better future, better solutions – that to me is where we’re going to have to go. And if you do it right, you can then appeal to virtually everybody in the country.

(via Music For Shuffle Sketch #15)

Sketch #15

Been playing around with Unity a bit. It’s got amazing potential as a musical tool. So far, I’ve not done much – I made a crappy little room you can walk around. All the coloured objects and surfaces have loops of music attached to them, so you can go and listen to things by walking up to them, or whatever.

As you can (hopefully) see/hear, the rotating pillars act as a kind of droney ostinato; the two little yellow cubes have little melodies attached to them, and the big flat canopies play bass lines when you stand under them. Super simple at the minute, but you get the idea.

Attention-aware music

I’m always banging on about this, and I like the thought that this sketch could turn into something that adapts to how much attention you want to give it. There could be free exploration, where you make all the effort, walking around, prodding things, or, after a period of inactivity, it could just wander around by itself. It could follow a random path, or a set, structured path. Maybe your footsteps could determine rhythmic qualities – if you marched or danced around, it could sound different to just wandering around aimlessly.