Core 77 has announced the fourth annual Recycling Design Prize contest. This year the focus is on small, practical consumer items likely to enter production and stimulate employment, although said items cannot currently be commercially available. Registration closes at the end of August and the grand prize is 2500 euros, or about $3400 USD.
Yep, that's a grilled sweat sock. Meatpaper's hardore.
This is a fascinating cultural artifact – Meatpaper, a magazine celebrating all things carnivorous. As a vegetarian I expected to be more than a little icked-out, but was surprised by how informative and entertaining the content actually was. The reading experience (at least online) felt like I was being taken on a tour of an alien culture by earnest, avuncular diplomats who wanted nothing more than for me to gain a deeper understanding of their civilization and its passions.
For example, the article “Chris Cosentino doesn’t want to eat penis, but if he has to, he will” caught my eye for fairly obvious reasons. The subject, a San Francisco-based chef who seems to specialize in organ meats, describes a field trip he and his kitchen staff took to a farm in order to experience a goat slaughter first-hand.
And I’ll tell you, from that day on, there were never any mistakes with meat in this restaurant. Because the cooks that watched the slaughter, they realized that there’s an animal that’s dying. There needs to be that consciousness in this industry. I felt like a hypocrite; I can go and serve meat all the time and talk about the whole-animal ethic, and yet I hadn’t done a slaughter. And it was hard. It was really hard. I don’t think people realize what it does to you emotionally. It makes you really think about what you’re doing at the restaurant every day.
I urge vegetarians and vegans to check it out. It’ll broaden your culinary cultural horizons and it’s a great example of dietary fanaticism without any condemnation of the alternatives. For a good example of what I mean, check out Heather Smith’s article “Phony Baloney — Layonna Wang’s gallery of gluten“.
Design Boom has announced a new design competition with a $10,000 USD grand prize: Design for All. As usual (regarding Design Boom contests), the guidelines are rather vague, but it looks like participants with a better-than-average understanding of South Korean culture will have an advantage in this particular competition.
From the announcement:
…the ‘design for all’ objective is made to increase the efforts and the pursuit of design production that can be shared by all, removing emotional and physical barriers by becoming an universal communicative social solution.
Yeah, the description is pretty broad, but ten grand is nothing to laugh at. That’s a lot of cabbage. Or, rather, kimchi.
Although the organization behind this looks a little, well, mercenary, their project is pretty cool. Free Range International is training Afghans to build their own wifi repeaters out of pretty much whatever they have on hand. It reminds me of the chicken wire satellite dishes mentioned in William Gibson’s Count Zero, and pretty much all of the improvised infrastructure in his Bridge Trilogy.
Via Boing Boing.
This pretty damned cool, but the projection display looks like you’d need low-light conditions for it to be of any use. A heads-up display might be a workaround. I wonder if it would make using phone/MP3 player while driving safer.
Via i09:
I was planning to submit this without comment (it really needs none), but this Boing Boing commenter summed up my experience:
*hold breath*
*click*
Oh, thank god.
Everyone’s already all over Topeka’s stunningly retarded decision to call themselves “Google” for a month in a bid to get the search company’s attention and become a test community for its new one-gig fiber broadband rollout.
My buddy over at Keep St. Joe Weird had a couple of suggestions for my dumb town via the Twitter:
keepstjoeweird RT @gregglynnonkjo If Topeka, KS can change their name to “Google, KS” we oughta change our name to Twitter (or free porn)
Slim pickings this week. I’m not sure what’s going on with webcomic artists at the moment, but content quality seems to have dropped off over the last couple of weeks and the overall mood seems to have become rather dark. I haven’t been blogging for a full year yet, so I wonder if this is a cyclical/seasonal thing. Artists are a strange species anyway, so it could be literally anything. I would totally believe any of the following explanations:
As always, click for big.
xkcd:
Cyanide and Happiness:
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
And finally, just to lighten the mood, Slim Pickins:
Here’s Hal Ruzal, career bike mechanic for Bicycle Habitat in New York, doling out grades for different bike locking methods. This is a 2003 video, but there have been two sequels made in the interim. Hal mentions that people actually recognize him from the videos, yet somehow seem to have learned little from his advice. Part one is embedded here as a YouTube video, but the higher-quality original and the sequels are available here, here, and here.
