Hello Stardust!

Happy New Year!     2014!

Wow we really are living in the future! 

If you reminisce on 2013, perhaps the thoughts of your year may not include the trillions and trillions of molecules that you are made of.

 

A new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope shows the dusty remains of a collapsed star. The composite image of G54.1+0.3 shows X-rays from Chandra in blue, and data from Spitzer in green (shorter wavelength infrared) and red-yellow (longer wavelength infrared). Scientists think that a pulsar (the white source in the center) is sending off a wind that is heating up remnant supernova dust.

 As they might say in the south "Honey, you are made of sweet cosmic stardust!"

The shapes of supernova leftovers can tell scientists the origin of this explosion, with Type 1a supernova from thermonuclear explosions leaving behind symmetric remnants (right). And supernova created when a massive star collapses tend to leave behind asymmetrical remnants (left).

                     Happy New Year Stardust! 

You are looking good this year and you always have!

Architectural Spaces Featuring Indoor Plants

You may have seen indoor plants in various design magazines or in advertisements; now we turn to "The American Architect" Frank Lloyd Wright to see how he has showcased the natural living sculptures in indoor environments. Let us start with the Cedar Rock house in Quasqueton, Iowa. Built in the 1940s this house exemplifies the beauty of using natural lighting through the use of light shelves and skylights. 

Great for people and plants! The more plants in an indoor space the cleaner the air. The golden pothos or money plants growing on the light shelf, along with the peace lilies, Chinese evergreens, and monsteras growing in the planters also balance indoor air humidity. 

I have read that the pothos on the light shelf is a vine from the floor planter. This saves a lot of space! Golden pothos truly are a hard working plant, in my experience they will keep growing and growing without complaining. 

For a little background on Frank Lloyd Wright's design style; he loved dramatic spaces. Thus the need to create custom furniture, place plants where you may not expect them, and entrances that are uncomfortable to make the living space feel even more inviting. This is his compression and release design theory.

Images in this article were found at:  

http://www.peterbeers.net/interests/flw_rt/Iowa/Cedar_Rock/cedar_rock.htm. 

Peter Beers also gives his account of a personal tour on this webpage!

An example of a larger commercial space completed by Frank Lloyd Wright is 

the Johnson Wax building.

The columns always reminded me trees in an old growth forest. The plants growing in this picture are 

ficus trees and I have seen photos of Dracaena. 

In my opinion this space needs to have more trees as every tree would flourish with this abundance of 

natural light. 

This photo shows plants enjoying the 

skylight in the entrance. In the 

lower image, the beautiful 

Chinese evergreen is in the gold pot, 

and golden pothos are growing in a row. 

Plants like these two 

thrive in office settings with an abundance of fluorescent light.

Watering the plants below in the mid floor planters must be a treat. I spy Dracaenas, Peace lilies, and 

Golden pothos.

All are on the top 10 list for air purification and NASA approved. Any others that you recognize?

Hope these images inspire healthy natural decorating and designing! 

I had fun writing this post so please enjoy!

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Arcosanti Balcony Views

Arcosanti, designed by Paolo Soleri and built by volunteers is an inspiring site. 

Walking around Arcosanti sometimes feels like living in an MC Esher painting. 

Enjoy!

View of the bell-making Foundry balcony.

View of the Vaults Housing toward artist studio and sunroom. 

View of the Vaults toward the Canyon. 

View of the Ceramic vaults toward the Cafe. 

A longly look at the Sonoran Desert sunset taken from an unfinished roof top that casually hosts a fabulous variety of events. Arcosanti has many more balconies and countless opportunities to see shape differently. 

Their website can be found at http://arcosanti.org/arcosanti_today

Arcosanti has tours available for $10 donations.  

The Guest center can be reached by phone at 928-632-7135

Arcosanti, HC74, Box 4136, Mayer, AZ 86333phone: 928.632.7135

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DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials Push the Limits of Very Slow Humanoid Robots

Although it may come as a shock to some prominent futurists, the ongoing DARPA Robotics Challenge this weekend shows that we truly are in the early days of humanoid robotics. Throughout the day, a live telecast of the beginning of the competitive robotic events was available to anybody who cared to watch. The event drew around 4,000 live remote viewers on YouTube, plus 17 robots, a sizable staff, and most likely a determinably exotic hodgepodge of high-tech VIPs. The event pushed bleeding-edge humanoid robots to cut and knock out portions of drywall, navigate obstacle courses, and drive ATVs. And our robotic brainchildren are a little slow on the uptake, apparently.

Some of the robots could not even manage to open a door, a task already mastered by cats, let alone grab and screw in a firehose.

It's a regular thing to spend 15 minutes staring at the nozzle before you touch it, right guys?

Although the robotic technology on display is indisputably on the cutting edge of robotic research, the 30-minute window allowed per-activity and the need for spare legs, circuitry, and high-ranking governmental researchers belies the primitive state of things. More than a few of the 17 "olympiads" had to default out of some of the events, such as NASA/JPL creation RoboSimian which was unable to operate an ATV. One of the members of the RoboSimian team did report during the live broadcast that it was likely for RoboSimian to possess this ability, as well as a few others, within the next few years. Other robots are not so lucky, and will fall prey to the inevitable entropy of the super-complex highly-nonlinear real world that humankind is relegated to live in. 

To some, the DARPA Robotics Challenge portends a huge leap forward in robotic technology and the human capacity to create lifelike machines which perform useful functions in the real world. This future world inhabited by many thinking, autonomous machines is under hot debate, however, in both academic and informal circles. 

The nature of artificial consciousness, of embedding in essence spirit and intention into nonhuman mediums, is mercurial, fascinating and ultra-deep. As evidenced by the challenge trials today, there are no experts, and entry-level research requires a highly diversified panoplia of specialities, including but certainly not limited to mechanical engineering, robotics, the philosophy of science, neuroscience, neurobiological feedback networks, OOP, natural language processing, qualitative and statistical research methods of cognitive modeling, and most likely a knack for science fiction literature. Although today's humanoid robots forthrightly require human input to guide them, it is within the general goals of AI to see to it that this will not always be the case. 

We're a little far off from having the robots do this.

As many optimistic AI researchers will tell you, achieving synthetic consciousness probably is not impossible. It is also not necessarily without a lot of economic momentum behind it. While we wait for nonhuman, yet highly intelligent objects to begin appearing in our world, there are a lot of other things we could prepare for. The heights of beauty achieved in literature and computer generated movies of ultra-advanced civilizations are, like autonomous androids, within the outer reaches of our ability to understand and create. Star Trek: The Next Generation inspired physicists, NASA engineers, and regular old armchair theorists alike to explore the depths of our shared imagination to datamine the impossible. 

Even projects as "old" as the Mir and Skylab space stations acted as the original intellectual stepping stones for the current-day International Space Station. There is as much difference between these early space habitats and the ISS as there is between Beijing 30 years ago and Beijing today.

So even if you find yourself getting bored watching a single robot prepare to pick up a drill for five minutes before moving one actuator, there are many reasons to hope. There is hope, at least, for continuous transformation and paradigm change. How well we do this, as a global and solar system-wide society, is likely to reflect each one of us, as a whole, unstintingly.


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Cities in the image of nature inspirations

What will our future bring? Can humans master the art of collaboration? Cities in the image of nature- architecture + ecology or Arcology as termed by Paolo Soleri may bring us cities that truly are vibrant with life.


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