House under ground (webpage)
A Japanese house and restaurant are contained within this mud-covered building by architect Junya Ishigami, which was crafted by pouring concrete into holes in the ground.
My house in Santa Fe was built into a hill and that had enormous benefits as the building was cooler in the Summer and warmer in the Winter than a free-standing building would be. We came out of the caves and into the caves we might return – but they will look so much nicer! :-)
Bioplastic Vinyl (webpage)
Music and sustainability collective Evolution Music has designed a 12-inch vinyl made of bioplastic using existing record pressing machinery.
Nice. How much sense does it make though? I wonder how many vinyl album are actually recorded with analog technology, meaning big analog multitrack tape machines? I would bet that most of the recordings that end up on vinyl are actually recorded digitally, mastered digitally, and are then transferred to analog via a digital-to-analog converter. If the recording was high quality it would be 24 bit and 96kHz… so what value would be added by using vinyl? Nothing I can imagine, other than having to limit the bass in order for vinyl to work and the EQ represented by using the stylus/cartridge. There is, of course, also the visual and experiential value of having a turntable.
Frances Haugen at Code 2022 (podcast)
Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who turned over documents known as the Facebook Files. What was the impact of Haugen’s disclosure, and what does she still wish to see?
Very interesting, and really concerns all social media platforms. We have DMV and FAA, which have made roads and skies so much safer, so shouldn’t we have a Social Media agency as well?
The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization (podcast)
Jesse Jenkins is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University and leads the Princeton ZERO Lab. He was a lead author of the Net Zero America report, the most comprehensive attempt to map out the different pathways to decarbonization I’ve seen. He also leads the REPEAT Project, which has done some of the most in-depth modeling of how the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies could affect emissions.
This was very educational for me and made me a little more optimistic about the future.
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