I have now spoken of lime and sand, with their varieties and points of excellence. Next comes the consideration of stone-quarries from which dimension stone and supplies of rubble to be used in building are taken and brought together. The stone in quarries is found to be of different and unlike qualities. In some it is soft: for example, in the environs of the city at the quarries of Grotta Rossa, Palla, Fidenae, and of the Alban hills; in others, it is medium, as at Tivoli, at Amiternum, or Mt. Soracte, and in quarries of this sort; in still others it is hard, as in lava quarries. There are also numerous other kinds: for instance, in Campania, red and black tufas; in Umbria, Picenum, and Venetia, white tufa.

In any case, stone, when used for columns or piers, must first be affixed to a hollow box made from composite board and then should be set firmly upon the bed of a wooden porch or deck. Further the wooden base should then itself be set, in it's turn, upon stone and mud pavements to allow the wood to fully participate in the humours of water. [emphasis added].

Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture. Book II, Chapter VII. Vitruvius. Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: Humphrey Milford. Oxford University Press. 1914

Who am I to argue with 2000 years of tradition?

We threw 2000 lbs of robot at Mars and it sent this picture back:

Impossible is a word that gets smaller everyday.

So good, go and play.

Karl Gerstner: “I see graphic design as a matter of solving problems; art as a matter of inventing them.”

More.

Dropbox is second only to Quicksilver for deep integration into my workflow — so deep in fact that, like Quicksilver, I use it so much that I almost forget it's a separate application and not a part of the OS.

Quite simply, Dropbox is a fantastic app and if you own a computer, there is really no reason why you shouldn't be using it. Here's why:

1. It's a folder that syncs. That's it. You drop something in there and, in short order, it's everywhere you've installed Dropbox. And you can install it pretty much everywhere: Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. iPhone, Android, Blackberry and, usefully, it can also be accessed by any modern browser and Internet Explorer.

Having a piece of your file system that quietly syncs itself across the cloud is a powerful productivity tool: a seamless combination of ubiquitous access and backups.

One example: Notesy, a fantastic note-taking app for the iPhone that I use multiple times daily for text snippets, outlining, drafting posts like this, random ideas — text files that Notesy stores in Dropbox. For note-taking on my main computer I use Notational Velocity which is an equally fantastic notes app that reads and writes it's notes to the same Dropbox directory as Notesy does. What this means is that a note begun on my iPhone is available (almost) instantly on my Mac and vice versa. Importantly, this all happens automatically and seamlessly behind the scenes.

2. File sharing. Drop box also let's you share too-larger-to-email files. Simply copy a link and share it. The recipient is directed to a web page with a download link. Boom.

3. Folder sharing. Dropbox let's you share a folder. What this means, for example, is that an engineer I'm working with can add a file to a folder on his PC and it will make its way to my Mac. Files added on my end are available to the engineer. As you can imagine this is very useful.

Cheesy intro:

Sign up by using this link and citylab will get extra storage space as kickback.

I love mid-20th century visions of the future, though often incredibly wrong they sometimes hit the mark. As with the above cover image which depicts, if I'm not mistaken, a giant stadium with an expensive retractable roof destroying the downtown of a city…

A lot more here, via BoingBoing.