From The Daily Show:
Lewis Black explains how dinosaurs were perfectly equipped to hunt down and kill plants and how the Hoover Dam makes a great altar.
From JesusSavesAtCitibank:
American politicians now pledging absolute support for the teaching of creationism in schools in order to get elected. The collective American populace is growing more ignorant and superstitious by the day.
Via NY Times, by John Branch:
To most people, the area under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, in the shadows of the off ramps and against the hulking stone structure of the famous East River crossing, is not a place to stop. It is a place to leave.
It is a long, sloping plaza covered in smooth red brick, with a few trees stretching for rare beams of sunlight. Those who amble into this area generally are children passing to and from a nearby school, or misplaced tourists looking for the bridge’s pedestrian walkway to Brooklyn.
But for generations of skateboarders, and an increasing number of BMX bikers, the place carries an iconic name and a sacred meaning. It is the Brooklyn Banks. It is the place to go, to be, and to be seen.
“It’s the best skate park in the world,” the professional skateboarder Mike Vallely said near the end of a popular YouTube video posted earlier this year to pay homage to the threatened Brooklyn Banks, “because it wasn’t supposed to be a skate park.”
It is about to become little more than a construction zone during a four-year renovation of the Brooklyn Bridge. Any day now, a new fence will slice the Brooklyn Banks roughly in half, giving construction crews a staging area for trucks and equipment until 2014. Sometime this summer, the entire area will be closed off for about six months while an overhead ramp is painted, the city said.
Skateboarders are used to being displaced from public spaces. But the Brooklyn Banks has a decades-long history and a cultivated status as a sort of skating Mecca. Besides, it was already saved once, with help from the city, just five years ago.
Read the rest here.
From ArchDaily, by Sebastian J:
A group of students of the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Aalborg University, Denmark, finished a Digital Design Miniproject. Originally Art615 is meant as an art pavilion for a crime-related park in Aalborg, Denmark. The concept mainly focused on drawing attention from the unsafe park, and ensuring the feeling of a safer environment for the visitors
“We wanted to work with the inside and outside of Art615 and also make a spatial connection between these two spaces. By perforating the shell, the scales are able take advantage of the displayed light on the inside and at the same time create a visual and audible connection between the two spaces.”
Art615 is the result of seven 4th semester students’ experiments and researches in linking CNC fabrication techniques, digital parametric sketching and dynamic light control.
Student Design/Management/Installation Team/Layout/Design and Component Production:
Bachelor Stud. Senad Gvozden
Bachelor Stud. Bjarke Mejnertsen
Bachelor Stud. Kenneth Rytter
Bachelor Stud. Bjarke Apollo
Bachelor Stud. Jacob Hilmer
Bachelor Stud. Dennis Jensen
For more information, click here.
Read the process details—if you find that stuff interesting—rhino, cnc, etc., here.
From Wired, by Betsy Mason:
Clouds are fascinating because they take on so many different, beautiful shapes and are constantly changing. Cloud-watching from Earth can be endlessly entertaining, but some of the most amazing cloud patterns can only be properly appreciated from space.
Satellites can take in thousands of miles of the Earth’s surface in one shot, revealing complicated and intriguing cloud patterns we could never see from below. We’ve gathered here some of the best cloud formations to see from above.
Von Kármán Vortex Street, Selkirk Island
The crazy-looking swirls in the image above may be one of the weirdest cloud formations that can be seen from space. The pattern is known as a von Kármán vortex street, named after Theodore von Kármán. First noticed in the laboratory by fluid dynamicists, it occurs when a more-viscous fluid flows through water and encounters a cylindrical object, which creates vortices in the flow.
Alejandro Selkirk Island, off the Chilean coast, is acting like the cylinder in the image above, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite in September 1999. A beautiful vortex street disrupts a layer of stratocumulus clouds low enough to be affected by the island, which rises a mile above sea level.
More strange and wonderful vortex streets formed by islands can be seen in the images below and in the last slide of this gallery. Below is Guadalupe Island, 21 miles off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California, shot in 2000 by Landsat 7; Rishiri Island in the northern Sea of Japan, photographed by space shuttle astronauts in 2001; and Wrangel Island, above the Arctic Circle northeast of Siberia, flanked by a vortex street created by the smaller Gerald Island, imaged by NASA’s Aqua satellite in August 2008.
Cyclones, South Atlantic Ocean
The swirling pattern in the image above is two tangled polar cyclones over the South Atlantic Ocean. Cyclones like these are often created by low-pressure systems over cold, open water. The spot of green in the upper left is water just off the southern tip of Africa.
This image was taken by the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite in April 2009.
Image: Jeff Schmaltz/NASA
The attraction of knowledge would be small if one did not have to overcome so much shame on the way.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 65, p. 79
To the deceptive attempts to give architecture an ideological dress, I shall always prefer the sincerity of those who have the courage to speak of that silent and outdated “purity”…
— Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, introduction
