I’m starting to worry that I’m turning into an ostrich.
I’m territorial and ill-tempered. I’m fighting a strange desire to eat shiny objects. And when I get scared, I find myself hiding my face as though not seeing whatever is scaring me will make it go away. And this may or may not be related: I’m developing a strong aversion to light bulbs.

Image courtesy http://www.ostrichheadinsand.com/
A company called Nth Degree Tech may be able to help me out with that last problem. They’re seeking to replace light bulbs with their first commercial product, …

I have a secret theory, based on anecdotal evidence supplied by my over-active imagination, that glowing architectural surfaces encourage people to spend more money.  I wonder why glowing, shiny objects are so alluring to human beings? It’s not like we have gizzards.  At any rate, if glowing surfaces do encourage people to open their wallets and part with the brass, it is quite a good thing because artificially illuminated glowing architectural surfaces cost a great deal to construct AND require supermegakilotons of energy to run.

Image courtesy thenewyorkgreenadvocate.blogspot.com
The Lumenatrix Backlighting System …

ARCHITERIALS is a year old now, and like most healthy, well-adjusted one-year-olds it needs to be changed constantly, crawls all over my apartment, and makes strange burbling noises.  No, really – it does.  It’s terrifying.
Over the past year I’ve profiled approximately 65 materials and learned about blogging, bacteria, and biscuits, although I must confess that the biscuts were a side project.  A delicious, buttery side project.  Anyhow, to celebrate the birthday of ARCHITERIALS and the fact that the tagline “Investigating architectural materials since 2010” has finally attained temporal legitimacy, I’ve compiled for this, …

 
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 …

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 …