[Image found here. Title quote from here.]
Besides myopic fish, I imagine birds and rabbits could use these, too. Maybe they’re ear glasses instead, to help re-focus your hearing after listening to all of the BlogmocRadio episodes back-to-back.
NOW HEAR THIS: The Overnight Open Thread is now in session!
“Guys! Check it out! Babs just showed up with a Tootsie Roll and she’s chewing it! Dump your skanky dates, you’re missing the best part! Man oh man, look at her go!”
True Fact: Tootsie Roll, see, is the life of every party… for wherever Young America gathers… Its popularity is acclaimed by all.
Acclaimed by all 13 dweebs in the advert, that is. The next best thing, besides watching Babs seductively remove her fillings with a chewy brown phallus-shaped wad of sugar, corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, condensed milk, cocoa, whey, soy lecithin, orange extract, and artificial and condensed flavors, is an Overnight Open Thread.
“Honey, it locked up again and I’ve gotta go, real bad.”
There’s something about designers who insist on taking a concept that works and trying to fix it. Just because it’s different, doesn’t necessarily make it better, and this is a great example.
Yeah, it looks cool, and it takes up less space than a regular bathroom with a toilet and a shower, but look closer at what it takes away.
–The floor and all walls of the room need to be waterproofed, and it has to have a floor drain.
–All electrical fixtures, switches and outlets need to be waterproof, too.
–The floor is always cold. And wet.
–Forget mildew problems. Now you have water deposits to clean.
–To clean it, you need a ladder… and machine oil.
–No grooming mirror in front of the lavatory so you might as well do it in a dark closet.
–The toilet seat will always be wet. No furry seat cover cozies for you!
–Forget about a toilet paper dispenser. You better remember to fish it out of the linen cabinet every time.
–Women have no countertop space to display all 31 beauty enhancement products and accouterments.
–Men have no place to set their beer while they pee into the floor drain.
Now, if it had a single button that springs everything into a usable configuration, that might be cool, except when the power goes out. In other words, it’s another great example of pure efficient genius, and just the thing for an Overnight Open Thread.
[Found here, with a Tip o’ the Tarboosh to Snork.]
[More info and images here via here.]
It’s a house. It’s a very ugly house. It’s a very ugly house created for a competition by people who have no concept of aesthetics, let alone standard construction practices. Here’s a partial description justifying the brilliance of the design:
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
Faced with the typical house model of a “box construction” made up of standard industrialized components, we chose to build a clever house with systemic logic components, rising into what we call a distributed intelligence. This means that each component of the prototype contains the same level of technology, energy, structural, etc… With this we say that the logic of all is found in each of the parts, and not vice versa.
That is, distributed intelligence can be understood as the development in fusion research systems and materials, implying a change of procedures, multi functionality in the construction field. Opening the possiblities of digital parametric design from the traditional assembly of standardized industrial components of the home-computer.
In other words, they’ve not only designed one of the ugliest dwellings ever imagined, they’ve invented a brand new lexicon to justify it. Archibabble at its worst. Phew.
To be fair, the design is clever in one respect, that the shape was generated based upon solar tracking, that is, a computer model engineered a shape that maximizes the amount of surface area that receives direct sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year, thus determining the configuration of the solar panels. WIN.
Unfortunately, the maximum efficiency is compromised by site orientation, its global latitude, and, um, unpredictable cloud cover. And it’s ugly. FAIL.
Since this was previously posted here, it’s only fair and proper to have an Overnight Open Thread. WIN!
The Diary of Daedalus
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