Golden Ratio Chicken Coop
Lovely A Chicken Coop made in the shape of a Fibonacci Spiral I wouldn’t mind living there myself… if I was quite a bit smaller, and feathery etc.
A shift in gears; A change of scene
The reason why the blogging has been on a bit of a back-burner of late, is that I’ve opened a digital fabrication lab… in Wellington, which has meant (in a round about sort of way), I’ve shifted town. The photo above is the street outside… The Wellington Makerspace. So I’ve been living out of a suitcase in the since March… and have been doing A LOT of renovating… but now have a brand new facility to make calipers in. It looks a bit like this: The other news is that I have a new partner… Lee Bennett… … a formidably talented engineer (who has hitherto been making antique fighter-planes for Peter Jackson) who has taken a look at the calipers… and said “ok, we need to do this, that etc etc” – so we now have a couple of other caliper projects in the pipeline… … this is iteration…
More Fantastic Phi Nature Videos
Further to that other one from a couple of months ago…
The Golden Mean and Web Design
I’ve been meaning to write this for ages – so long in fact, that a fair few people have beaten me to it, and covered the ground I would have… … so I’ll run through the outstanding ones, mixed in with all sorts of hare-brained opinions of my own. The people I’m talking about here are proper designers. I’m a programmer who is occasionally forced to do design. Their word carries more authority than mine. All of the examples below make this site look like a shambles :) – I’ve actually done the redesign already, it’s just that it’s dependent on having a video… which I have yet to get around to making. 1) Nice detailed article by Jarel Remick over at net.tutsplus.com This gives a fairly good run-down of the structural makeup of a web-site – although although this is how the majority of web-sites “look”, and it is…
Fibonacci Solar Biomimicry
There was a load of fuss last year when this 13 year old invented this solar-array that got better results than the grown up ones, and all the blogs (that pretend to be all “green”, but really only exist to sell advertising) reported it as fact, then it turned out he’d measured the wrong thing etc etc… … well, the grown-ups appear to be having a crack at it themselves. And apparently they’re using the same configuration as sunflowers… which probably makes sense, if you’re not physically tracking the sun. Some flowers do… I don’t, on account of being a largely nocturnal geek. According to the article, this array configuration increases efficiency by .36%, while also reducing its land footprint by 15.8%… which um… doesn’t that mean an increase in efficiency of 16.16%? I would have thought so. It does probably make sense, because that is actually what a gazillion…