Mile-High Skyscrapers and Floating Cities That Never Were

Wired.com has compiled a portfolio of “promised skylines we never got to see — and a few that may yet come to be — as seen from the imagined eyes of those who live there.” The picture above is Frank Lloyd Wright’s “This Illinois”, which was supposed to shoot 5,278 feet above Chicago. Other “alternate reality architectures” include

Welthauptstadt Germania: The projected renewal of the German capital Berlin by Adolf Hitler

X-Seed 4000: Home to 500,000 of Tokyo’s finest.

The Arcologies, 2070: Sets of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density.

The Reading Tub: Don’t you just love the logo?

The Reading Tub is one of the two 501c3 literacy projects endorsed and supported by the Dreamblogue. The Library Project (Asia) and the Reading Tub (US) share the ad revenue generated by the blog of dreams.

The single most significant factor influencing a child’s early educational success is an introduction to books and being read to at home prior to beginning school. National Commission on Reading, 1985 60% of the kindergartners in neighborhoods where children did poorly in school did not own a single book. The Patterns of Book Ownership and Reading, D. Feitelson and Z. Goldstein, 1986.

The most successful way to improve the reading achievement of low-income children is to increase their access to print. Communities ranking high in achievement tests have several factors in common: an abundance of books in public libraries, easy access to books in the community at large and a large number of textbooks per student. Newman, Sanford, et all. “American’s Child Care Crisis: A Crime Prevention Tragedy”; Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, 2000.According to the National Academy on an Aging Society, 73 billion dollars is the estimated annual cost of low literacy skills in the form of longer hospital stays, emergency room visits, more doctor visits, and increased medication. “Toward a Literate Nation”, Luis Herrera, Public Libraries, Jan/Feb 2004.

The reading tub is intermittently blocked in China and you may need to use this link: http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://thereadingtub.com

Planting Florescent Bulbs

Yep, you heard me. 1301 glowing florescent bulbs are planted in a field in England. There are no plugs though, because they’re powered by the magnetic field produced by the power lines above. As scientific as it sounds, it is actually an art project initiated by Richard Box.

More pictures can be found here.