inkbluesky

ghost train. I used a commercial action from Kubota - Artistic actions Volume II - antique with glow. It does tend blow out most of the color so first I duped the layer and selected multiply for layer properties which gave me an intense saturation to start with.

OMA designs Residential Tower in Singapore or as I like to call it The Jetson’s Apartment Complex

Four individual apartment towers are vertically offset from one another and suspended from a central core. The skyline of floating towers directly relates to the surrounding building volumes and explores the most attractive views towards the city center and an extensive green zone to the north. The lifted apartment towers reduce the building’s footprint to a minimum; the liberated ground level provides communal leisure activities embedded in the tropical landscape.

I had occasion a few years ago to read up a little on the literal nuts, bolts and stresses involved in structural engineering and this building seems to test the limits of what is possible.

Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

“The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. “This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of America’s most popular environmental protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction.”

At this point many of us have heard someone piss and moan about how the ESA has caused them some kind of hardship. I genuinely sympathize and maybe it is time to have a good rational scientifically informed revisit of the Endangered Species Act by our elected representatives. It is not time to sneak around our legislators and try to shove some radical fringe ideas down the publics throat through some bureaucratic back door..