Farmers should make house-calls

[Ooooh, I like this idea. -egg]
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Farmers should make house-calls:

John Robb wants us to stop landscaping our lawns, and start foodscaping them — growing food for our families. And he thinks the way to jumpstart it is for farmers to make house-calls. I love this idea, but don’t think I could participate in it: when we applied to Hackney Council in London for permission to add a greenhouse frame to our balcony they rejected it because it would “interrupt the vertical rhythm” of our building. As far as I can tell, “vertical rhythm” is an imaginary aesthetic quality that is more important than real food.

Of course, since most people in the developed world don’t know how to grow food anymore and many of the methods and tools used to grow high quality food are still being developed, we are going to need to some help.

One great way to do that is to join a local foodscaping program.

This type of program is like a food subscription at a CSA. However, in this program, the farmer comes to you. He/she converts your yard into a high performance garden and teaches you how to garden it successfully.

I think that if we are smart, we’ll be spending more money on foodscaping in ten years than landscaping. If so, good food will be available everywhere.

What if Farmers made House Calls?

Good Vibrations Storage Unit by Ferruccio Laviani“Echoes…

[“disorienting” heh heh heh. -egg]
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Good Vibrations Storage Unit by Ferruccio Laviani
“Echoes…:

Good Vibrations Storage Unit by Ferruccio Laviani
“Echoes of faraway places and Oriental elements are glimpsed in the “disorienting” design of this storage unit, which seems to have been “deformed” by a strong jolt or by swaying movements. Although it appears to depart from the aesthetics of the past, in fact it draws upon ancient knowledge in the use of carving and fine wood workmanship.”
Hand-carved glitch, submitted by David A.

The Aleph: Twitter and Gutenberg mashup tribute to Jorge Luis Borges

[Effing brilliant. -egg]
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The Aleph: Twitter and Gutenberg mashup tribute to Jorge Luis Borges: A neat project by David Hirmes: The Aleph: Infinite Wonder / Infinite Pity. Sentences from Project Gutenberg and Twitter that start with two words: “I saw…”

You can view only Gutenberg, or only Twitter, or mush them both to produce beautiful word salad like this:

I saw wild hands upcast to the gloom above, a shrunken, pallid face, the gleam of snow-white hair. I saw and smelt that they used real powder. I saw the horrible glare of her eyes, but I could not see so much of her as I wished, and I said that I would call again in the morning. I saw her first five years ago at Gerard’s; she came from Switzerland, where she had taken refuge. I saw him the other night, and from what he said, and what she says, I can see pretty well how things are going. I saw a picture of @AmalJamal_ on prom night. lol.

The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. The website’s creator David Hirmes explains:

I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase “I saw.”
The title of the piece is a reference to the narrator’s summing up of the vast whirring world he’s seen, one of “infinite wonder and infinite pity”.

(HT: @samryan)

Australian pop-out camper that is full of well-thought-out features

Australian pop-out camper that is full of well-thought-out features:

Here’s a slow, gentle, fascinating demonstration video for the Wedgetail slide-on camper, “built for rough Australian terrain.” It’s a pretty amazing feat of engineering, with lots of thoughtful features. But what really gets me is in the money shot where the whole thing opens up like some kind of origami trick. Big things hidden in little things! Hell yeah!


Wedgetail slide on camper demonstration

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Welcome to the Ballroom, where Voguing is always in style

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Welcome to the Ballroom, where Voguing is always in style

Mention the word “voguing” to people, and generally their first reaction will be “strike a pose, there’s nothing to it”. A dance fad made popular by Madonna in the early Nineties, voguing faded into obscurity as quickly as it popped up. It’s good for nostalgic giggles, though: we’ve all seen that clip of “Vogue Boy” voguing in a shopping mall. But what if I were to tell you—like a big, gay Morpheus—that vogue was not a short-lived fad? Voguing is now part of a complex, diverse, fully-formed and constantly evolving underground culture called ballroom.

To be clear, “ballroom” takes it name from the venues in which the “ball” events take place, and is not to be confused with the “strictly” kind of ballroom. Like hip hop, ballroom encompasses many different elements of artistic expression, from music and language to clothes and design, and, of course, dance. It deals directly with some of society’s most controversial issues, namely sexuality, race, class, gender roles and expression, beauty modes, self-definition and competition. It doesn’t do this in the polemical style we may be used to from punk and political hip-hop, however, where topics are theorised and discussed. In ballroom these issues are lived and experienced, as a vast number of those taking part in this underground scene are transgender, working class, people of colour.

Ballroom includes society’s most marginalised: minorities within minorities within minorities, for whom voguing and ballroom culture is an important resource. In a world where they have been rejected, ballroom not only accepts these people for who they are, it celebrates them, in a variety of unique and different categories. The competitive, prize-winning aspect of ballroom gives some participants a sense of worth lacking in the “real” world (not to mention money), and the familial structure of the “houses”—mother, father, sister, brother—often acts as a real surrogate, as many in this world have been disowned by their biological families.

Here, voguing is not just a dance, and ballroom is not just a genre. It’s a way of life that brings pride, peer recognition and self-respect. The genre of music is one thing, but the culture which surrounds it is another; and both are intricately tied into one another.

“Ballroom is a competition where you have houses (teams) that compete against each other, much like a sports team, except the competition in fashion, dance, runway, modelling, creativity and other categories. It is still usually an underground thing attended by people in the scene, though some outside the scene…

Print your own "Machine With Concrete" and produce a gear ratio of 244.14 quintillion to 1

Print your own “Machine With Concrete” and produce a gear ratio of 244.14 quintillion to 1:

A fanciful post to Thingiverse from 3DTOPO allows you to print out your own version of Arthur Ganson sculpture Machine with Concrete , a system of wormgears that produces a gear-ratio of 244.14 quintillion to 1.


This is a printable version of Machine with Concrete. The sculpture is a series of twelve 1:50 worm gears, with each gear reducing 1/50th of the previous gear. With 12 gears, the final gear ratio is a mind boggling 244,140,625,000,000,000,000 : 1 (244.14 quintillion to 1). With the first gear spinning at 200RPM it would take over 2 TRILLION years for a single revolution at the end of the machine, so the final drive shaft can be embedded in concrete or plaster.

I emailed Arthur Ganson a link to this page and he replied “looks FANTASTIC!”.


Printed Machine with Concrete

(via JWZ)