So I’m in Boston right now , and yesterday evening I walked past an Abercrombie store. Wouldn’t you know it - they have topless male models all around the place. Now I don’t frequent these stores, so I can’t say for sure that these models don’t exist in Toronto, but I can hardly believe they do. As I’ve thought about this, I’ve been unable to attach any positive/negative value judgement - I’ll leave that up to you guys. Right now, I’m just showing off what I believe to be a crazy phenomenon.
While the concept has alreadybeenpickedupbybloggers, as the designer I feel I should at least provide a brief rationale for the idea. In short, Filterbrella is an umbrella with a canopy that channels rainwater through an activated carbon filter. The handle incorporates standard-size threads so that users can screw in a water or pop-bottle to collect the purified contents to drink later. The entire umbrella is moulded of compostable polylactic acid blends to reduce plastic waste.
I should admit first of all that I never meant this to be seen as a purely utilitarian product. Rather, it is a whimsical, conceptual piece intended to get people thinking about the idea of water use in our society, and the need for (im)permanence in everyday artifacts by taking a cradle-to-cradle approach.
Part of the impetus derives from my longstanding contempt for bottled water and the environmental and ethical ills it embodies. While I recognize that people drink bottled water largely out of convenience, and waiting for a rainstorm is anything but, the Filterbrella would hopefully serve (in some limited capacity) as an everyday reminder of the manner in which we take water utterly for granted. That some sort of rainwater harvesting (or at least greywater recycling) for toilets and gardens isn’t mandatory in new construction continues to baffle me.
(And for the people who have hounded me to make the canopy design more dramatically inverted, like a chanterelle mushroom, I suspect such a shape would result in a seriously top-heavy, unwieldy umbrella, prone to dumping loads of water on the user if it were unbalanced. Not a great way to encourage adoption of the product - besides, in any reasonable downpour you should still get plenty of water.)
I think this is Sarracenia purpurea, but I’m not entirely sure. Saw this in the swamp at the Guelph Arboretum, and I always have to stop to admire plants that consume animals. It just seems like a great metaphor - I’m not sure what for though.
I just recently completed my industrial design undergraduate thesis, and the design that I decided to explore combines two elegant sustainable technologies - airships and renewable electricity - and puts them to work on the oft-neglected (but increasingly significant) issue of disaster relief. It recently won 1st place in its category at the 2008 ACIDO Rocket Show.
Air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. That problem is compounded because, unlike other industries, there is currently very little investment in alternatives. One potential option is airships (lighter-than-air craft) because they are inherently extremely efficient - by George Monbiot’s reckoning, their impact is 80-90% lower than jets. The problem with historical attempts at building a modern airship is that they’ve begun at a massive scale, which makes attracting venture capital much more difficult. The goal of my thesis, thus, was to produce an airship at a modest scale, fulfilling a present need, to act as a transitionary element towards a more sustainable aerospace industry based around airships.
Solarial is an unmanned airship that provides mobile support infrastructure for disaster relief and remote communities, generating renewable energy and supplying communications links where they are needed most. Utilizing a skin coated in thin film photovoltaics, and a reversible drive propeller/wind turbine, it delivers clean energy via tether cable. Housing a suite of telecommunications equipment, Solarial also acts as a relay station for radio and cellular telephone signals, aiding the coordination of relief operations.
If you haven’t heard, a 415-square kilometer sheet of ice has just collapsed off Antarctica. What makes this one special is that someone spotted the warning signs of the collapse in a satellite photo, and scientists were able to do flyovers of the sheet to get some pretty rare footage of the event. Check out this stuff from National Geographic:
Scientists are saying that this will probably be the last big collapse for a few months, because the Antarctic winter is starting soon and the ice will have a chance to thicken a bit. I’m sure there will be more footage of this stuff coming next year though. Now, if only the goddamn La Nina would let up and let us experience some global warming action in the north…
I know it’s to be expected that some critics will capitalize on the fact that the leading democratic presidential nominee at this point is a muslim named Barack Hussein Obama, but the situation is getting out of hand. One of the cunts currently at the top of my most-despised list, Hillary Clinton, has just released a photo of Obama while he was touring Kenya in 2006:
I don’t have too much useful to add here - Hillary’s becoming desperate, and revealing herself as the sack of shit she really is. The only reason I’m commenting on this is because this is not a stand alone occurrence. On February 18th, this was what MSNBC was displaying as Chris Matthews talked about Barack Obama on Hardball:
CNN, too, has been in on the act. Check out these gems from the “most trusted name in news”:
How many fucking “mistakes” can the media make with this guy? I can’t wait to see how they treat him in a general election. Wait… What I truly want to see is what the Republicans pull. It’s gonna be fun.
I let this happen all the time. I get lulled into an ordinary routine where I’m too busy to actually think about anything beyond my immediate goals. So I forget about things, and it takes seeing (or even just re-seeing) something really dramatic to shock me back into realizing why I want to live my life the way I do.
I’ve known about his documentary ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ for a while, and even saw Ed Burtynsky speak at the ‘Worldchanging’ book launch tour last year (where was the post for that one? Ha!). The clips he showed from industrial China, especially combined with his personal narration, were pretty mindblowing. But it takes seeing a full 90 minutes of the stuff to really hammer it, uncomfortably, into your head. There’s even some comment on the perverse beauty that arises from it all, and when its framed so artfully, it’s hard to disagree.
It was especially poignant to watch after seeing a Chinese factory in person last summer, though the scale I witnessed doesn’t compare with the factories Burtynsky shoots. Even still, the scale of production was difficult to capture - part of the reason I’m glad I actually took a few panoramic scenes. I’ve even been inspired to sift through some of the other photos I took but didn’t post, and a couple are actually cool, so if someone reminds me I will definitely get on posting them.
Here’s some excerpted scenes from Manufactured Landscapes - watch the DVD if you can:
