Zinc Air Batteries

You’ve likely heard of what some are heralding as the coming Hydrogen Economy, which some think may replace the fossil-fuel economy we have now. Problem is, hydrogen isn’t a fuel source, it has to be created by electricity. That makes it more akin to a storage medium than a source.

Apparently some are also looking forward to a Zinc Economy, using Zinc Air batteries. They apparently hold a great deal of power, but they need to be recharged in a central location. Just like with hydrogen, there are a number of companies announcing miraculous breakthroughs which they say will revolutionize everything, but I’m a little more skeptical. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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Mini Moleskines

I really like my Moleskine notebooks, but I sometimes find them too large to carry in my pocket all the time. Luckily, I stumbled across someone who decided to simply cut theirs in half. Looks like it worked pretty well too. Here are instructions on how to do it.

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TED Talk: Robert Full: How Engineers Learn from Evolution

How he and his fellow researchers are making robots that walk, climb, jump and run by copying animals in nature. His solutions are often elegant and simple, but not always intuitive.

Analog Letter

A neat little idea of sending a letter rolled-up inside an analog cassette. Cute.

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10 Things You Shouldn’t Buy New

A very quick guide of things that make more sense financially to buy used. I would also expand “office furniture” to include home furnishings as well. There is a lot of low-quality furniture out there, but the old stuff is often the best.

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Church Windows Help Purify the Air

Gold used in old church windows helps purify the air when exposed to sunlight.

“For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colors, but little did they realise that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst,” Professor Zhu said.

The Rambling Lead-Up

I think everyone is pretty familiar with the Moleskine notebook at this point. These little notebooks are pretty high in quality, very portable, and extremely well designed. In particular, I’ve recently been turned onto their weekly planner, which I’ve switched to for keeping track of my tasks, appointments, and phone numbers. I made the move from a digital planner/organizer, and I couldn’t be happier - I can make drawings, jot things down more quickly, and usually find things faster than with a digital PDA.

If I need more space I just drop in an index card (I keep a few in the handy back pocket). The design also includes a separate removable phonebook which slides neatly into the back pocket. Lastly, it’s much more satisfying to cross an item off a list than to click a check box.

The total cost of ownership of an iPhone is somewhere in the range of $1000 a year if service contracts are included. My planner cost me $15, and I’d argue it does a better job at some of its core functions. That makes the iPhone over 66 times as expensive. I’m not going to claim that my little black book does even nearly as much, but it’s definitely more bang for the buck.

The Project

The Moleskine planner, like all Moleskines, uses a little ribbon-style bookmark which I use to keep track of the current date. That’s great, but I also want to often open up certain other pages quickly, like the conversion tables or the weekly schedule (which keeps track of recurring things like putting the garbage out).

I’ve seen people use tabs for this, but I was worried about them being damaged in my pocket. My alternate solution to this was to add on a couple of small coloured threads to the main bookmark. I should note that any more than two extra threads would probably make it a bit trickier to open, since fumbling to find the right thread isn’t super easy. Using one or two threads is easy and quick, which I’ll explain later.

The Instructions

You’ll need:

- A Sewing Needle

- 2 Colours of Thread

- Scissors

It’s really simple. You basically just need to attach the thread to the ribbon bookmark on the Moleskine, as close as possible to the book’s binding.

There might be a better way to do it, but I just did what I’d do if I were anchoring the thread to sew on a button. I put the thread through in one spot, then back through in another, looped it a few times and then tied it off with a few simple knots. That’s it.

Using It

The problem you’ll quickly notice is that both of the threads will often get entangled if your marked pages are close together. The threads are small enough that separating them is a bit of a pain, too. That’s ok though, there is a solution.

So long as there are only two threads, you can grab both threads at once to get to the page you want. You may need to do it in two motions - one to open the book, and then a pull in the opposite direction to get to your page. It wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after a few tries it worked extremely well, and is still much quicker than thumbing through the pages.

Prints by Bree,ree

I just spent about 30 minutes going through this guy’s prints. They’re great.

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The Largest Police have Ever Seen

The worst kind of crime hits my home province.

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The Bitter End

Anyone in Montréal over the fall should check out Dan Beirne (of Said the Gramophone fame) in his new improvised “sitcom” The Bitter End. I’ve not seen it live yet, but I have seen this funny preview on their blog (where they also hope to be posting every single episode).

Boing Boing has a little post about a traffic engineer famed for his work in Drachten, The Netherlands, in which he successfully pushed to have all traffic signals and signage removed from the center of the city. This idea has been copied elsewhere, and in some places the philosophy has been extended to also integrating pedestrian space with the automobile carriageway, creating what is referred to as a shared space or naked street. The result is an alleged decrease in travel times and better safety, because drivers are forced to pay attention.

I find the concept interesting, but perhaps much less practical in a large city. On a certain level, however, it can be seen as mainly a scheme to reduce both car usage and travel speeds, which it does well. This is a laudable goal, but one which seems to go against everything current North American planning stands for (that is, accommodating as many cars as possible, as quickly as possible, while ignoring pedestrians and cyclists).

New Urbanists have been singing the tune of slower cars for years, and haven’t made any noticeable headway. The fundamental nature of American cities, and the attitudes of those who inhabit them, would need to change before this became even remotely possible on this side of the ocean on any kind of scale.

Ignore That Logo Under the Tape

Apparently the authorities in Beijing are banning all corporate logos in the olympic venues, except for those of the official sponsors. This means that all sinks, toilets, fire extinguishers, security systems etc. have ugly bits of white tape on them.

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Shipping Container Hotel

A hotel made from stacked shipping containers, which comes out looking like a somewhat conventional hotel. It was apparently much cheaper, faster, and caused less waste on site.

Unfortunately, however, the shipping containers, which form the rooms, are put together in China and shipped halfway around the world. So basically they’ve figured out how to outsource the construction of buildings.

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Amazing Shadow Performance

Looks like it’s from the Conan O’Brien show, but I don’t know anything about this.

I might be late with this one, but it’s still fantastic news. The Canadian National Film Board is getting some of their films online. I don’t know their reputation outside of Canada, but in it they’re particularly known for their work in the fields of animation and documentary.

Pictured is Pas de Deux, by Norman McLaren (Who I coincidentally mentioned this morning). Other notables include Walking by Ryan Larkin, The Log Driver’s Waltz, and my childhood favourite, the very goofy The Big Snit.

Via Matt Forsythe, who worked on the site, and who does nice drawings.

I recently took part in a study for McGill University, where among other things they had to do an MRI of my brain. Seeing as this doesn’t happen too often for me, I politely asked me if they could email me a copy of some of the images when they were done. I thought they had forgotten, but a week or so later some amazing images popped into my email inbox - portraits of my brain.

A slice of my brain as taken horizontally straight through my eyeballs.

One of my heroes, the late, great animator Norman McLaren, once decided to turn an x-ray of his head into an art project by drawing on it. McLaren was an animator, and much of his work was stream of consciousness doodles, so this made a lot of sense. I put my images through photoshop, my tool of choice as a designer, in an effort to make the various structures pop out a bit more and add a little colour.

Here is McLaren’s head compared with mine:

Word Clock

Fun clock screensaver that simply changes text highlights to denote time. Not at all practical, but fun.

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Boy or Girl Paradox

in a random two-child family, one of the children is a boy. What is the probability that the other one is a girl?

It’s very unintuitive, but it’s 2/3. Very neat.

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Bruno Taylor’s Public Play Spaces

71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now. Are we designing children and play out of the public realm?

This project is a study into different ways of bringing play back into public space. It focuses on ways of incorporating incidental play in the public realm by not so much as having separate play equipment that dictates the users but by using existing furniture and architectural elements that indicate playful behaviour for all.

My friend at Lake Jane has posted a profile of Les Touilleurs, the best cooking store in my town of Montréal. Aside from having an attractive space, they do a few things very right. In a certain sense it might be seen as the opposite of a big-box commodity store.

A few of the things they do which I wish more stores would copy:

- No packaging. You can pick everything up and see how it actually feels in your hand. It also lets you more adequately tell the quality of what you are going to buy, which can be difficult behind the thick packaging on many products.

- Small, but good, selection. They have been known to discontinue items that are selling well if they decide the quality isn’t up to snuff. This sort of editorializing makes sure you get something really good, and builds a great customer loyalty. Yes, you could buy something cheaper elsewhere, but you know the one from here will be great, and will probably last at least 10 years if maintained well.

- An Excellent Staff. They really know enough to help you find what you want. These aren’t apathetic Best Buy workers who don’t care about what they’re doing, they take pride in their work and it shows.

- Educational Courses. Cooking workshops are held often in the in-store kitchen. Many top chefs from the city take part.