fluid when shaken, stirred or otherwise disturbed

best parking lot ever!!

and you know i wouldn't just say that about any old parking lot...

via nextnature

design:landscapes

posted by thixotropic @ 10:15 AM 1 comments

east river energy

tony is really cool

and so is this article about hydropower turbines that generate energy from the flow of the east river

...in December 2006, an innovative energy company ...planted two state-of-the art turbines in the East River. They spin with the ebb and flow of the river's tides, turning the water's boundless energy into electricity (as long as dead bodies don't get stuck in the blades).

via world changing

mini-turbines in every pipe and drain? the water tunnels also providing power as fresh water flows into the city. ocean turbines? i imagine that a place like the bay of fundy could produce a lot of power - maybe even enough for the biggest starbucks sign ever that just went up on manhattan avenue. at night the marquee lights up the entire block!

posted by thixotropic @ 10:56 PM 0 comments

non sequitur economics

courtesy of adbusters

posted by thixotropic @ 9:29 AM 0 comments

define:irony

- leaving the apartment to take the bus after waiting forever for a car, and an empty cab comes up the street
- i was out of money but a friend who happened to be walking by to go home lends me a 20 for the ride
- finding a parking spot in under five minutes at 11 pm at night (basically, a miracle)
- park in the first empty spot i saw - which
a) had the right alternate side parking and
b) is the *exact same spot* we parked in after digging the car out of the snow on valentine's day

it almost makes me believe in a god.

almost.

posted by thixotropic @ 11:36 PM 0 comments

the rise of O*S*A*M*A

every morning this past week, riding the B61, i've been checking out the incredibly rapid destruction of the gorgeous, circa 1885 hackett building.

when i first noticed the scaffolding and the removed windows, i had (naively) thought the building was being renovated into new apartments. but instead this glossy shiny and ultimately pretty boring bauble will be built.

i am completely baffled by the ubiquity of these glass boxes. i believe that city populations are increasing because the sons and daughters of the Levittown generation are fleeing suburban uniformity and automotive isolation.

i read somewhere yesterday, that soon Long Island City will be known as O*S*A*M*A - that is One*Stop*Away*From*Manhattan. And also just happens to be an appropriate moniker for the Bedford*Zoo.

old*structures:porches*and*back*alleys

posted by thixotropic @ 10:17 PM 1 comments

painting mountains green

i'm not kidding

posted by thixotropic @ 1:34 PM 0 comments

lost in translation

it has been over a year since jesse and i were in shanghai laughing uncontrollably at english translations of chinese signs.

i wish i had taken a picture of a sign in the shanghai train station advertising a new industrial machine - model no. A.S.S.

or the sign in the taxi that said no psychos were allowed in the vehicle

but i've never seen a sign quite as funny as this one



i guess figuring out whether or not a customer is a prostitute is a privilege accorded only to the friendly security guards. do the mean security guards get the seconds?

translation:shanghai

posted by thixotropic @ 1:39 PM 0 comments

doodle schooled

my mom always said, no matter how good you are at something, there will always be somebody else who will be better than you are.

and so, i present the "why" of math doodling, courtesy of the triumvirate of smarty pants in my personal orbit.

mvb:

Its a symbol of the multiplication you have to do to arrive at the final answer. There is really nothing to the graph itself. For instance write out the problem the traditional way:

42
X 12
--------

the steps you need to take are:

2X2 (symbolized by the upper right)
2X4 (upper left)
2X1 (lower right)
4X1 (lower left)

if you do the multiplication out longhand you'll see the way the are put together- when you do the 2X2 that is the right side of the answer, the 4X1 is the left side. But you have to add those middle 2 up (the 2X1 and 2X4) which is why the middle of the diagram is added. and the 1 is carried to the left side of the equation, just like in the long hand method.

If you reversed the order in which you draw the multiplication factors (i.e the 2 starting on the top, instead on the 2 on the bottom), your just reversing the order in which you are multiplying, getting the answer to 42 X 21.

i also think it works because when you multiply, you are just dealing with 1's which can be represented by simple tick marks. the process of multiplying you learn in grammer school is all about breaking a problem of multiplying 10s and 100s into the simple task of just multiplying with 1's, and then adding them up to get the 10s and 100s. This all goes back to binary theory!

sadist jane:

Hey, I did this with 42 x 23 and got 966.

So did Matlab. I am matlab.

That's logic, not math.

*** but really ***

Do you know how an abacus works? this is a similar accounting system - it's a means of keeping track of the digits (in powers of ten) - then the intersections are the products. The problem is you have to be moving in the same direction on the 90 degree plane, so it's not very intuitive (i.e. the 10s columns in our numbers don't both go at the 'top', they go at the 'left' in their respective orientation).

OR, you can think of the numbers as sort of in a matrix, and you're doing inner and outer products. It's not as though the lines help with the accounting once the entry exceeds 9.

the flyshower:

this is basically a variation on lattice multiplication, which is basically the same general 2D format but with numbers. i'll show you sometime. yhat's pretty dope though thanks for sharing. sharing is caring, you know.

so if nothing else - i do care. really.

posted by thixotropic @ 1:05 PM 0 comments