I like, kind of have a massive crush on architecture robots.  In my spare time I doodle the names of various smoking hot robots in a three-hole punched college-ruled notebook that I store in my TrapperKeeper.  And like, every time I see one (a robot, not a TrapperKeeper) I completely freak out and start hysterically screaming, hyperventilating, and crying.  Picture the reaction of a typical teenage girl as The Beatles were getting off the airplane in 1964.   But to be perfectly clear – I don’t care about robots that are not architecture robots.  For instance, I don’t give a semi-ripe fig about the Transformers or …

Sometimes human beings want to go to outer-space, or into a volcano, or all the way to the bottom of the sea.  The problem is that human beings are not particularly adapted to these environments, and without a lot of really intensive preparation and fancy gear, they will die spectacularly on arrival (if not before).  Robots designed to survive in these horrible places can go in our stead, and send back useful information about conditions there.  But it’s hard to create a robot that can survive adverse conditions and still respond to them like a human being …

 
Life is funny sometimes.  Just yesterday I was talking to a coworker about this crazy book I’m reading that I may have mentioned in a previous post called The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, in which the author posits that we are moving towards a world where our technology and biology fuse to become indistinguishable, and now today I’m writing about solar cells powered by bioluminescent jellyfish.  Let me also say that I’d much rather write about jellyfish than swim with them; they navigate the sea in creepy pulsing motions and some of them …

 
It’s hard to compete with the luminous output of a ball of hydrogen and helium gas 864300 miles in diameter, but it should be noted that sunlight is not without its drawbacks.  It’s nearly impossible to use at night, and the quality of light is affected by everything from cloud cover to latitude.  Fire works indoors and at night for light, but it’s not very bright, often rather smoky, and could potentially rage out of control and destroy one’s house.  Incandescent light bulbs use too much electricity and put out a kind of yellow …

I’ve been looking at dresses on the Internet lately because my lovely friends keep getting married and, for some unknown reason, they keep inviting me to their weddings.  I’ve found some good deals online, and it’s nice not to have to deal with roaming tween hordes off-gassing pale clouds of angst or resist the insincere entreaties of pushy salespeople at the mall.  The drawback of Internet shopping, of course, is that you can’t try anything on and whatever you’ve purchased must be shipped. 
While waiting for my latest dress to arrive (it’s a snazzy sky-blue linen number with strategic pleats, …

I just had one of those moments when you realize you’re compulsively writing about air conditioning.  This is my second post on the subject this month, and I can’t swear that it will be the last.  I’m most likely drawn to writing about AC because it’s summer in Texas and the heat index on any given day makes the national debt seem piddling and insignificant.  I’ll probably be writing about heaters in December, so you have that to look forward to in addition to the winter holidays.
The material on which I intend …

Every once in a while in the course of my quest to discover materials with architectural potential, I stumble across something so interesting that I emit an audible yelp akin to the bellow of an excited elephant seal, drop whatever I’m doing, and write a post about it.  Unfortunately this tendency has resulted in the accidental smashing of several objects, including one unfortunate incident where I dropped an ancient and rather valuable Ming vase on an unforgiving tile floor with predictably catastrophic consequences. 
Yesterday I learned that researchers at MIT have developed functional plastic fibers that can detect …

The content of this post can be summed up in two lines from the song Wheel in the Sky, written and recorded by Journey in 1978, which I hope is now as firmly stuck in your head as it is in mine:
“The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’ / I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow”
Well, okay, I mostly know where I’ll be tomorrow (at the office) but there are a few hours between work and going to sleep tomorrow night that I’m going to play by ear.

Image credit www.moonbeammcqueen.wordpress.com
So now onward to our …

While I was in New York a few weeks ago I stopped by the American Museum of Natural History – mostly in order to pay a visit to @NatHistoryWhale – which, in case you’re not familiar, is a 1:1 replica of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling.  As I went to enter the gigantic hall of enormous ocean life I stopped short to examine a back-lit wall bedazzled with a fascinating array of taxidermied creatures including a 7 pound lobster from New Jersey. 

Images courtesy amnh.org and vipnyc.org 
Pinned up along one side of the wall was a row of brilliantly …

As Kermit the Frog has said time and again, it’s not easy being green.  You don’t have to tell that to scientists working with LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes); producing red light is a cinch, blue light has been with us for around 15 years thanks to some clever researchers from Japan, but green light is as hard to get right as a celebrity marriage and people have been struggling with the problem for the past ten years (Scanlon).  Red, blue, and green light combine to make white light.  So if you don’t have a green, you’re …