Jgbillings

From Maurice Sendak’s retelling of Wilhelm Grimm’s Dear Mili.

Tagged: Art, Dear Mili, Maurice Sendak

This delightful Lovelace & Babbage Analytical Engine is gathering support on LEGO Ideas (formerly CUUSOO) where the community can up-vote fan-made play sets into consideration for production.

Featuring Lada Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, this set pays beautiful, Victorian tribute to their collaboration on the mechanical general-purpose computer of his design, including her pioneering work in creating the algorithm that would be used to program it.

 

What's more, the lovely, monochromatic Analytical Engine model can be used to house a Raspberry Pi Linux computer. Swoon.

Creator Stewart Lamb Cromar also proposes two bonus sets, an "Ada Junior Classroom" and a "Babbage Tea Party".

If you're interested in making this set a reality, please head to LEGO Ideas and support the project. Currently at around 3000 votes, they require 10,000 to be reviewed by LEGO for possible production.

Lovelace ande LEGO Ideas set 

CHICAGO—After seeing yet another anemic, lifeless display in the stands, sources confirmed Tuesday that frustrated Chicago Cubs players began heckling the team’s lackluster fans at Wrigley Field.

Masterpiece London saw a rise in visitor figures ending with an overall increase of 20% on last year’s attendance. Just under 34,000 people in total came to the fair to enjoy the breath-taking calibre of art, antiques and unique collector’s items for sale. Many exhibitors reported strong sales this year throughout the fair, and across all categories supporting the ethos of cross-collecting, a core distinction of the fair. Notable patrons, collectors and museum directors were apparent and active during the fair. Spotted browsing as well as purchasing have been representatives from the Rijksmusuem, Wallace Collection, Peabody Essex Museum, Legion of Honour - Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Yale Centre for British Art, Getty, Sir John Soane Museum, Dresden were among the mu

Located off the coast of Nagasaki, the long-abandoned Hashima Island (also known as "Gunkanjima" or "Battleship Island") was the inspiration for Raoul Silva's lair in Skyfall. Now, thanks to Google Maps, you can visit the island on Street View.

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WikiHouse is an ambitious global open hardware project that aims to “allow anyone to design, download and ‘print’ CNC-milled houses and components, which can be assembled with minimal formal skill or training.”

New Zealand’s WikiHouse Lab was formed by Martin Luff and Danny Squires, who discovered the idea after the second Canterbury earthquake in February 2011. As Martin puts it, “Danny and myself were trying to find a solution to a whole number of different issues in the built environment. We spent about six months researching different systems. During that process, a friend tipped us off to the WikiHouse project.”

After the Canterbury earthquakes, over 6100 businesses were displaced from the central city. “Only about ten of those have gone back to their original location,” Martin says. “The rest needed to relocate somewhere else. We were looking for a system whereby, in the worst case scenario, within a few weeks you could relocate your business and be back up in running.”

Martin and Danny were also keen to empower the local community. “A lot of people down here in Canterbury are stuck in limbo because they are dependent on a whole hierarchy of other agencies before they can get on with things like repairs and replacement housing.

“One particular thing we were looking for was a system that allowed people to be involved right from the get-go, through the whole design process, right the way to implementation. One of the really nice things about WikiHouse is that the people can really assemble the things on the ground themselves, as well being involved in the whole design process along the way. One of the main things we looking at was empowerment.”

As Martin explains, WikiHouse could also make housing more affordable. With WikiHouse, young people looking to enter the housing market would be able to start small, and be able to expand when they need to. Parents with large houses would also be able to break off sections of their house, to pass on to their children as a ‘starter-kit’—a form of “hand-me-down housing.”

Martin and Danny also wanted to ensure that what they produced was healthier, stronger and more environmentally friendly than the current housing stock. “We wanted it to be world-class in terms of its ability to stand up to seismic resistance. We also wanted it, longer-term, to go beyond sustainability to something that could be restorative to our environment.”

Creative Commons licensing is a core part of WikiHouse. As Martin explains, “Creative Commons is essential to the whole WikiHouse project. There are ten core principles, and principle number one is be lazy like a fox. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Copy, adapt, give credit and share.”

Creative Commons licensing enables WikiHouse teams from around the world to collaborate and improve on each other’s designs. By way of example, Martin explains that the initial WikiHouse design “had a lot of mechanical fixings in it. A collective design effort quickly eliminated the need for those. The system we’ve got at the moment can be put together without power tools, by unskilled people in a very short length of time. There are no mechanical fixings in it, no bolts or screws or glue.”

Going forward, Martin sees WikiHouse taking off through a series of local projects, “probably neighbourhood based manufacturing plants, where local people can drop in, not just to build buildings, but all sorts of other things as well.” This global network of community-based organisations is where Creative Commons licensing becomes important.

“We really see this as a social enterprise, and it’s only going to work if we can deliver on scale—very large scale. One of the workshops we’re setting up in the WikiHouse project is in Rio. The global perspective on the project is that in the next 40 to 50 years, if the projections hold true, then we’ve got to built as much urban development globally as currently is in existence. This is mind-boggling. We can’t do that with conventional building techniques or without openly working together on solutions.”

In 2012, WikiHouse Rio won part of the TED City Prize 2.0, for its project setting up an “open source maker lab in the heart of the favela.” With its Creative Commons licence, this project could potentially be duplicated—and improved—in other cities around the world.

“As I see it, if you’re shutting away that information, the things that you learn, then it’s essentially a waste-stream. It seems critical that, as far as possible, you’re open. If you take the bigger picture, it can seem a bit petty to fence that knowledge away, and charge people to access it; especially since any new idea only ever builds incrementally on all the knowledge and wisdom that went before. Creative Commons seems like a great way to acknowledge that.”

Open source hardware, however, is still a new concept, especially for highly-regulated industries like construction. “It’s much trickier to get the globally distributed network right, especially when it’s a mix of professionals and amateurs.”

Despite these challenges, Danny and Martin, along with the founding WikiHouse team in the UK, are looking to have a finished house by the end of the year. “That’s one of the beauties of a large, open source project: It’s surprising how quickly it can progress.”

The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 90 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.

• Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
  
• Critical Reasoning for Beginners - iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video – Oxford
• A Romp through Ethics for Complete Beginners - iTunes Video–Web Video – Oxford
• Introduction to Political Philosophy – YouTube – iTunes – Web Video - Steven B. Smith, Yale
• The Art of Living - Web Video – Stanford
• The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London

Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.

Explore our collection of 700 Free Courses to find topics in many other disciplines — History, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond. As we like to say, it’s the most valuable single page on the web.

Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and we’ll make it easy to share intelligent media with your friends! 

Related Content:

Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self

Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein Released by Archives at Cambridge

Take First-Class Philosophy Lectures Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts

Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

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Under Bonaire Salt Pier by Andre de Molenaar.

Who wants to go diving? A small selection from the many examples at 360Cities. There were fewer wrecks than I hoped but some of the pictures contain surprises, such as the manatee descending to investigate the camera in the Red Sea photo below.

Cape Maeda by Hitoshi Olkawa.

Olho D’Água River by Marcio Cabral.

Dugon, Red Sea by Igor Baskakov.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive