David Nolan here again, and I was going to just provide a link to a 30 strong list of Science Blogs composed by Times Online, that can be found in their Eureka Zone. WOW! I thought Paul gets some great comments over here at Kitchen and Residential Design. Their list generated a heated response from what appears to be enraged scientists and science writers, given the size of the words they are using and the imaginative phrasing. Nothing like a Global Warming Denialist blog to get scientists of all types in an uproar!
How did the Times Online include the offending blog in their list I wonder? Surely they must have read "Watts Up With That?" by Anthony Watts before they included it. Maybe Times Online is trying to get a bump in web traffic to charge more for advertisement. Enraging your readers might not be the best methodology to increase traffic, but it certainly makes for interesting reading.
If you do read the comments in the Eureka Zone, here's a definition of an abbreviation used:
AGW (anthropogenic global warming) - global warming caused by the actions of humans, not natural causes.
The reason I wanted to post the list though, is to bring a little something different to the loyal readers of Kitchen and Residential Design. I love when Paul breaks down scientific information in his posts so that everyone can understand and relate to it in their everyday life. A lot of science blogs have writers who do the same thing, and just as well.
My favorite from the list is by Ed Yong called Not Exactly Rocket Science. Ed Yong published a book by the same name, as pictured above. He focuses on new discoveries and has an easy-to-understand writing style, while not dumbing down the details or leaving out data. I find it refreshing to read about science from the perspective of an educated journalist helping me to understand complicated ideas and theories, rather than bone-dry drivel delivered down a researcher's nose at me.
Check out the list if you like. The "Eureka Team" is looking for reader suggestions on other science blogs to compose a "Best 100 Science Blogs" list. Let's see if we can get Kitchen and Residential Design on there. I would love to read the comments then!
Is this meant to be some kind of a punishment for misbehaving children?
Instead of threatening to bake them into pies a la Hansel and Gretel, do you threaten your kids with "Behave or I'm going to buy a Jonathan Adler Junior blue zebra carpet!"
I can only imagine how much this stuff costs. Here's an idea, if you're going to spend a lot of money on your kids furniture and accessories, why not buy something with real value instead of just freak value? Am I so wrong?
As I mentioned last week, in exactly one more week I'll be in New York as a guest of Brizo faucets. Brizo is flying me and 18 other designer/ bloggers to attend a product education seminar and a Fashion Week runway show by the designer Jason Wu. This promises to be an event that will live on in story and myth for centuries, and that's no exaggeration. In the interest of keeping the FCC off my back I need to state loudly and clearly that Brizo is picking up the tab for this excursion. And to that I'd like to add thank God for Brizo.
My itinerary arrived yesterday and as was the case last September when I went to this same event, I'll be spending the weekend at the 70 Park Avenue Hotel in Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood. The hotel, as the name would suggest, is on Park Avenue at 38th Street. Four blocks to the north is New York's famed Grand Central Terminal. Inside the Terminal, on the east balcony, is Charlie Palmer's Métrazur. My fellow attendees at the Brizo event and I will be dining at Métrazur next Thursday night.
I was looking over the menu last night and I cannot wait to try the place. The restaurant looks incredible, and it's impossible to beat the location. Grand Central Terminal is another one of New York's great buildings. By extension, that makes it one of the world's great buildings.
If I were to walk out the front door of the hotel where I'll be and stand in the middle of Park Avenue then look north, here's what I'd see.
Grand Central Terminal sits in the middle of Park Avenue at 42nd Street. Since the building opened in 1913 (after a ten year construction), The south facade has risen up from Park Avenue like a Beaux-Arts mirage. From the outside, you'd never imagine that underneath that building is the worlds largest train station. Grand Central Terminal occupies 48 acres in total. Now that, is a big building.
At the top of the south facade is the station's clock. At 13 feet in circumference, it's also the largest example of Tiffany glass in the world. Surrounding the clock is a statue depicting Mercury with Minerva and Hercules alongside him. To give you a sense of the scale, zoom in on the Terminal's facade in the Street View above. That statuary and clock grouping is 48 feet high. There's a great blog called Which Yet Survive, and it's all about Manhattan statuary. Here's a great post about the Mercury statue if you'd like to read more about it.
The terminal was nearly torn down in 1968 and threats to demolish it led to the establishment of the US historical preservation movement. The drive to save Grand Central Terminal .enlisted some pretty high profile supporters, most notably Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis.
Once saved, the building languished in a state of filthy disrepair for decades. The enormous windows were so caked with grime that no light passed through them. The incredible ceiling had become so coated with the residue of 70 years of tobacco smoke that the mural of the constellations couldn't be seen. The building was restored to its original glory in 1998, after a four-year renovation.
It's an incredible structure, and it's most definitely one that's etched into the American psyche. The 80,000 square foot main concourse has been in more movies than just about any other location in the city. From North by Northwest to I am Legend, there always seems to be a good excuse to film inside that building. Dreamworks even worked in an animated version of it in the movie Madagascar.
So the next time you're in New York, or maybe it'll be the first time you're in New York, it doesn't really matter either way. What does matter is that you find your way to Park and 42nd. Once inside the building, walk into the main concourse and just look up. Spin in a slow circle if you want to, I always do. Just look up into that cerulean sky and marvel. Who cares that everybody'll know you're a tourist? You'll never see any of them again anyhow. So as you're doing your slow spin, thank the Vanderbilts for leaving behind such an incredible legacy.
But wait! There's more! After you're done having a moment under those 125 foot high ceilings, find this passage just off the main concourse.
The area under that arch has the most amazing acoustics you'll ever experience. It's called the Whispering Gallery, and this intrepid Manhattan blogger describes it better than I can. Grand Central Station's Hidden Acoustical Wonder. Amazing!
All images and a handful of the factoids about the terminal are fromWikipedia.
Julie Richey is an award-winning master mosaicist and great friend of this blog. She won the prestigious Orsoni Prize in Venice last year for her dimensional mosaic, Night Shirt.
Night Shirt now hangs in Venice's Orsoni Gallery alongside the other greats from the long history of mosaic as an art form. Julie's based in Dallas and shows her work all over the world. She can still put in a mean floor too.
Well Julie Richey put together something she's calling the Mosaic Masterpieces Tour, an eight-day excursion to explore the art, culture, food and wine of Italy this June. Julie's leading the group and she'll be accompanied by another titan in the world of fine art mosaics, Nancie Mills-Pipgras, the editor of Mosaic Art Now. The group is limited to 15 to make sure that this tour is un-tour-like as possible. This trip's been coordinated through ACIS, the American Council of International Studies. ACIS is the world leader in educational travel. ACIS' superb planning ensures that this trip will be about art and laughter, not missed connections and lackluster meals.
With ACIS taking care of the specifics, Julie and Nancie can be the personable, knowledgeable and good humored people they are. These women are even bigger Italophiles than I am, and that's quite an accomplishment. Travelers on the Mosaic Masterpieces Tour can expect to see masterworks up close and from behind the velvet ropes. They can also expect to experience Italy as Italy and at a pace where it can be savored.
The tour will start on June 9th in Venice. Then it's on to Ravenna, Siena and finally Rome. Ahh, Rome. Julie assures me that Rome's famous Carciofi alla Giudea will be in season when she and her group arrive. Carciofi alla Giudea are an early summer treat, fried artichokes. Their description loses something when it's translated to English, but to eat one is to taste the very essence of the sun-drenched fields that surround the Eternal City.
A tour such as this is an ideal opportunity for design professionals, mosaicists and mosaic aficionados to get a real feel for the history of this ancient art form while at the same time, seeing up close its expression today. From the Orsoni foundry and gallery in Venice to the Byzantine wonders of Ravenna, from the Medieval treasures of Siena to the High Renaissance glories of Rome, it's all here.
I've begun the process of rethinking Kitchen and Residential Design and so far as I'm concerned, everything except for the name is fair game in this reworking. I'm going to move everything over to a new Word Press template and that's going to give me a lot more flexibility so far as how everything is going to look and function. This is a process of course, and I'm not in any great hurry to have all this done tomorrow. I have however set a goal for a re-launch in May.
I want to use this planned change to ratchet up what I do here by a couple of notches and that's where I'd love your feedback. For starters, what's missing? I mean that in the layout sense and in the editorial sense. Is there a function on another blog you like and wouldn't mind sharing? Are there topics I don't touch on or touch on too much? I write this thing as a means of self expression of course, but what keeps me writing it is the feedback I get from you guys. So now's your chance to help me make this a better site. Pretend for a moment that you're running the show. What would you do differently? How can I make this site better? Oh, and unless some angel investor wants to descend, this has to be done on the cheap.
David Nolan here again, and I was going to just provide a link to a 30 strong list of Science Blogs composed by Times Online, that can be found in their Eureka Zone. WOW! I thought Paul gets some great comments over here at Kitchen and Residential Design. Their list generated a heated response from what appears to be enraged scientists and science writers, given the size of the words they are using and the imaginative phrasing. Nothing like a Global Warming Denialist blog to get scientists of all types in an uproar!
