David Lidsky's Blog, page 3015
April 6, 2015
The Urban Death Project: Designing A Better Way To Die
With her Urban Death centers, Katrina Spade wants to create a more environmentally sustainable way to die. Morbid or brilliant?
In her thirties, Katrina Spade* started thinking about death. She wondered what her parents would do with her body if she were to die and realized she had no idea. In researching her options, she became fascinated by the rituals surrounding how Americans die and found major problems in the paths most of us take. For her master's thesis at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Spade laid out the Urban Death Project, an ambitious plan to build a system for composting human bodies after death and turning them back into soil.
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How To Design The Googleplex Of Schools
Alexandria, Minnesota's new high school could teach your so-called "open office" a thing or two.
When the city of Alexandria, Minnesota, asked community members what they wanted in their new high school to be like, they replied, "like the Google campus." So they hired John Pfluger of Cuningham Group Architecture to make that a reality. Something that might not be the same size, or even necessarily have the exact design considerations, but that represents the same sense of possibility—the feeling of being adaptable to the future, whatever might come of it. The result is a state-of-the-art facility for more than 1,400 students where the word "classroom" is verboten, and where an hour in algebra class might be indiscernible from kicking back in the quad.
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April 3, 2015
Tesla's Ban In West Virginia Is The Latest Roadblock For Mass-Market Electric Cars
West Virginia is the fifth state to effectively ban Tesla from operating dealerships.
When a company is as disruptive as Tesla aims to be, the potential barriers have a way of stacking up. Today, the electric car maker met its latest challenge: The company is banned from selling cars directly to consumers in the state of West Virginia, according to The Verge.
Today in Tabs Quiz: House of Snøøker
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Another week has passed, five more workdays you'll certainly never see again, and not only did you waste them reading about nonsense on the Internet, now here you are eager to fritter away several more of your precious life's minutes clicking buttons on a form. So let's get started!
Google Is About to Optimize Search Results For Mobile--Prepare Yourself
If you've been putting off updating your website, now's the time to act.
Google is the undisputed king of Internet search, accounting for 75% of searches in the U.S. and a staggering 90% of those in the European Union—so dominant that the EU is set to sue Google for allegedly prioritizing search in its interests. That's why you should pay attention when Google switches up how it ranks sites in search, which the tech titan is about to do again when it updates its algorithm on April 21: According to Search Engine Land, mobile-friendly sites are going to rise to the top when users search from mobile devices.
A Love Story Made In Robot Heaven (And Starring Over 1,200 Rubik's Cubes)
Stop-motion maestro Mystery Guitar Man's latest short is a puzzling masterpiece.
When's the last time you successfully solved a Rubik's Cube? There is zero shame if your answer is "never," but YouTuber Mystery Guitar Man and his team are claiming to have cracked 1,296 mini Rubik's Cubes 961 times to create this charming stop-motion short starring love-struck robots.
Why Not Google Map Your Body?
Researchers have used Google Maps tech to create zoomable "maps" of the human body.
No, you won't need Dennis Quaid to travel to the Innerspace of your body—just a little Google Maps know-how. Researchers at the University of South Wales, borrowing the algorithms Google Maps uses to make sense of large volumes of data, have mapped out human tissues down to the level of the human cell, says Gizmodo. They scanned a human hip joint with an electron microscope and used the scale-zooming Maps algorithms to accomplish molecular analysis in weeks that would have previously taken 25 years. And they have even put it online for you to peer into the molecular mysteries of the human hip.
Never Walk Home In The Dark Again With This Simple App
Rudder is a navigation app with a twist: It always leads you down the most brightly lit route.
A 2007 campus sexual assault study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that one in five female college students is the target of an attempted or completed sexual assault.
Science Fairs Just Got A Lot More Fun: This Company Will Let Kids Send Experiments To Space
Satellite technology is becoming so accessible that even kids are doing it.
Consider this: Tiny satellites are becoming so ubiquitous that there is now a startup dedicated to giving students access to these satellites so they can conduct space experiments. This company, Ardusat, has a partnership with satellite data company Spire to get an "education payload" on every satellite that Spire launches.
MIT Student Develops A Facebook For Depression
Koko is an upcoming iPhone app that aims to help people fix the bugs in their thinking by crowdsourcing cognitive behavioral techniques.
Koko, an upcoming app based on an MIT experiment, is designed to build the world's first social network for dealing with depression. If it takes off, it could change the way some of us think about our problems.
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