The Flame of The Search

Design references

CBC
Oct. 8, 2004
Martha Stewart reports to the minimum-security federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia to begin serving her five-month sentence. Stewart says she will miss her pets during her stay in prison, but hoes to be free in time for spring gardening. She is scheduled to be released in March 2005.

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Their spelling mistake, not mine.

Miraj Hammam Spa
In centuries past, the Hammam was known as the silent doctor. A place of cleansing and healing for both body and soul. This is the essence of MIRAJ Hammam Spa. An exotic oasis where you can indulge yourself in traditional Middle Eastern treatments while your imagination takes you on a mystical journey into the past. Old World traditions, introduced into the new world - this is the MIRAJ Hammam Spa experience.

Dick Cheney

We watched this documentary last night, and it is unfathomable that someone can be so heartless. Until you find out that he has had four heart attacks!

How many world leaders have heart conditions?

Just when you think you are all finished shopping ...

Christopher Dresser

Discussion today on building the tour for the MC exhibition. The sad thing, we cannot cover all of the sections, it is just not physically possible. You could spend at least two hours in each room, each economy is rich with information. Considering the show is about design, the design process, collaboration, it would be cool to allow the groups to design their own tour: to choose the rooms they want to explore, and the order they would like to explore them in. I am certain there will be those who are disappointed that their pet interest is not covered. of course, they can come back, but how often would that happen? Perhaps this would be too chaotic, definately more complicated for the docents, as we would have to know each station intimately, materials and activities ready. That is considerable work.

DNA

This is a cool resource ...

Notes from Market Economies
Markets are conceived as systems of exchange.

How can we use this efficiency to create positive social change?

Kyoto Protocol created an emmission gas trading market, a designed market.

Walmart is a perfect distribution system. They do not manufacture anything, but they have created an efficient system.

Visa does $2.5 trillion/year in transactions. When it was designed, Dee Hock had to design a new system, and looked to nature. It is a self-regulating system, where each office is cooperates and competes, a decentralized network.

The Chaordic Commons
The Chaordic Design Process

Possible Questions/Activities
1. How do you feel that you have to use a swipe card to hear the stories? Do you like this technology?

2. Let's listen to this story together. ... How was this system of exchange designed? What would you do differently?

3. How does understanding the design of a market system make you feel about the world and how it works today?

Notes from Image Economies
We will make visible the as yet invisible.

Our ability to make an image of physical phenonmenon across the electromagnetic spectrum has increased.

Through our ability to image the world, we can appreciate the awe and wonder of what is around us.

Possible Questions/Activities
1. Look around the room, and find an image of the smallest object. Draw this object on your sketch pad. Does its shape remind you of anything else?

2. What is your first impression of this room? Why do you think the room is organized like this?

3. Look around the room, and let yourself be drawn to images that interest you. Read the captions below. Are you surprised at what you have read? Write your thoughts in your journal.

Notes from the Energy Economy, Massive Change Exhibit
maps of potential renewable energy


Solar Power Tower
The Solar Mission project is based on the "Solar Tower" design by Professor Jorg Schlaich from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. The basic principle of operation is the use of the Sun's radiation to heat a very large body of enclosed air. Being warmer than the surrounding atmosphere, this air will begin to rise. By causing it to flow through windmill-style turbines on its journey up a tall chimney, electricity can be generated.

Every hour, the sun gives us more energy than the whole population uses in one day.

2 billion live without the benefit of electricity.

Distributed energy production = political & economic autonomy

The Stirling Engine

The Freeplay Foundation
The Freeplay Foundation is unlike any other non-profit humanitarian organisation in the world. Its sole mission is to enable sustained delivery of radio information and education to the most vulnerable populations via self-powered radios.

Working mostly in Africa, where affordable energy is scarce or non-existent, the Freeplay Foundation collaborates with professionals in education, health, agriculture, peacemaking, and voter education - all sectors where radio can play a vital or even life-saving role.

Nano Solar Cells

Possible Questions
1. What is your favorite thing to use electricity for?
Is there another way that energy could be created?
Look around the room for ideas.

2. Why aren't these technologies being used yet?

3. What are some ways you can reduce your energy use?
Look at this illustration for some ideas.

4. What do you think is the best technology in this area? Why?

Proteus

For the nineteenth century, the world beneath the sea played much the same role that "outer space" played for the twentieth. The ocean depths were at once the ultimate scientific frontier and what Coleridge called "the reservoir of the soul": the place of the unconscious, of imagination and the fantastic. Proteus uses the undersea world as the locus for a meditation on the troubled intersection of scientific and artistic vision. The one-hour film is based almost entirely on the images of nineteenth century painters, graphic artists, photographers and scientific illustrators, photographed from rare materials in European and American collections and brought to life through innovative animation.

The central figure of the film is biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). As a young man, Haeckel found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds. Through his discoveries beneath the sea, Haeckel would eventually reconcile these dualities, bringing science and art together in a unitary, almost mystical vision. His work would profoundly influence not only biology but also movements, thinkers and authors as disparate as Art Nouveau and Surrealism, Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Lenin and Thomas Edison.

Amnesty International accuses Canada of ignoring violence against aboriginal women

OTTAWA - Canadian officials and police are failing to protect aboriginal women from violent attacks and ignoring the acts when they occur, according to a report from Amnesty International.

Released on Monday, the report harshly condemns Canada's "indifference and apathy" toward native women, particularly those who end up in the margins of society, such as sex trade workers.

Aboriginal women aged 25-44 are five times more likely than other Canadian women of the same age to die of violence, said the report. More than 500 aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered over the last 30 years.

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It is so good to hear that these issues are finally getting international attention. I have been hearing about this discriminintaion for years. I remember my father condemning a judge in Fort St. John for not protecting the aboriginal girls. There were problems with the young women being raped on the reservations, and the judge's response was that they should know better than to be out there, and that they should protect themselves better. Can you believe that? All the responsibility on the women.

But it is a man's world, isn't it? I like to believe that things have changed, that women have more respect, that we are equal citizens, but then you hear of the same old stories, the same laddish behaviour going unchecked, women's vulnerabilities exploited. And it is difficult, because I think men keep these secrets. The eternal boys club. Which is cool, or "harmless" until they have daughters. Women will rarely hear of men's real comments. How are we supposed to protect ourselves, when we don't even know what the reality is? How are we supposed to know the lay of the land, when it is hidden? And I am surprised sometimes, by the people who will silently allow this bullshit, because they don't want to be the "odd" man out. It's total crap.

I certainly don't hate men, I am just weary of their blanket acceptance. So weak!

Blackspot Sneaker

The Red Stripes

POPKOMM

Heard about this on DNTO Sat. Jian Ghomeshi (Moxy Fruvus) reported on some of the shows he saw, the vibe "Berlin has this grit, this creativity, that only can happen after years under communism, and then to have freedom that hasn't been tainted by the all-pervasive capitalism we experience in North America." or something like that. I so want to go to Berlin. I need to experience that freedom.

PDF list of bands at festival

Tahiti 80 was one they played on the radio. I liked it!

Also Is all successful German music crap?

The Limits of SpongeBob SquarePants

Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so he could share his broadband Internet connection. But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service. Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth. Is this the future of home communications and entertainment? It could be, five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it.

...

Somewhere in Andrew's house is a hefty Linux server running many applications, including an Asterisk Open Source VoIP software PBX. There is no desktop PC in Andrew's house. Instead, he runs a Linux thin client on a Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 Linux PDA. Sitting in its cradle on Andrew's desk at home, the Zaurus (running a special copy of Debian Linux, NOT as shipped by Sharp) connects to a full-size keyboard and VGA display, and runs applications on the server. Another cradle, monitor and keyboard are at Andrew's office, where he also doesn't have a PC. Walking around in his house, the Zaurus (equipped with a tri-mode communications card) is a WiFi VoIP phone running through the Asterisk PBX and connecting to the Vonage VoIP network. Walking out of his house, the Zaurus automatically converts to the local mobile phone carrier, though with a data connection that still runs back through Vonage. At Starbucks, it's a Wifi Vonage phone. At Andrew's office, it is a WiFi extension to the office Asterisk PBX AND to Andrew's home PBX. That's one PDA doing the job of two desktop PCs, a notebook PC, and three telephones.

Starnix