Friday, April 14, 2006

Green office towers

Some of the green features in the new NYC Hearst Tower (link will come when it’s out from behind the TimesSelect wall):

The Hearst Tower lobby largely relies on the radiant floor for both cooling and heating. Tubes embedded in the floor pump hot water through the system, yielding heat that provides a comfort zone to about six feet above the floor. In the warmer months, cold water is pumped through to absorb the heat generated by the sun on the stone floor. Brandon Haw, a senior partner at Foster & Partners, likened the effect to entering a church on a hot day.

“All the stone has embodied the coolness,” he said. “This is a huge space - we don’t want to just throw loads of air into it.”

The building’s roof has been designed to collect rainwater, which will reduce the amount dumped into the city’s sewer system by 25 percent. Harvested in a 14,000-gallon reclamation tank in the basement, it will replace water lost to evaporation in the office air-conditioning system. It will also be fed into a special pumping system to irrigate plants and trees outside the building - and to serve “Ice Falls,” the lobby water sculpture.

RELATED: I compare the building I work in - the most ambitious modern architecture within a 40-mile radius - to the Hearst Tower.

Limbaugh WRONG on Domenech

My mother will quote Limbaugh’s words to me as fact. Media Matters:

On the April 12 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that after “the left-wing fringe threw a hissy fit” about The Washington Post’s hiring of Ben Domenech to write Red America, a conservative weblog on washingtonpost.com, the Post “concocted some phony excuse that the guy that they had hired was a plagiarist” and “he was gone inside of two weeks.” Limbaugh added that the allegations of plagiarism against Domenech were “a bunch of garbage [meant] to impugn his character and reputation at the same time.” In fact, on the day of his March 24 resignation, only four days after his blog for the Post began, Domenech admitted to using other writers’ work “inappropriately and without attribution.” READ ON.

Hearing glasses

Still no improvement from the hearing loss. I’m adjusting well. (Not so cranky anymore.) My mother says see a chiropractor. Some friends say see an acupuncturist. Me, I still want to find a researcher.

Vertigo continues. And aural cues to spatial orientation are gone; I’m always confused about where sounds are coming from. That and noisy rooms are probably the most disconcerting things I deal with now.

Maybe I should get me a pair of these hearing glasses:

Varibel says its glasses can detect which direction sounds come from, amplifying words spoken directly to the wearer while dampening background noise.

The company’s hearing glasses have four interconnected microphones embedded along both arms of the frame, each taking in sound. Signals are sent along the frame to a built-in processor, which localizes sounds by calculating the time it takes the signals to reach the different microphones. All sounds coming from the front of the carrier are intensified, while noise from other directions is dampened. This means that a person speaking to the carrier’s face would be clearly heard even in noisy environments.

South Park should kiss-off Viacom II

IT’S NOT OVER. IT’S ONLY JUST BEGUN.

From my South Park should Kiss-off Viacom post:

My advice to Matt and Trey? Announce they’re leaving Comedy Central unless they get, say, the same kind of total control that huge Hollywood directors and stars like Cruise get over the content and distribution of their movies.

To back up their threat, they also announce that they are “exploring” Andy Bowers’ suggestion for West Wing (which was itself derived from MIT media analyst Ivan Askwith): pay-per-view distribution of South Park.

They further announce that they are exploring distribution deals with Netflix and TiVo. What would Sumner say to that?

Matt and Trey have done so much better than that. No threats, instead they’ve produced the most brilliant pair of targeted satirical episodes yet. From Part I of Cartoon Wars (from Matthew Stintson via James Joyner):

Cartman: And in just a few weeks from now, “Family Guy” will be off the air forever.

Kyle: Off the air? But, we’re just trying to get the Mohammed episode pulled.

Cartman: It’s simple television economics, Kyle. All it takes to kill a show forever is get one episode pulled. If we convince the network to pull this episode for the sake of Muslims, then the Catholics can demand a show they don’t like get pulled. And then people with disabilities can demand another show get pulled, and so on and so on, until “Family Guy” is no more…

Part 2 ends with Jesus crapping on President Bush, an animated question mark over “The End” and Ayman al-Zawahiri in subtitles saying, “Oh yeah, take THAT! We burned you!”

Ted Turner invented cable networks when he put TBS on satellite; HBO invented pay cable when it became the first non-terrestrial broadcast TV network; South Park can become the first iProgam and invent individual series syndication online if it becomes the first non-telecast program.

More than mere masters of creative content, Matt & Trey have been inventive in their use of animation technology and their use of the Internet to extend the show’s reach began back when Comedy Central was carried on far fewer cable systems than it is today. They can do it!

RELATED: Tom Cruise is on Primetime tonight. Diane Sawyer will ask about Oprah, Scientology and quiet birth. But will she ask about South Park?

LATER: She did. He answered, “...no, I honestly didn’t even know about it.”

UGA & Domestic Partnership benefits

More from the Berkeley of the South today in Southern Voice:

The president of the University of Georgia will announce within two weeks whether the school will offer limited benefits to its gay faculty and staff, according the school’s spokesperson.

UGA President Michael Adams is also expected to address whether the state’s flagship public university will add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.

Health insurance is controlled at the regents’ level; they and Adams have been batting the issue of ‘soft’ benefits back and forth.

UGA freshman Chuck Cohen chairs the Social Justice Committee for the university’s gay student group, Lambda Alliance. Cohen said Adams has not been an advocate for gay issues on campus.

“What he tells us is that UGA is a flagship school and cannot jump ahead,” Cohen said. “But really he wants to avoid any firestorm and direct all attention to the Board of Regents.”

At least two state universities also governed by the Board of Regents, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University, already offer soft domestic partner benefits, according to Cohen.

“Administrators are terrified of tackling any gay issue because of the potential for homophobic backlash,” he said. “But what they should worry about are students that don’t feel safe.” [...]

A spokesperson for UGA’s Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Employees & Supporters organization said that by stalling, Adams is only drawing a spotlight to his lack of action.

“I believe that one of his primary fears is based in publicity; that having such a progressive action will generate public interest and potential backlash,” said GLOBES spokesperson Adrian Childs. “The irony is the adoption of progressive policies by institutions of higher education really isn’t newsworthy; but suppression by an administration is.”

ALSO FROM UGA: Student detained for wearing a mask.