This winter has hung around for far too long. Last month the UK saw their second coldest March on record and I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had enough with snow, the cold and everything else that comes with this horrendous weather… that is, until I saw this beautiful video of Paris in wintertime by Andrew Julian.
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April 11, 2013 - See more posts by Philip
I’m endlessly fascinated by the idea of Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency that’s certainly shaking up the ideas of traditional financial institutions. If you’re unfamiliar, read this excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. It was introduced in 2009 by a pseudonymous developer, Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. In trade, one bitcoin is subdivided into 100 million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal places.
Bitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an Internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that confirm bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes.
The well-produced video below gives a really great sense of illustrating what Bitcoin is and how it works. It seriously feels like the future of currency, even if Bitcoin isn’t necessarily the future itself. Watch and learn.
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April 10, 2013 - See more posts by Bobby
Monocle takes a look at Grasse in the south of France, a town known for it’s robust creation of perfumes. The video is beautiful, framing the town in an incredible light. But it’s also quite an interesting piece as you get to see the changing culture of perfumery. There are artistans who’ve been making scents for hundreds of years, which is based on traditions and experienced noses. On the other hand you have science now playing a large part in the market, being able to manipulate and change how scents are created. As the correspondant Gillian Dobias mentions in the piece, these artists work to create something invisible from raw materials that are so very visible. What a fascinating career.
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April 4, 2013 - See more posts by Bobby
If you’re looking for a fun place to hang out and interact with data (and who isn’t?) try the Teton County Library in Jackson, Wyoming. The library has a new addition built by Gilday Architects. And inside the new entrance lobby, you’ll find a stunning installation created by E/B Office. The New York-based practice has filled the lobby with five miles of fiber optic cable cut into a thousand segments.
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April 4, 2013 - See more posts by Alex
I’ve spent the last several hours watching two dozen or so videos from the Creators Project, and I regret nothing. The videos are great, highlighting work created by some embarrassingly talented folks. One of the newest videos is focused on the light installation on the San Francisco Bay Bridge that Bobby wrote about last week, and another one I particularly like focuses on the work of Aranda\Lasch.
Lead by Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch, the architecture firm has built a body of work along the boundaries of what most would call architecture, spilling over into a kind of computer and fabrication science where the firm experiments with ideas about everything from crystals to infinity. While their website is molting into something new, the two are pointing the curious to their flickr account. There, you can find more pictures (like the ones above) of an excellent project featured in the aforementioned video: a set for the band yeasayer. If you’re unfamiliar with the band, they are bueno and I added one of their songs to the TFIB March Playlist so you can take a listen.
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March 28, 2013 - See more posts by Alex