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 | Fractals by William McDonough There are two kinds of fractals, so when you think about chaos and we start to when you think about how that renders itself as form, if we render that thought process visible wouldn’t that be interesting. When you look at fractals there’s the kind that explode out and become these huge swirling forms, or an oak tree for example that has a fractal relationship out to a certain point and it has ... Read Full Story |
| E=mc2 as a Poem by Bill McDonough Suddenly I saw Einstein as a poet. 'E' is the sun, its physics, its energy. And 'm' is the earth, and its mass, and its chemistry. And you put the two together its 'c2' and magic happens, biology, the thing that Einstein didn't deal with, the thing that scientists can't explain, the first single photosynthetic cell, who can explain that? When did life appear? How does that happen? What is that spa ... Read Full Story |  |
 | Textile Company by William McDonough Albin Kälin faced an all too familiar dilemma in manufacturing: that ofshrinking margins coupled with rising costs and ageing equipment. Asmanaging director of the Swiss firm Rohner Textil AG (Rohner), Kälinmade the decision to bolster his firm's efforts to pursue a sustainability strategy. The result was a 30% increase in total output,a drastic reduction in costs, and the production of the fir ... Read Full Story |
| Windows 95 by Bill McKibben Let's say you go into the clinic in a few years to get this sort of enhancement or genetic upgrade for your first child. Five years later you decide you want another child. By now, the upgrades are better, and there are more genes they know about. What's your first child - sort of Windows 95? The conversion of human beings into products means we will have all the attributes that go with products, ... Read Full Story |  |
 | New College Oxford by William McDonough We were inspired by a famous story told by Gregory Bateson about New College in Oxford, England. It went something like this. They had a main hall built in the early 1600s with beams forty feet long and two feet thick. A commitee was formed to try to find replacement trees because the beams were suffering from dry rot. If you keep in mind that a veneer from an English oak can be worth seven dollar ... Read Full Story |
| The Plight of the Bumblebee by by Janet Ritz on October 26th, 2007 With all the focus on the disappearance of the honeybee, there has been little discussion about the plight of the bumblebee, one of the hardest workers in the wild world of agriculture, despite this warning issued by the National Academy of Sciences last October. That focus may now change as word comes from scientists that at least one bumblebee species from the Northwestern region of the United ... Read Full Story |  |
 | Whales by Carl Sagan But the grandest creatures on the planet, the intelligent and graceful masters of the deep ocean are the great whales. They are the largest animals ever to evolve on the planet earth, larger by far than the dinosaurs. Their ancestors were meat-eating mammals who migrated 70 million years ago from the slow steps from the land into the waters. Whales like these humpbacks are still mammals. We hu ... Read Full Story |
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