The architect Andrew Burgess projects an image of the Icelandic parliament building onto the building itself and then mucks with it in various interesting ways.
Fun fact: "Thing" means "parliament" or "assembly" in Icelandic. So the projection is another thing, literally.
Via Archinect.
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The European Union is doing an impressive job of switching over to renewable sources of electricity:
Renewable energy made up the bulk of new power generation capacity added in the European Union last year, the European Wind Energy Association, or EWEA, said Wednesday.
Renewables accounted for 61% of new electricity generating capacity in... Read & Discuss Can someone explain to me this distinction between "How to think" and "What to think" that Beck is talking about? If you're told that the area of a circle is pi times the square of the radius, are you being told how to think or what to think? What if you're taught climate science that strongly suggests we're facing catastrophic anthropogenic climate change?
Also, Glenn Beck's whole raw emotion deal really reminds me of Oprah.
When you look at the unemployment numbers like this, it makes the Obama team look pretty bad. But when you look at them like this:
...it's actually pretty impressive. What you're seeing in the chart above is a turnaround in the rate at which jobs are being lost each month that coincides almost exactly with Obama taking office. That said,... Read & Discuss 
Over at the The Washington Post, Annie Lowry imagines various other ways Senate representation could work:
Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets -- with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.
Based on Census Bureau... Read & Discuss 
The economist Samuel Bowles has an interesting theory about why it's good to keep wealth inequality in check. When there's lots of wealth inequality, he says, more and more people have to be employed as "guard labor"—as protectors of the rich peoples' stuff and defenders of their interests. From the Santa Fe Reporter:
Inequality leads to an... Read & Discuss 
The CircleBath Hospital in Bath, England, was designed by the high-profile architecture firm Foster + Partners to be a more pleasant place to convalesce:
CircleBath is Foster + Partners’ first hospital and represents a radical departure from orthodox approaches to hospital planning. The three-storey building is set into the hills on the edge... Read & Discuss Hey John, Cory Doctorow found a work-around for that situation.
You may remember the idea of taxing soda to help pay for health care reform. I thought it was a pretty good idea. You know who didn't, though? Purveyors of soda. And they sure sent a lot of lobbyists to Washington. We don't hear much about that soda tax anymore.
Via Matt Yglesias. Read & Discuss 
The city of Houston is partnering with Nissan and Reliant Energy to make the city electric-car friendly (and get people driving the Nissan Leaf). From The Houston Chronicle:
To support electric vehicles like the Leaf, which will be available in Houston toward year's end, the city and Reliant are working to create an infrastructure that places... Read & Discuss 
Last week we posted the underwhelming edited version of Jon Stewart's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor that aired on Fox News. But you can see the entire unedited version at Comedy Central and guess what? It's a lot better. Someone should tell Fox they cut a bunch of Stewart's best points. Oh, good. Gawker's on the case. Do you think the... Read & Discuss Ali G meets "Bombs Over Baghdad"? It's fascinating to see how hip-hop gets adopted and adapted by/for different cultures. Incidentally, this is a truncated version of the song. The full lyrics, which you can look up, would make 2 Live Crew, Getto Boys, Eminem, or anyone else blush.
This thing sounds awesome. I've seen some pictures of it around the web too. But I have to wonder: If you fill this thing with water is it too heavy to work as a soccer ball? And if you only fill it with a little water then it might not roll right. Maybe you use it as a soccer ball when empty and then for some medicine-ball style weight training when it's full? :)
And who is he? Senator Richard Shelby. He wants his home state of Alabama to get a $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers and an improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. And he's not going to let any of Obama's nominees for administration jobs get through the Senate until he gets them.
So basically 2,000 jobs... Read & Discuss 
It seems like every time you turn around there's a team of engineers at Stanford making another autonomous driving system. Meet Shelley (video after the jump).
It's a long way from superintelligent AI, but Shelley is going to climb Pikes Peak at race speeds. Read & Discuss The people have spoken! I'll dig into this and have more on local investing on Monday if not before.
I am not a fan of this Meg Whitman woman. Check out the email her henchmen sent to Poizner to try to muscle him out of the race. Sketch!
http://calitics.com/diary/11024/cagov-whitman-tried-to-push-poizner-out-poizner-calls-for-investigation
Hey Dorian, he's definitely talking about 25 percent. I think there's just manipulation of the units going on in the scatter plot for, I assume, some statistical reason. The plot should still reflect the relative positions of the states though.