This is an exciting step in the right direction for public transportation. Buses already have an incredible miles-per-gallon-per-person ratio, and taking the gallons out of the equation can only make this bus pay for it’s self in short order.

Solar-powered mass transportation? It’s no longer a dream! Tindo, a solar-powered electric bus, was introduced just last week in the city of Adelaide in Australia. The best part? It’s free to ride the supercute, supersolar Tindo. [From Inhabitat » TRANSPORTATION TUESDAY: Tindo, the Solar-powered Bus!]

The possibilities are endless. I mean, just think about the graffiti!

MPK, a company that has made a name producing glow-in-the-dark paint, has developed self-luminous micro particles called Litrospheres. The new material is said to be inexpensive (35 cents to light up a 8 ½ x 11 piece of plastic that is 1/8″ thick), non-toxic, and capable of staying constantly lit for over 12 years thanks to a betavoltaic technology that uses a radioactive gas. [From Heading To A Club Near You: New Material Provides Constant Light For 12 Years Without a Power Source]

This guy is an amazing artist.

Book Synopsis Thomas Allen selects the pulpiest of pulp paperbacks and then lovingly slices out a figure from the cover, gently folds it into position, and constructs a witty scene around it. In Thirst, a sultry dame reaches from her cover toward a guy with a bottle on a nearby volume; in Teeter a man careens toward the edge of a stack of paperbacks ready to topple. [From Uncovered]

Wow. Watch this.

Journey apparently saw Arnel Pineda’s band “The Zoo” on YouTube, and hired him as their new lead singer!!! That’s amazing.
Read an article about it.

This is great. They’ve rigged up the lights in this building (multicolor lights) to be controlled by cell phone to play games. It’s a HUGE, low res display, and it’s pretty cool, I think.

SIPs are actually quite different from the green materials I have looked at in the past. For example, they use petroleum products in the insulation! Generally something I would turn away from immediately, but it seems like the benefits of using SIPs in building a Zero Energy Consumption house could outweigh any negatives in the insulation. It’s worth looking in to, in any case.

This site also does a good job of reminding everyone of an important and frequently overlooked aspect of going green- houses are made up of systems: air systems, water systems, power systems, etc. These systems aren’t made green by simply getting a solar panel. “Reduce Re-use Recycle” was a boring slogan, but it was in the right order. We need to reduce our use of building materials in general, as well as focus on the footprint of those materials.

In any case, the site’s worth a read, and the materials are worth thinking about.

Structural insulated panels (SIPs) are high performance building panels used in floors, walls, and roofs for residential and light commercial buildings. The panels are typically made by sandwiching a core of rigid foam plastic insulation between two structural skins of oriented strand board (OSB). [From What Are SIPs? - Structural Insulated Panel Association]

The site “Indexed” is really pretty great. It’s home to a collection of notecards with hand-drawn diagrams about life, and the way things are. Simple and nice, especially for diagram sluts like myself.

Without knowing the details, this is exactly the kind of design I can appreciate. It’s not just reflecting a natural system, but integrating a natural system to accomplish a task. Plus, it looks straight out of 2001. It is supposed to use the plants to filter certain toxins out of your Air. It was apparently developed by NASA to help the astronauts.

[From Eco: Bel-Air Filtration System Uses Plants to Purify Our Environs]

This is a pretty cool little film about “unsanctioned public art”.

“Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”

- Henri Poincare