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Continuing with our Victory Garden series, we offer this trellis design to increase your vine crop production in a small area. Admittedly, what you see pictured here will never be on Home Depot’s inventory; and you’ll never see it in one of those luxurious suburban dream garden magazine spreads. That’s because the trellis is pure function, held together at the base by the earth itself. But the virtues are many. First is simplicity. Only two materials are used: 6 bamboo upright poles and two pieces of bicycle inner tube form the structure; four more diagonal poles are added to help the plants climb. The bamboo poles were purchased for about 20 cents each in bulk, and will last 5 years or more if you put them away at season’s end. The bicycle inner tubes were got from the repair shop waste basket and cut into segments with a knife. The second virtue is design for rapid assembly and rapid disassembly. Experienced gardeners know that at year’s end they’ll be busy putting the harvest by, the weather can be nasty, and we’re about “gardened out.” So anything that makes clearing debris and putting away equipment easy is going to be much appreciated. Because there’s no tying of twine, you don’t even have to cut it away when you’re done.

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Originally by John Laumer from Treehugger on May 4, 2006, 7:23am

Know that question - “If you could have dinner with a famous person, who would it be?” The one where the guys say Elle MacPherson, and the girls opt for Nelson Mandela? In lieu of such fantasies we present Nobelity, a movie where you’ll get to sit down with nine Nobel Laureates for 84 minutes of inspiring discussion. It features Nobel Laureates: Steven Weinberg, Jody Williams (ok, maybe not quite Elle, but she is the founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which is way more impressive anyhow. Plus she is one of only 33 women nobel winners, when there have been 725 blokes), Ahmed Zewail, Rick Smalley, Wangari Maathai, Sir Joseph Rotblat, Dr. Harold Varmus, Desmond Tutu (hey, he’s almost like Nelson Mandela’s brother, so you haven’t done too badly), and Amartya Sen. Filmed in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, Nobelity combines the insights of some of the world’s most intelligent and accomplished individuals with their first-person view of 50 years from now. (Several have passed away since they contributed to the film.) Communities can host screenings of the film and here is a list of the current locations doing so in the US. We can’t voucher for the movie itself, but maybe one of our readers has seen and can review it. Or you check out the trailer. More at ::Nobelity

Originally by warren from Treehugger on May 4, 2006, 6:11am

We’re quoting here from a recent Associated Press piece: “BISMARCK, N.D. - Buoyed by high natural gas prices, the Great Plains Synfuels Plant has paid $79 million to the U.S. Department of Energy as part of an agreement that rescued the Beulah factory from a possible shutdown”. Apparently the lignite fed plant, after two decades, has only repaid a small portion ($241 million) of the total Federally guaranteed $1.5 billion construction loan from the early 1980’s. “Low natural gas prices made the synfuels plant unprofitable, and the pipeline companies defaulted on their loans in August 1985. The Energy Department, after operating the plant for three years, sold it to Dakota Gasification in October 1988”.

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Originally by John Laumer from Treehugger on May 4, 2006, 7:34am

There are lots of things out there that store solar energy in the day and release it at night, but how many come with such a story? We love the Solar Plant:

A natural plant absorbs sunlight and carbon dioxide, and discharges oxygen and water.
The solar plant absorbs sunlight and emits light after dark.
Although it does not grow like a natural plant, it always stands still next to you.
Please, fully expose it to sunlight in the daytime.
You could feel the solar plant which shines after dark like the sun.

Designed by Takanori Hayakawa, ::cute flash demo here via ::Product Dose

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on May 4, 2006, 7:24am

Originally from Science And Politics on May 4, 2006, 11:13am

The fourth part of the series on circadian clocks in bacteria is up on Circadiana. And look around while you are there - I do not always link here to new posts over there.

Originally from Science And Politics on May 3, 2006, 6:25pm

Sketch & Share by Robert Faludi, John Schimmel & Grace Kim is a collaborative sketch pad toys for sharing drawings and sounds over distance. Developed as part of the networked objects & toy design class at ITP. User scenario:

Children turn on the toy and begin pressing lit buttons to create patterns. Each button press activates a sound, and the child can toggle between a variety of amusing and annoying sounds including lasers, elephants and doorbells. Each toy can be paired with another toy over a local wireless connection, or over long distances using the Internet. So children in remote locations can draw together, play games like tic-tac-toe and share a variety of funny sounds. There is also a software version of Sketch & Share that runs on a computer, and can connect to any Sketch & Share toy over the Internet. Grandparents and family friends can join in the fun from wherever they live, and take an active role in the child’s playtime–strengthening the bonds with that child.

Part of the ITP NYU Show

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on May 4, 2006, 2:33am

It might not be a surprise that walking is good for you, but did you know it can extend your life. LiveScience.com talks about a study that shows that your ability to walk can predict your future health.

“The ability to complete this walk was a powerful predictor of health outcomes,” said study leader Anne Newman of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “In fact, we found that the people who could not complete the walk were at an extremely high risk of later disability and death.”

Our advice? Get out and walk as much as you’re able. It’s good for you in many ways.

 
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Related: How to exercise your eyes

Originally from Lifehacker on May 3, 2006, 8:00pm

The Guardian is running a piece on how a discarded airline boarding pass can lead to identity theft.

The article is an interesting read on privacy and security issues, and since there are more ways than ever that an identity thief can get to your personal information, it seems like a good time to turn to you, our loyal readers. What do you do to prevent identity theft? Have any of you had to deal with a stolen identity, and if so, any advice for best handling that? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

 
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Originally from Lifehacker on May 3, 2006, 3:00pm

This ginormous occasional chair from Twentytwentyone is made of iron wire and comes in orange, blue or white. Perfect for any home that would look good with a cell phone tower in the backyard. Doubles as a clothing rack. Put three of them together and you’ve got the skeleton for a Zeppelin. According to the spec sheet it’s 41/128 somethings high and costs 2,800 even they knew you wouldn’t buy

Originally from Funfurde on April 13, 2006, 11:49pm

This is one record by The Saints that I’m just not that familiar with. I never bought “Monkey Puzzle”, but lucky for us Mary did. I remember liking it last week when I played it, but it’s been a long week people. Please mister mover man deliver my turntable and records tomorrow!

Originally from I’m Heavy Duty! on May 3, 2006, 11:31pm

several different graphs & animations showing how 2,147,483,647 web pages, deliberately ordered in a binary search tree, were monitored by different search engines, such as Yahoo! Slurp, Google bot & msn bot, over a time period of a year. each search engine’s behavior was visualized as a tree image that represents which nodes were crawled: each line in the image represents a node, the number of times a search bot visited the node determines the length of the line.
by investigating the shape of the resulting tree over time, one can discover how the search engines are different in crawling the web.
see also yahoo versus google & search engine comparison.
[drunkmenworkhere.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 3, 2006, 6:37pm

ART+COM are a group of Artists I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. Based in Berlin they produce commercial interactive installations, as well as work for Galleries and Exhibitions. Here are a few of their projects; a complete list of their works can be found on their website

The Science of Aliens

For the ‘Science of Aliens’ Exhibition at the British Science Museum, ART+COM created an interactive room where visitors can get in touch directly with aliens. The creatures living on the planets ,“Aurelia“ and “Blue Moon“, move dynamically through virtual landscapes. They are generated in real time. Visitors interact with the two worlds via a touchsensitive surface of 2 meters width and 7.5 meters length. They can not only watch the aliens but also influence the creatures’ behaviour and actions.

Video

Vattenfall media facade

100 m² of the facade as well as the interior of the Vattenfall building were transformed into a partially visual, partially real garden with projections. In the building, the visitors saw unusually dressed actors with circular skirts who moved across the room at intervals. They formed the starting point of the media production. Virtually growing tendrils spread from their skirts across the entire floor and blossomed colourfully in the end.

Video

floating.numbers

“10 + 5 = God. The power of signs” – the title of the special exhibition in the Jewish Museum which commissioned ART+COM to produce the “floating.numbers” project.

The central element in this exhibition is a 9-metre long interactive table with a mass of numbers flowing in a continuum on its surface. Individual digits appear randomly at the surface of this stream of numbers and, once touched by a visitor, surrender their secret in text, pictures, films and animation. The significance of the numbers materialises from the various perspectives of science, religion, art or one’s outlook on everyday life

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on May 3, 2006, 7:43pm

I have tons of pictures but never get around to putting them in frames, so mostly they sit around in piles. What I really need is a simple way to put photos up, take them down and change them. The Wave Magnetic Track might do the trick. It’s basically a curved metal track with magnets that let you stick photos (or whatever) on it. And at the moment it’s just $9.99. Bargain! Not a very

Originally from Funfurde on April 16, 2006, 6:31pm

125,000 euros Distributed

Our much-discussed, game-theory-oriented approach to cultural funding represents a clear rejection of all the Austrian cultural industry’s hegemonic tendencies, states MANA coordinator Stefan Lutschinger: This hack of the outmoded jury and committee system opposes every rationalistic funding cut with pure difference, contingency coping and the fruitful development of paradox.

Software-based Funding Distribution: Last week, a participatory cultural support budget of 125,000 euros was distributed to artists and cultural producers in Vienna using the MANA Community Game – an innovative software-supported selection process. The decision regarding the distribution of funding was not made by curators, juries or committees, but by the submitters themselves. Twelve people will receive project grants between 5,000 and 15,000 euros, whereby 42% of the recipients are women.

“Old” Concepts and “New Thinking”: The Community Game is one of the most innovative distribution systems for cultural funding worldwide. It is based on “old” concepts of the avant-garde – auto-curating and self-organization – and the “new thinking” of second-order cybernetics. MANA’s great advantage is its capacity for self-correction and adaptation to intelligent system environments: errors and irregularities can be recognized and corrected immediately by the net community, which emerges strengthened from this process. Here 120 submitters agreed to a complex set of rules.

A Self-managed Cultural Funding Budget: Since the autumn of 2004, the open net community “netznetz.net” has grown out of the numerous digital cultural initiatives that have developed in Vienna in recent years. In order to do justice to these diverse cultural and artistic modes of expression, an application has been made to the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs (Net Culture Unit) for a self-managed cultural funding budget to support this very active scene with around 500,000 euros yearly. The heart of this funding model is the software-based selection process MANA. After a two-month evaluation phase in early summer, the net community will decide on its specific adaptation and further development.

Inquiries:

Stefan Lutschinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Hans Bernhard
Email: s.lutschinger[at]digitaldrafts.at
+43 660 6538616
http://mana.netznetz.net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netznetz
http://www.parliaments-of-art.net

Originally posted by jo from networked_performance, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 3, 2006 at 06:43 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 3, 2006, 6:43pm

Be sure to check out the gameplay video of Spore to see where Wright is taking games. –GH

Originally posted by cast42 from del.icio.us/tag/future, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 4, 2006 at 10:53 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 4, 2006, 10:53am

Dave Chiu and Didier Hillhorst have developed an interesting concept of what they call Reputation Management Service. Interesting because it gives a glimpse of what tomorrow could bring but i also find it rather frightening (and not just because i never ever pay my bills on time). RentAThing enables negotiation for access by addressing risk.

A series of transaction mechanisms and interactions leverage trust and reputation to enable a variety of scenarios involving access to objects and services. Instead of silos of reputation, with various services, companies, and individuals developing isolated reputations, RentAThing provides a centralized means of managing and developing a single reputation: your reputation.

As you go through life, you acquire a reputation. Do you pay your bills on time? How do you treat library books? Do you forget to return money you’ve borrowed? This reputation affects your ability to gain access to things and services. In the future, with spimes and smart objects as actors in a world of ubiquitous information, your objects could be rented to anyone at any time. Gaining access to those objects could be as simple as having a great reputation.

Photos by Dave Chiu. Slideshow.

Reputation systems are hard, but Playmobil is easy, so it’s a wash. –GH

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 4, 2006 at 08:49 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 4, 2006, 8:49am

Tim Berners-Lee has posted on his blog why we must have the neutrality of the net.From the post.”It is of the utmost importance that,if I connect to the Internet,and you connect to the Internet,that we can then run any Internet application we want,without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video,or quality audio.But we each pay to connect to the Net,but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.When I was a child,I was impressed by the fact that the installation fee for a telephone was everywhere the same in the UK,whether you lived in a city or on a mountain,just as the same stamp would get a letter to either place.To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers,but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task.It is a very important one.The US should do it now,and,if it turns out to be the only way,be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us.The neutral communications medium is essential to our society.It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy.It is the basis of democracy,by which a community should decide what to do.It is the basis of science,by which humankind should decide what is true.Let us protect the neutrality of the net”.

Neutrality of the Net

Originally posted by Jim_Downing from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 4, 2006 at 08:39 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 4, 2006, 8:39am

Essentially, Otaku is Japanese for ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’, specifcally someone deeply versed/obsessed in the worlds of Anime (Japanese Animation) or Manga (Japanese Comic Books). Mostly, Otaku are seen as being so obsessed with their made-up worlds that they can’t live in the real one. Kind of like people I know stuck in World of Warcraft. The term even spawned an awesome TV show that I’ll blog about some point in the future called Densha Otoko.

In a strange twist of events, the term has caught on here in the States as a label of pride for geeks of all types, specifically those into Japanese culture.

So why the hell should you care about all of this?

Well, check out this Google Video ‘Otaku From USA’. It’s a Japanese TV program that chronicled a group of American ‘Otaku’ on a group tour of a Anime Festival in Japan.

It’s basically a nature video about nerds. Totally awesome.

[ via ]

I bet the Americans featured know whether or not they’re being made fun of, but I sure don’t. –GH

Originally from Negatendo's Livejournal, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 3, 2006 at 02:40 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 3, 2006, 2:40pm

Recitation (2006, 2.2MB, 30 sec)

We’re down in t’coil oil
Weer muck clarts up t’winders
We’v used all us coil now
And we’re reight down t’cinders
But if bum-bailiff comes
‘E’ll never find us
‘Cos we’re down in t’coil oil
Weer muck clarts up t’winders

from Scenes Of Provincial Life

Originally by doron golan from DVblog on May 3, 2006, 11:00pm