Monthly Archive for September, 2008

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Space X’s Falcon 1 Makes it to Orbit!!!

Liftoff.

Main booster separation.

Pop them corks!

Wow! What a week for space exploration.
First the Chinese spacewalk, and now Elon Musk’s company Space X has successfully launched a vehicle into orbit.

We are now entering the age of commercial space travel. No longer do our Earthly borders matter, from this point on there is only one border. The gravity well between Earth and space.

Check out the screams of amazement in the background of this incredible video:

We are just (choke!) so proud to be human today!

Great Job to the people at Space X; and of course to China, our allies in the East.

Nat Geo Presents – Best Science Images ’08!





Science! Oh yeah, sweety sweet science! So much funny fun fun! Science! Bum-ba-dummmm!

SCIENCE!

Nat Geo has released their picks for Best Science Photos ’08, and they are stunnifying.

The Great Schlep!



Comedienne extraordinaire Sarah Silverman has just released this incredibly hilarious and profane video for The Great Schlep.

The Great Schlep is a movement aimed at getting young Jewish kids to fly down to Florida, visit with Grammy and Grampa, educate them on the necessity of an Obama presidency, and get them to cast their vote for the man.

(Yo, this is Sarah Silverman. I’m serious when I say it gets profane. That said, this is lovely, uplifting, and hilarious.)


The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

We Pr’Obama! We say G’Obama!

Kinship With All Dolphins


Have you ever been on a date where you have so little in common with the other person that you find yourself asking them 3rd grade questions like “if you could be an animal, what animal would you be?” No? Well try it sometime, it may just turn your night around. Me, I’d choose a dolphin.

They are amazing animals. I have rarely felt more awestruck and humbled than when swimming alongside them in the wild.

If you’ve never done this before, it’s an incredible experience. One of those 1001 must do’s before hitting the big jackpot in this game of life. Speaking of which, I’ve just added lion cuddling, personal jet-flight, and wingsuit gliding to my list.

But what I never knew before about dolphins and just found out (thank you Neal), is that they can do this:

Ok, so humans can do that too…but we can’t play with our rings or bounce them through the water. How do dolphins do it? Theories abound, but no one’s really sure. The one thing I do know is that it looks really, really fun. They’ve got to be at least as smart as we are.

So make sure you buy dolphin safe tuna, so that this won’t ever happen!

-jordan

"Z" is for Peace.

Kinship With All Lions

In line with this week’s Kinship with all life theme, I present Christian the Lion:

Amazing… cheesy music and all.
-jordan

FusionMan!

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s buzz lightyear!

No it’s FusionMan! Swiss pilot and skydiver Yves Rossy is now the first man to fly the English Channel with a jetpack. The future is here, kiddos… and it needs to be seen to be believed:

I don’t know about you, but I was one of those little kids that always wanted to fly. That’s actually not true, I wanted to breathe underwater, my twin brother wished he could fly. And not like superman or buzz lightyear (he was after our time)… more like a flying squirrel.


Which is totally awesome, not embarrassing. Just ask this guy:

It never ceases to amaze me what man can dream up and accomplish. Now if only someone could figure out how to breathe underwater...

-Jordan

Have a Great Weekend!

Wow!

It’s been a great week. A great month. A great time to be SuperForesting.

Have a safe and happy weekend, y’all!

See you next week with lots more righteous sustainability sweetness.

Love,

Team SuperForest.

Operation NICE

Good Friday Ya’ll!

I just ran across a most excellent blog and immediately thought of SuperForest’s Humanifesto.

So naturally, I have to post it.

Operation NICE is the name. It is filled with all kinds of great ideas on how to share your niceness with others.

But don’t take my word for it, here is the first post of the blog, from creator Melissa Morris Ivone:

The other day I was waiting for an elevator in my building with one other gentleman. As the elevator arrived, I hesitated. I usually let others enter first, as a courtesy. But this gentleman held out his hand, motioning me to the door. As I walked through, he said with a chuckle, “You didn’t really think I was going to walk in here first, did you?” I responded, “Well, I don’t like to take anything for granted nowadays.”

That one minor gesture brightened my day! I started to think, “What a great world this would be if everyone had consideration for others.” It’s a shame that that’s not the case currently. It’s obvious that common courtesy is lacking in society today. Just drive down a major highway and you’ll see that.

What we all need is a little NICE.

Operation NICE encourages individuals to be proactively NICE. Stop by to read some positive, upbeat news stories (yes, they exist) about nice people. Download some tools (coming soon!) to help you in your quest to communicate the concept of niceness. Share a story or two about how someone made your day.

It is not true that nice guys finish last. Nice guys are winners before the game ever starts.
- Addison Walker

Beautifully put.

So do yourself a solid and check out Mrs. Melissa’s awesome blog, and spread some nice this weekend!

Sincerely yours,

Spoon

The Vieger House

Hiya! Recently my wife and I got an older house in a neat-o neighborhood built in 1957. We were blessed with the chance to renovate it and turn it into something spectacular. With this great opportunity came an important and fun responsibility of making sure the final product was something not only built with environmental awareness and efficiency in mind while it was being built but also in it’s use, everyday. We kept blue orby care, enjoyment and living all in mind.

Here are some products we offered to the house. It accepted!

Ranai Tankless Water Heater

Eurofase Low Voltage Lighting

Kohler Low Flush Toilets

It has “Dual Flush Technology” which includes a 1.6 gpf and also an eco-friendly, 0.8-gallon flush option. The daily devotional derriere domicile saves as much as 6,000 gallons of water annually over a traditional 1.6-gallon toilet. However, we still use the practice, “If it’s yellow…

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs 6500 K

K.I.S.S. Below Flow Sprinkler System

Succulents and local grasses

Radiant Barrier Paint and Radiant Barrier Insulation In attic and underneath Pier and beam foundation

Jenn Air Refrigerator-it has an alarm that goes off if the door isn’t closed all the way. It says” Hey you! Stretch! Close me, I’m wasting energy! but I still love you”

All the major points of entry front, back and side doors are double sealed. They make a great “Psshhhhhhhunk!” sound when you close them! Ooooooooh space crafty!

And we went with Green Mountain Energy. They would ensure we get our power from wind and solar~ Thank you wind!!!Thank you sun!!!

This whole project has been quite an outstanding sophomore class in building right and right living. We loved it!

and we’re getting better at it everyday~

Love,

TV

Helicopter Prodigy! Machine Teaches Itself to Fly!

This is pretty neat, here, kiddies.

Toy helicopters are pretty fun, right? Of course. Still, they are one of the more difficult things to maneuver because they require constant input from the pilot to keep it steady. Well, I was over at LiveScience and found an article about some dudes over at Stanford (Andrew Ng, a Stanford University professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley) are creating software that allows a helicopter to learn difficult maneuvers that only a pilot can do by watching other helicopters perform them.

Thats right, these helicopters have real human eyes!

No no… of course they don’t have eyes. They just record the actions of pilots, and can reproduce those actions on their own. It is the first step to creating machines that can go places too dangerous for humans to go. Neat!

Here’s a video of the helicopter doing sweet tricks:

And here’s a link to a video where they explain what the project is about:

Learning Helicopter.

Sorry, I can’t embed that one. Its “protected”.

Take to the skies, SuperForesters!

War is Over – A Clarification




Good Morning SuperForest,

Jackson here.

I owe you all an apology. Yesterday I posted the “War is Over (Via NASCAR & Coors Light!)” post as if I had found it online and was simply passing it along, where in fact I created it myself, and put it up as if it were real.

This is why…

For me, there is nothing more exciting and amazing than the transmission of ideas. Ideas are our main currency here at SF, and we try to find the best, brightest, shiniest ideas and pass them along to you, so that you can form your own ideas, and we can all grow together.

Yesterday I made a mis-step. I was not thinking that many would think that the ad was real. I incorrectly assumed that people knew about John & Yoko’s worldwide campaign for Peace, which is what the whole thing was based on.

Here’s the story: In December of 1969, John and Yoko purchased ad space on billboards in more than eleven cities worldwide. The cities included New York, Tokyo, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, London and Toronto. The billboards simply read: “War is Over! If You Want It. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”

I look to John Lennon a great deal for inspiration and guidance, and in reflecting on his ethos of Peace branding I thought: “Well, it’s fine and good for a bearded, anti-establishment hippie to buy ads for Peace and promote it. But how powerful would it be if major corporations also took a stand for Peace?” And why wouldn’t they?

Then I thought how fun it would be to subvert the whole “Red state/Blue state, Us/Them” mentality by having the ads come from companies that one would assume to be “Pro-war.”

Now, I have no idea what Coors Light and NASCAR think about war and Peace. (Hopefully they are interested in Peace because it makes sound economic sense.) I chose them because in my mind they served as good examples of “Red state corporations.”

The very idea of “Red and Blue corporations” is too big to get into in this post.

The issue here is that I should have presented my idea in the context of: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if this happened? Wouldn’t this be extraordinary to see?” Instead, I succumbed to my impish desire to prank and provoke. (And I forgot that most of our lovely readers we probably born after 1969.)

This is a matter of trust. When you read something on SuperForest, I want you to know that it can be trusted, that WE can be trusted.

What I find wonderful about SuperForest is our transparency, meaning that what we do and what we say are in line. We have no need to hide in the shadows, we can dance in the sun.

Love to All,

-Jackson

Plaf!

If you’d consult your Spanish or French dictionary and look up the word plaf you’d probably find out that it means splash (it’s a bit of a slang word so you may not find it in a dictionary). But anyway, in the comming context it means splash.

Plaf is the result of a collaboration between MOMO and Eltono. Both being two really great art blogs/instances who do street art and related stuff.
Plaf can be seen as an outdoor exhibition through the entire metropolis of New York. The exhibited objects are so called “autonomous mechanisms”, mechanisms that function on their own. In this art perspective it are just sculptures that move due to natural influences. For example the wind, the tides and the sun. In fact the objects in Plaf are a bit like Theo Jansens Strandbeest. Take a look.


This is in fact the first object in the outdoor exhibition and it was placed in the East River at Hallets Cove (an area in Queens). As you see the installation requires some wind and a bit of streaming water to start moving.

The coming time Plaf will be placing their autonomous mechanisms throughout the city. They’ll even be giving out maps showing where you can find their work

via:wooster collective

-jdh