David Lidsky's Blog, page 4826

The World's Greenest Homes

From a 5,000-square-foot family home in rural New York to majestic hillsides outside Santiago, Chile, with stops in Hamburg, Hong Kong and Seattle; Planet Green goes inside some of the most environmentally and aesthetically conscious homes in the world. Here's a look at a select few.

DBA Wants to the be the Muji of Green Design

Let's admit that most green consumer products look terrible--if it's made out of recyclables, odds are, it also looks like it was made by someone wearing patchouli and dreadlocks. DBA, a small start-up based in New York, is looking to change that, with products that are both seductively minimal and fastidiously sustainable. 

Cities Go Gaga for Google Fiber With Glowsticks! Flashmobs! Twistee Treats! An Icy Lake Jump!

Google's announcement that it was contemplating a move into the ISP business with an ultra-high speed fiber network has sparked a municipal cage match.

No one knows exactly how much Google plans to invest, but its reputation as cash giant alone has cities from Anchorage, Alaska, to Sarasota, Florida battling to become the search giant's new test market. Faster than you could say Google Fiber (though not faster than the company's proposed gigabit speeds) metros whipped up Facebook pages and...

Verizon's Bringing 4G Speeds in Mid-2011, But Wave Buh-Bye to Unlimited Data

Verizon's just revealed its going to have Long Term Evolution (LTE) handsets ready for mid-2011, which is six months earlier than it had previously said it would be available. It looks like the big carriers are making the first moves to snatch the next-gen mobile market.

The company will have infrastructure installed in some locations by the end of 2010, but it'll take up to six months for suitably equipped 4G (also known as 3GPP) mobile devices to arrive. At first these will most likely be...

Pink Floyd to EMI: We Don't Need No Digital Singles

Although it's been clinically proven that sympathy for major record labels is a medical impossibility, some people may be feeling a slight twinge of compassion towards EMI*. Yesterday, OK Go dispensed with their services following a row about over video embedding, and today, the big boys joined in. A judge in London has ruled in favor of Pink Floyd, after they went to court to stop EMI from chopping up its albums and selling the tracks individually.

The band went to court asking for...

Infographic of the Day: The Best Jobs in America

What jobs earn the most, and will be most plentiful, in the coming decade?

Recently, CNN.com produced a Top 100 list of the best jobs in America. And it wasn't particularly compelling until Focus.com put it in this infographic, which summarizes the results (click the link for full-size):

The most interesting data is in the parentheticals--in particular, the number of people actually employed in that job, which gives you some sense of how large the employment opportunity actually is:

But...

Karl Lagerfeld Becomes Fashion's Sarah Palin With Climate-Skeptic Runway Show

Chanel's legendary designer flips the bird to climate science, with a 240-ton "iceberg" created for his latest runway show.

Fashion makes a mint using calculated provocations and wanton displays of luxury. You expect it. But Karl Lagerfeld's latest runway show for Chanel, showing off his Autumn/Winter 2010 collection, was stomach-turning in its grandeur. For the stage, Lagerfeld commissioned 30 ice sculptors to chip away at 240 tons of ice over 6 days, creating an artificial iceberg 28 feet...

3-D Printing Whole Buildings in Stone...in Space: This Printer Rocks

Enrico Dini's brilliant-or-crazy (or both) prototype machine prints entire buildings in solid rock... On the MOON!

In Pisa, Italy, mad genius Enrico Dini is building sandcastles on the moon. His giant 3-D printer is the first of its kind with the potential to print whole buildings, and it makes them out of solid rock, cutting down a thousand-year-long process into a few minutes. It uses sand, but someday it'll use moon dust.

The machine, called D-Shape, sprays a thin layer of sand with a...

MIT Media Lab Unwraps Its New Digs

The building will now host MIT's most storied hothouse for interactive design innovation.

Last Friday, MIT opened the doors on it's newest big budget building, a spacious complex for the MIT Media Lab. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki Associates, with project architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates, it's a departure from some of the bold experiments scattered around the campus, by starchitects such as Steven Holl or Frank Gehry. It's a fairly straight-laced building...

It's Banks vs. Families, Who Will Come Out on Top? Q&A With Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren is Main Street's woman in Washington. A professor at Harvard
Law School, she's researched the travails of the consumer credit market and
the hidden bankruptcy epidemic for over 25 years. Not satisfied with merely publishing academic research, she leaped at an invitation from Senator Harry Reid to take a more public role in reforming the financial system after the credit crisis: She's now the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, the group charged with...