Daniel

Despite being small enough to fit in your pocket, a tape measure is one of those tools that is almost impossible to use by yourself. Laser measuring devices are far easier to wrangle if you don’t have an assistant — even with just one hand — but it’s taken decades for a company like Bosch to finally create a version that’s as compact as roll of metal tape. More »

If you imagined Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animation director behind movies as enchanting as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, as a lovable grandfather all eyes wide with wonder, you might be disappointed. In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a compelling documentary by Mami Sunada that sees release in New York this week, Miyazaki largely comes off well as a polite, diligent worker blessed with a stroke of genius. But the man is also marked by moments of...

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Australia’s car manufacturing industry has a longer and more diverse history than the conversation about Ford, Holden and Toyota might suggest. And when those three, in a year or two hence, shut down their manufacturing operations, they will exit via a well-trodden path.  Australian car manufacturing is littered with the shattered dreams of vehicle engineers and entrepreneurs, many of whom have been beaten, like our current manufacturers, as much by circumstance as by any short-...

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The Motor Report is Australia's fastest growing auto website. Click through to read the full article.

Our series on Australian car makers and the unique cars they produced, continues. MORE: Part 1, 1900-1940 The second World War saw the country’s manufacturers - and blacksmiths shops and forges - preoccupied with the war effort, and car production for the civilian market slowed to a crawl. Then, following the war, Australia’s political and economic allegiances began a slow shift, and American economic interests began to replace British ones. The Chifley Government had no dif...

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The Motor Report is Australia's fastest growing auto website. Click through to read the full article.

Video: Here’s a short video showing the before and after footage of a movie being colour corrected by a colourist. It’s dramatic to see the difference between the initial footage and the final official scenes. It’s also fascinating to see the process and how certain things change slowly. More »

There was a time in the '60s and early '70s when Australia’s car manufacturing industry had an unshakeable self-belief. This was the time when Holden, without permission from GM Detroit, went ahead and produced the Monaro. It also, at the same time, produced the astonishingly prescient rear-engined Hurricane concept car as a platform to showcase its locally developed 253 V8. This was when Chrysler/Valiant designers here started toying with an antipodean two-door ‘Cha...

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The Motor Report is Australia's fastest growing auto website. Click through to read the full article.

For those of you who ever doubted the power of modern architecture, it can re-frame your desires and teach you about the importance of simplicity. This astonishing courtyard house in Scottsdale, Arizona, proves that a clean, functional design can support an inspiring effect on the interior and exterior atmosphere. Designed by Wendell Burnette Architects, the captivating desert courtyard house constructed from soil excavated from the site will stay with you as a reminder of the beauty that can be created in this world.

Designers see this massively beautiful residential structure as “a mass of concrete and rammed earth walls that meet the sky without termination.” Weathered steel covers the roof, continuing the rammed walls up and making the home appear hidden in the landscape :”when seen from above, recedes into the landscape as a deep shadow.”

A central courtyard provides a piercing design. During hot desert days, it floods the interiors with light while showcasing its glass facades mirroring the sky and surrounding vegetation. The resulting effect is a stunning play of shadow and light. At night, this interior courtyard becomes something magical, capturing lights from the inside and allowing the steel plate ceiling inside to visually merge with the night sky.

According to the architects, the spectacular desert home was created to be enjoyed as a work of art inspired by geometry and the natural world:

“Mass, hollowed mass, faceted mass, fissured mass, and mass that cracks open and hinges apart informed how we proceeded to give this home its defining qualities all the way down to the fittings and fixtures that one touches with the hand or the eye. For instance, all the millwork is volumetric concealing its thinness until a bronze void is touched with the fingertips revealing its smooth, contoured surface allowing the mass to be cracked open revealing contents within. Fissures in the steel ceiling reveal light while maintaining the quality of nothingness at night. One can also push open a massive translucent stone to take an outdoor shower in a private faceted court. Mass and the improbability of delicacy discovered within, is what gives the Sonoran Desert its remarkable presence.”

Last but not least, an infinity edge pool visually spilling into the desert extends an invitation to spending time outdoors. Some might find it too transparent, but it was ingeniously designed to be private and cozy. Maybe this black desert mansion suits your taste more.

The post Visionary Courtyard House Piercing the Deserts of Arizona appeared first on Freshome.com.

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Microsoft didn't live stream its Windows 10 event this morning, but the company has now posted the full 40 minute video from its press event for all to see. Windows chief Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore, head of PCs, tablets, and phones, both discuss Windows 10 at its first unveiling in San Francisco. There's a look at how Windows 10 will work on touch machines, the new Start menu and interface changes, and an overview of the future of Windows. If you missed our live blog, or you want to see Microsoft joke about the naming for Windows 10 it's worth the 40 minutes of your time.

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Snuffleupagus plays a bantha, the mythical horned mount of Tatooine. Only-One Cannoli is a wise, weathered Jedi who mentors a young Luke Piewalker. Princess Parfaita's hair buns are made of two Oreos. That's about all you need to know to appreciate Star S'mores, Sesame Street's send-up of the George Lucas classic.

This will hold you over until Episode VII hits theaters, maybe.

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American car design reached its experimental, optimistic zenith in the post-WWII era. Yet for every car built, hundreds of sketches and concepts were destroyed, the designers who penned them working in corporate anonymity. This new documentary works to bring these ageing designers and their beautiful concept work back into the spotlight. More »

It’s our job here at Gizmodo to bring you the news in the most informative and impartial fashion as we can, but every now and then we see something that’s just so insane that it can’t pass without comment. Village Roadshow Australia’s submission to the government’s copyright consultation was released yesterday, and it’s nuts. More »

This is another installment in my series on corruption. The New York Times ran an article last week about Buddy Cianci entering the race for mayor of Providence. Cianci is a larger than life figure in Rhode Island. Dubbed the “Prince of Providence,” he served two previous stints as mayor of the city – both times ending up forced from office due to felony convictions.

I don’t know the details of the first case, in which he pleaded no contest to a felony assault charge over attacking someone with “a lit cigarette, ashtray and fireplace log.” There’s got to be more to that story than I know because I can’t imagine a felony charge resulting from something like that, or that he’s plead no contest knowing it would get him removed from office.

The second time was he was convicted of racketeering charges (though actually acquitted of all but one of the things he was charged with) as part of an FBI investigation called “Operation Plunder Dome” that resulted in a number of convictions. He did 4+ years in federal prison as a result.

Now Cianci is back and running for office again. Apparently he remains quite popular and there is so much fear among many that he’ll actually win – he’s running as an independent – that various candidates have dropped out of the race in an effort to avoid splitting the vote and letting Cianci somehow slip in.

The fact that Cianci is considered a viable candidate for mayor despite being notoriously corrupt shows something that tends to happen in communities where corruption is the norm. Namely that the people themselves become corrupted in the process.

This actually happened long ago in Rhode Island, which seems to have been crooked about as long as it’s been around. One of the most famous pieces of writing about the state is Lincoln Steffens 1905 McClure’s Magazine screed called “Rhode Island: A State of Sale.” Here’s what he had to say about the matter:

And Rhode Island throws light on another national question, a question that is far more important: Aren’t the people themselves dishonest? The “grafters” who batten on us say so. Politicians have excused their own corruption to me time and again by declaring that “we’re all corrupt,” and promoters and swindlers alike describe their victims as “smart folk who think to beat us at our own game.” Without going into the cynic’s sweeping summary that “man always was and always will be corrupt” it is but fair while we are following the trail of the grafters to consider their plea that the corrupt political System they are upbuilding is founded on the dishonesty of the American people. Is it?

It is in Rhode Island. The System of Rhode Island which has produced the man who is at the head of the political System of the United States is grounded on the lowest layer of corruption that I have found thus far — the bribery of voters with cash at the polls. Other States know the practice. In Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, and Pennsylvania “workers ” are paid “to get out the vote,” but this is only preliminary; the direct and decisive purchase of power comes later, in conventions and legislatures. In these States the corruptionists buy the people’s representatives. In Rhode Island they buy the people themselves.

Rather than just businessmen buying politicians, the politicians bought voters, and virtually ever voter in the state was on the take, and in fact became quite peeved if their vote wasn’t purchased:

Nine of the towns are absolutely purchasable; that is to say, they “go the way the money goes.” Eleven more can be influenced by the use of money. Many of their voters won’t go to the polls at all unless “there is something in it.” But there need not be much in it. Governor Garvin quoted a political leader in one town who declared that if neither party had money, but one had a box of cigars, “my town would go for that party — if the workers would give up the cigars.” In another town one party had but one man in it who did not take money, and he never voted. A campaign marching club organized for a presidential campaign paraded every night with enthusiasm so great that the leaders thought it would be unnecessary to pay for votes in this town; few of the members voted. Another time, when no money turned up at a State election, one town, by way of rebuke to the regular party managers, elected a Prohibition candidate to the Assembly.

In this environment, the public is mostly indifferent to corruption and can even embrace it as part of the civic identity. Hence the viability of a known crook as a mayoral candidate.

It’s the same in Illinois. Even many of my highly educated professional friends there actually take pride in the state’s corruption, cracking boastful jokes about how it only proves Chicago is the best or something.

As Scott Reeder put it in an article earlier this year:

Well, another state legislator is heading to prison. You won’t hear much outrage in Springfield. Or dismay for that matter. In the grand scheme of things, the conviction of state Rep. Derrick Smith, D-Chicago, on bribery charges is picayune. You’ll hear it whispered around the statehouse: “He ‘only’ took $7,000.”
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llinoisans have become jaded to criminality among those we elect. A few years back, some Springfield wag printed up bumper stickers that said, “My Governor is a Bigger Crook than Your Governor.” This kind of cynicism has metastases through the electorate leaving political tumors of apathy, inevitability and suspicion.

Derrick Smith, the representative of $7000 bribe fame, was expelled from the House back in 2012 after being indicted, but actually won re-election with 63% of the vote.

And this bit in an article about corruption in Springfield:

Larry Sabato, a nationally recognized political analyst from University of Virginia, adds insight while talking about Illinois in an article written by Dave McKinney for Illinois Issues: “The central and most vital point about corruption is it flourishes where people permit it to, in part because they expect it in the normal course of events. A classic case comes from your state with Otto Kerner being caught solely because the people extending the bribes to him actually deducted it from their taxes as a necessary and ordinary business expense,” he says. “Their argument was, ‘This is how business is done in Illinois.’ That’s what has to change. It’s always up to the people. It’s a democracy. They have to go beyond the images.”

It’s one of the challenges that makes cleaning up corruption so hard. Once it has dug roots deep into the civic soil, the public becomes co-dependent and so there is no constituency for change.

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The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism. Included are 28 carefully curated essays out of nearly 1,200 posts in the first seven years of the Urbanophile, plus 9 original pieces. It's great for anyone who cares about our cities.

Renault has revealed the final design of its R.S. 01 racecar, developed in collaboration with Dallara and designed byRenault Sport Technologies under the management of Laurens van den Acker.

Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was lauded by critics and fans alike on many fronts: it was a better realization of Middle-earth than most thought possible, and it was clear that an incredible amount of detail went into every facet of the films. One particular facet — composer Howard Shore's excellent score — will get its due in April 2015 when the entire trilogy is screened alongside a live orchestra performance at New York City's David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.

The films will be projected on huge screens set above 250 musicians, including a full symphonic orchestra, choruses, soloist, and conductor Ludwig Wicki. The trilogy will be shown and performed two times in total — one film will be shown at 7:30pm...

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