Monday, November 17, 2008

Greenways




As humans living here in the city, we have gotten a little far away from our roots. This is way I am proposing a test project called Greenwalks. These green walks are normal city side walk that have had a layer of artificial grass laid upon and fused to them. Now this grass is not just cheap and tacky Astroturf, The Greenwalks will be composed of millions of little soft nanotube grass blades made from one of the most abundant elements in the universe, carbon. This grass will be designed to feel just like the front lawns and parks of your childhood which, will hopefully make for a happier city.

One of the big downsides of reel grass is its ability to hinder the progress of wheeled machines, like bicycles and strollers. The GreenWalks are not composed of normal crass though. When a section of the nanotube grass senses the curvature of a wheel it will automatically lay down flat to provide a smooth ride. Also, sense the artificial grass is networked and controlled by a cloud computer made up by thousands of processors embedded under and grass, any section of the grass can communicate to another section so that if a wheel is sensed in one section, the section following it will also lay down in preparation for the wheel. In the future these Greenwalks should give the city a little injection of green to combat the mixed tones of gray and makes up so many cites.

Monday, November 3, 2008

My 89 minuets of (holy crap there’s a zombie behind you)! bliss



Like many of adrenaline junkies my most blissful moments are when the world is flying past me, aliens are creeping up on me, or as in this case a rapidly spreading virus is turning the people around me in to zombies of the fast moving type. For this moment of bliss I viewed the movie Quarantine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(2008_film).

Here is a simple check list that made this movie one of the best zombie movies sense Shaun of the dead.

The sometimes crazily use of pseudoscience to explain things when the site inevitably hits the fan. (Check)
The use of the fast moving zombies (rage infected) from 28 days later. (Check)
The creative use of space. Normally a zombie movie can engulf a hole movie studio and thousands of stand-ins, but Quarantine only used (infected?) a small cast in a run down apartment building in LA. (Check)
The infection of every human character in the end. (Check)
No modern day apocalypse. (Check)

Although this movie looked to many other zombie movies for inspiration I think Quarantine was a perfect balance for suspense and pure horror.