'We're in sort of the early, early days of this,' says Michael Green, a Vancouver architect who has gained international attention for evangelizing about the potential for tall wooden buildings. Spurred by new ways to work with wood and concerns about the environmental toll of urban construction, they are trying to push the limits of height for wood construction and win wider acceptance for its use. Scientists and architects across the globe are trying to adapt this ancient building material for the demands of the modern city. Yet it represents a leap forward for a material long regarded as too weak, variable, and flammable to support high-rise buildings. As skyscrapers go, the boxy structure is modest. A few kilometers from downtown Vancouver, on the University of British Columbia campus, workers are putting the finishing touches on an 18-story dormitory set to be the world's tallest wooden building. Not far from Canadian forests thick with Douglas firs, the most ambitious effort yet to harness these remarkable qualities in a human structure is rising. Its luminous, patterned wood can be sculpted into virtually any shape. A single tree can store half its weight in carbon and can replace itself, given enough time. Kilogram for kilogram, a wooden beam made from this fir is 3.5 times stronger than steel. It's supple enough to sway in windstorms without snapping, yet strong enough to support its weight-up to 160 metric tons. The trunk, made mostly of slender dead cells each a few millimeters long, can reach heights of 100 meters. Links: Collapsing NYC Skyscraper, NCAA Bagmen, Yahoo, Health Insurance, Etc.A Douglas fir tree is a marvel of natural engineering.Water Waves with Angled Crests: Preprint Available Monday, June 30, 2014.Well, you shouldnвЂ™t get cable anyways-why not read? ( Silicon Valley is great, though.)ДЄ somewhat sad but quite interesting article on Tom Lehrer.

Why unbundling cable wonвЂ™t save you much money. On bicycle laws: why cyclists should be able to roll through stop signs.

I must admit I found myself doing the same thing as the author of this article about Tiki BarberвЂ™s website that lets fans pay to do various activities with athletes: I started searching for the most obscure and absurd things, e.g., the karaoke. Unfortunately, see this recent news: the IRS isnвЂ™t letting employers nudge employees to the health exchanges. On health care: Why employers will stop offering health insurance. WouldnвЂ™t it make sense to tax such outside real estate investment higher? Also on Yahoo: how can Yahoo be worth less than zero. I found this particularly interesting as someone who has very careful notes for a whole range of things-IвЂ™ll interrupt conversations with (certain) friends to вЂњconsult my journalsвЂќ, knowing exactly where to find something I canвЂ™t remember, especially when it comes to literature.Дavid Auerbach on product management and Marissa Mayer. A perhaps naive question: this isnвЂ™t illegal in terms of law, just in terms of NCAA regulations, right? (Well, except for the tax code.) Interesting article about the bag men who direct and link the booster ecosystem in NCAA football. For more, see the BBC documentary (part 2 and part 3) and the New Yorker article (paywall). This is really scary/fascinating: there was a design flaw in the CitiCorp Center tower in Manhattan that could have led to its collapse.The writeup on my math, linguistics and writing freshman seminar is in the works. Now that my PhD is done-for the water wave aficionados out there, I will post a link to the preprint of my research sometime soon, I hope 1-itвЂ™s time to start catching up on things.

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