2250 AD: A Nautical Odyssey

desoumal writes " In the blog 2250 AD: A Nautical Odyssey published in WorldChanging, which covers a recent challenge presented to the student teams from 80 Indian colleges that entered in NASA '04 (National Association of Students of Architecture's annual design event), held in Mumbai, India, by Hiray College Of Architecture, Rohit Gupta writes about the highlights of the event - a city based on a giant question mark, a city inside a giant genetically-modified tree trunk, cities that grow like viruses, cities that look and function like holes made by earthworms... my personal favorite amongst them being a city with a photovoltaic dome 'designed so that it literally followed the path of the sun round the year, to maximize the solar energy, down to individual housing units'. Damn cool. "

Comments

Re:problem solvers

[carlmenezes]

"In nxt 250 yrs cncpts of sustnblty'd mk us thnk'f dffrnt apprches for svng energy. Wstge of papr and ink'd be rducd thru chnging th way v wrte. Th wrds v use rgulry'd b wrttn in shrtst possible way."

Pretty impressive I must say. Reminds me of this :

Reading Test:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd
waht I was rdanieg!

THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID

Aoccdrnig to rsceearh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it
deosn't mttaer in waht

oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt
tihng is taht the

frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset
can be a taotl mses

and you can sitll raed it wouthit any porbelm. Tihs is
bcuseae the huamn

mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the
wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?

Holy Crap

[iamdrscience]

This has to be one of the worst descriptions ever. Firstly because it's one big, incomprehensible run-on sentence, but more importantly because it doesn't even give a summary of the challenge,despite going into some detail about the variety results.

Both the original author and Hemos deserve to be sacked. I mean, come on, I know they're not going to catch every mistake, but they're called editors for a reason and if they're not going to even bother to fix a horrible description like this then they're just not doing their job.

Re:problem solvers

[The-Bus]

ANd your post reminded me of this...

Having chosen English as the preferred language in the EEC, the European Parliament has commissioned a feasibility study in ways of improving efficiency in communications between Government departments.
European officials have often pointed out that English spelling is unnecessarily difficult - for example, cough, plough, rough, through and thorough. What is clearly needed is a phased programme of changes to iron out these anomalies. The programme would, of course, be administered by a committee staff at top level by participating nations.
In the first year, for example, the committee would suggest using 's' instead of the soft 'c'. Sertainly, sivil servants in all sities would resieve this news with joy. Then the hard 'c' could be replaced by 'k' sinse both letters are pronounsed alike. Not only would this klear up konfusion in the minds of klerikal workers, but typewriters kould be made with one less letter.
There would be growing enthusiasm when in the sekond year, it kould be announsed that the troublesome 'ph' would henseforth be written 'f'. This would make words like 'fotograf' twenty per sent shorter in print.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible. Governments would enkourage the removal of double letters which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.
We would al agre that the horible mes of silent 'e's in the languag is disgrasful. Therefor we kould drop thes and kontinu to read and writ as though nothing had hapend. By this tim it would be four years sins the skem began and peopl would be reseptive to steps sutsh as replasing 'th' by 'z'. Perhaps zen ze funktion of 'w' kould be taken on by 'v', vitsh is, after al, half a 'w'. Shortly after zis, ze unesesary 'o' kould be dropd from words kontaining 'ou'. Similar arguments vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
Kontinuing zis proses yer after yer, ve vud eventuli hav a reli sensibl riten styl. After tventi yers zer vud be no mor trubls, difikultis and evrivun vud fin it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drems of the Guvermnt vud finali hav kum tru.

Back on topic, I found these ideas to be nice, but I couldn't really get a handle on them without some illustrations or sketches.

Re:Free GMAIL Invites

[sinthetek]

If anyone is interested, this post was made by a guy who goes by the nick of 'mikealkav' or 'malkav' on the undernet irc network. he posted a link to this story less than 2 minutes after he made it in a linux help channel and he's always joining and attempting to harrass it/us in new, moronic ways. I should hope that anyone who wants to will feel free to join undernet (eu.undernet.org or us.undernet.org) and let him know what you think of his post. i hope he isn't too disappointed about the demise of his anonymity.

Build a defensive pod?

[Thinkit4]

Putting your brain in a defensive pod would protect it from TB--it only attacks the lungs anyway. Eventually we'll see just how the thalamus hosts consciousness and do away with the brain too. Then take vacations to the center of the sun and be fine!