Homeless homes!

Austin has been developing individual housing for "chronically homeless" people.  It will soon be opening to allow them to move in.  There are small cottages and health care available to them on site...and a community garden! The residents will pay a small monthly rent and it will function as a way for them to get their lives back in order.

Teepees and cottages are available for homeless people.
 click photo for link to the KUT article about the village

S

His house

This is awesome.  Not practical from an environmental preservation point of view, but really awesome.

This picture is from apartmenttherapy's story about the book,
if you click on the picture it will take you to a video.

An artist in Denmark had this book cut as a replicate of his house so you can flip through the pages and go through the house





S

Male Breast Cancer Awareness Week

This week is male breast cancer awareness week (Oct 17-23).  We have talked about breast cancer on this blog, but rarely mentioned men.  So here is a trailer for a documentary about two men with breast cancer.




S

Sexism

Click this image to see ads from UN Women on Behance

UN Women used real google searches to show how pervasive sexism is currently.

Click this image for story from AdWeek

How much do you spend?

Lately, my weekly grocery budget has been on my mind.  I realized that when I moved from Berkeley to Austin I was forced to increase my budget because there were not as many cheap fresh food options, and again when I moved further east (now I am in Florida), I have had to increase my budget.

I mentioned to one of my coworkers that I spend at the most about $30 on groceries for the week (not including eating out, which I don't do every week). He was very surprised that I could live on such a small budget, but I tend to eat a lot of cheap things (rice, beans, pasta) and make most food from scratch and from my garden (I made pesto last night with my own basil, yum!), so I also mostly buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

source

This is an interesting take on the cost of a weeks worth of groceries for families around the world. I was surprised by the small amounts many of them need, and also shocked by the huge amounts of food many people buy (how many 2-liter bottles of coke can you drink in a week?).  But mostly it was very interesting to compare the different types of foods that are purchased.  The commentary says that in Ecuador they eat guinea pig, and ice cream sundaes were invented in America (so it's a societal pressure that is making me love ice cream...I'm ok with that).  Further, the percentage of the purchase (space wise at least) that consists of beverages if pretty ridiculous; beer, soda, tequila.  The poorer families did not make beverage purchases.

I can't speak to the authenticity of the stories associated with each picture (they got the pictures from many different sources but seem to be able to comment about details of the individuals in the pictures), but it still made me think about what I'm buying and how much I'm spending.

Also, the website (http://likes.com/chrisnhr/what-a-week-of-groceries-looks-like-around-the-world?) has lots of ads and things that are pretty annoying, so just ignore that.

S

Don't drink the blue liquid

Richard Neill asked a simple question on facebook to a maxipad company (Bodyform)...

Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn't I get to enjoy this time of joy and 'blue water' and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn't wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen .....you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger

 
This is how they responded
It has some very good information in it.  And is also hilarious.
 


S

Passive Accident Speak

Lately, my urban planning/transportation enthusiast/etc personality has manifested as a bitter speaker against passive "accident" speak. A couple weeks ago, a woman was driving to work in a suburb of Chicago when she crashed her car into a building a died. The article stated "woman on her way to work dies when her car crashes into building" and in the actual text of the article it never mentioned that she was even driving, just that the car, somehow on it's own I guess, crashed into the building, maybe with the intent to murder her... I'm not really sure. However, today, I discovered a new low in passive accident writing when I saw this article title on the Chicago Tribune website:

In the Tribune's defense, the article itself was not quite as passive, but really "Man leans out car window, killed by parked car" ummm.... I'm not really sure how the parked car decided to kill the man, but, I guess so. Granted, I think the title would be a little long if it said something like "Man leans out car window and was dragged out of said car when driver got close to parked cars and he did not pull himself back in in time for him to hit a parked car on the side of the road" but.. it could have said "killed when hitting a parked car" or something a little bit more related to the fact that the parked car did NOTHING in this whole process, except be parked on the side of the road. Don't get me wrong, I hate parking, and cars kinda in general, but .... it irks me that the responsibility of this crash (not accident!) is placed on the parked car in this title.

And with that, I will end my bitter rant... for now.

R

Should we be paying attention to Google glass?

While Google was worrying about banning the first porn app to be released on Google Glass (before the product is even commercially available), other people are working on something much more important.

An Israeli startup has developed a device to help the visually impaired read, even while walking around on a normal day.  This is not an app for your phone that will read websites or PDFs for you, it is a device that can be clipped to the side of your glasses and reads text that the wearer points to, even from far away.  This video (also in the article I linked to before) shows one of the employees of OrCam, who is visually impaired, demonstrating the device. While Google is working to change the lives of people who are not visually impaired by introducing Glass, this small company is releasing the product (that so far reads English text) for $2500.

This product can inform the user that a traffic light (hopefully they are only pedestrians) is green or red.  It can also be taught to recognize specific products (as shown in the video), and faces of people you know.  That's good for me, I never remember anyone.  And, it will secretly inform you of their name using bone conduction for audio, which this device also uses (sorry that website is kinda freaky, but it has a good explanation).  The OrCam device doesn't use an implant to conduct through the bone, it counts on your glasses holding the device against your head to transmit the audio through your skull.   All of that is beside the point, the exciting part is that I could program it to tell me the person's name and how I know them secretly so I would seem much nicer than I am.  

Anyway, this is pretty exciting technology for the vision science field and for the visually impaired community.

S  

Open Space

I love to have extra space in my apartment, I don't want to get home and be surrounded by stuff. I LOVE the show hoarders because it makes me a little uncomfortable, but when they do finally get some of the stuff cleared out it makes me feel so much better (and it's not even my house!). So when I read this article on Apartment Therapy's blog, I loved it. To some extent, the article is actually a bad article, it's a little confusing, and doesn't seem to have a follow through at all; but I absolutely agree that empty space allows for creativity and exploration. I am always looking to re-enforce what I already believe though, so there's obviously that.

I have many friends who cannot fathom having an empty room in their apartment, I have just that. I do keep my suitcases and my bike in the closet, but the room itself has a couple empty plastic milk crates and my bf's broken bike. I love knowing that I can always go somewhere completely devoid of clutter, and I can flip my bike over and do random work on it, or do a major art project (still haven't done this at all) if I wanted to, or just go in there and meditate. The rest of my house is fairly barren as well, but I would love if it could be even more so. Space allows for a clear mind, and you know if it's dirty or not because there really isn't much to clean!

An empty room, to me, always reminds me of when you first move into a new place. There are so many opportunities, so many ideas about how the space will be used. Those opportunities are still there even when the space is full of stuff, we just have to remind ourselves that it exists every once in a while.

R

Up next: how to control your children

Ok, we still have a long way to go before we can control other people.  Aside from the fact that we don't have much control over the rat, people don't even have tails!

Yoo, S-s, Kim, H, Filandrianos, E, Taghados, SJ, and Park, S. PLOSone, 2013

 

 

A group in Harvard has made a way for humans to control rat tail movements with their minds. And all of this is noninvasive for both of the participants (the human and the rat).  Well, the rat was anesthetized, so not completely noninvasive.  

Further, being anesthetized means that the rat couldn't reject the movement, so this doesn't allow the "controller" to force motion of an otherwise functional rat.  And, the movement doesn't actually correlate to a movement that humans perform, so we can't get too excited about controlled, focused, functional motion just yet but this is a huge step toward brain-to-brain interfaces.

S

Invading Privacy

A while ago, S had her apartment broken into, and while only a couple things were stolen (namely money and a camera) the idea of someone you don't know walking around in your house and rooting through your things is very unsettling. I remember discovering that my freshman year roommate had eaten something I purposely hid in my underwear drawer so she wouldn't find it and realizing that she was probably looking in all of my drawers every day (or else, how would she have found it!). The anger, but mostly betrayal, and embarrassment for something I didn't need to be embarrassed about (I really didn't have anything to hide, except food) was overwhelming. So overwhelming that I still hold disdain for her, a girl I haven't seen in almost 7 years. In a way, I feel really bad for her, because she was severely depressed and lost in the world that she was thrust into for college, but I also feel violated in a way I have never felt violated since or before.

However, the recent hacking of the Bush email accounts has me wondering what it would feel like if someone hacked into my email or my online life. Honestly, I probably do have many things I wouldn't want everyone to see, not that I can think of things right now, but I also don't know what is there. I have had my gmail account for about 7 years and my hotmail account for over 12 (I don't even WANT to know what I emailed to people back then.. weird) and I wouldn't want everyone to have access to those things!

This article, in Slate of course, discusses what that might feel like. A business man was threatened by a hacker to reveal all of his information (mostly business related information) and when he approached his superiors and a lawyer they also had to look through the information to see if anything would be damaging. The fact that not only would a person you don't know have all that access to your stuff, but people you will have to see again every day would want access as well is ... humbling, to say the least.

What is privacy in today's world? I know that someone in Google could probably track all of my activity, and if someone hacked into my email accounts there would probably be things that I don't want them to see, but I know that generally, I assume no one will see it. I guess we should assume the only thing we can regard as private are our thoughts, and maybe person to person conversations that are not in the public domain. It's interesting to think you'd have to live your life in a completely cleansed form to be completely innocent. Just think of celebrities, they are followed and every move is documented. I think if I were not allowed to have any privacy I would probably go insane, and I think the definition of privacy is changing dramatically.

R

Legos!

Lego has an architecture collection!  It's pretty interesting and there are pamphlets for each building with information about the architect and the building and it's impact on the world.  They even have the Sydney Opera House!
This collection has been around as an educational promotion since the 1960s.

S

New Year 2013



This is also how happy I plan to look every time I'm flossing...

As the new year rang in, everyone started wondering what resolutions to settle on. I have always struggled with that, breaking my lifelong habit of picking my nails (S has this problem as well) or eating healthier, or setting up an actual workout plan (not that I am not fairly healthy and not active, but just getting organized with it) are my normal ones. This year, like any other year, I still have not fully decided what my resolutions are. I think they need to be measurable, and I need to have some way to account for them. One of my recurring resolutions that I am sticking in there again this year is to floss at least 4 times a week. I downloaded an app called habit streak, so I'll be able to see if I actually flossed 4 times a week, and hopefully that helps, but more importantly I need to get on my willpower train and start believing in myself. There are many articles about fulfilling New Years resolutions out there, but I do agree with this one about how willpower is really your most valuable resource, but it isn't depleted unless you THINK it's depleted.

Basically, I'm just letting everyone know they should believe in themselves (and not make COMPLETELY unachievable goals) and they should be able to keep their resolutions strong!

Now.. just to decide what my resolutions should be, suggestions anyone?

R