Learning Through Living: Green Building

Monday, October 13, 2008

Green Building

We are all fascinated by green building. For the girls it started a few years ago with a project on sustainable architecture. They designed their own green homes and did scale drawings and models of them. Then, we bought a solar home kit and did some of the hundred or so projects that came with it. I'm not sure when D and I first became interested but we are. Anyway, I've collected some interesting pictures and articles. Check out these houses. And, these. And this roof. And how about living in one of these? Awesome, eh?

And, we just saw a clip on these houses -- want one?

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Top Places We've Visited Since July 2006

Alaska
Cinque Terre, Italy
Florence, Italy
Maui, Hawaii, USA
Venice, Italy
Rome, Italy
Normandy, France
Aspen, Colorado
Paris, France
London, England
Marco Island, Florida
The Everglades
Yellowstone National Park
Big Sky, Montana
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Frankfort, Michigan
Chestatee River near Atlanta
Monet in Normandy Exhibit at NC Museum of Art
Savannah, GA
CNN Center in Atlanta
Impressionist Landscapes Exhibit Raleigh, NC
MLK Center in Atlanta
Pinckney Island Wildlife Refuge
Women's National Team Game in Richmond
Rural Hill Farms
University of Maryland
Hilton Head Island
Acklund Museum of Art and Chapel Hill

Random Interesting Things We've Learned

There is eveidence that whales evolved from land creatures that evolved from fish.
Marine Protected Areas are an important way of providing safe havens for fish and other marine life.
The metal ring that holds the eraser to the pencil is called a ferrule.
Most pencils are made of cedar.
We call the writing material in the pencil lead not graphite because the word pencil comes from the Greek word pencilis which means "made of lead."
The average house contains more than 65 tons of minerals.
Every day you lose a billion skin cells.
Even if you are 95, your bones will only be about 20 years old.
A strawberry is not really a berry, and may not be a fruit, The strawberry is the enlarged end of the plant stamen, although it is sometimes classified as an aggregate fruit.
Scientists have identified more than one million species of arthropods on Earth, with millions more yet to be discovered. Almost 830,000 of those are insects!
The circadian rhythm is a name given to the "internal body clock" that regulates the (roughly) 24 hour cycle of biological processes in animals and plants.
The bristlecone pine grows in the deserts of Nevada and southern California. Some of these trees are believed to be over 4,600 years old.
Adults have fewer bones than babies
Males have bigger skulls, square jaws, and bigger chewing muscles
Your spine bones are larger as they get closer to the ground
FDR's mother mailed postcards to her dogs when she traveled
The average number of people airborne over the U.S. in any given hour : 61,000
The Palm Cockatoo found only in Australia mates for life and both the mother and father look after the single egg usually in a nest made in a hollow tree.
There are 18 species of cockatoos in the world and there are 14 in Australia
What a C clamp is
How to build our own jig
The birds that are on the Hawaiian islands, came when the islands were young, and instead of continuing their flight they were lazy and stayed on the island.
The Polynesians came to Hawaii after seeing birds fly over the ocean for the winter, they assumed there was land and they were right.
Captain Cook was the first white settler to discover Hawaii; he actually landed on Kauai.
Islands have four stages of life, the last stage is when the island becomes an atoll, the third stage is when the island gradually starts getting older,like the island of Kauai, and it sinks in the water, the second is what the island of Maui is, when it has one major erruption left before it is done growing, the first stage is where the big island is, errupting more frequently.
In the United States Halloween only became popular after the Irish potato famine.
The English used to set bowls of food out to prevent spirits from entering their houses.
Fudge and taffy have to be cooked at lower temperatures and hard candies require higher temperatures.
Pumpkins could be classified as fruit along with gourds, cucumbers, and melons.
Lollipops and licorice are some of the oldest candies.
Butterflies have yellow blood.
There are 2 billion platelets in a teaspoon of blood
Chemical analysis shows that tears have items which make you unhappy. So, it is scientifically proven that a good cry makes you feel better.
The human face can make 7,000 faces.
A man who spends 5 minutes a day shaving starting at age 15 will have spent 1368 hours of his life by the age of sixty. That is nearly 60 days of non-stop shaving.
The difference between right brained and left brained
The definition of cybercondriac
It is better not to eat in front of the television because the television may distract you and you may eat more.
There is a place called Ft. Mose. It was located in the 1600s in a small city in Florida. There, Indians, free blacks and whites lived together in peace.
If all Americans used the GE Profile dishwasher, over 15.5 billion gallons of H2O would be saved...enough to fill more than 20,000 Olympic swimming pools
Duck when the boom goes, or else!
The sheet is the rope that attaches to the boom.
When in doubt when sailing, push the tiller away from you.
The tiller is in the back of the boat and it controls the direction you sail.
The dagger board is in the front and you should lift it when you enter shallow water.
When the bow of a boat goes underwater it is called submarining.
By the time you are a teenager, you will have already heard the widest spectrum of sound you will hear in your life. You lose hearing every day after age 13.
Reflexive reactions occur when your brain takes over and forces you to listen to it like when you catch yourself from falling
Babies can swim because they have a mechanism that automatically closes and prevents water from entering their lungs
A person grows 30 yards of hair overnight
The longest studied predator/prey relationship in a US national park is the wolf/moose on Isle Royale
The mojave rattlesnake is the most poisonous North American reptile
The definition of desiccation
In the middle ages, size in a sculpture showed superiority
Botticelli was one of the first artists of the renaissance to paint on cloth
How to help keep bugs off tomato plants without using pesticides -- use garlic!
How to differentiate between human hair and animal hair
What a disdrometer is
How to ask where the bathroom is in Italian
How to throw a pot
What a fumerole is
How to differentiate between a crocodile and an alligator
How to create an MP3 file
How to "dig"
How to measure the circumference of the earth
What a seed bead is
How to ski moguls
How to do a lay-up
How to blog
How to prepare and cook stuffed sweet potatoes
How to mush
How to sew pajamas
How to draw people
How to create a yearbook using Microsoft Publisher
What makes a hot spring
What a kettle bell is
What moose eat
What armadillos eat and how they live

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Monday, October 13, 2008

Green Building

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