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I have been searching the garlic online stores for this Fall plantings and everyone seems to be 'sold out for the season' all ready. Didn't realize I had to preorder so early!
Only my second year of garlic, last year I made the big mistake of ordering from ebay...ja, I know better now. All the garlic must have been top setter clones(extremely tiny seeds were sent to me) because, even though they all grew 1/2 to 3/4 inch in size, not one got cloves out of the 6 types I ordered/planted-just a bulb like an onion! I just scratched that as a learning experience. So, if anyone could share their ordering sources with me I would greatly appreciate it. I'm looking for softnecks (I'm in NC) and a few creoles. Thanks in advance! |
Follow-Up Postings:
- Posted by largemouth Z6 NY (My Page) on Thu, Jun 28, 12 at 21:51
Forget the on-line stuff. Your best bet is ALWAYS farmers markets. And you said this is your second year. Did you not save some cloves (the biggest, plumpest ones) for the next year? Buying a few heads in an organic store will also work. Found crazy big purple heads of garlic in a small farm stand yesterday from California. Hate to buy non-local stuff, especially from 3 thousand miles away, but half of these babies are going in the ground in November. Getting shut out on-line is probably the best thing that ever happened to you. Explore, my friend. |
Farmers Markets it is then. I am on a mission. The two local farmers markets that I attend I have yet to see garlic for sale this year or last year... but I'm going on a road trip to Nebraska next week and will stop at every stand along the way! I did keep the garlic this year, it's out curing now. THe grandbabies did mix them all together for me so I don't know the korean hots from the mild sweets... Ahh so is life. |
- Posted by austinnhanasmom 5 CO (My Page) on Fri, Jun 29, 12 at 21:11
I think you are looking a bit early. I've been doing the same... The online sources are probably harvesting, or soon will be, and will update their sites. Many state that they will be "open" in August. |
Many folks here on this site including myself sell garlic for planting at very reasonable prices. We are gearing up to harvest in a week or so so if you have any interest you can email me at madroneb at yahoodotcom for the availability list. We also start shipping in August. I hope this plug is not breaking any forum rules. |
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Welcome to New Trier High School! The mission of New Trier High School is to inspire students "to commit minds to inquiry, hearts to compassion, and lives to the service of humanity" by working in partnership with the community to provide innovative programs for all students, nurture their unique abilities, and encourage them to pursue excellence in their endeavors. The Principal is responsible to keep that mission at the forefront of our work as a school. Students, staff, and parents are encouraged to contact the Principal's Office or stop in for any questions, concerns, or comments.

subset: commoncrawl


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Cloud services to help optimize results for clinical trials and management of the patient ecosystem
BT today announced that Berg Pharma and BT Global Services will be working together to accelerate the process of drug discovery and development, using resources and technology from both companies. The joint effort will focus on the use of innovative approaches to target identification and validation and on lead optimization of novel drug candidates. It will support the use of cloud-based high throughput molecular profiling techniques to select patients for clinical trials.
Berg Pharma will use the BT for Life Sciences R&D cloud service as the de facto standard for running Berg"s unique Interrogative Biology® platform. BT for Life Sciences R&D, unveiled at the 10th Bio-IT World meeting, is the first cloud service designed to enable collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased R&D productivity.
BT for Life Sciences R&D is being developed to become a secure and segregated platform for scientists in pharmaceutical, biotech, devices & diagnostics companies as well as in academia and government. It will enable Berg Pharma to maximize its late-stage clinical trial activity and continue research and development of early-stage technologies in CNS (central nervous system) and metabolic diseases.
In addition, Berg Pharma will be able to offer major pharmaceutical companies its Interrogative Biology® platform from BT"s cloud service in a secure manner, to produce better quality information. This will provide results that can lead to faster IND (Investigational New Drug) filings and to safer and more effective options for clinical trial participants. By running the Interrogative Biology® platform in a secure cloud environment such as BT for Life Sciences R&D, Berg Pharma will also be able to work with major pharmaceutical companies that need faster and more innovative approaches to drug discovery and development.
Niven R. Narain, President & CTO for Berg Pharma, said: "Berg Pharma"s novel approaches to drug discovery and development will integrate well with BT"s new cloud services offering. This approach will enable us to gain insight to underlying disease mechanisms and pathophysiology, provide a template for expedient "proof of principle" IND enabling testing and allow for higher clinical trial success based on much deeper disease understanding. This will readily create a diversified data ecosystem that represents the narrative of patient populations. Medicine of the future must be data-driven to address the multifactorial nature of disease onset and allow for astute clinical and economic modelling. Big data is important but actionable data is invaluable."
Bas Burger, president of Global Commerce for BT Global Services, said: "Pharmaceutical companies are constantly looking for ways to accelerate the process of identification of new pharmaceutical targets and new lead drug candidates as well as moving promising new drug candidates through all phases of clinical trials with a greater degree of confidence. In addition, BT for Life Sciences R&D provides both Berg Pharma and their customers with a cloud platform that allows them to comply with the industry"s stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements."
About Berg Pharma
Berg Pharma is a fully integrated Boston based pharmaceutical company and parent to Berg Biosystems and Berg Diagnostics. Its core focus seeks to understand how alterations in metabolism relate to disease onset by engagement of biointelligence. With use of the Berg Interrogative Biology® discovery platform, hallmark insight into metabolic control factors and namely into underlying elements in the Warburg Hypothesis have been unraveled. The company has a deep pipeline of early-stage technologies in CNS diseases and metabolic diseases that complement its late-stage clinical trial activity in cancer and prevention of chemotoxicity. Armed with use of the discovery platform that translates biological output into viable therapeutics and a robust biomarker library, Berg Pharma is poised to realize its pursuit of a healthier tomorrow.
About BT
BT is one of the world"s leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to its customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, BT Retail, BT Wholesale and Openreach.
In the year ended 31 March 2011, BT Group"s revenue was £20,076m with profit before taxation of £1,717m.
British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.
For more information, visit www.btplc.com
Membership Deliverables
MassBio Membership gives you:
Purchasing power-MassBio negotiates a broad-based collection of services on behalf of member companies and passes the savings on to its members.
Networking and professional development-MassBio organizes and executes numerous conferences, committee meetings, and networking events throughout the year.
MassBio Signature Events-Attend our Investors Forum, Innovator Roundtables, Pharma Days, our Golf Classic Fundraiser, Policy Leadership Breakfast, and many others.
Public policy & Advocacy-As the state's leading advocate for our life science super cluster, we fight for public policy initiatives and tax incentives in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., that will enable biotechnology companies to do their best work.
Economic development-MassBio provides expert advice and guidance to help companies find suitable locations and resources as they move to and grow in the Bay State. We make Massachusetts a better place for your business.
Visibility/Resources-Members are listed on a searchable directory that includes a profile and link to the company's website. We highlight your company's latest news by posting to our MassBio member news page. In addition, members can post job openings on our website free!
Educational incentives-We promote education, workforce development and lifelong learning through the MassBioEd Foundation. The foundation customizes training programs for companies and educational institutions and promotes science in the classroom through BioTeach. MassBio members receive a discount on courses offered by the foundation.


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Why Darden MBA
Darden students pursue internships and full-time jobs around the United States and abroad, and our alumni network spans the globe in 90 countries. The table below includes geographic information from the Class of 2013:
View the list of companies that have recently hired Darden students.
Over 100 companies travel to Charlottesville, Virginia each year to recruit Darden students. Each company posts opportunities prior to their visit, and Darden students can apply and potentially interview for positions around the U.S. and abroad while the companies are on-Grounds.
In addition to the companies that travel to Charlottesville, hundreds more post opportunities online for Darden MBAs. In total, approximately 700 job postings are posted each year.
Learn about the variety of career search resources for students.
Students who are interested in pursuing careers in niche industries and/or at companies that do not typically have recruiting relationships with business schools can also participate in a job trek. Jobs treks are career-focused trips organized by groups of students interested in working in specific locations around the world. Job treks typically include a series of company visits as well as a networking/social gathering of local alumni.
Approximately 15 – 20 job treks take place each year in locations such as New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai and more (locations are chosen based on student interest and vary from year to year).
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Paul Rhynard, Darden Class of 2012, talks about the MBA career search process for students interested in consulting.
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Earlier today I sent an email to a Darden recruiter. It was a new kind of note that I'm still...
I apologize for my extended absence as Darden SY recruiting has consumed my existence until now. All that being said,...


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From the fresh, regional ingredients to the traditional recipes and of course the flair and passion of our head chef, Ossigeno showcases deliciously rustic Italian cuisine at its finest.
The stylish setting is perfect for focusing on an inventive approach to Italian cuisine, presented in new and exciting ways: try...
Royal Club Suite
Designed to envelop guests in a cocoon of understated luxury, the Royal Club Suites are the ideal sanctuary for daily stress relief.
Soft feathery duvets and pillows ensure that you will leave pampered and rejuvenated. A 24 hour butler service is also on-hand to cater to all your requirements.
Guests are encouraged to lay back and indulge in a tranquil and relaxing bath using the complimentary Cinq Mondes toiletries stocked vanity counters, polished off with a nightcap whilst gazing out at the perfect view of the sea.
The Royal club Suites are exquisite opulence to provide you with a memorable stay.
Suite Benefits
- Complimentary Private Car Transfers from and to Dubai International Airport.
- Complimentary access to the Royal Club Lounge.
- Complimentary welcome amenity on arrival.
- Complimentary breakfast served in the comfort of your suite or at Royal Club Lounge.
- All suites amenities include a 42" LCD TV, and DVD-CD player.
- All suites with balcony and sea view.
- Personalized registration in the suite.
Full Screen


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In 1996, Mansour Rasnavad, an air cargo seasoned executive, through his holding company, acquired
the majority shares of Florida West International Airways, Inc. (Florida West), and became principal controlling share holder, and director.
In 2002, as President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Rasnavad took operational control of the airline and transitioned Florida West's fleet from DC-8-61's/71's series to modern and fuel efficient B767-300F.
Under Mr. Rasnavad leadership and with a group of dedicated aviation professionals that use motivation, safety and personalizated service to better serve the customer,
Florida West has overcome difficult obstacles and become a successful, profitable, and major player in the air cargo industry. Currently Florida West serve several Latin American markets with daily services on a modern and efficient fleet.


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This giveaway has ended. See the list of winners.
American Express Charge Card Services has offered up 10 Black Flip Ultra Video Cameras for me to give away here on the blog. Yes. 10! Skip to the bottom to find out how to enter yourself into the giveaway.
American Express Charge Cards
What's a charge card? Charge Cards are different from credit cards. The debt is not revolving credit, it's a small loan. And you have to pay off the card in full each month. There are some definite advantages to using one of these cards in the way of services. To see more about American Express Charge Cards see my previous post on charge cards.
Card | Initial Bonus | Annual Fee | Notes |
ZYNC from American Express (review) | $100 - After Initial Purchase | $25 | Earn 2 Points Per Dollar in Select "Go Pack" Categories |
American Express Preferred Rewards Green Card | None | $95 | Annual Fee Waived 1st Year |
American Express® Gold Card | $100 - Spend $500 in 3 Months | $125 | Annual Fee Waived 1st Year |
American Express® Premier Rewards Gold Card | $150 - Spend $30K in Calendar Year | $175 | Annual Fee Waived 1st Year. |
American Express Platinum Card | $250 - After $1,000 Spent in 1st 3 Months | $450 | Gives you free office space anywhere in the world. |
Flip Ultra Video Cameras
I already have my own Flip Ultra video camera. I love it. It's perfect for capturing those spontaneous moments. We leave ours lying around the house or in Mrs. PT's purse. We've got a ton of 30 second little moments of little Miss PT's life captured on that thing. The cameras hold about an hour of footage and they quickly link up with your computer for uploading. It makes sharing your videos really easy.
To give PT Money readers a taste of the types of rewards available through the Membership Rewards program, American Express gave me the opportunity to host my own American Express Charge Card holiday giveaway on PT Money in which 10 of my readers can win one Flip video camera each! Here is how it works:
10 Flip Ultra Giveaway
I'm giving away 10 Black Flip Ultra video cameras. Here's how to enter the giveaway… there are 2 ways to enter:
#1 - Simply answer this question in the comments section below:
What is the savviest way you have made your money work harder for you this holiday season?
I'll choose the 5 comments that I think are the best answer and American Express will provide the Flip video camera prizes.
#2 - Via Twitter:
Step 1. If you like what I tweet, follow @ptmoney on Twitter (optional).
Step 2. Simply tweet the following:
Just entered to win 1 of 5 Flip cameras from @ptmoney. Retweet to enter. Rules: http://tinyurl.com/AmexFlipPT
I'll randomly choose 5 from the tweets and American Express will provide the Flip video camera prizes.
The Giveaway Rules:
- No purchase necessary; void where prohibited
- One entry per person/household; US residents only
- All prizes are provided by American Express.
- Contest ends Thursday, December 31, 2009.
- Flips will be shipped shortly after.
How I've Made My Money Work Harder
I'd say the savviest thing we've done this season is to buy some things on Craigslist and pay a portion of full price. We purchased a barely used pre-lit Christmas tree for a 3rd of the new price. It looks great in our living room. We also found some nice, clean toys for little Miss PT's Christmas presents.
That's all. Good luck to ya!


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Bruce Schneier is one of the world's leading cryptographers and theorists of security. Jonathan Zittrain is a celebrated law professor, theorist of digital technology and wonderfully performative lecturer. The two share a stage at Harvard Law School's Langdell Hall. JZ introduces Bruce as the inventor of the phrase "security theatre", author of a leading textbook on cryptography and subject of a wonderful internet meme.
The last time the two met on stage, they were arguing different sides of an issue – threats of cyberwar are grossly exaggerated – in an Oxford-style debate. Schneier was baffled that, after the debate, his side lost. He found it hard to believe that more people thought that cyberwar was a real threat than an exaggeration, and realized that there is a definitional problem that makes discussing cyberwar challenging.
Schneier continues, "It used to be, in the real world, you judged the weaponry. If you saw a tank driving at you, you know it was a real war because only a government could buy a tank." In cyberwar, everyone uses the same tools and tactics – DDoS, exploits. It's hard to tell if attackers are governments, criminals or individuals. You could call almost anyone to defend you – the police, the government, the lawyers. You never know who you're fighting against, which makes it extremely hard to know what to defend. "And that's why I lost", Schneier explains – if you use a very narrow definition of cyberwar, as Schneier did, cyberwar threats are almost always exaggerated.
Zittrain explains that we're not debating tonight, but notes that Schneier appears already to be conceding some ground in using the word "weapon" to explore digital security issues. Schneier's new book is not yet named, but Zittrain suggests it might be called "Be afraid, be very afraid," as it focuses on asymmetric threats, where reasonably technically savvy people may not be able to defend themselves.
Schneier explains that we, as humans, accept a certain amount of bad action in society. We accept some bad behavior, like crime, in exchange for some flexibility in terms of law enforcement. If we worked for a zero murder rate, we'd have too many false arrests, too much intrusive security – we accept some harm in exchange for some freedom. But Bruce explains that in the digital world, it's possible for bad actors to do asymmetric amounts of harm – one person can cause a whole lot of damage. As the amount of damage a bad actor can create, our tolerance for bad actors decreases. This, Bruce explains, is the weapon of mass destruction debate – if a terrorist can access a truly deadly bioweapon, perhaps we change our laws to radically ratchet up enforcement.
JZ offers a summary: we can face doom from terrorism or doom from a police state. Bruce riffs on this: if we reach a point where a single bad actor can destroy society – and Bruce believes this may be possible – what are the chances society can get past that moment. "We tend to run a pretty wide-tail bell curve around our species."
Schneier considers the idea that attackers often have a first-mover advantage. While the police do a study of the potentials of the motorcar, the bank robbers are using them as getaway vehicles. There may be a temporal gap when the bad actors can outpace the cops, and we might imagine that gap being profoundly destructive at some point in the near future.
JZ wonders whether we're attributing too much power to bad actors, implicitly believing they are as powerful as governments. But governments have the ability to bring massive multiplier effects into play. Bruce concedes that his is true in policing – radios have been the most powerful tool for policing, bringing more police into situations where the bad guys have the upper hand.
Bruce explains that he's usually an optimist, so it's odd to have this deeply pessimistic essay out in the world. JZ notes that there are other topics to consider: digital feudalism, the topic of Bruce's last book, in which corporate actors have profound power over our digital lives, a subject JZ is also deeply interested in.
Expanding on the idea of digital feudalism, Bruce explains that if you pledge you allegiance to an internet giant like Apple, your life is easy, and they pledge to protect you. Many of us pledge allegiance to Facebook, Amazon, Google. These platforms control our data and our devices – Amazon controls what can be in your Kindle, and if they don't like your copy of 1984, they can remove it. When these feudal lords fight, we all suffer – Google Maps disappear from the iPad. Feudalism ended as nation-states rose and the former peasants began to demand rights.
JZ suggests some of the objections libertarians usually offer to this set of concerns. Isn't there a Chicken Little quality to this? Not being able to get Google Maps on your iPad seems like a "glass half empty" view given how much technological process we've recently experienced. Bruce offers his fear that sites like Google will likely be able to identify gun owners soon, based on search term history. Are we entering an age where the government doesn't need to watch you because corporations are already watching so closely? What happens if the IRS can decide who to audit based on checking what they think you should make in a year and what credit agencies know you've made? We need to think this through before this becomes a reality.
JZ leads the audience through a set of hand-raising exercises: who's on Facebook, who's queasy about Facebook's data policies, and who would pay $5 a month for a Facebook that doesn't store your behavioral data? Bruce explains that the question is the wrong one; it should be "Who would pay $5 a month for a secure Facebook where all your friends are over on the insecure one – if you're not on Facebook, you don't hear about parties, you don't see your friends, you don't get laid."
Why would Schneier believe governments would regulate this space in a helpful way, JZ asks? Schneier quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. – the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. It will take a long time for governments to figure out how to act justly in this space, perhaps a generation or two, Schneier argues that we need some form of regulation to protect against these feudal barons. As JZ translates, you believe there needs to be a regulatory function that corrects market failures, like the failure to create a non-intrusive social network… but you don't think our current screwed-up government can write these laws. So what do we do now?
Schneier has no easy answer, noting that it's hard to trust a government that breaks its own laws, surveilling its own population without warrant or even clear reason. But he quotes a recent Glenn Greenwald piece on marriage equality, which notes that the struggle for marriage equality seemed impossible until about three months ago, and now seems almost inevitable. In other words, don't lose hope.
JZ notes that Greenwald is one of the people who's been identified as an ally/conspirator to Wikileaks, and one of the targets of a possible "dirty tricks" campaign by H.B. Gary, a "be afraid, be very afraid" security firm that got p0wned by Anonymous. Schneier is on record as being excited about leaking – JZ wonders how he feels about Anonymous.
Schneier notes how remarkable it is that a group of individuals started making threats against NATO. JZ finds it hard to believe that Schneier would take those threats seriously, noting that Anon has had civil wars where one group will apologize that their servers have been compromised and should be ignored as they're being hacked by another faction – how can we take threats from a group like that seriously? Schneier notes that a non-state, decentralized actor is something we need to take very seriously.
The conversation shifts to civil disobedience in the internet age. JZ wonders whether Schneier believes that DDoS can be a form of protest, like a sit in or a picket line. Schneier explains that you used to be able to tell by the weaponry – if you were sitting in, it was a protest. But there's DDoS extortion, there's DDoS for damage, for protest, and because school's out and we're bored. Anonymous, he argues, was engaged in civil disobedience and intentions matter.
JZ notes that Anonymous, in their very name, wants civil disobedience without the threat of jail. But, to be fair, he notes that you don't get sentenced to 40 years in jail for sitting at a lunch counter. Schneier notes that we tend to misclassify cyber protest cases so badly, he'd want to protest anonymously too. But he suggests that intentions are at the heart of understanding these actions. It makes little sense, he argues, that we prosecute murder and attempted murder with different penalties – if the intention was to kill, does it matter that you are a poor shot?
A questioner in the audience asks about user education: is the answer to security problems for users to learn a security skillset in full? Zittrain notes that some are starting to suggest internet driver's licenses before letting users online. Schneier argues that user education is a cop-out. Security is interconnected – in a very real way, "my security is a function of my mother remembering to turn the firewall back on". These security holes open because we design crap security. We can't pop up incomprehensible warnings that people will click through. We need systems that are robust enough to deal with uneducated users.
Another questioner asks what metaphors we should use to understand internet security – War? Public health? Schneier argues against the war metaphor, because in wars we sacrifice anything in exchange to win. Police might be a better metaphor, as we put checks on their power and seek a balance between freedom and control of crime. Biological metaphors might be even stronger – we are starting to see thinking about computer viruses influencing what we know about biological viruses. Zittrain suggests that an appropriate metaphor is mutual aid: we need to look for ways we can help each other out under attack, which might mean building mobile phones that are two way radios which can route traffic independent of phone towers. Schneier notes that internet as infrastructure is another helpful metaphor – a vital service like power or water we try to keep accessible and always flowing.
A questioner wonders whether Schneier's dissatisfaction with the "cyberwar" metaphor comes from the idea that groups like anonymous are roughly organized groups, not states. Schneier notes that individuals are capable of great damage – the assassination of a Texas prosecutor, possibly by the Aryan Brotherhood – but we treat these acts as crime. Wars, on the other hand, are nation versus nation. We responded to 9/11 by invading a country – it's not what the FBI would have done if they were responding to it. Metaphors matter.
I had the pleasure of sitting with Willow Brugh, who did a lovely Prezi visualization of the talk – take a look!
This afternoon, MIT's Political Science distinguished speakers series hosts Regina Dugan and Kaigham Gabriel, director and deputy director of DARPA, the US defense advanced research project agency, who are here to speak about advanced manufacturing in America. The title for their talk is "Just Make It", a response Dugan offers to people who ask her to predict the future. "Visionaries aren't oracles – they are builders."
She shows a five minute video of nerd porn, a montage of dismissive predictions about technologies (like Lord Kelvin's statement about the impossibility of heavier than air flight, followed by footage of the Wright Brothers, and then from Top Gun. The video ends with observations about the time to 50 million users for different technologies is rapidly shrinking, pointing to Facebook's sprint to 100 million users, and offers images of protesters holding banners celebrating the internet. "Still think social media is a fad?" the video asks. The video ends with a challenge for the engineers in the room – "just make it".
Dugan tells us that the decline in America's ability to build things is a national challenge, if not a crisis. Americans consume an increasing percentage of goods made overseas, and are less likely to be employed making things. Perhaps this reflects on productivity increases, or on currency manipulations, but it has implications, she warns, for national defense. Adam Smith warned that if an industry was critical to defense, it is not always prudent to rely on neighbors for supply.
There have been many years of debate around the inefficiency of America's design and building of defense systems, Dugan tells us. One extrapolation of increase in airline design cost – sometimes referred to as "Augustine's Laws" – suggests that by 2054, a single military aircraft will cost as much as the entire military budget at that time. Obviously, it's dangerous to extrapolate linearly from current data… but if you do, the cost of military systems is growing much more rapidly than defense budgets. "Quite obviously, this is not sustainable".
When we design aircraft, she tells us, we're often designing ten years out. That means we're trying to understand the threat environment ten years out. That's risky. "Lack of adaptability is a vulnerability."
What's worse is that it's really expensive. She shows a graph of production costs for the F-22 fighter. The price per unit keeps increasing, and the volume required keeps dropping. This might be because we need to amortize design costs over fewer units. Or it might be because the costs get so high, we simply can't afford as many units as we wanted. This isn't just true of the F-22 – it's true for the Marine EFV project and the Comanche helicopter as well.
This difficulty in building complex systems has implications for defense and for the economy as a whole, she tells us.
"To innovate, we must make. To protect, we must produce." DARPA is not a policy organization, she tells us, but pushing from "a buy to make strategy" is of strategic importance to the US Department of Defense.
There's $200 million a year being invested in innovation, looking for ways to change the calculus of cost increase. Can we turn a long problem like vaccine design into one we can solve in weeks? Could we permit the participation of tens of thousands of designers into a process and harness their ideas? She suggests that the future of innovation is around increased speed of production and number and diversity of designs. The rise of electronic design aides revolutionized the semiconductor industry – could this shift in speed and diversity bring a similar paradigm shift?
Dugan tells us that the systems we have to manage complexity are inherited from 1969-era systems engineering. We take complex systems and split them along functional lines – power system, control system, thermal system – then try to put them back together. What happens is that we experience emergent behaviors that weren't predictable. As a result, we end up with a design, build and test system that we iterate through, trying to solve those emergent problems.
This isn't the only way to design complex systems. She shows a graph that measures time to design, integrate and test, versus a measure of product complexity, which includes part count and lines of source code. There's a linear increase in time to build to complexity for aerospace defense systems. Another piece of the graph shows a flat design and test time cycle with increasing complexity – that's the semiconductor industry. And a third industry – the best in class automotive manufacturers – show a decrease in time with an increase in complexity! How are they pulling this off?
Gabriel tags in here, to explain how the semiconductor industry achieved gains in complexity without extending the timeframe necessary to design and test their products. The key factor was a decision to control for time. "If we aren't out there with new chips in 18-24 months, we'll miss the next generation of PCs." So the principles of VLSI design were optimized around producing new product on a timecycle as tight as that for less complex integrated circuits.
Two major design innovations characterize the VLSI shift, Gabriel tells us. First, it's critical to decouple design and fabrication, a shift that was comparatively easy for circuit designers to accept. The second was initially heresy: you needed to stop optimizing each transistor, and sacrifice component performance for ease of system design and reliability.
We've seen a similar move in computer programming, a shift away from assembler, which produces very efficient code that's hard to test, to higher level programming languages. Those languages abstract operations, which leads to a decrease in performance efficiency, but since we're no longer as limited by how many operations a computer can perform, the design speed benefits outweigh the performance compromises. He hints that we may be seeing some similar shifts in biological sciences as well.
How does this work in terms of DARPA projects? Dugan retrieves the mic to speak about the Adaptive Vehicle Make program, designed to build a new infantry vehicle in two years instead of ten. A first step is developing a language to describe and design mechano-electric systems so they can integrate more smoothly. The vehicle, she tell us, will be flexibly manufactured through a "bitstream-configurable foundry-like manufacturing capability for defense systems" capable of "mass production in quantities of one".
With facilities that can accept a design and custom-forge parts, she believes we can move to an increasingly democratized design system, which enables the participation of many more people to design and submit systems to foundry-like fabrication facilities. We'll design vehicles "using the most modern techniques of crowd infrastructure and open source development," in a program called VehicleForge.mil. (While a valid URL, there's no webserver at that address. Just wanted to save you a Google search or two.)
Critics tell her this approach won't work. But Dassault recently designed the Falcon 7x aircraft using "digital master models, by tail number, for aircraft" – i.e., building extremely complex individual models for each aircraft they build. The models only do geometric interference (i.e., they test whether the parts fit together), but they've halved the time needed to produce a new plane. Critics claim that the analogy between integrated circuits and military vehicles is an inept one. But in terms of part count, ICs are much more complex than vehicles. What's complex is the diversity of components used in the combat vehicle.
A new experiment, conducted in cooperation with Local Motors, a small-scale vehicle fabrication company (see my notes on the founder's Pop!Tech talk in 2009) invites designers to compete to design a combat support vehicle, the XC2V. $10,000 in prizes were offered, and instead of getting the 3 designs they get in an invitation-only design scenario, they received 159, 100 of which the judges deemed "high calibre". It wasn't a clean sheet of paper design – the chassis and drivetrain were designed by Local Motors – but it was effective at expanding the idea pool, and led to a functioning design within four weeks.
The power of the crowd may be even greater in a field like protein folding, where humans are still able to solve some problems better than algorithms. Foldit is the brainchild of a biochemist, a computer scientist and a gamer, who decided to turn protein folding into a game, building "a Tetris-like environment for folding". 240,000 people have signed up to play, but what's really cool is "the emergence of 5 sigma savants for protein folding, some of whom have very little biochemistry training." Recently, Foldit solved a key protein – a retroviral protease SIV for the rhesus monkeys – which had been unsolved for 15 years. The community folded it in 10 days. Projects like this, she tells us, make her a believer that bringing many diverse minds to a problem and increasing the pace of building will increase the speed and diversity of innovation.
Gabriel offers three other examples where massive innovations are possible through new methods.
Optics are the dominant cost in many imaging and sensor systems. It turns out that making light do something different – bending, focusing, diffusing – requires materials and systems that are heavy, complex and expensive. M-GRIN – manufacturable gradient index optics – moves beyond lenses that are made out of a single material with a single index of refraction. Instead, they use a stack of multiple layers and films, combined via heat and pressure, to make lenses that are smaller and lighter. A test around a shortwave infrared lens produced a device that was 3.5x smaller and 7.5x lighter. That's a breakthrough… but the real innovation is creation of a set of design rules that let you go from an application to a recipe for combining materials into the lens you need.
In telling us about maskless nanolithography, Gabriel tells us "Moore's law is dead in circuit design, though the corpse doesn't know it yet." The culprit is heat – we can make tighter and smaller circuits, but they're getting very difficult to cool. As critical is cost. Working at ultra-small line width is prohibitively expensive. It's hard to spend tens of millions on a set of 45 nanometer masks to create a few hundred chips for a defense system, when building those masks costs tens of millions of dollars.
We know how to do lithography without masks, but it's traditionally been very slow. So now designers have built a system that creates and bends an electron beam, then splits it into millions of beamlets, controlled by a "dynamic pattern generator". Program that pattern generator, and it allows millions of writing operations to happen at the same time, leading to a current working speed of 10-15 wafers per hour, the minimum required to produce custom ICs for military applications.
His third example is the accelerated manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, a strategy he tells us was Plan B in 2009-2010 if the H1N1 flu virus had resurfaced. It's very hard to produce vaccines quickly – egg-based strategies require a piece of virus and many thousands of chicken eggs. These methods work, but can require 6-9 months to build up a stockpile. A new method uses tobacco plants to produce custom proteins, working from strands of DNA in the virus. Envision a football-field sized building filled with lights and trays of tobacco plants. A facility like that can now produce a million doses a month of a novel vaccine. In scaling up capacity to 100 million doses per month, the key problem turned out to be lighting – it was impossible to light everything without switching to LED bulbs. Once they made the switch, they had a new opportunity – tuning the spectrum to optimize production. Using an experiment of "high school science complexity", they grew plants under different lighting conditions for a few weeks, and determined a mix of blue and red frequencies that doubles protein production.
Gabriel ends with a slide quoting MIT scientist Tom Knight:
"The 19th century was about energy.
The 20th century was about information.
The 21st century is about matter."
If we embrace this challenge, Gabriel tells us, we will be able to make things at the cost we used to produce and stockpile them in bulk, and this change will change how we innovate.
I thought the DARPA folks gave an impressive talk, inasmuch as they got me thinking about a problem I'd not considered – the insane cost and time frame of producing military equipment. But for a talk sponsored by the political science department, it seemed woefully lacking of discussions of politics or markets. If I were trying to explain the difference in production processes between military vehicles, consumer automobiles and integrated circuits, I suspect I might look at the power of markets. IC manufacturers needed to build chips quickly because customers wanted to buy newer, faster chips… and would buy other chips if the manufacturer wasn't fast enough. Ditto for automobile companies.
The defense industry is different. It's very hard to terminate a weapons system, even if it's massively over time and over budget. The competition happens well before a product is built. Discovering that the F-22 production isn't going well doesn't create a market opportunity for another company to produce a better product faster – the company producing the F-22 is going to get paid, even if they take an absurd time to produce the product.
I admire the approach Dugan and Gabriel are putting forward, and certainly appreciate that it plays well to a room full of engineers. But I was very surprised not to hear questions (and I only caught the first five or six) about whether the DoD purchasing process can be reformed so long as military budgets are sacrosanct. We're currently facing mandatory budget cuts with the failure of the budget supercommmittee, and conventional political wisdom suggests that the social service cuts will go through, while the defense ones will not. How do you encourage companies to innovate when they're currently amply rewarded for dragging design and production out over decades? How do you innovate without market pressures?
My homogeneously left-wing family was talking politics over the Thanksgiving dinner table and realized the solution to America's current social problems was to simply adopt the Egyptian political system – let the military run everything. The right doesn't like cutting military budgets, but is okay when the military provides state-sponsored healthcare and subsidizes education. All we need to do is ensure all Americans are employed by the US military and we can build a thriving, successful welfare state. The same absurdity behind that suggestion is what makes DARPA's ideas so hard to implement – if there's no pressure to cut military budgets, anything is possible… except real innovation around cost and efficiency.
This is one of the more surreal weeks of my recent life. On Sunday, I took possession of an adorable and small apartment near Inman Square in Cambridge, fought my way through Ikea and spent the first night of my new itinerant academic existence in Cambridge. Monday, I moved into my office in the Media Lab, using a borrowed ID from a student as my ID card isn't turned on yet. Tuesday, I met with my new masters students and other colleagues at the Center for Civic Media, then retreated to the Berkman Center to be part of their iLaw series. And then I found myself in a lecture hall in the Harvard Science Center, attending a lecture on cooking, given in part by David Arnold, one of the leading minds in haute cuisine… and a guy I used to hang out with more than twenty years ago. It feels like a very strange compression of history into a single (very long) weekend. But it was a great talk, so I thought I'd share it with you as well. (And that I'm not posting until two days later helps show how crazed the week has been…)
The lecture is a public talk associated with a Harvard class called "Science and Cooking – From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science", taught by David Weitz. It's a science class focused on the chemical and physical changes associated with cooking. The text for the class is "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, the opening speaker. McGee wrote the book in Cambridge and tells us "In late 1970s, I never dreamed Harvard would give a course on cooking – I can make a living now."
McGee is accompanied by Arnold, who he introduces as the director of culinary technologies at French Culinary Institute in NYC and "the one guy in the world who knows the most about cutting edge tech in the modern kitchen." Arnold insisted that the class needed a definition of cooking, and so we're working with this definition: "The preparation of food for eating, especially by means of heat". The term comes from the Latin coquere, "to cook, prepare food, ripen, digest". Cooking is the application of energy and ingenuity to change foods so they're easier, safer and more pleasurable to eat.
McGee quotes Arnold as observing that if a peach is perfectly right, the best thing you can do with it is put it on a plate with a knife. Nature, McGee argues, wants us to eat peaches so that we'll carry seeds far and wide. What we do in cooking is, in part, trying to approach the complexity and the balance of the perfectly ripe piece of fruit.
The first stop on a history of cooking has to be fire. McGee references Richard Wrangham's "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human". Cooking allows us to turn raw starch into something digestible. We needed these calories, Wrangham argued, to build our big brains. In that sense, learning to cook may literally have helped us become human. For us to tell if Wrangham is right, we need to see evidence of cooking much further back in history. We currently see evidence of 100,000 years ago, while Wrangham speculates we should see evidence 1 million years back.
By the Middle Ages, cooks had figured out how to make gelatins and clarify them, and how to do very complex decorative work for the courts. They'd also invented food as entertainment. We see a recipe from the 15th century titled "To Make a Chicken Sing when it is dead and roasted". It involves stuffing a chicken with sulfur and mercury and sounds like a very bad idea… but it is amusing, and that notion of food as amusement is returning to modern kitchens today.
By 1681, we see the introduction of a very different way of cooking – the pressure cooker. In 1681, Denys Papin was a member of the Royal Society, working with Boyle on gases. He figured out that you could cook food using pressurized water and speed cooking processes. Because the Royal Society are mostly bachelors, there's a wonderful set of literature of dinner parties where scientists brought ingredients and Papin cooked and served them.
Arnold jumps into explain that pressure cookers allow us to cook at temperatures other than what we could normally achieve. This leads to some fun discoveries. He read an influential book on pressure cooking that advised increasing use of onions in pressure cookers because the onion flavor dissipates. So he pressure cooked other similar foods, and discovered that foods like garlic lose their stink when pressure cooked. "The sulfur compounds in horseradish get totally knocked out so you can eat it by the bushel." Mustard seeds cooked with vinegar puff up like caviar. And other effects can't be replicated any other reasonable ways. "Pressure cookers speed up Maillard reactions – you can pressure cook an egg for an hour and get browning that you otherwise wouldn't get without cooking for several days."
McGee notes that Arnold hasn't mentioned his durian experiments. Arnold sheepishly explains that this is a lesson in the importance of repetition. Durian smells bad (or wonderful, if you grew up in certain corners of Asia) because of sulfur compounds, and so you should be able to knock out the smell in a pressure cooker. "So I threw some stuff with durian into a pressure cooker and got the most incredible Durian caramel." But he's never been able to replicate it, with more than a month's worth of attempts. "Don't be a schmuck," he tells us – document your work so you can replicate.
Replicability is, of course, the essence of experimental science. In 1770, McGee tells us, Ben Franklin was spending a huge amount of time on ships, traveling between the US and France. He noticed that when the cooks threw out the waste from cooking, the wake behind the ship calmed. He later tried an experiment in Clapham Pond in London, putting a teaspoon of oil onto a pond on a windy day. The water calmed over an area of half an acre. Had Franklin made a further leap, he could have pretty easily calculated the size of a molecule based on the experiment, assuming that the layer of oil eventually was a single molecule thick.
To get a sense for the molecular scale, Arnold gives us a demonstration of Dragon's Beard candy, a preparation seen in China, Turkey and Iran. Cook sugar to a particular hardness and you can stretch and fold it at will. Arnold takes a centimeter-thick piece of sugar, turns it into a loop, and stretches it. Folding it once, it's now two loops. He repeats until we have over 15,000 strands, each about a micron thick. It's flavored with cocoa, but Arnold likes to serve it with vinegar and mustard powder, with peanuts wrapped inside.
McGee would like us to take Count Rumford as seriously as we tend to take Franklin. Rumford was a Colonial New Englander who was on the wrong side of the war, so he spent much of his career in England. Amongst his many discoveries, Rumford discovered that slow cooked meat is delicious, a discovery that's come into fashion recently with sous vide cooking. Rumford accidentally discovered the technique by trying to cook a leg of mutton in his potato drier, and left it overnight. In the morning, he encountered an "amazing aroma". And because was scientifically minded, he replicated the experiment and tried an objective taste test. At a cocktail party, he cooked one leg of mutton over a fire and another using the slow technique and put them at opposite sides of the room, and weighed the remnants – the slow-cooked mutton was far more popular.
The opposite of Rumford was Justus Liebig, a German chemist who was a theoretician, not an experimentalist. Working only from his own "brilliance", not from experiments, Liebig introduced a new way of cooking meat – searing it to seal in the juices. It's revolutionary, but also really bad. Apparently he never actually tasted it.
In 1969, the British scientist Nicholas Kurti suggested that we bring scientific methods back to ordinary, everyday phenomenon. "I think it is a sad reflection on our society that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés". His investigations were part of a movement towards "soft matter science", a study of phenomena like soap bubbles that led to a 1991 Nobel prize.
McGee found himself investigating these phenomena in 1984 when he wrote his book on the history of food. In collaboration with scientists, he began testing a Julia Child assertion about whipping egg whites in a copper bowl – Child advocated always whipping in copper. Experiments testing whipping in copper demonstrated that it took a much longer time, but led to lighter whites. The paper was eventually accepted by Nature, though one reviewer commented, "The science is good, but the subject is fluffy."
While much of what's emerged in science in the kitchen, like molecular gastronomy, is fairly recent, nouvelle cuisine is very old. In 1759, a poem was published that read:
Every year nouvelle cuisine
Because every year tastes change;
And every day there are new stews:
So be a chemist, Justine.
French cooking, historically, has been far from experimental. Classic French cooking as compiled by Escoffier and others codified cuisine to the point where it was difficult to innovate, since the classic textbook offers 100 "correct" recipes for beef tenderloin. McGee cites Michael Bras as helping invert these dynamics with the melting chocolate cake, an inversion of the "correct" idea that a cake is surrounded by a sauce – instead, a cake contains a ganache. A later dish, the Gargouillou, recreated a salad as a walk through a garden, whatever ingredients were most appropriate on the given day.
Chef Jacques Maximin was influenced by these experiments and observed, " To be really creative means not copying." His maxim struck a chord especially with Ferran Adria, who recreated the gargouillou as an endlessly surprising salad – nothing is quite what it seems. Adria went on to thoroughly revolutionize cuisine as we know it, with techniques like flavored foams and the spherification of ingredients like melon into texturally odd balls of flavor.
He's had many followers. Joan and Jordi Roca use rotary evaporators to separate aromas from ingredients – this makes possible a dish of foods that are shades of white which have flavors usually associated with visually dark ingredients. Jose Andres experimented with a chemical most often used to make cough drops, offering a bonbon of liquid olive oil within a clear shell. Wylie Dufresne uses an enzyme called "meat glue" to offer a chicken nugget that's white meat wrapped in dark, wrapped in skin. And now the field has been exhaustively documented by Nathan Myrvold, who's published a massive, five-volume book on Modernist cuisine.
At this point, McGee gives the reins to Arnold, who offers a rapid-fire walk through some of his favorite techniques and his creative process. He shows us a Japanese ring that features a wavy woodgrain effect, produced by beating two different metals together. Arnold achieved something similar using fish as a way of persuading Hobart, the cooking machine company, to give him a really badass slicer. Using meat glue and casein, he glues salmon and fluke together and slices them into a thin sheet that looks a little like mortadella and a bit like wood grain. It's served with creme fraische seasoned with nitrogen-frozen herbs, a fennel apple salad infused with curry and pressure cooked mushroom seeds, a veritable tour of modernist technique on a plate.
(The nitrogen chilled herbs allow fresh herbs to be broken into very small pieces, as you would break up a dried herb, but maintain the fresh flavor and texture. Arnold recommends you blanch your fresh herbs, flash freeze in liquid nitrogen, shatter into tiny pieces and pass through a chinoise, using only the tiny bits that escape the mesh.)
Using agar, a gelling agent made from seaweed, Arnold produces a concord grape jelly, a thick, stiff substance. He points out that it cuts cleanly and can't be put back together. But if you break it violently – in a blender, say – you get a different effect: a microgel or fluid gel. It looks like a puree on the plate, but tastes like juice in the mouth.
Agar works well as a clarifier too, in lower concentrations. Arnold makes a loose gel of lime juice, then uses a whisk to separate it into "whey and curds". He passes this through cheesecloth, making rude comments about "gently massaging the sack", before producing a liquid that looks very much like water, but turns out to have intense lime flavor.
We clarify liquids, he tells us, because then we can infuse them into other foods. "We can make a cucumber better by adding liquor to it… we can make a lot of things better by adding liquor to them." Injection techniques work better with clear liquids, and Arnold shows us how to infuse a cucumber with lime and sugar in a vacuum machine. The vacuum pulls air out of the cucumber, and rapidly threatens to boil it, as liquids boil at lower temperatures in vacuum. (Arnold recommends you heavily chill your ingredients as you vacuum infuse…) While the air is sucked out, the liquid is incompressible, and as air floods back into the chamber as he turns the vacuum off, liquid infuses into the cucumber in a flash, turning the vegetable into something that looks like stained glass. "It's one way to get something that looks cooked, but still has crisp, clean lines to it."
You can rapidly infuse using pressure as well. Arnold puts vodka and coffee into an ISI whipped cream maker, and uses nitrous oxide to force the coffee into the vodka. What results is heavily flavored, but not carbonated – the tingle of carbonation comes from carbon dioxide escaping from solution. Nitrous oxide offers pressure and fluff without carbonation.
Arnold offers his advice on carbonating some of his favorite things. As with infusion, clarified liquids work better. "If you're going to carbonate liquor – which I highly recommend – you're going to need more pressure than carbonating water because CO2 is more soluble in alcohol than in water." You can force carbonate a wine at 30 psi, sake at 35psi, and liquors at about 40 psi.
Why would you infuse vodka with coffee? "The flavors you pull out of a product are dependent on time, temperature, pressure." You don't just get yummy coffee vodka – you can get different flavors than you'd ever experience through conventional means.
It must be fun to have a kitchen where liquid nitrogen is as common as hot water. Arnold chills a glass with liquid nitrogen, pointing out that it's cold only on the inside, and doesn't generate condensation. He pours himself a carbonated gin and lime concoction as the audience is served marshmallows frozen with liquid nitrogen. McGee returns to explain the history of the marshmallows – they were served at The Fat Duck as both a palate and "mind cleanser". The chef responsible wanted to reset his diners' expectations, so he served them a marshmallow flavored with lime, tea and vodka and frozen. The heat of your mouth melts the treat and you find yourself with vapors pouring from your mouth and nose. We have a similar experience with the frozen marshmallows, and like the Fat Duck diners, find ourselves laughing, our expectations reset.
Hugo Van Vuuren, Berkman Fellow and graduate student at Harvard's Graduate School for Design and Gregg Elliott, researcher at MIT's Media Lab, tell us that we're experiencing a global communications "crisis", one that we can address through better communications protocols.
Hugo sets the stage at today's Berkman Center lunch talk, showing us the beginning of this video from design firm JESS3:
JESS3™ / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
He summarizes the crisis, as he sees it, with a quote from Swiss designer Tina Roth Eisenberg: "Too many channels. Too many messages. Too much noise. Too much guilt."
Lots of people are trying to build tools to cope with this flood of information. (Google's priority inbox is one possible example of a tool to manage an overload of messages.) There's less effort focused on overcoming the guilt. When we see people talking about reaching "inbox zero" or declaring "email bankruptcy", they are looking for ways to deal with the guilt.
Even in an age of social media, mail and phone contact are massive in relation to new forms of communication. Russell Munroe's legendary Online Communities map from 2005 has been updated for 2010, showing that massive social networks like Facebook are dwarfed by SMS, phonecalls and email.
Some recent articles in the New York Times – "Don't Call Me, I Won't Call You", "Keep Your Thumbs Still When I'm Talking to You" – suggest that we're seeing a conflict in cultural norms. Some people (me, for one) don't answer the phone except for scheduled phonecalls, which is deeply confusing for people who consider phones the primary way to contact people. Some people check mobile phones while carrying on conversations, which can feel extremely rude to people who focus on face to face contact. Hugo points out that there can be differences in community protocol from one side of a university to others: "The Media Lab is much more of a phone-centered place than the GSD. At the GSD, email is something you do at your desk…"
We're starting to see the explicit emergence of communications protocols. danah boyd's "email sabbatical" involves discarding all email received during a vacation – if you want to reach her, her autoresponder tells you, email her again once she's come home. Tim Berners-Lee's home page includes a complex protocol about what you should and should not email him. Harvard CS professor Harry Lewis suggested to Hugo that one of the massive problems in organizing a conference is figuring out how to contact academics, who tend to hide between different media, letting some emails go to administrative assistants while "real", direct email addresses are carefully preserved commodities.
Hugo shows five.sentenc.es, an intriguing attempt to simplify email conversations by declaring that emails will be answered in five sentences or less. The hope is, by declaring a different protocol, it will no longer be considered rude to answer emails compactly and succintly. But this is "a kernel, not a generalized idea" for communications, Hugo offers. We need something broader and more inclusive.
One option is "stop and go signaling", which we see on tools like instant messenger. But these status messages, which Greg explains used to be expressive, much like Facebook status messages, have turned into their own sort of protocol. "Away usually means that you're at your keyboard, but busy." It's a step in the right direction, but perhaps too limited a vocabulary.
Hugo shows us a code of manners presented by the "Children's National Guild of Courtesy", a British organization from early last century. There are no single norms for behavior these days, set by institutions like this one. Norms are now set by individuals, or illustrated by example for leaders within communities.
To address these issues, Greg suggests that we need to:
– Define our rules of engagement
– Organize a system to execute on those rules, and
– Share your rules and expectations
Protocol.by is a first pass at defining and sharing these rules of engagement. Coming out of a closed alpha test shortly, it lets you register an account and compactly state the ways in which you'd prefer to be contacted. Greg explains that he dislikes spontaneous phonecalls – his protocol tells people not to call him before noon, and not to expect an answer to unscheduled calls. For emails, he urges correspondents to avoid polite niceties and get to the point. For people unsure of how to contact him, these protocols can make it easier for people to contact him in a way that's minimally intrusive and maximally effective. (I have a protocol, if you're interested…)
The goal for the site, Hugo offers, is for the site to become a "social anchor" to help bridge across multiple identities and online presences. In the long term, it could plug into location-based services and offer richer, more targeted information on how to contact people politely. A group could use protocol.by with voting systems which could help group protocols emerge.
Going forward, protocol.by might offer suggested protocols based on your identity – if you're a technophile, you might want to be contacted with email and IM, not phone, for instance. Over time, these might emerge as a small set of cultural norms, rather than purely personal norms.
There's dozens of questions from the Berkman crowd, as well as many observations phrased as questions. Some of the highlights, to the best of my reporting ability:
Q: Is there a revenue model for protocol.by?
A: Not at present – it's a research project. In the long run, there might be fun ways to use the data, perhaps the way OKCupid analyzes dating information, in a way that might have financial value.
Q: Protocol-free communication leaves a lot of ambiguity in communications, which can be a good thing. Is someone not answering their email because you contacted them the wrong way, or because they don't want to talk to you. Is it such a good idea to squeeze out this ambiguity?
A: You've got a good degree of freedom with the tool in how explicit you want to be. If you offer promises – "Emails will be answered within 48 hours" – you eliminate ambiguity. But a prioritized list of communication protocols is still pretty ambiguous.
Q: This system is very elegant, but it doesn't recognize that you might communicate differently with a babysitter calling you about an emergency and an undergrad asking to interview you for a paper. How does the system handle this?
A: Protocols will likely differ for complete strangers versus friends and family. Protocol.by is mostly for people outside your circle of trust.
Q (David Weinberger): How many users do you need for this to be an effective research project and how will you get them?
A: There are about 500 users thus far. Having a few thousand may let us run bigger experiments. We'll get more by embedding the tool into webpages and social networks.
Q (David Abrahms): I might want to be contacted via phone, but if I'm in Beijing, I'd like the system to accomodate that.
A: Great idea.
Q: (David Weinberger) There's certainly a need for more metadata about your norms when you communicate with people outside your community. We need it for IP issues as well – Creative Commons helps us communicate what you can do with your content. Maybe this is a model for getting people to adopt this protocol?
A: Figuring out how to embed this well is going to help us work through these issues.
Someone on Twitter pointed me to Damn You Auto Correct, a site that's at least as narrow in focus as your average LOLCats site, but pretty funny nevertheless. I suppose it's useful mostly as a warning not to invite someone over for gelato unless you've really thought things through. Then again, anyone who's listened to Benjamen Walker's 13th episode of Too Much Information, where an innocuous text message to a notoriously cranky rock star is transformed into a curt insult by autocorrect. Suffice it to say, I've never since typed "NP. Thanks so much" on my iPhone again.
It does seem like the manufacturers of autocorrect should keep up with the times in editing their dictionaries, realizing that "NP" has become pretty common slang and to find a different way to correct misspellings without alienating quick-fingered radio producers and SMSing computer scientists. And then I remembered a routine from British comics Armstrong and Miller:
The key phrase for me: "Our job, Gilbert, is to offer people not the words they do use but the words they should use."
And you thought technology was value neutral…


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NOOK Color eReader - 7" Multi-Touch, 8GB Storage, 800MHz TI processor, 512MB Memory, MicroSD Card Slot, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
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Backup Exec Agent for HyperV
Technical Solution
VMware or Hyper-V Agent backups complete with exception while backing up application servers with SQL or Exchange installed
Doc. ID: TECH126737 | 2014-03-10 -
Backup of a virtual guest fails intermittently generating a IRPSTACKSIZE windows event.
Doc. ID: TECH214318 | 2014-01-23 -
Hyper-V Conversion fails with "Failed to create the standby virtual machine required for warm conversion"
Doc. ID: TECH187941 | 2012-05-09


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noun, often capitalized \pu̇-ˈrä-nə\Definition of PURANA
: one of a class of Hindu sacred writings chiefly from a.d. 300 to a.d. 750 comprising popular myths and legends and other traditional lore
— Pu·ra·nic \-nik\ adjective
Origin of PURANA
Sanskrit purāṇa, from purāṇa ancient, from purā formerly; akin to Sanskrit pura before, Greek para beside, pro before — more at for
First Known Use: 1696
noun (Concise Encyclopedia)In Hinduism, an encyclopaedic collection of myth, legend, and genealogy. A Purana traditionally treats five subjects: primary creation of the universe, secondary creation after periodic annihilation, genealogy of gods and saints, grand epochs, and histories of the royal dynasties. Written in narrative couplets, the Puranas date from c. 400 to c. 1000. The 18 principal surviving Puranas are grouped according to whether they exalt Vishnu, Shiva, or Brahma. Most popular is the Bhagavata Purana, which treats the early life of Krishna.
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More on Disney Baby
Create magical moments with these inspired ideas and feel-good products.
The Most Bizarre & Unusual Celebrity Rockstar Baby Names: From A to Z
Posted by Selena Burgess
It's no secret that there is plenty of strange celebrity baby naming going on. It seems to be the current trend for stars to come up with names that are as obnoxious (so unique!), obscure and bizarre as they can conjure up.
Celebrity rockstars are amongst the most esteemed strange baby namers, to be sure. Which, as it were – isn't a new thing and it's all Frank Zappa's fault. (Arguably.) What do you think? I actually like some of the names on this list, perhaps not all together in how some of them are paired in their never-ending-ness; but a few of them on their own are quite unique and lovely!
Whatever your opinions may be, a chuckle is to be had here. As long as you don't take things too seriously.
The Wild & The Wacky...
…Or the unique and the lovely, depending on your tastes. What do you think? Any keepers?
Apple Blythe Alison
Daughter of Chris Martin (Coldplay), and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Bandit Lee Way
Daughter of Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance), and LynZ (Mindless Self Indulge)
Bear Blue
Son of Alicia Silverstone and Christopher Jarecki. (S.T.U.N.)
Bingham Hawn
Son of Matt Bellamy (MUSE), and Kate Hudson.
Blue Angel
Daughter of "The Edge" (U2), and Aislinn O'Sullivan.
Blue Ivy Carter
Daughter of Beyonce and Jay Z.
Bluebelle Madonna
Daughter of Geri Halliwell (The Spice Girls), and Sasha Gervasi.
Bronx Mowgli
Son of Ashlee Simpson (solo), and Pete Wentz (Blink 182).
Calico Dashiell
Daughter of Alice Cooper and Sheryl Goddard.
Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen
Daughter of Frank Zappa and Gail Sloatman.
Dusti Raine
Daughter of Robert Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice), and Laura Giarritta.
Everly Bear Kiedis
Daughter of Anthony Kiedis (Red Hot Chili Peppers), and Heather Christie.
Fifi Trixibelle
Daughter of Bob Geldof (The Boomtown Rats), and Paula Yates.
Fushia Catherine
Daughter of Sting and Frances Tomelty.
Gunner Nicholas
Son of Nikki Sixx (Mötley Crüe), and Brandi Brandt.
Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily
Daughter of Michael Hutchens (INXS), and Paula Yates.
Daughter of Myleene Klass, (actress and solo artist).
Son of Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde and his wife Barbaranne.
Son of Jermaine Jackson and Alejandra. (Who also happens to be the mother of Jermaine's nieces and nephews. Yep.)
Keelee Breeze
Daughter of Robert Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice), and Laura Giarritta.
Mars Merkaba
Daughter of Erykah Badu and Jay Electronica.
Mirabella Bunny
Daughter of Bryan Adams.
Memphis Eve
Daughter of Bono (U2), and Alison Hewson.
Moon Unit
Daughter of Frank Zappa and Gail Sloatman.
Peaches Honeyblossom
Daughter of Bob Geldof (The Boomtown Rats), and Paula Yates.
Son of Korn frontman Jonathan Davis.
Prince Michael II/Blanket
Son of Michael Jackson, (surrogate mother).
Daughter of Erykah Badu and Tracy Curry.
Rainbow Aurora Rotella
Daughter of Holly Madison (no explanation needed), and Pasquale Rotella (international electronic music festival mogul).
Son of Robert Rodriguez (director and musician), and Elizabeth Avellán.
Rolan Bolan
Marc Bolan (T. Rex), and Gloria Jones (solo artist). Best couple ever!
Son of Robert Rodriguez (director and musician), and Elizabeth Avellán.
Son of Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde and his wife Barbaranne.
Seven Sirius
Erykah Badu and Outkast's Andre 3000.
Sparrow James Midnight
Son to Joel Madden (Blink 182), and Nicole Ritchie.
Spec Wildhorse
Son of John Cougar Mellencamp and Elaine Irwin.
Storm Brieann
Daughter of Nikki Sixx (Mötley Crüe), and Brandi Brandt.
Sunny Bebop
Daughter of Michael "Flea" Balzary (Red Hot Chili Peppers), and Frankie Rayder.
Duncan "Zowie Bowie" Heywood Jones
Son of David Bowie and Angie Bowie.
Zuma Nesta Rock
Son of Gwen Steffani (No Doubt,) and Gavin Rossdale (Bush).
Celebrity Baby Names
Selena is a crafty, culinary mom. Creative Director. Social Media & Branding Consultant. Part-time big-mouth & frequent foot-eater. Daily Babble.com contributor. Proud of her Anishinaabe roots.
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New York Times, #1 international bestselling author, and world-class forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, hailed by the critics as the new Patricia Cornwell, takes Temperance Brennan behind the scenes of a major commercial airliner crash in this magnificent follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Deadly Decisions.
Temperance Brennan hears the news on her car radio. An Air TransSouth flight has gone down in the mountains of western North Carolina, taking with… (more)
Publisher: Scribner (July 17, 2001)
Format: EPUB
File size: 2 MB
Protection: DRM
Language: English


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The Body Shop • Passionfruit Body Butter • Lotions/ Creams
(76 reviews)
Average Rating. | 3.4 |
Would buy this product again. | 43% |
Ingredients |
andreakp103 on 1/1/2014 10:49:00 PM more reviews by andreakp103
Age: 18 & Under Skin: Combination, Fair-Medium Hair: Brunette Eyes: Hazel
I got this lotion for five bucks and its honestly my favorite lotion. It has this amazing fresh smell. I could smell it on my skin all day. I also really love the texture. It's kinda like avocado texture x) you don't need a lot too and it's extra creamy. It moisturizes well.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
Gonelvik on 11/13/2013 8:44:00 PM more reviews by Gonelvik
Age: 25-29 Skin: Combination, Fair Hair: Blond, Straight, Fine Eyes: Green
It smells juicy and fresh and moisturizes well without being greasy. It might not work well for the people with the dry skin though.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
TinyNeuron on 8/31/2013 5:48:00 AM more reviews by TinyNeuron
Age: 19-24 Skin: Combination, Olive Hair: Black Eyes: Brown
Sticky and greasy. It lasted all day since it didn't absorb well in my skin - It just coated it. When I put it on overnight some were absorbed but it still felt sticky.
I could slightly smell "passion fruit" when spread on the skin but it mostly smelled like burned plastic.
Expensive and would not recommend even for those who love passion fruit.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
kattmua on 5/25/2013 7:02:00 PM more reviews by kattmua
Age: 30-35 Skin: Other Hair: Other Eyes: Other
This smells pleasant, feminine and youthful: like a sparkling passion-fruit/peachy drink
The scent is strong and long lasting so i use it as a 2 in 1 body cream and perfume
it's only available on christmas/easter sales and is at least half the price of the non sale body butters.
i think the scent would be especially suit teenagers and women in their early 20's.
it also has a 'summery' scent vibe to it.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
Daynnie on 4/7/2013 11:18:00 PM more reviews by Daynnie
Age: 25-29 Skin: Acne-prone, Fair-Medium Hair: Brown Eyes: Brown
I just bought the large size body butter today - but fell in love with it already. I am so into maracuja oil (=passion fruit oil) thanks to Tarte. While the smell of this is quite strong, it is not overly sweet/irritating as in other "fragranced" lotions. Why I am crazy about this is that it kept my wintery hands moisturized for hours! While out shopping and using sanitizing wipes. I can not believe it. Love the consistency, soaked right in. Body Shop has specials for some scents (large packaging for $10) right now. I'm thinking about going back for more :) I put some in small to-go jars to keep in my purse and car.
1 lippie down for couple "unwanted" ingredients high on the list.
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bnm5077 on 1/27/2013 10:58:00 PM more reviews by bnm5077
Age: 19-24 Skin: Normal, Fair-Medium Hair: Brown Eyes: Blue
I honestly don't know why there seem to be so many bad reviews on this product! Here's the background story: I got this body butter and the papaya body butter for $5 each and free shipping!!!! Here's the kicker, the post office tracker said my package got returned so I called and the person at The Body Shop said it did so I got a refund, but the package arrived the next day! So I guess I technically didn't pay anything. Anyway, this smells awesome in the tub. It's fresh and sweet and smells like you could eat it! However, when I put it on my skin it only smells for a couple minutes then it goes away. That's okay for me, since I like to layer perfume with it. I would buy it again, but only if it was $5. It's a wonderful moisturizer but i wouldn't pay $20 for it normally because I would like to try other scents first. And I actually probably wouldn't pay $20 for any body moisturizer since I'm HUGE bath and body works fan and they usually have amazing coupons. But this was a great purchase to start trying Body Shop products.
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Romanticide on 4/12/2012 5:06:00 AM more reviews by Romanticide
Age: 19-24 Skin: Other, Fair Hair: Brunette Eyes: Other
- purple packaging
- hard, sticky consistency
- strong fragrance
- left skin itchy
Overall I disliked the Body Shop Passionfruit line, mainly for the smell, and it irritated my skin without providing moisturisation.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
*TOP REVIEWER* ChristinaMarieT on 2/14/2012 3:50:00 AM more reviews by ChristinaMarieT
Age: 18 & Under Skin: Dry, Medium, Cool Hair: Brunette, Wavy, Fine Eyes: Brown
Like the shower gel, this body butter is light in comparison to others available at The Body Shop. It moisturizes, but not enough. Drier skin types will need something much more heavy. This body butter doesn't absorb well, either. It has a very strong passion fruit smell, so for those who like it, it'd probably be great to use during summer time. I hate the smell, so I wouldn't use it again, personally. I got this for free, but its price is the same as the other body butters sold by the store. The texture isn't very creamy... It's more solid than I would prefer, too. Normal skin types would work for this, but not my own.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
CherryBerryPie on 10/12/2011 4:56:00 PM more reviews by CherryBerryPie
Age: 30-35 Skin: Sensitive, Fair Hair: Blond, Straight, Fine Eyes: Green
This is my first body butter.
*Nice scent.
*Moisturizes great.
*Lovely texture.
*Nice packaging.
*Expensive unless you buy it on sale.
*Take some time to sink in.
Will I buy it again? I think so but in a different scent i think. There are many to choose from!
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No
Nitala on 8/26/2011 3:12:00 PM more reviews by Nitala
Age: 19-24 Skin: Normal, Fair-Medium, Warm Hair: Black, Straight, Fine Eyes: Brown
I really liked this scent in the store and since it was on sale I decided to try it.
The consistency is nice and light (similar to satsuma) so it's easy to spread. The light purple colour is also very cute. :) It's a fairly good moisturizer too.
A major con would be the smell once you put it on. It seems to smell a bit different, not as pleasant as in the tub. I would not purchase again for this reason.
Top Rated Lotions/ Creams
- 28 reviews
La Roche Posay Lipikar Balm
34 reviewsBadger Cuticle Care
64 reviewsFlexitol Heel Balm
81 reviews


text:
Chan Lü
Assistant Professor of Chinese
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University
Office: University Hall 3942
Phone: 310.338.5359
Email: email@example.com
Research Interests:
Second language reading skill acquisition; Biliteracy acquisition; Chinese language teacher education
Selected Publications:
Lü, C. (Forthcoming). Chinese Heritage Language Schools in the United States. In X.L. Curdt-Christiansen, X. and A. Hancock, A. (Eds). Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities: Many Pathways to Becoming Chinese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Koda, K., Lü, C., & Zhang, D. (2014). Cross-Linguistic Transfer in Biliteacy Development in Chinese and English. In X. Chen, Q. Wang, and Y. Luo (Eds). Reading Development in Monolingual and Bilingual Chinese Children (pp. 141-170). Springer Netherlands.
Lü, C. (2011). Lexical proficiency and quality of compositions: The case of school age Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners. Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association, 46, 61-84.
Lü, C. & Koda, K. (2011). Impact of Home Language and Literacy Support on English-Chinese Biliteracy Acquisition among Chinese Heritage Language Learners. Heritage Language Journal, 8, 44-80.
Lü, C. (2010). The effects of word-knowledge depth, part of speech, and proficiency level on word association among learners of Chinese as a second language. In M. E. Everson & H. H. Shen (Eds.), Chinese Language Teachers Association Monograph Series: Vol. 4: Research among learners of Chinese as a foreign language (pp. 67–92). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, National Foreign Language Resource Center.
Koda, K, Lü, C., & Zhang Y. (2008). Effects of print input on morphological awareness among Chinese heritage language learners. In He, W. A. & Xiao, Y. (Eds.), Chinese as a Heritage Language: Fostering Rooted Citizenry (pp.125 - 135). Honolulu: National Foreign Language Resource Center/University of Hawaii Press.
Selected Grants/Awards:
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Junior Scholar Grant (2012-2013). Principal Investigator.
Language Learning Dissertation Grant (2009).
For more information:


text:
Today we talk to our old pal Lonnie Scott about guns, guns, and more guns.
Podcast (weekday-briefing-mp3): Play in new window | Download
Today we discuss:
- What was really in the gun bill
- The Senate defies the American people
- We need to continue to talk to legislators and let them know that we are watching
- The importance of grass roots organizing in defeating the NRA
- The GOP is attacking from all sides, you cannot keep track of everything
Headlines & more:
- Education reform group forges voucher-like plan for Michigan
- Muslim Woman Attacked After Conservatives Repeat False Speculation About 'Dark-Skinned Suspects'
- Michigan State Spartan statue vandalized with colors, block 'M' of archrival Wolverines
- Four Michigan counties declare states of emergency after flooding
- Sequester facts (pdf)
- US House of Representatives passes CISPA by 288-127
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Fun stuff:
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Contact Governor Snyder and tell his office that you do not want his "skunk works" voucher plan.
Don't forget you can comment on this post, leave us a voicemail using the voicemail widget, or use the contact link to send me an email.
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text:
New Architecture set revealed at Eurobricks
Posted by Huw,A Eurobricks member has uncovered this picture of the next Architecture set, Sydney Opera House, at Amazon.co.jp.
If you visit Amazon you can zoom in to see the detail. I haven't been able to extract the large version of the image so I've made this image of the model itself.
I have to say, I'm not overly impressed. It's a valiant attempt to model a complex structure at a small scale but I think it's just a bit too small and resembles little more than a random collection of curved wedges at odd angles.
Maybe I'm being too harsh. What do you think?
According to Brickshop.nl, it will cost €40 and be available in June.
40 comments on this article
I'd be ashamed to ask people to pay 40 euros for that...
@ huw - I agree - it just looks a mess.
I have to agree with consensus so far. I like the idea... the execution is something of a miss.
Couldn't they have picked the Sydney harbour bridge or something? Or maybe Parliament house in Canberra? Surely there's a building somewhere in Australia that would look good at this size.
Oh dear, this looks certainly interesting :?
The thing I'm most interested in is whether or not this set will be available in Australia So far, I haven't seen any architecture sets in any stores here and have only been available through S@H. If this set doesn't make it to the shelves of our major retailers, then the issue really becomes laughable and I think Lego Australia will have some explaining to do.
As an aside however, this model is pretty ugly and whilst I have no intention of buying it, I do think that as a matter of principle it should be available to us Aussies as it is an iconic Australian landmark.
I'm not impressed by any of the Architecture sets, to be honest. A lot of the buildings I've never heard of, and the ones that I have heard of, such as the White House, Brandenburg Gate or this Sydney Opera House, are too small and blocky for my liking. They're nowhere near as impressive as the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower or Tower Bridge sets.
I wonder if this one will be widely available in Australia unlike EVERY other Architechture set released thus far...
I completely agree. I didn't even recognize it until I read the article :) Wouldn't even be worth $15.
Nice idea, shame about the execution. Maybe it will look better in the flesh.
Nice idea, terrible model. The scale and piece usage just seems incorrect and uneven if I'm being honest.
I love it, instantly recognisable...but maybe I'm biased. I think they've done a great job for such a small scale. Can't wait to get one.
I think it looks terrible. When I first saw it I thought it as a bad remake of Sarlac's pit from ROTJ. Do better Lego. If you make quality the cash will come...lol
@scoopi68, I don't think 'instantly recognisable' and 'good model' are necessarily synonymous--I recognised it, but close up it's not quite so pretty.
gosh, Architecture only released one good set...Fallngwater
also, that really is a criminal price.
...Nope. It's instantly recognisable as the Opera House, but it's still a significant, offputting mess sailways. The Opera House does strike me as a very difficult building to render in small-scale LEGO (I recall seeing a fantastic model of considerable size back in 1999's Ultimate LEGO Book), but if they'd bumped up the scale just a bit I'm pretty sure there are some larger curved shell pieces which are hollow and thus may be more conducive to getting the job done.
I'm inclined to question the wisdom of going ahead with producing such a difficult-to-render Architecture set, especially considering Australia has quite a few other iconic structures which would likely lend themselves much better to a LEGO replica; Canberra's Parliament House comes to mind (may be a bit biased here as a Canberra denizen), as does the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
@duilim: To my knowledge (again, restricted to northern Canberra outlets), Architecture sets are rare around Australia, but I have seen them on occasion; the store chain Little Sprout stocks a handful of them, but I can't recall how up-to-date they are. Additionally, Myer may be worth a shot, as I do recall the Canberra Centre one stocking a couple at some point in the past few years, but I've no idea how likely it is.
Yeah, t doesn't look great does it? But it is possibly the hardest model of any building in the world to design in Lego at this scale. I like this one though which is even smaller: http://amodularlife.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/3601075231_5809409eca.jpg
Looks like the ruins of an ancient building. Maybe make it in the same scale as that waterfall house?
When I showed this to my younger brother, he thought it was the Pit of Carkoon from Return of the Jedi. Back to the drawing board, Lego....
^It does look like the Pit of Carkoon!
It is really a mess. Too many large pieces for a small scale set. This is not how I would imagine a LEGO Sydney Opera House...
@grelb32, I thought that was really funny! XD
It looks kinda wierd, but does anyone know how much this will cost in the USA? (I might get this set if it comes on sale)
I HATE Frank Gehry - the architect of this particular building. I've been unfortunate enough to spend time inside one of his "buildings" and they are an abomination.
SHAME on TLG for justifying the existence of one of the worst architectural criminals of all time.
@serviceburo It's actually by Jørn Utzon although Utzon resigned part way though and the design was changed significantly.
This is rather disappointing, I think this building is too non-legoy a shape to do at such a small scale, while I'm sure it could be rather impressive made bigger, and emulating the sails' shapes more accurately.
I stuck all the zoomed in parts from Amazon.co.jp together, you can see them here (plus the Hayabusa probe too): http://8of5multiverse.blogspot.com/2012/01/next-lego-architecture-set-is-sydney.html
I was hoping this was a hoax. If not, its a joke.
An uninviting set, like the rest of the Architecture series, but I am glad to see non-US sets are being added to the series.
Was rather hoping it would be designed as a Large Scale Model :(
I immediately recognized it. I like it. I find it a good representation of the design. Like most Lego Architecture models, it's not meant to be realistic, but capture the essence of the design & concepts. Yes, I am a fan of the entire Architecture series. It seems many Lego fans aren't, which is too bad.
I'd be a fan of the architecture series if it was cheaper.
@ The Reviewer - and anyone else that is wondering - 40 Euros is:
I think the set looks terrible.
You're right. It stinks.
As an Australian resident, I'm starting to think TLG despises Australians! In the first two weeks of this year, they have:
1. Continued to exploit exchange rate changes and priced the 2012 sets at astronomically high prices relative to the UK, Euroland, and the US. In some cases - particularly the Batman lineup - at over 2x the price available through parallel importing.
(When local retailers can import from online shopping sites at significantly less than their wholesale buy price, you know something's wrong.)
2. Staggered the release of themes to much later than when the rest of the world gets them, eg, Dino is not out here until September. This means Australians are disadvantaged when joining in online discussions.
(Batman has been the talk of Gotham since December. We'll be holding our breath until mid-February.)
3. Released this, er, "five minute Creationary slap together", when a 10189 Taj Mahal or 10214 Tower Bridge or 10181 Eiffel tower scale would have been much more appropriate for such a beautiful structure as the Sydney Opera House.
No offence to the designer, but if you can't capture the essence of the sweeping sails using white wedges, then don't. It's artistically dishonest and a pure cash play to expand the Architecture line.
^ Bravo, Ravenhook. Could not have said it any better.
I love the idea... I don't love the set. The wedge pieces just don't have the same elegance.
No, just no. This is an absolute mockery of a LEGO set. All this is is a bunch of curved pieces put at herky-jerky angles. LEGO, scrap this model and replace it with something that actually looks good.
Its recognizable, as I instantly knew what it was, but it also looks like a couple eggs fell out of a tree and went SPLAT
Nope, won't be buying this one -- the sails look too bulky to soar. My favorites are Fallingwater and Robie House. Might consider the White House. Fallingwater -- I've actually toured it. Robie because it's colorful and resembles Japanese historical architecture. White House because I do like the Greek Ionic columns.
Wow way for everyone to pile on. I love the Architecture series and have every model proudly on display. Too many people seem to be completely lost on the point that these sets are not meant to be precise replicas. There is a stylized element about these sets that I really like.
Whenever an Architecture set is announced almost every comment I read is a complaint. Too many American buildings, too expensive, too unrealistic, too ugly, etc.
The refrain is complain, complain, complain. So I'm here to defend the Architecture series and say that there is at least one AFOL who thoroughly enjoys these sets.
I love these architecture set's but it is not my kind of sport.
Because in the Netherlands lego is so expensive compared the usa.($=€)
I stick to technic.
But otherwise I would buy ever one of them architecture sets!
Seeing as the original building is a a random collection of curved wedges at odd angles (I'm assuming--hoping!--it's shaped that way for some acoustic reason), this model pulls it off well!
Commenting has ended on this article.