Living

Aug 11, 2012 9:00 PM   Yes. I'm going there. While considered to be one of the worst movies ever, I maintain that watching Battlefield Earth can be a fun, education experience so long as you pair it with two things: friends and alcohol. Obviously I'm coming at this from the "so bad, it's good; let's all laugh at someone else's horrifying inadequacy while tacitly patting ourselves on the back for not having failed so miserably in such a public way" angle, but that's not the only way to come at it. If you're interested in the mechanics of how good fiction works, how the seams are sewn, and how the pieces fit together, there's only so much to learn from good examples. Yeah, good movies are actually enjoyable on a level other than the ironic, but the gears are hidden. Battlefield Earth lets you see how the mechanisms of story-telling work by showing you how bad they can fail. Really bad. Battlefield Earth is streaming on Netflix now, so if yo...

Jul 26, 2012 10:00 PM   Although I know there's probably no danger involved with this house—which has a bonafide, funnel-shaped opening in the middle of it—there is something ominous about this Nobuhiro Tsukada-designed Earth House, which is connected directly to the terrain below it. The inspiration for the concrete house design comes from the client, who, looking for privacy in his exurban Tokyo home, wanted all the rooms to open into a courtyard. But the courtyard would have been too small, so instead, they filled the tunnel-like space with earth and created the courtyard on the second-story, enclosing it on all sides with graceful, swooping walls. The generous use of skylights still allows for plenty of natural illumination, and more importantly, privacy from the outside world. But still, I'd probably have nightmares about that funnel sucking everything down into the Earth's core. [Architonic via Architizer] View the original article here This post was made using th...

About 4.1 billion years ago, our solar system was a huge cluster of comets bombarding every planet orbiting the Sun and crashing into each other. That period of chaos is known as the Late Heavy Bombardment , and astronomers believe it was key to the formation of life in our planet. For the first time ever, scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found a star system in which this is happening right now —just around the corner. It is called Eta Corvi. Located just 59 light years away from us, it's 40 percent more massive than the Sun but much younger. The star is surrounded by two debris disks. In the outer disk—which is orbiting around 150 astronomical units from the solar system's center—comets keep crashing onto each other and into rocky bodies in a seemingly never ending dance of planetary mayhem. The collisions break these objects into smaller pieces, which will keep striking each other until they turn to dust. Spitzer's infrared detectors got evidence ...

These days it seems like we're constantly seeing gorgeous images of the Earth from space. It wasn't always that way. On July 23rd 1972, NASA launched ERTS-1 satellite into space to observe the planet. We've never seen ourselves the same since. ERTS-1—Landsat 1—was the first of seven satellites in the Landsat program, which has continuously recorded our planet for the last forty years. According to NASA's, the program was inspired by the ominous photographs taken by astronauts from space that showed us the first images of Earth from without. Can you blame us for wanting more? Can you imagine what it was like to see the Earth from space for the first time? The same curiosity that sent us out into space to try to learn more about distant galaxies suddenly left us with an unquenchable urge to stare back at ourselves. Landsat 1 beamed data back to Earth for six years, and was instrumental in halting—or at least slowing down—the ecological disaster in the Amazon by giving us...

Jul 22, 2012 1:47 PM   I've seen plenty of time lapse videos from the International Space Station. None of them were even near the amazing beauty of this one. Play it at full screen and high definition—just the opening Star Wars-like shot will leave you in awe. It was created by Knate Myers using photographs taken from the International Space Station. He removed the noise, processed some of the shots in Photoshop and compiled the whole thing in Sony Vegas. [Twitter] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.