[Marchelo] wanted to build his own chicken coop. He started researching different designs and ended up basing his build on the golden spiral.

In addition to the interesting shape, a ton of clever design choice made it into the build. For instance, [Marchello] took the time to dramatically round over the lumber used as the skids of the base. This, along with wheels on one side, will make it much easier to slide the coop if he needs to move it. Also, the roosting boxes are an addition to the side wall of the hen-house. The roof for these boxes is hinged, so checking on the chickens, or harvesting eggs happens at a comfortable height for the farmer. And finally, the plank that allows entry for the hens doubles as the door at night. So far this is a manual-operation, but we could see some mechanization as a future improvement.

Source: Hack a Day

“What do you think, great king? Suppose a man, trustworthy and reliable, were to come to you from the east [..west... north ... south...] and on arrival would say:

‘If it please your majesty, you should know that I come from the east [...west ... north ... south...]. There I saw a great mountain, as high as the clouds, coming this way, crushing all living beings [in its path]. Do whatever you think should be done…’

..If, great king, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life…what should be done?”

- The Buddha to King Pasenadi Kosala in the Pabbatopama Sutta.

Source: IDP

taskforce writes“There are good reasons to think web services like Facebook won’t be around forever. If Facebook ever were to go down there would be potentially huge costs to its users. We can all take individual steps to protect our data and social network, but is there anything we can do to our economy to mitigate the costs of the failure of these services? The Red Rock looks at the role open source, open standards, consumer cooperatives, and enterprise reform can play. The author concludes that all is not lost, and that there’s a lot we can do to reduce both the cost and frequency of failure.”His suggestions are pretty radical: “The first is draw up an Open Data Bill and pass it into law. This would (where applicable) mandate the use of open standards by firms, and also mandate that all data held about a user is downloadable by that user, in an open standard. … The second is to reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders. Not all the directors, like in the Cooperative Group, and not even a majority, but just a small portion of the board — say one third.”

Source: Slashdot

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What is cancer? It’s not an invader; it’s spawned from our own bodies. And it bears striking resemblance to early multicellular life from 1 billion years ago. This has led astrobiologists and cosmologists Paul Davies and Charlie Lineweaver to suggest that cancer is driven by primitive genes that govern cellular cooperation (abstract), and which kick in when our more recently evolved genes that keep them in check break down. So, far from being rogue cells that mutate out of control, cancers are actually cells that revert to a more ancient level of programming, like booting in Safe Mode. The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we’ll know how it works. It’s unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.

BitTorrent and Khan Academy To Distribute Education:

BitTorrent, Inc. announced this morning that they have launched a partnership with the Khan Academy to distribute open education videos. They launched with more than 2,000 videos, covering high school and college level curriculum, across science, math, history, finance and test prep. All of the videos are free to download and open licensed with Creative Commons.

David Lynch Helps S.F. Schools Meditate:

KALW reports on Visitacion Valley Middle School’s implementation of the innovative Quiet Time program, which sets aside fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of each school day for students to meditate. All but a few of the kids practice the voluntary activity and report finding it enjoyable. The school has experienced a small but encouraging rise in test scores and attendance rates so far.

Visitacion Valley’s principal, James Dierke, started the program four years ago to help his students deal with the stress of living in a neighborhood that’s seen, in just the past three months alone, two homicides and over a hundred assaults within a mile radius of the school.

The program is funded largely in part by the David Lynch Foundation, which aims to provide Transcendental Meditation in schools and communities that could benefit from stress reduction. San Francisco’s Everett Middle School and John O’Connell High School have also recently begun trying out the Quiet Time program.

A subtle, yet powerfully destructive force of electronic attacks may be working slowly and silently to disrupt elements of the world’s market-based economies. Recent cyber-attacks on the European Emissions Trading Scheme shut down that exchange’s carbon market just a few weeks ago. Along with the fear of lights-out DDoS attacks that has traditionally stalked electronic markets, and logically still does, new types of attacks by subtle manipulation could slowly turn electronic markets on their heads by corrupting their very legitimacy. What’s worse? Attacking someone’s borders, or slowly disrupting and degrading confidence in their entire national economic well-being?

animosity