Cricketeria, Too

From FastCompany, “This Giant Automated Cricket Farm Is Designed To Make Bugs A Mainstream Source Of Protein“.  Eeewww!!!

Inside a new building in an industrial neighborhood near the airport in Austin, a robot is feeding millions of crickets, 24 hours a day. The facility–a 25,000-square-foot R&D center that opened this month for the startup Aspire–uses technology that the company plans to soon duplicate in a farm 10 times as large. It’s a scale that the startup thinks is necessary to begin to make cricket food mainstream in the United States.

 

Eating bugs–or at least products made from bugs–has been growing in popularity. For a few years, it’s been possible to buy cricket snacks such as protein bars made with cricket flour or cricket chips (like Chirps) at some grocery stores or online. But for insect food to fulfill its sustainable promise of supplying protein without the massive carbon and land footprint of beef, it will have to be much more widely available, and more affordable. Aspire believes its farms can make that possible.

Here’s the actual ‘Automated Cricket Factory’. And I thought all you needed to do to ‘farm’ crickets was drop some crumbs on the floor and turn off the lights.

‘Stop Action’ Genius or Poster Child for International OCD Foundation

You judge, but do watch. His project is wonderful.

Phil Tippett has spent a lifetime in the film industry, working as a model-maker, visual effects supervisor, director and stop-motion animator.

He’s been involved with big-name productions such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and RoboCop among others. But his real passion lies in handmade stop-motion animation. For over 30 years, Tippett has been working on an incredibly detailed film called “Mad God”. He describes it as being set “in a Milton-esque world of monsters, mad scientists and war pigs.” Amazingly, each character is painstakingly constructed by hand from foam, clay, latex and wire. Despite all the arduous toil, Tippett sees “Mad God” as a form of therapy and a way to reconnect with a time when special effects and animation were all done by hand.

Hurricane Harvey – ‘Hanging Ten’ With My Dog in Houston

SurferToday – “The Glossary of Surfing Terms”

Discover the vocabulary of surfing and learn new words:

Aerial – a surf maneuver where a surfer hits the crest of the wave and flies through the air
A-frame – a wave peak breaking left and right with perfect shape
Aggro – an Australian expression for aggressive surfing or aggressive surfer
Alaia – a surfboard made of wood originally used by Hawaiians to surf breaking waves, in the late 19th century
Aloha – a Hawaiian greeting that means “hello” or “goodbye”
Amped – excited, stoked
Backdoor – when a surfer pulls into a hollow section from behind the section
Backside – when a surfer rides with his back to the wave
Backwash – when a wave sweeps up the beach and returns to the ocean, sometimes colliding with incoming waves

Read more

Ride, Forrest, Ride

CNN Money has the chocolates on Forrest Gump, “Now you, too, can “Run, Forrest, run!”

Nike is bringing back some vintage kicks from the pre-Jordan era: the Classic Cortez running shoes that were a hit in the 70’s and worn in the 1994 feel-good flick “Forrest Gump.”

Even those who never ran a marathon in the Cortez shoes — or weren’t alive in the ’70s — might still recognize them from the Tom Hanks film, where his character Gump wears them on a cross-country run from Alabama to the Southwest. Gump also wears them in the famous park bench scene where he cogitates about chocolates.

It’s amazing how Forrest’s slow twin, Timmber, has figured out that it’s much better to ride than run, but he still like those Nike Cortez runners.

Forest Gump’s slow twin, Timmber. “Ride, Timmber, Ride!”