Using new technologies, powerful imagery and design, this festival will transform Athens into a lively, interactive space which will present proposals and ideas about how everyday life could be greener and more friendly to the environment.
Participants include over 70 architects, industrial designers, graphic designers, fashion and street artists, who have worked on the theme of the festival on projects who embrace the non-connoisseur.
The Ringshot is a change from your regular slingshots, as this one is worn on your hand with a durable rubber band attached to the metal piece. It won't be easy to miss your target now, unless the "bullets" that you use are of inferior quality. Unfortunately, most kids these days prefer to settle their rivalry online by spamming hate messages on one another's blogs instead of slugging it out like a man in the classroom with discreet projectiles under the teacher's nose.
via ubergizmo
These interesting but admittedly vague and flaky estimates come from computer scientist Peter Gutman. Although you can pick at the numbers quite easily, the guy makes a very interesting point. While projects like Seti@Home can harness a lot of computing power, a virus or worm that doesn't need to ask permission from a user could conceivably be vastly more powerful. Imagine the potential if virus writers found more interesting things to do with those cycles than send spam.
Will the first person to find extraterrestrial signals be an amateur hacker, rather than Seti? Could complex protein folding solutions be found by bored crackers? And would the benevolent act of finding a cure for a genetic illness outweigh the malevolent act of creating the worm that rounded up the processing cycles needed to do it?
It's not exactly a Leif-Ericson-class discovery in terms of positivity, but it's important nonetheless. Oceanographer Charles Moore was on the high seas between Hawaii and the US mainland when he drifted into the "'North Pacific gyre'--a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. What he found was revolting:
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"
This "garbage continent" is apparently twice the size of the US landmass, and was formed from garbage both shipborne and dumped from land. Even worse, it's more malevolent than just a bunch of floating rubbish--it's decomposing into a kind of toxic soup, and it's due to double in size over the next decade. Read the unbelievable tale here.
