install theme

Kubrick.

yainks:

just shut up and watch.

8 months ago 2 notes Reblog
9 months ago 633 notes Reblog

best thing I’ve ever seen on the internets.

barthel:

“Orphaned wombat and joey become friends”

crikeymatethisrocks: Nice one, Willard. 
laughingsquid: Suburban Planning
smarterplanet: Who invented the Internet?: The outrageous conservative claim that every tech innovation came from private enterprise. - Slate Magazine Earlier this month, President Obama argued that wealthy business people owe some of their success to the government’s investment in education and basic infrastructure. He cited roads, bridges, and schools. Then he singled out the most clear-cut example of how government investment can spark huge business opportunities: the Internet. “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama said. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” Until recently this wouldn’t have been a controversial statement. Everyone in the tech world knows that the Internet got its start in the 1960s, when a team of computing pioneers at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency designed and deployed ARPANET, the first computer network that used “packet switching”—a communications system that splits up data and sends it across multiple paths toward its destination, which is the basic design of today’s Internet. According to most accounts, researchers working on ARPANET created many of the Internet’s defining features, including TCP/IP, the protocol on which today’s network operates. In the 1980s, they strung together various government and university networks together using TCP/IP—thus creating a single worldwide network, the Internet. Suddenly, though, the government’s role in the Internet’s creation is being cast into doubt. “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal,argued Monday in a widely linkedJournal op-ed. Instead, Crovitz believes that “full credit” for the Internet’s creation ought to go to Xerox, whose Silicon Valley research facility, Xerox PARC, created the Ethernet networking standard as well as the first graphical computer (famously the inspiration for Apple’s Mac). According to Crovitz, not only did the government not create the Internet, it slowed its arrival—that researchers were hassled by “bureaucrats” who stymied the network’s success. “It’s important to understand the history of the Internet because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government,” Crovitz says. I’ll give him one thing: It is important to understand the history of the Internet. Too bad he doesn’t seem interested in doing so. Crovitz’s entire yarn is almost hysterically false. He gets basic history wrong, he gets the Internet’s defining technologies wrong, and, most importantly, he misses the important interplay between public and private funds that has been necessary for all great modern technological advances.

thenewinquiry:


So I’m not interested in calling The Dark Knight Rises names; I’m interested in understanding what it is. And what it is, it turns out, is an effort to evade the consequences of its own parable, just as conservatives never want to remember how closely aligned their tradition has been with actual fascism. 

Zunguzungu, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Dark Knight”

Excellent

9 months ago 19 notes Reblog
1 year ago 117 notes Reblog

OMA

(Source: ainfantek)

German Shop Windows, 1934retronaut.co
1 year ago 1,241 notes Reblog

whoa. 

oscarraymundo:

Artist Jason de Caires Taylor creates life-size cement sculptures of people and submerges them into the waters of South America. As time passes the sculptures become part of the underwater landscape and slowly become artificial reefs ripe with marine life.

courtenaybird: Pinterest’s Hype Bubble Has Burst, And Now It Is Actually Losing Users Monthly active users are down from 11.3 million on March 1 to 11.15 million on April 1 to just 8.3 million today.
wildcat2030: Manila is one of the world’s five dirtiest cities, but graffiti? That’s not a problem. It’s not that people don’t paint on the walls in the hyper-polluted Philippines capital, because they do. But they do it with a paint that actually eats smog out of the air. The catalytic paint, called Boysen KNOxOUT, reacts with light and water vapor to filter out nitrogen oxides. An environmental scientist interviewed in this BBC video says it can scrub out 20 percent of polluting nitrogen. Manila is deploying the paint in the form of massive murals, which are both beautiful and, because of their size, effective. Eleven square feet of paint-covered surface can absorb as much pollution as a full-grown tree, and these murals are close to 11 THOUSAND square feet. If we could get this stuff into the hands of street artists and taggers, it would be like having an army of energetic teenagers planting trees all over the city all day, every day. (via Super-polluted city tries to clean itself with smog-eating paint | Grist)

FUTURE.

filthyphil:

insooutso:

Jet packs.

I remember when this project first launched. It’s amazing to see how controlled the flight has become.

Jealous.

Imagine using these to get to work, travel, in war, for solo freestyle or synchronized flying competitions?

1 year ago 8 notes Reblog
too much to wrap my mind around. 8bitfuture: Has life from Earth spread to other planets? Researchers at the Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan have released a study showing how life-bearing meteorites from Earth could have spread around our galaxy after a massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago.  The asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater in Mexico could have ejected as much mass from Earth as the asteroid itself. While much of the mass ejected would have ended up on the Moon, almost the same amount is thought to have landed on Europa. That’s because the gravitational field for Jupiter draws in anything passing by, where it can be swept up by orbiting planets. Estimates for the number of Earth rocks on our Moon and Europa are as many as 100,000,000 individial rocks on each planet. While it’s not known if microbes would be able to survive that long journey and seed life on other planets, there are many planets that would easily support them if they did make the journey intact. For example, a super-Earth planet orbiting star Gliese 581 is thought to have attracted up to 1,000 rocks from the Earth impact event. The journey there would have taken around 1 million years, meaning that if any Earth microbes made the trip, they’ve had 64 million years to evolve.
Toronto becomes first city to mandate green roofs climateadaptation: Lovely followers, does anyone have data or a before/after study that shows greenroofs have actually lowered temps in a city? Msg me here. Toronto becomes first city to mandate green roofs Toronto is the first city in North America with a bylaw that requires roofs to be green. And we’re not talking about paint. A green roof, also known as a living roof, uses various hardy plants to create a barrier between the sun’s rays and the tiles or shingles of the roof. The plants love the sun, and the building (and its inhabitants) enjoy more comfortable indoor temperatures as a result. Toronto’s new legislation will require all residential, commercial and institutional buildings over 2,000 square meters to have between 20 and 60 percent living roofs. Although it’s been in place since early 2010, the bylaw will apply to new industrial development as of April 30, 2012. While this is the first city-wide mandate involving green roofs, Toronto’s decision follow’s in the footsteps of other cities, like Chicago and New York. Under the direction of Mayor Richard Daley the city of Chicago put a 38,800 square foot green roof on a 12 story skyscraper in 2000. Twelve years later, that building now saves $5000 annually on utility bills, and Chicago boasts 7 million square feet of green roof space. New York has followed suit, and since planting a green roof on the Con Edison Learning Centre in Queens, the buildings managers have seen a 34 percent reduction of heat loss in winter, and reduced summer heat gain by 84 percent. But lower utility bills aren’t the only benefit of planting a living roof. In addition to cooling down the city, green roofs create cleaner air, cleaner water, and provide a peaceful oasis for people, birds and insects in an otherwise polluted, concrete and asphalt-covered environment.

climateadaptation:

Neat.

evanfleischer:

A sloth makes its way through a collection of the press corps following Obama in Colombia — via.

1 year ago 38 notes Reblog