Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Thanks again to the glorious, corpuscle-covered Pink Tentacle for this link.
Sumo wrestling filmed in tilt-shift stop-motion. A yokozuna is there (dunno if there’s still more than one, there was for a while) – he’s the guy that comes out in the big white belt and dances for a while around 2 minutes in. The even have some comedy sumo. I know tilt shift is trendy and all the rage right know, but I enjoy it and this is a fairly unique subject matter for the format.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Blogging from bed with a purring contented cat and fiancee next to me. Thinking about how great it will be to be able to design a garden and the have robots keep it up for you. The could render the trimmings for epoxy and carbon nano things, that they could then use to build the ponds, bridges, buildings and statues of your japanese or chinese or english style or whatever crazy type of mashups we come up with in the future.
I suppose it might even be possible to have the robots excavate cavities they could then laminate & support with aforementioned garden-born carbon products. The purpose, of course, would be to captue and store rainwater for the water-poor seasons of the year.
And of course we will have robots capable of growing vegetable gardens, too. I keep running over the problems of robotic gardening in my head. I dunno why, it’s not anywhere near my chosen career path. I guess it’s just one of those things that likes to go on in my mind’s theatre of operations.
Friday, March 6th, 2009
I personally hate the show Monk, so thank science this post is actually about Japanese Buddhist monks. Specifically the ones who attempting living mummification. Those dude were some crazy motherfuckers. Some actually fucking succeeded. That sounds like one of the most awful ways to die, especially since it took over 6 years (1000 days is about 3 years). I bet they sure felt like they were in Nirvana, after drinking arsenic water and eating bark and roots for a couple years. They eventually went into underground chambers and breathed via small bamboo pipe until they died completely. 1000 days later, they were dug up, and if they successfully became a mummy, they were consecrated as Buddhas and enshrined. The failures presumably buried and forgotten.
And apologies to anyone receiving the podcast via RSS feed, the second song appears to have gotten dumped from the feed so I just sound like a lunatic with bad wordpress markup talking about music that doesn’t exist. /sigh. So here’s the second track for the feed (but not the win). I guess Two for Second Tuesday was just a tragic idea all around. Anyone viewing through the web probably already heard this one.
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
So what’s one of the main fears of people owning houses with trees growing nearby? The tree falling down and crush-crush-crushing the house. So what do they do? They trim the tree mercilessly, without regard to the health of the tree. What does that do? It allows disease into the tree, which rots it, and eventually makes it fall down on your house.
I’m thinking a series of carbo/aramid/expoxy wrapped bamboo trusses could be used to help prop trees up and away from the house (standard tall-X shape leaned away from the house and planted a few feet into some permeable concrete plugs in the ground. Japanese gardens make much use of this on a small scale, but I want to keep massive oaks or camphors sheltering my house.
Which brings me to point two, habitation. If we can have super-strong trusses holding our trees up, what’s to stop us from just building up on/in that? Especially camphors, which are highly disease resistant. The idea is we’ll treat large trees sorta like bonsai (without all the root shenanigans) – training them to grow where we want, selectively keeping strategic branches but taking utmost care when we cut to properly protect our tree from disease – grow the tree in such a way to gently encompass the house, truss the branches in aforementioned ways to help support them and the house, of course build the house out of high-strength, lightweight composites. At times the trusses may need to be jacked up and more concrete backfilled under them, if the tree grows taller, though the pace is very, very slow. Another thing: how many houses outlast trees? How many human lives can outlast a tree, if well taken care of? None! Well, no houses made out of tree material – I’m sure some ancient stone domiciles outlast the 2000 and 3000+ year old trees we’ve found – but are no longer considered habitable by most means. The trees however are still making leaves and growing.
Oh yeah, don’t live in a hurricane or tornado prone area. Flooding and snowing should be okay (Go ahead, try to flood my treehouse Ms. Nature) as long as the roof is designed to easily shed snow (i.e. tall and tapering at the top).
