DIY: Build your own tiny house

Sunset House, Tiny House Swoon

***

According to Wikipedia's entry on the Small House Movement,

In the United States the average size of new single family homes grew from 1,780 square feet (165 m2) in 1978 to 2,479 square feet (230.3 m2) in 2007, and to 2,662 square feet (247.3 m2) in 2013, despite a decrease in the size of the average family. Reasons for this include increased material wealth and prestige.

The small house movement is a return to houses of less than 1,000 square feet (93 m2).

Sometimes there is a distinction made between small--less than 1000 sq.ft.--and tiny--less than 400 sq.ft. A resource for information on the tiny house is The Tiny Life, a site with a lot of information about living tiny. 11 Tiny Houses looks a number of different approaches to building a tiny house. Some of these builds remind me of living off the grid. Note that many tiny houses are built on wheels, making them sort of home-made RVs.

For more background on tiny houses, take a look at Time Magazine's Tiny Houses With Big Ambitions. Also, there's a documentary on Vimeo titled Living Small.

***

The $8000 tiny house, Loving Tiny Life

***

TinyHouseBuild reports on a tiny house you can build for $8000. One article worth note is The Incredible $8,000 Tiny House: Serious Saving Strategies While You Build. The builders of this house have a site, Loving Tiny Life, that talks about their experiences.

Two photo essays about small houses are These tiny homes are full of big ideas and 44 of the Most Impressive Tiny Houses You've Ever Seen.

Stock house plans can be found at sites like America's Best and Jacobsen Homes. But the prices can range from several hundreds to thousands of dollars. It's best to do some research at a site like Home Style Choices first.

If you're wondering what living in a tiny house might feel like, check out this video.

***

***

-- Marge

Politics: Boehner and the Pope

John Boehner, Pope Francis(Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin/Craig Ruttle), Salon

***

Wow! John Boehner resigned.

He simply decided to resign on Friday, says NPR (National Public Radio). News analysts at Business Insider say this action will likely avert a government shutdown. The military has been preparing for such a shutdown.

Robert Costa at the Washington Post tells how Boehner was affected by the Pope's presence in Congress in What John Boehner told me the night before he said he was quitting.

The New York Times has an analysis of Pope Francis' address to Congress. And Time has published a transcript of the Pope's speech.

For some perspective on why men of power change course, take a look at Meet Hillary Clinton’s Bulldog,

-- Marge

Cartoons: the Pope has landed

This week's mix looks at belief in its many forms.

The Pope has landed.

***

Walt Handelsman, The Week

***

Republicans are the new heretics.

***

Drew Sheneman, The Week

***

It looks like D. Trump's only God is himself.

***

David Fitzsimmons, The Week

***

VW disappoints. Wikipedia tells us that the Volkswagen, Beetle version, was originally "formulated by Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, wishing for a cheap, simple car to be mass-produced for the new road network of his country." The simple, cheap part of his concept was discarded years ago. Did you know that Volkswagen installed "software known as "defeat devices" in many of its diesel cars to evade federal emission limits?"

***

Bob Gorrell, The Week

***

-- Marge

DIY: a (smart) phone worth keeping

Dave Hakkens, Phonebloks, Wikipedia

***

In 2013 Dave Hakkens' Phonebloks campaign began with a single video. Dutch designer Hakkens had presented his idea for an open-source modular smartphone at his graduation from Design Academy Eindhoven. Here's the video.

***

***

Soon after Google/Motorola stepped up to partner with Phonebloks in developing the concept. This effort became Project ARA with a pilot release date of early 2015. Google's ATAP group is handling the effort; the team is headed by Paul Eremenko, formerly with DARPA. There's an ATAP channel on YouTube. Here's a video about the development effort.

***

***

The Verge reported in May 2015

...the project is expected to begin a pilot test in Puerto Rico later this year where the public will presumably be able to try it out.

As an aside, another ATAP project of interest is a Spotlight Story titled "Duet" in Times Square; a making-of video is below.

***

***

-- Marge

Art: Zaha Hadid's flowing architectural shapes

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid is an architect known for remarkable buildings like this one: 

***

Heydar Aliyev Centre (photo by Iwan Baan), zaha-hadid.com

***

You can see more views of this gorgeous construct at Zaha Hadid's site under Heydar Aliyev Centre.

What I wondered is how such a structure is built. Luckily Buildipedia has an extensive article on the Aliyev Centre's construction. Here's a photo of the central structure without the "Glass fiber reinforced plastics (GFRP) and glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) panel (Buildipedia)" façade.

***

Heydar Aliyev Centre, Buildipedia

***

To get an idea of what the Centre feels like inside, take a look at this photo of one of three auditoriums.

***

An auditorium in Heydar Aliyev Centre, Buildipedia

***

In July 2012, Architects' Journal reported a fire that damaged the roof. Apparently some controversy surrounded the design project. The building had opened in the preceding May.

E-architect reported in 2014:

Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan has won the Design Museum Design of the Year Award 2014. Hadid is the first ever woman to win the top prize in the competition, now in its seventh year.

-- Marge

Cartoons: sharp pencils

Today's mix includes comments on Donald Trump v. Carly Fiorina; the Pope v. Republicans; County Clerk Kim Davis v. all not in agreement; and Apple v. the common pencil.

In the second GOP presidential debate Trump met his match: Carly Fiorina.

***

Steve Benson, The Week

***

The Syrian refugees are posing intense problems for Europe and the U.S. is being asked to step up and help. Here's are some excuses the U.S. is presenting: Why the U.S. Can't Immediately Resettle Syrian Refugees. Pope Francis wants us to give them shelter.

***

Steve Kelley, The Week

***

Published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Clergy weighs Kim Davis' legal, moral rights.

***

Mike Luckovich, The Week

***

And last, but not least, Apple announces the Apple Pencil for iPad Pro.

***

Nate Beeler, The Week

***

-- Marge

LSD news

thisisvegas, This cat.., reddit 

***

This is just in from the Alchemist Newsletter, a ChemWeb publication--Wondrous, tender music:

New research into the hallucinogenic drug, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, could help explain why music gives us the tingles and makes us emotional. There is renewed interest from medical science into the mode of action of LSD as well as its potential therapeutic effects. This coupled with its infamous use by musicians and other artists, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, led to a placebo-controlled study that looked at whether or not LSD enhances the emotional response to instrumental music. In a preliminary study with a small group of volunteers, LSD was found to boost emotions such as "wonder", "transcendence", "power" and "tenderness", according to a team from Imperial College London writing in the journal Psychopharmacology (Berl) in August this year. 

Reports on this study are in The Atlantic, Seeing Opportunity in Psychedelic Drugs, and The Guardian, Psychedelic drugs like LSD could be used to treat depression, study suggests. The team at Imperial College London reports New study discovers biological basis for magic mushroom 'mind expansion'.

***

LSD illustration, Imperial College London

***

For a more traditional view of LSD, check out the Wikipedia article, Lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD is a controlled substance in the U.S; HowStuffWorks explains what that means. The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has published a fact sheet on LSD (PDF format).

Disclaimer: Please don't take this post as an encouragement to experiment with LSD. This writer is simply offering information.

-- Marge

Exploring WikiArt

Every child is an artist.
The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

--Pablo Picasso

WikiArt, aka WikiPaintings, is one of the best references for learning about painters and their work I've found.  One of the most useful features is being able to see how an artist's work evolved. You can find a specific artist by name in the alphabetic list or search using the search box in the upper right corner.

Take, for example, Pablo Picasso. The page that loads when you select his name has 3 tabs: Artist; All Artworks Chronologically, and All Artworks by Alphabet. Below his self-portrait there is a slider with featured works arranged chronologically. Under the chronological tab all of his works are presented in a matrix and at the bottom of the page is a slider with all of this works by date. Picasso produced an amazing total 1127 works. Any work listed can be clicked for a slide show of larger images.

Also on the main page for Picasso is a list for access to works by style, period, series, genre, and technique. Each category opens to its own slider.

Perhaps the best known painting from Picasso's early years is his "Portrait of the Artist's Mother," painted in 1896.

***

Picasso, Portrait of the artist's mother (1896), WikiArt

***

In his Blue Period, he painted "The Old Blind Guitarist."

***

Picasso, The old blind guitarist (1903), WikiArt

***

Perhaps his best-known work of all is "The girls of Avignon," painted in 1907. It marked the beginning of his cubist period and a personal turning point. Camille Paglia in Glittering Images says that the 8 foot by 7.6 foot painting was considered "the most important painting of the twentieth century." Its original title is "The Demoiselles d'Avignon."

***

Picasso, The girls of Avignon (1907), WikiArt

***

This little introduction to WikiArt touches only the tip of the iceberg. According to Wikipedia:
"They claim to have reached 75,000 paintings, as of June, 2012." ... "The developers are based in Ukraine." The WikiArt Blog gives a Financial Report for 2013.

-- Marge

Cartoons: reap the whirlwind

This week there are rumors and dire predictions (of course) about Russian military activity in Syria; pleas for financial help with wildfire expenses; and Donald Trump.

The BBC asks and partially answers Who are these Russian fighters posting pics of themselves in Syria?

***

Scott Stantis, The Week

***

The Seattle Times tells us Ten things to know about the Washington wildfires, including how to help with fire-relief efforts. Meanwhile Congress returned from recess on Tuesday. Provocateur Ted Cruz promises another shutdown.

***

David Horsey, The Week

***

And D.Trump just keeps on doing his thing.

***

John Darkow, The Week

***

-- Marge

Avatar seducers and beggars

Ashley Madison' Sensuous Kitten, Gizmodo

***

A New World Notes post today was titled: With Ashley Madison's Babe Bots, Life (Once Again) Imitates Second Life. If you'll remember Second Life is that virtual world that seems to have faded into obscurity. It hasn't died yet, though. It still has residents, around 43 million of them, not all necessarily actively playing.

Keeper of New World Notes, Wagner James Au, in his article links to Annalee Newitz's How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con From Users and Investigators. She writes:

The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer ... send a message!”

Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

***

Second Life: Sign at a high traffic shop, New World Notes

***

And speaking of avatars that act as decoys meant to suck your money, take a look at beggar bots in Second Life (aka flatterbots). Here's a sample:

James Au: I didn't reply [to Flatterbot1] or give her any money, she just ran through her script from start to finish, even after I'd left the area. Now compare the speech above with this snippet from the second flatterbot I dealt with that day:
Flatterbot2: don't you be pushin me!
Flatterbot2: I'm just kidding but we can be bumper car avatars!
Flatterbot2: holy crap you have an amazing avatar!
Flatterbot2: I am art retarded, I never make good avatars! Did you make yours?
Flatterbot2: I just got back to SL from a long break, omfg everything is so different
Flatterbot2: you look like you have been in SL for a long time, have you?
Flatterbot2: being back here after so long I don't remember anything about the sliders at all, I keep making a chubby round face lol

Apparently, while some scripts are automated, some are being run by a person at a keyboard. James reports on Flatterbot3:

This morning I popped over to a store with a heavy bot presence and while I received the same tired story from today's bot-du-jour, she was simultaneously arguing with a customer in local chat who had presumably called her out:
Flatterbot3: I can just tell by what you say that SL is all you have
Flatterbot3: that is reserved for fat people who are quite invested in a subreality
Flatterbot3: because they can't make stuff happen irl

This is a virtual world that simply mirrors "real life (rl)."

-- Marge

Labor day: honoring those who toil

United States Department of Labor poster, 2010, Wikipedia

***

The first labor-related incident listed in Wikipedia's Timeline of labor issues and events is the Maine Indentured Servant's and Fisherman's Mutiny in 1636. Details of a similar incident in 1774 were reported by the U.S. Department of Labor:

On August 5, 1774, just a month before the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, the ship Needham landed in New York from Newry, England, Captain William Cunningham, master. The ship's cargo was white indentured servants. On arrival they protested to the authorities that they had been kidnapped in Ireland and had suffered "bad usage" on the voyage across the Atlantic. Whereupon the city fathers ordered them discharged. The servants had gained their freedom, but Cunningham nursed a grudge, and later, as the notorious provost marshal of the British army in America, he confined captured Patriots to atrocious prison ships and jails. The incident of the Needham's cargo dramatizes how the early American labor market was supplied. It also reveals that certain aspects of the old labor system were repugnant to that free society the American inhabitants sought to create for themselves.

In time labor unions were established and these became vehicles for abuse themselves. Union Facts notes that

For too long, big unions have opposed employee rights, engaged in self-dealing and corruption, and made excessive demands that have killed tens of thousands of jobs and driven major cities into bankruptcy.

The Great Depression in 1933 initiated a number of the conditions we saw paralleled following the Great Recession of 2008. Quoting from a previous version of the Department of Labor history--

...Following the stock market crash of 1929, the Hoover Administration urged and many industries and unions adopted work-sharing. For example, the United States Steel Corporation in 1929 had 224,980 full-time employees. The number shrank to 211,055 in 1930, to 53,619 in 1931, to 18,938 in 1932, and to zero on April 1, 1933. All who remained on the payroll on this last date were part time, and they were only half as numerous as those on full time in 1929.

Massive unemployment had a profound social and emotional impact upon American workers and their families. The movement of population, historically a response to economic opportunity, changed drastically when opportunity dried up. Immigration from abroad virtually stopped. The long-term shift from farm to city slowed significantly and there was, in fact, some reverse migration. The great population movement of the thirties was transiency, the worker adrift in a sea of unemployment. People, especially the young, girls as well as boys, took to the road because they could no longer bear to stay home. In the middle of the decade when the dust blew in the Great Plains, wiping out their farms, whole families of Okies, Arkies, and Mizoos migrated west, especially to California. The migrants often made their way to the junk-pile Hoovervilles with their Prosperity Roads, Hard Times Avenues, and Easy Streets. The destitute often lost their homes or farms because they were unable to make payments on mortgages.

While Labor Day simply signifies the end of summer to many, there is a rich history associated with the historical intent of the day. There's also a Worker's Memorial Day on April 28th, "an international day of remembrance and action for workers killed, disabled, injured or made unwell by their work,"

John D. Rockefeller said (among other things):

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

-- Marge

Cartoons: McKinley (again), Republicans, and Trump

Today we have some reactions to renaming Mount McKinley Denali; an on-target observation about Republicans; and the (currently) obligatory jab at D. Trump, who says he's a Republican.

***

Chan Lowe, The Week

***

Drew Sheneman, The Week

***

Mike Luckovich, The Week

***

RJ Matson, The Week

***

-- Marge

DIY: walking for power vs. power-walking

Sustainable Dance Floor, Sustainable Dance Club

***

Studies conducted in 2007 revealed that longer legs and upright walking, compared to a chimp's shorter stride and crouched gait, may have given humans a leg-up in evolution. Walking upright is more energy-efficient.

Now scientists and innovators are working on converting what energy we do expend to power our cell phones and other devices. Engineer Patrick Chapman at Illinois University gives some basics on using bodily motion for power in From power walking to walking for power: Harnessing human motion to power electronics (2009). An interesting article with tables giving energy expended for various activities is Kinetic energy harvesting: Everyday human activity could power the internet of things. Columbia University's project is called EnHANTs.

Currently being reported as possible transformers of human energy are flexible cloth, body heat, and piezoelectric conversion of stress to electricity (fiber nanogenerator).

For more info and info that's up-to-date, there's a site called Wearable Technologies. One of the products found at the site is Ampy--also on Kickstarter (a video is below).

***

***

Googling "energy harvesting products" returns a host of sites offering devices like energy harvesters; actuators and sensors; haptic feedback actuators; and cooling (these are all piezo; example taken from Mide Technology). Use them to develop your own harvester.

Then there are buildings and surfaces that harvest the energy of the people that use them, such as the Sustainable Dance Floor.

-- Marge