A Frenchman is making “green walls“. Which are exactly what they sound like. Rather than a wall being made of wood or concrete, he’s making them out of living plants. Well, the wood and concrete are still there, you just can’t see them any more because the wall is entirely covered with plants. Think dense jungle on the side of your office building. Or in the lobby. Check out his site, Vertical Garden, because the pictures are cool and the final products are currently stumping my powers of description. These walls are probably too “designer” for practical, wide-spread application. Watering …
Category: current events
Ah, climate change and automobile dependency… I haven’t tried this out myself, but I know if I sit in my running car in a closed garage, I’m pretty sure I will be dead long before the fuel runs out. My car holds two. We would both be dead. Did I mention that I drive a hybrid? My car could kill many more. Taking the conservative estimate of five carbon-monoxide deaths per car, I started estimating how many cars there are in one mile of traffic. I reset my odometer and checked the clock. In rush hour, it took me an …
A recent conversation on our family mailing list brought 911 Mysteries to my attention. (Watch part 1, part 2, and part 3 of the first installment, Demolitions.) The producers make a pretty compelling argument, although I could just be too willing to believe people in positions of power are capable of shocking feats of corruption. The movie doesn’t make accusations, perhaps one of its strongest aspects. It just presents lots of evidence, about buildings and steel and fire and explosions and demolitions and insurance and investments and permits and planes and volcanoes and thermite and basements and the weekend before …
Apparently, this “where does my money go” site (see previous post) isn’t an original idea, although why the best summary of the battle for getting the matter unveiled appears in a Scots newspaper, I’m sure I don’t know. According to the font of information that is Wikipedia, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act has passed both House and Senate and is awaiting a Presidential Signature. It looks as if it’s focussing on listing the organizations that receive federal funding as well as the amounts received. Depending on how that gets translated from the legal-speak of the bill to an …
So, it’s that time of year again, and I’m wading through a (mercifully short) voter’s pamphlet in preparation for Washington’s mid-September primary. In compliance with some apparent rule out there that says one cannot have an election without something about taxes in it somewhere, there’s a local initiative looking to add approximately $150 to the “average” homeowner’s property taxes. They insist that these funds would go exclusively to local schools. I’m probably naive when it comes to things governmental, and I’m generally pro-education, but I find I have a small problem with all the repeated requests for more money (more …
I was driving, so most of my critical thinking brain cells were not paying attention to the radio, but I did catch most of KUOW‘s interview with Noah Feldman, author of What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building. How refreshing to hear someone speaking rationally on the topic, weighing in somewhere between “Stay the Course!” and “Bring the Troops Home Now!” His logic: No matter what flawed logic got us there, the US has more or less completely dismantled Iraq and, having made a mess, it’s our responsibility to clean up after ourselves. We owe the …