The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses. Our ultimate goal is to be able to store excess energy in or alongside the Solar Roadways. This renewable energy replaces the need for the current fossil fuels used for the generation of electricity. This, in turn, cuts greenhouse gases literally in half.

Solar Roadways

[via Dale Allyn]

This is a nice piece on the amount of work that goes into commercial food still and video photography. I love them screwing down the pizza to make the “pull” work better. 150 people for a few seconds of video. Great stuff (the shoot video, not the pizza).

Domino’s has a photo contest to promote their brand.

This is an incredible interview with Christopher Finch who has just published a biography of Close and the artist Chuck Close.

Jeffery Brown does an excellent job here and Close, who has various disabilities including severe learning issues shines. What an amazing mind he has.

The NewsHour post is here: Conversation: Chuck Close, Christopher Finch.

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Holy shit. Get this, I think they’re doing it.

This is an incredible screencast by Stephen Wolfram and I highly recommend watching it, it will blow your mind. I’d heard about this project but had never seen it demoed and talked about like this. One of the more incredible demonstrations of something that all of us can use right now.

Use WolframAlpha here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

I just downloaded and installed the WolframAlpha iPhone App.

I just found out that I was born on a Wednesday.

Check on the weather in Warren, CT right now.

Enough, I need to get on to other things… Wow. I’m going to be using this, a lot.

[via Dale Allyn]

For me, this is less about these fantastic paper airplanes and more about the work and teaching of science teacher Slater Harrison. Listen to his wonderfully supportive and enthusiastic narration, for example:

When you work through trouble, success is sweet.

I want this guy as my science teacher!

More resources on this and related projects:

http://www.youtube.com/user/sciencetoymaker
http://www.sciencetoymaker.org/
http://sciencetoymaker.org/hangGlider/index.htm

This made my day.

[via Boingboing]

Here’s his website which is also excellent: Michael Mauro Photography.

Nice documentary on The Impossible Project which is the new, reinvented Polaroid.

[via Daring Fireball]

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Fantastic idea and video. The ideas are creative, fun, brilliant.

[via Kottke.org]

This is a fantastic documentary film on the history of pixel art, both digital and analog. Very well done.

[via Kottke.org]

This is a nice compilation post over at PetaPixel. I’ve seen them all but if you haven’t they’re worth a look.