Jonathan Grubb

FrankenMurray by Jeff Boyes

Suntory Time by Doug LaRocca

Winger by Rich Pellegrino

Gallery1988 in Los Angeles will be hosting the Please Post Bills: a tribute art show to Bill Murray. 80 artists created art for the show who were “influenced by the movies, TV appearances and iconic jokes of a comedic legend”. The show opens Thursday November 3, 2011 and runs to November 26, 2011.

The vertical air plant gardens that Seth Boor and I designed for the Napa Valley’s Bardessono Hotel a few years ago were such a huge hit. After the gardens appeared in the New York Times, we got email from people all over the world asking how they could make their own vertical tillandsia air plant garden. So we created Thigmotrope Satellite! (Thigmotrope?? Read on…  Satellite? Because it kind of looks like a retro planetary orbiter.)

Designed for Flora Grubb Gardens by Seth Boor of San Francisco architecture firm, Boor/Bridges, Thigmotrope Satellite is a beautiful tool for creating vertical gardens using tillandsia air plants. Thigmotrope Satellite is a vehicle for cultivating nature in otherwise impossible-to-reach places: that smooth wall in the living room, the little area next to the bathtub, or just above the kitchen sink. Composed of solid welded steel, it’s made here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Thigmotrope Satellite is simple to install and makes caring for tillandsia air plants equally easy. It screws directly into a mounting surface such as painted drywall or a wood plaque. If you pre-drill, you can even screw it into a concrete or masonry surface. Its three prongs gently cradle these varied little plants, allowing for effortless placement, removal for watering, and rearrangement. Tillandsias thrive in bright light with a little moisture, but don’t need soil. If they’re especially happy, they’ll even bloom!

The beauty of Thigmotrope Satellite is that if allows for tremendous flexibility in design: Use one for a single focal point, three for a simple balance, or dozens for an endlessly variable constellation.

We’re featuring Thigmotrope Satellites here in our San Francisco store, where we also have an enormous collection of tillandsias to create your own unique garden with. They’re also available in our web shop.

So what’s with the name Thigmotrope? “Thigmotropism” refers to the instinct of certain organisms to turn toward touch, as for instance the roots of an air plant embrace the bark of a tree, or a vine wraps its tendrils around a twig. Thigmotropes are gardens that cradle tillandsia air plants, taking on the role of the bark and branches they’d normally grow on.

When Seth Boor and I collaborate (often also with my honey, Kevin Smith, who’s an expert builder) we call our projects Thigmotropes. Seth designs exquisite structures to hold plants, and I am tasked with figuring out what lovely plants will thrive on the structures he creates.  The Thigmotrope Satellite is just the first of our collaboratively designed tools that we hope will inspire people to put plants in places they wouldn’t have thought they could go.

Ruling Clawss was a Daily Worker comic strip by "A Redfield," better known for his contributions to the New Yorker under the name Syd Hoff. The strips are pretty resonant today, amid the Occupy uprisings and crackdowns.

Syd Hoff’s Teeth: The Leftist Satire of A. Redfield (via MeFi)

One of our most-requested features is now live and ready to rock! Get Satisfaction communities can now be created in seven new languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Swedish and Dutch.

Want to know more? Contact us today to learn more about bringing a global audience to your community.

See it in action: Check out how website host Yola is integrating their existing English community with new communities in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and German.

Full press release on MarketWatch.

Update: For some commenters and other writing in, multiple language support is one language per community. This is not translation of the actual community content. This changes the interface elements and language of the Get Satisfaction platform.

This concept design for a "microbial home" centered around a methane digester hub that feeds gas from your food into various appliances has a nice, bodgy, Rube Goldberg feel. We can call it methanepunk (not perfect, but better than "fartpunk").

The Microbial Home is viewed as a cyclical biological machine where wastes like sewage, effluent, garbage, wastewater are filtered, processed and recycled to be used as inputs for the various home functions. The project includes various aspects like a Bio Digester Island and Larder in the kitchen, Urban Beehive, Bio-light, Apothecary, Filtering Squatting Toilet and Paternoster Plastic Waste Up-cycler.

DKNG Studios created a beautiful Moog art print for the SYNTH group art show at Moogfest 2011. Prints will be available for purchase on November 1st. Here’s DKNG’s 2010 Moog art print.

To spark debate about racially-themed Halloween costumes, S*T*A*R*S, an anti-racism student group at Ohio University, created a poster campaign entitled “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume.” The posters (above) feature students of a variety of ethnic backgrounds posing with photos of racially-themed costumes.

The posters have indeed sparked a debate, spreading virally on Tumblr and other blogs. But the Internet’s Lulz-Industrial Complex was not far behind–the campaign has spawned a parody meme of photoshopped posters (see parody posters below).

via Boing Boing

poster images 1-3 via S*T*A*R*S, parody posters are uncredited

Last year Nate Bolt discovered Facebook’s Secret Message.

Gaius, a self-described member of the 1% ("Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan would save me roughly $400,000 a year in taxes, and President Obama's tax proposals would cost me more than $100,000") writes on DailyKos in support of the Occupy movement and describes the absurdity of the pitched battles over raising taxes on the rich by a mere 3.5%:

Thus you can imagine my amazement this summer when I watched the Republicans in Congress push the United States to the brink of default - and the world to the brink of ruin - over whether to repeal a portion of the Bush tax cuts and raise my taxes by 3.5%. I know a lot of people with high incomes and even the conservatives among them were confused by that sequence of events. Here is a secret about rich people: we wouldn't have noticed a 3.5% tax increase. That is not only because there isn't a material difference between having $1 million and $965,000, which is obvious, but also because most of us don't actually know how much money we are going to make in a given year. Most income at that level is the result of profits rather than salary, whether it comes in the form of bonuses, stock options, partnership distributions, dividends or capital gains. Profits are unpredictable and they tend to vary wildly. At my own firm, the general rule of thumb is that if we are within 5% of our budget for the year, everyone is happy and no one complains. A variation of 3.5% is merely a random blip.

I was not amazed but disgusted when John Boehner and his crew tried to justify the extremity of their position by rebranding the wealthy as "job creators." While true in a very basic sense, it obscures the fact that jobs are a cost that is voluntarily incurred only as a result of demand. Hiring has no correlation at all to profits or to income - none. Let me keep more of my money without increasing customer demand and I will do just that - keep it. Perhaps I will spend a little more of it, though probably not, but even if I do it won't help the economy very much. Here is another secret of the well-to-do: we don't really buy much more stuff than everyone else. It may be more expensive stuff, sure, but I don't buy cars, or appliances, or furniture, or anything else more frequently than the average consumer. The things I do spend more money on are services such as travel, entertainment, restaurants and landscaping, none of which generate well-paying middle class jobs. There, in a nutshell, is the sad explanation of what has happened to the American economy over the last 25 years of "trickle down" economics.

A Voice From the 1% (via Beth Pratt)

Shared by Jonathan Grubb
Right on. When startup people focus too much on the idea and not enough on the execution, I say "Here's a billion dollar idea: make a search engine that works better than Google. Oh, you don't think you can execute that? Well now it's clear that the execution is more important than the idea."

spytap:

nxtgn:

Never too late.

Idea is nothing. Execution is everything. Focus on execution.

Sometimes I like inspirational things.

Shared by Jonathan Grubb
A good improvement would be a "dead man switch." When you think you might be arrested soon (i.e. you see police moving in) you launch the app. It rings/vibrates every 15 minutes, and you have to hit a button or enter a code. If you don't enter the code, it assumes you've been arrested and fires off the message. Might as well grab the current location and start recording audio at that point as well.

I’m Getting Arrested is a one-click notification Android app to “alert your lawyer, loved ones, etc … that you are being arrested”. Artist and technologist Jason Van Anden of Quadrant 2 was inspired to develop the app “after hearing that a Wall Street-occupying friend had come within one nightstick swing of being arrested”.

I’m Getting Arrested enables anyone, with one click, to broadcast a custom message to SMS numbers in the event they are arrested.

Inspired by a real Occupy Wall Street incident. Free to the other 99%

via The Brooklyn Paper, New York Magazine and BetaBeat

Sarcasm is over, this guy won it.

the Movie title stills collection: Updates

Les choses de la vie (1970)

Through a widely-reported poster campaign (see inset), "We're a Culture not a Costume" is a sincere and laudable effort to draw awareness to the perpetuation of prejudice through racist Halloween costumes. Not some big-budget ad campaign either; a project that came out of a smart and resourceful student group at Ohio University.

But as with all things sincere and laudable, the internet has turned it into lulz.

The originals really are great, though. It's nice to laugh at Daleks and golden retrievers, but the message of the original campaign is a meme that really does deserve spreading. Kudos to the designer, whoever he or she may be!

Shared by Jonathan Grubb
7. Sexy concept of forgiveness

slacktory:

1. Guy
2. Tall guy
3. Guy with backwards pants
4. Member of opposite gender
5. Older member of same gender
6. Concept of forgiveness
7. Sexy concept of forgiveness
8. Someone else
9. Yourself but different
10. Yourself, UK paperback edition

40 more on Slacktory

Photo: Jay Springett

Vinay Gupta is a man between worlds, and he’s got a lot of arms. Born to Scottish and Indian parents, he was programming from a young age. But looking back on the advent of web-culture in the late 90s, he found that he wasn’t satisfied with the thought of sitting around on .com cash and helping to empower the same old corrupt systems of power and influence just because they’d now found homes online.

No, no. Vinay packed up and went west to the American desert. There he did work with the Rocky Mountain Institute (he was on the editorial team for Small is Profitable and Winning the Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins et.al.), spent years meditating and learning Nepalese magical practices, and found himself on the playa trying to live out of a cardboard box. That struggle with the box lead him to make observations about a sort of pixelated version of the yurt, that ancient and highly efficient house of the high Mongolian desert. Thereby: the hexayurt.

Now it’s been ten years of struggle for Vinay, and he’s shown his invention (and the many conclusions that follow from it) to .biz high-rollers, .mil doves, and .org worldchangers. He has become a worldchanger. We caught up by email in October.

Woody

Give us a quick history of the hexayurt.

Vinay

So the Hexayurt Project story starts on The Farm, the 70s era hippie commune linked to midwives, tofu and The Well. I visited The Farm pretty much as soon as I got to America in 1995, seeking understanding of what had happened in the 1960s. I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, some chance to bathe in the afterglow of the golden age perhaps.

Instead they ruined my life! Albert Bates of Worldwatch and Permaculture fame introduced me to environmentalism, and some of the guys on the farm asked me to fix a minor mathematical bug in one of their domes. I knew the math - I used to be a rendermonkey - but by the time it was fixed, the question which came to dominate the rest of my life had been asked: "how do we make a geodesic dome with less waste?"

Six years later, I was working a little on the Sustainable Settlements Charrette and something clicked in my head. "What's the simplest thing which could possibly work?" and fifteen minutes later I had a sketch of the firsthexayurt. SketchUp, before they were part of Google, donated us a license, and a very nice man, Mark Jacobson of Pactive, sent us some materials. We were in business!

Woody

You've written about shelter design in connection to Gandhi and Buckminster Fuller - why are they important figures for these concerns, and how are they connected?

Vinay

So the Hexayurt Project could have been simple. I could have incarnated the hexayurt as a company, or as a charity, and taken a conventional path through the world. But those things never seemed to deliver the worldchanging bang-for-the-buck that I craved, where as Free Software movement seemed, even in 2002, like it was going to deliver its particular brand of global good. So I decided to copy the Free Software model as closely as possible whenever possible, understanding that hardware would work a little differently. So far it has worked.

It's been hard. I've been putting this thing first in my life, in all kinds of obvious and subtle ways, since 2003. I knew when I was in the first hexayurt, in the middle of a dust storm on the playa, feeling completely safe and sheltered, that it was going to go all the way, and it's been like my kid ever since. I just keep it available, keep it moving forwards, and slowly the people who need it and want it pull it towards them. The deep model of change is actually Stallman, when you get right down to it, but the political analysis is pure Gandhi, with Fuller's core perspective. Let me explain.

From Stallman we take the Four Freedoms approach to owning your technology, but in this case, the non-patented commodities like screws and plywood give us an non-restrictive foundation to build on, unlike most computing equipment. But we have to run naked, without patent or copyright protection, because neither is suitable for hexayurts - patent is too expensive for us to use to defend the freedom of the hexayurt, so we use defensive publication to thwart attempts to patent the goodness!

From Gandhi comes the fundamental goal: everybody in the world gets a bowl of rice and a place to sleep, everybody in the world owns what they need to survive. At the deepest core: we accept poverty as a fact, but we insist on universal human dignity regardless of wealth. That means that everybody works and everybody eats, no exceptions. Gandhi's goals are much broader and subtler, but I'm a lump-hammer type of a guy, so I just took the simple stuff and started to do it with whatever meager capabilities I could bring to the table. I get by mostly on luck and persistence. Because of the meditation practice it's all personal to me: I feel like everybody's kids are my kids, like the whole world is crying out for some basic common sense, and I can't separate myself from what is happening to and in the world. And I have to live with that, every single day.

From Fuller comes the potential of engineering as a spiritual practice: build what is good, commit no evil, design the options we need to lift ourselves out of suffering and into safety, not in a transhumanist way, at least not at first, but in a simple housing-water-and-sanitation type way. I think that Bucky's techno-utopian political strategy is good, but without Gandhi's deep humanity and deep humility, I'm not sure any good was ever going to come of it.

So we get down to basics: Stallman's approach to human cooperation, Gandhi's goals, and Fuller's methods.

It's a potent combination.

Woody

The military keeps dabbing a toe into your work, doesn't it? What are they up to?

Vinay

There was a period around 2006 when, as far as I can tell, about half the money in appropriate technology research globally was coming from the US Department of Defense. My take on the DoD has always been that it's actually got a dual nature: the world's best technology development house on one hand, paired to an archaic war machine on the other. 5000 years from now they are going to remember three things about the 20th century: first nuclear bomb, first man on the moon, first computer networks. That's all the technology development side of the house.

The warfighting side is, frankly, a bit useless these days: it was configured to defeat the Soviets, built from the ground up over generations for that task, and its Failure To Adapt is largely responsible for the financial collapse which seems to be all around us: they needed to either stay at peace, or win quickly and efficiently, but this long, drawn-out, expensive, inconclusive war has burned the financial surplus of the world for nothing but pain and sorrow. Real power in the 21st century is tech power, not killing power, and I don't mean nanotech robots, I mean algal turf scrubber biobutanol factories are worth 500,000 tanks.

So the DoD saw the hexayurt and said "that's neat, how much?" and I said "Free!" and, at that point, they don't see many well-intentioned, non-hostile faces who aren't trying to make a buck from them or the people they're trying to help on the humanitarian / protector side. They think in really large terms, about huge needs, so the "as much as you could ever need" availability of plywood hexayurts suited some of their contingency thinking rather well. It was just an easy piece of capability to pick up, and it's slowly diffusing through the organization as needed. I think that if the DoD had been more involved in sheltering in Haiti there is a good chance we could have seen hexayurts deployed there. It might still happen, in fact.

More broadly, and this is fundamentally important, it's worth remembering that nobody winds up in very senior positions of power inside the services if they don't treat their peers and subordinates well. They have a pretty refined promotion process which seems to produce very high quality leadership, often real philosopher-kings, unlike many other branches of government. So I think there's a basic level of "well, this makes sense, it's not exactly our core business, but we're well-intentioned towards it" and that's about where it stands, really. Maybe there'll be a humanitarian crisis the DoD encounters one day that needs hexayurts, and maybe there won't.

They do build them every year in the garden in the middle of the Pentagon every year, though, as part of the STAR-TIDES program, though.

Woody

Is it fair to see the hexayurt as just another tool in a larger set? I mean, you've got CheapID, you link up with the Appropedia crowd... What would you call the whole package of these solutions?

Vinay

I wrote a short story a few years ago called TheUnplugged. It's really all about that. We need a lifestyle which works for nine billion people.

Let me break that down: you take the sustainable harvest of the earth, and you take the share of that we're allocating to humans, and then you divide by nine billion. So much carbon, so much steel, so much bamboo. It's not quite that simple: some places are cold, other places rain a lot, but the basic framework is that we have to share the inputs the world generates nine billion ways. Right now we're sharing them so badly that a billion of us are regularly hungry to the point where they get hunger diseases. Really that's not OK. I know we all have our struggles, but this is not OK. So we have to fix this: design a good lifestyle which uses that amount of resources, and then adopt it.

Sounds simple, I know, right? But there's no way around this: we're at four times consumption in Europe, and something like eight times consumption in America. Can you imagine us cutting our consumption, on average, by 80%? That's what we need to do. Maybe we'll get the Hail Mary pass on Nanosolar or Konarka, I think there's a very good chance we're going to get to the Cheap Energy, Cheap Information future, but even then, it's still going to be about a nine billion person split. I think we can produce a very good hexayurt out of about 100 lbs of paper and thick aluminium foil, all recycled and recyclable. I think the biosand filter and the rocket stove are pretty much ready for prime time technologies for our basic human needs, and the toilets are only a little further behind. And that's a standard of living, that and a cheap Android tablet that's been engineered to last for three decades, that's a standard of living which you can make sense of at nine billion, which is our likely peak population. We're going to hit seven billion right around the time this piece is published, and it's important to think about it in these big number terms, because that's the world we really live in.

So the future I see works like this. We make cheap things - a house for villagers who want something a bit more solid than woven grass over sticks, say. They could save for a decade for concrete, or take paper-and-foil today, bought cash. They could wait for plumbing, or make a biosand filter. They skip hypercapitalism completely, go directly to local production plus sophisticated-but-simple technologies, STAY SUSTAINABLE, right where they are, as organic farmers on land their ancestors have tilled for centuries, and that's a world which seems to measure up numerically. I can't make those sums work for any variant of the way we live in the West: either we're going to fix it through as-yet-unknown technologies, or we're going to be the caboose, the last part of the human race to live in a sustainable way. We're the last, not the first, and we have to face the fact that our lack of sustainability is a crimeand a shame, a black mark on our nations and our own lives.

So that's my vision: get the poor to a comfortable sustainability with sophisticated-but-simple technologies, so that the people who are actually sustainable get a much better standard of living, and as that standard of living rises, as Gandhi envisaged, perhaps we can adopt it by degrees, one by one as the occasion allows, and eventually fix the planet that way.

It may not seem like much of a hope now, but after a really major economic collapse comes through, we might not be able to afford to live at this incredibly unsustainable fossil fueled burn rate. How many of America's homeless would rather be smallholding farmers with access to first world medical care? We need to start thinking about what's next, because this is going away. In fact, for many of us, for the fifty million Americans on food stamps, it has already gone.

Vinay Gupta’s current work includes a collaborative e-book, The Future We Deserve, and related talks (beginning November 1st @ Hub Westminster, London). There have been up to 500 hexyaurts at Burning Man (including innovations such as these nearodesic polyhedrons), and his work to promote the technology continues.

Woody Evans is a librarian living on the south side of Dubai. He’s written for American Libraries, H+ Magazine, Juked, Public Scrutiny, Library Journal, Rain Taxi Review of Books, 971 Menu, ACCELER8OR, and others.

Here's the latest Narco Polo comic by Rob Arthur, a a former inner-city teacher and public defender and author of one of my favorite books, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos.

The astronomer and author, Carl Sagan, attributed numerous insights to marijuana and has defended this inspiration from those who call it illusory. (5) To read his entire treatise on the cerebral benefits of marijuana use go to this link.

The psychologist, Susan Blackmore, has written, “I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written.” (1)

The Science

One way in which creativity can be described is the ability to find new and novel connections between concepts. In scientific terms the ability to find connections between words is called semantic priming. A 2010 study published in Psychiatry Research found that the use of marijuana induces a state of hyper-priming. (9) When presented with an activation word, subjects reacted faster to distantly-related words when high than when sober. (For a neuroscience journalist’s take on this study go here.) The flow of loose associations promoted by marijuana is a real phenomenon.

B3ta user Limpfish's "Lossie" graphic is great JPEG artifact humor -- and other B3tans took up the challenge with similarly altered movie posters.

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