All That Jazz - LTG
Our friend Claire belts out All That Jazz in Lourdes Theatre Group production. Bravo!
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Cabin Fever: Skinny Little Garden Home is Only 3 Feet Wide
via Dornob by d0rn0b on 07/06/10
[ Filed under Portable or in the Architecture category ] 
Part prefab mobile camping unit, part green garden shed and part small-space summer cabin, this tiny, portable, light-weight wooden ‘home’ structure dubbed Walden is a modern reinterpretation of the nature-oriented attitudes of Henry David Thoreau. Most impressive of all: cabin fever is not a concern – the design makes up for in extreme openness what it lakes in square footage.
Barely wider than a standard swing door, the residence by German architect Nils Holger Moormann accommodates a surprising breadth of domestic activities. An open-sided living, dining and reading room sits in the middle and seats four – two per side, facing one another. The exterior walls have a series of built-in cabinets that serve as woodshed-style storage for gardening implements and cupboards for tableware, decorative objects, even a barbeque.
Open to nature (and view) on the main level, this tiny home still has a few secrets accessible up a set of stairs on one end. These are accessed via a door along a skinny side that takes the occupant up to a relatively-enclosed loft bedroom space.
The private sleeping quarters have small slot windows for side views but also a large roof-spanning skylight that slides open for more light, air and a straight-up look to the night sky when lying down. Sure, it is narrow for a double bed, but how wide would it really need to be to sleep a single person (or a skinny pair)?
Famous for works like Civil Disobedience (in which he encourages resistance against overly-controlling governments), Thoreau is perhaps most well known as an advocate of simple living in natural surroundings. As something that can be placed on private land but equally well in a public park, this structure reflects his attitudes toward both individual independence and cultivated simplicity.
Keep Going - Check out this Great Related Dornob Design:
Small Island Cabin Plan Conceals Wide-Open Interior Design
Both in plan and in perspective views from all around, this island cabin looks little - its overall size broken into small and manageable pieces through angled roof lines and other clever architectural tricks. Inside, however, is another story entirely. What looks like a modest and piecemeal home constructed on a rocky archipelago in rural Canada in fact hides a secret central space of ... Click Here to Read More »»
[ Dornob Design - Filed under Portable or in the Architecture category ] 2.5 dimensional optical illusion bookshelf
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 12/05/10
Designer Bjørn Jørund Blikstad created these "2.5 dimensional" wall-hung shelves that combine real depth with optical illusions to bend your brain and hold your stuff.
Second and a Half Dimension Shelves
Previously:
- HOWTO make a bookshelf out of books
- Invisible bookshelf - floating stacks of books for your walls ...
- Bathtub with built-in bookcase
- HOWTO Make an upside-down bookshelf
- Equation Bookshelf with nesting parens
- Infinite bookshelf can't hold infinite number of books - Boing ...
- Platzhalter book shelf splits into "V" and reveals secret ...
- The Graffititek Bookshelf by Charles Kalpakian Gadgets
Hot human-on-neanderthal action: A scientific update
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker on 5/6/10
So, remember a few weeks ago when new genetics research challenged the accepted idea that humans and neanderthals had never knocked boots? Back then, I mentioned that we were waiting to hear from Svante Pääbo, a hominid genetics expert who was due to publish his findings from sequencing the neanderthal genome. The Pääbo data would be the key to clearing up this ancient soap-operatic mystery.
This week, Pääbo weighed in and the answer looks pretty clear: If your ancestors are from anyplace other than Africa, you've got a little neanderthal in you. And so did your great-great-etc. grandma.
In fact, researchers can actually narrow down the location where at least some of this hanky panky happened.
all non-Africans - be they from France, China or Papua New Guinea - share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did the deed.
Interestingly, there's not any one trait or even genetic sequence that seems to come from the neanderthals. Everybody (except Africans) is a little bit neanderthal, but it's not the same little bit.
Got questions? This New Scientist feature has answers.
Image courtesy Flickr user erix, via CC
