Here is a piece of terrible design I thought I’d share. It’s possibly the worst terrace I’ve ever seen in my life. Granted, I took this picture in the middle of winter, but it looks only slightly better now that it’s summer.

When I first came to Vilnius, Lithuania, from Berlin, it seemed like there was virtually no art on the street. Then I started to see more and more little, subtle pieces spread around the city. Here are some of the photos I liked best.

Hedgehog Launch

Addictive Flash game of the moment. Try to launch the hedgehog as high and as long as possible.

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NASCAR Driver Uses Hypermiling Tricks to Win Race

Ok, ok, I can’t condone NASCAR, or any other car racing, but thought it was noteworthy that being economical actually won someone a race by letting them refuel less often.

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Cube Cola

An open-source recipe for Cola, based on OpenCola but more refined.

50/50 Chance There Will be No Ice at North Pole this Summer

This would be a first. Be afraid.

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Aaron Sewards New Website

My friend Aaron has a great new website to showcase his drawings.

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Peak Oil Overview by Congressman Rosco Bartlett

It’s a little dry, but this video will give you a great overview of our peak-oil problem.

I have absolutely no background for this, but apparently there’s a monkey on top of Tel Aviv’s city hall. Pretty great photo by my friend Jax.

Update:

Ah, ok, it’s actually a duck. I jumped the gun a little bit by posting it without doing further research. Artist Dudu Geva thought Tel Aviv was so ugly he created some funny animals to liven things up a little.

“My initiative stems from the fact that the city is lost,” Geva wrote in 2003 in the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’Ir. “Tel Aviv is so ugly that you need to erase entire streets and start from scratch. At least let us decorate and celebrate in the streets. The city hall is a lost building. If a giant duck were placed on its roof, everything would change.”

The closest I’ve ever come to being an engineer was a brief stint on my high school’s robotics team. Me and some friends built a different robot each year, and pitted them against schools from across the country (Canada, in my case). The competition¹ was a great experience for me, and taught me so much about design, electronics, and even being on TV.

We won the competition in my last year, and ended-up getting a spot on the long-now-cancelled TLC show Robotica (check out the awesome website I made for our team - the shiny metal background is quite something).

I had never intended to be an engineer, I was just doing it to have a good time. I moved on to other things, but still kept a distant fascination for construction and design.

507 Mechanical Movements

One of my prized possessions from this period of my life is this book. My copy is a reprint of the 17th edition, which was originally printed in 1893. Each two-page spread features 9 different mechanisms for doing various things. They range from the simplest of gears to complex water pumps, watch mechanisms and governors.

I see a great need for modern designers and engineers to periodically look backwards to older designs which may have been forgotten. This book is a fantastic resource for gazing into the past of engineering.

There are two designs in the book which stood out to me as being particularly relevant even today.

Item 77 is a mechanism designed to turn vibrations into rotational motion. As the lever (c) vibrates, the arms push the wheel around. The diagram is super simple, and there are more advanced models of this in the book, but I included this one because it was the easiest to understand.

This one caught my eye because of similar (an much more advanced) research into turning vibrations into electricity. Something along these lines could be used, in theory, to power a generator and produce electricity from waste vibrations.

Item 484 is a windmill, amazingly designed over 100-years before similar models getting attention now.

1. The idea of having high school kids do competitive robotics was actually begun by Dean Kamen, the guy who would later gain infamy for designing the Segway.

Kate Beaton draws funny comics, mostly about history. They’re generally pretty entertaining. If you’re like me you’ll want to access the Livejournal page, from which you can subscribe to her RSS feed.

An Arrested Development Movie?

Sounds like it isn’t set in stone, but it’s “in the works”. I don’t know how it would translate to the big screen, but “AD” is one of the best comedy shows of all time, and deserves a second lease on life.

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Bottled-Water Use Inversely Proportional to Education Level

I occasionally indulge in a bottle of sparkling mineral water for taste reasons, but I generally limit my intake to water from the tap because of the pollution and waste I know comes with bottled water. It turns out that the more educated people are, the less likely they are to get most of their water from bottles.

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Ten Commandments of Web Design

Train Travel in U.S. is Up On Recent Fuel Price Increases

Via Kottke, who wisely adds:

Train travel, particularly high-speed train travel, should be *the* way to get anywhere on the East Coast, mid-to-southern California/Vegas, and between moderately large cities clustered together . . .

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Adam Grosser and His Electricity-Free Fridge for the Third World

This short, 3-minute long video shows off a pretty fantastic design for a low-cost refrigeration device.

It has been brought to my attention that there are still some glitches with the new layout and plugins. We’re slowly filling the holes one by one. If you notice something that seems out of whack feel free to leave us a comment. We’re still in quasi-dev mode and ironing out wrinkles, especially with Internet Explorer.