Microtubles and Motor Proteins have never looked so cool!

http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

Spike Jonze's Fully Flared opening sequence fucking rocks!

Directed by Spike Jonze for Lakia's Fully Flared intro, its pretty amazing.
Apparently from this interview the explosions are real.
"the most dangerous part of the introduction was Mike Mo Capaldi's switch flip, which was followed by a staircase being blown up with napalm" -Brandon Bieble
Music: M83 – Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun
Interview: http://www.certifiedrandom.com/node/1559

To Watch Intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHX8jezNBTk

The Nerd Handbook (thanks Ruth!)

Tech Life An annoyingly efficient relevancy engine
The Nerd Handbook
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.
It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should...

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html

Milan Fashion Week: Exquisite, Exquisite, Exquisite...

Minimalism Is Back: At Jil Sander, designer Raf Simons applied his complicated cutting technique to a long, simple evening gown. (black gown)

In The Cut: As far as technique is concerned, few designers can cut clothing with the kind of precision that Jil Sander designer Raf Simons applied to coats and dresses for fall. (cream dress)

English Accents: Christopher Bailey's Burberry collection takes it's cue from the streets of London and his silhouette for fall, a swingy coat over stovepipe skinny pants, is taken straight from the streets of Soho. (beige outfit)

Minoans in Manhattan! This is SO exciting!

Minoans in Manhattan
March 13, 2008
Text by Mark Rose

Photos courtesy Onassis Public Benefit Foundation
A new exhibition offers a rare opportunity to appreciate the achievements of Crete's Bronze Age civilization.
An important new exhibition, From the Land of the Labyrinth: Minoan Crete, 3000-1100 B.C., has just opened at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York. It brings more than 280 artifacts from Crete--from a miniature gold double-ax to a four-foot-tall storage jar, from wall paintings to carbonized figs--most of which have never been shown abroad before and some being displayed for the first time ever. On loan from the archaeological museums of Herakleion, Khania, Rethymnon, Haghios Nikolaos, Ierapetra, Siteia, and Kissamos in Crete, the artifacts are arranged in 11 thematic sections intended "to reveal aspects of daily life in the Minoan civilization--including social structure, communications, bureaucratic organization, religion and technology--during the third and second millennia B.C." The first solely Minoan exhibition in the United States, From the Land of the Labyrinth is a great overview of the civilization and its achievements....

Images:

(Top) Miniature gold double-ax votiveArkalochori cave, Middle Minoan IIIB (ca. 1650-1600 B.C.)(Courtesy Onassis Public Benefit Foundation)

(Middle) Carved chlorite bull's head with (restored) gilded hornsZakros, end of Late Minoan IB (ca. 1450 B.C.)(Courtesy Onassis Public Benefit Foundation)

(Bottom) Heavily mended and restored wall painting ("The Partridge Fresco")Knossos, Middle Minoan III-Late Minoan IA (ca. 1700-1525/1500 B.C.)(Courtesy Onassis Public Benefit Foundation)

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/minoans/jpegs/index.php?start=2

Residential goes LEED-H Platinum

"LivingHomes Founder Steve Glenn has knocked the socks off the eco-conscious world with his modern homes that emphasize beauty + environment. As I've been thinking about how I want to blog about this company, I've noticed a flurry of posts and press releases regarding this Ray Kappe-designed abode that was just awarded LEED-H Platinum.
This story has gone wild...as it should.This is the first residential building to receive the USGBC's Platinum LEED-H rating and it's raising the bar for residential construction: zero energy, zero water, zero waste, zero carbon, and zero emissions. LivingHomes received a total of 91 out of a total possible 109 points, to barely skirt past the 90 point threshold required to obtain a Platinum rating. It will be 80% more efficient than similar sized home and was constructed with 75% less waste than a traditional one..."
http://jetsongreen.typepad.com/jetson_green/2006/08/livinghomes_gon.html
http://www.usgbc.org/

Steven Ehrlich's Helal New Moon Residence, Dubai

http://www.s-ehrlich.com/

Does anyone else find this highly ironic? Ah, "The Grand Tradition of Contradiction in Catholicism"

March 10, 2008, 3:01 pm
Seven More Sins, Thanks to Vatican
By Mike Nizza
(painting: "The Papacy Crowning themselves Kings")
Lust, gluttony, greed and the rest of the seven deadly sins gathered in the 6th century will have
to get used to a modern companion. A Vatican official has articulated seven new categories of sin “due to the phenomenon of globalization.”
“While sin used to concern mostly the individual, today it has mainly a social resonance,” Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti told L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s local paper. Bloomberg News parsed his remarks into a clip-n-savable list:
1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control

2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

Is it just me or is this a joke? Being that historically, the Catholic church not only actively directly and indirectly participated in #1, #3, #5, #6 and #7 (and probably #4 as well...) on their new list of sins, but often boasted, reveled and proudly exhibited most of these characteristics.

#1: It is known that the bearing of countless bastard children, and encouraging their mistresses to end their unwanted pregnancies often resulting in the "silencing" of certain mistresses that refused to do so, was commonplace . ("How many papal mistresses have been known in history? How many literary works -- Umberto Eco's The Name of The Rose comes to mind -- and scholarly histories through the centuries have described priestly sexual liaisons and priest-produced pregnancies? "http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0426-06.htm)

And having a history as being the single most wealthy country and government in the world with the largest physical monetary holding makes #6 and certainly #5 ludicrous. ("Bankers' best guesses about the Vatican's wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate." http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,00.html)

There is a somewhat endless well of evidentiary support in the art world; mostly pictorially immortalized in paintings and frescos, in addition to other written evidence that has been found, and no doubt destroyed or safely guarded deep within the Vatican archives.

"The Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter, instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene."

Resources:

"L’Or de Rennes" (Le Trésor Maudit) by Gérard de Sède and Pierre Plantard

"Holy Blood, Holy Grail" by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.

"The Messianic Legacy" by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.

The Jesus Scroll, written by Australian Donovan Joyce

Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum

The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, L’Or de Rennes, mise au point (La Garenne-Colombes, 35 bis, Bd de la République, 92250; Bibliotheque Nationale, Depot Legal 02-03-1979, 4° Z Piece 1182).
Jean-Luc Chaumeil, Rennes-le-Château – Gisors – Le Testament du Prieuré de Sion (Le Crépuscule d’une Ténébreuse Affaire) Editions Pégase, 2006
The Times, 18 January 1982.
The Real Da Vinci Code, Channel Four Television, presented by Tony Robinson, transmitted on 3 February 2005.
Bill Putnam, John Edwin Wood, The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château, A Mystery Solved (Sutton Publishers, 2003).
Pierre Jarnac, Les Archives de Rennes-le-Château, Tome I, p.197-198 (Editions Bélisane, 1987)
Jean-Luc Chaumeil, La Table d'Isis ou Le Secret de la Lumière, p. 121-124. (Editions Guy Trédaniel, 1994, ISBN 2-85-707-622-3)
Massimo Introvigne, Gli Illuminati e il Priorato di Sion (Piemme, Milano 2005).
Bernardo Sanchez Da Motta, Do Enigma de Rennes-le-Château ao Priorado de Siao - Historia de um Mito Moderno(Esquilo, 2005).
Jean-Jacques Bedu, Les sources secrètes du Da Vinci Code (Éditions du Rocher, 2005).
Franck Marie, Rennes-le-Château, Etude Critique (SRES, 1978)

Pierre Jarnac, Histoire du Trésor de Rennes-le-Château (Editions Belisane, 1985).

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/seven-more-sins-thanks-to-vatican/index.html?hp

New Acropolis Museum due to open in September: but will they win back the Elgin marbles?

Posted (3/5/2008 5:04 AM); 8h 14m ago By Thanassis Stavrakis
A woman walks past copies of the 2,500-year-old Parthenon frieze sculptures in the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. Museum officials oversaw a three-month operation to transfer more than 300 sculptures from an old museum on the Acropolis, some 400 meters away. The new glass and concrete museum, designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, is expected to open by the end of this year...

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2008-03-05-new-athens-museum_N.htm

For more about architect Bernard Tschumi: http://www.tschumi.com/home.asp?flashver=9&res=800x600&color=32

Robbie Williams CDs will be used to pave roads in China...Awesome

EMI has announced that "unsold copies" of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, "will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads." More than a million copies of the CD "will be crushed and sent to the country to be recycled," we read, where they "will be used in street lighting and road surfacing projects."This reminds me of a house I visited back in September, in Chicago – about which I wrote a short article for the March 2008 issue of Dwell – wherein the owners had pulverized boxes of old vinyl records, added them to a glass aggregate, and used that to surface the floor of their master bathroom. You could actually see tiny, vaguely recognizable pieces of crushed 45s catching sunlight near the toilet... National Geographic also covered the house....

giving credit where credit is due: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/robbie-williams-cds-will-be-used-to.html