Adventures in Retirement
We have had a fantastic autumn. The forecast for the rest of September is sunny with daytime highs in the low to mid 20′s celsius. The walk to work this morning was beautiful.
Do you think there is such a thing as comfort architecture?
There are many comforting things; soup, a fire in the fireplace, a down quilt. I guess anything that is linked to a warm memory can be called a comfort item. Even though I hated it as a kid, today the smell of Vicks Vap-o-Rub is a comforting thing for me.
I was sitting in the main mall at the hospital today and noticed the design. It so reminded me of the buildings at the university I went to. All that 60′s and 70′s preformed concrete, open centre, overhanging design that makes you think of Expo 67 in Montreal. Then it struck me! I felt good. My university days were happy times and I was feeling so at ease sitting there.
So what about you? Does architecture do it for you? Maybe your grandparents farm house, or the cottage design. Maybe the look of an old English pub. Must be a few of you out there or we would not have as many similar looking man caves as we do.
Holy Smokes! Harvard University researchers have developed a method to encode binary data onto bits of DNA making DNA the densest, most stable storage media ever. The approach they use is actually quite simple even if the enabling technology of DNA sequencing and synthesizing has taken years to develop and perfect. When I read the article and watched this video I could help thinking of the computer in Star Trek.
Obviously this is a long way from being practical in any sense. This work is research and I say very cool research. If you read the comments on the article you will see lots of people slagging the work and pointing out all sorts of problems. People who are poo-pooing this research completely missed the point and are incredibly short-sighted and just plain naïve. Future advances in biochemical based information processing will solve many of the issues the naysayers point out. Researchers will continue to look to nature for answers and they will find them.
Read up on it here
or better yet here.
My Elysium 