Daily Loaf

If Magnus Larsson, a student of the Architectural Association in London, has his way, he’ll combat the encroaching Sahara desert and provide green refugee housing simultaneously. The ambitious plan turns sand into sandstone by using microbes to eat the sand and output a solid surface that can be shaped into any structure needed.

While there is already a plan being carried out to plant more vegetation in the soil, Larsson’s proposal provides much more than just a simple green line. It will serve as more of a structure with the purpose of creating not only a habitat for the trees and vegetation, but for the humans who could live and take care of them. This seems to be a win-win scenario for many of the African nations involved, not only in preventing their nations from turning into Sahara sand, but also providing a more comprehensive solution than simply planting migratory trees.

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The richest and most famous woman in America has announced, via her her Facebook page today, that she will send her first tweet tomorrow on air. As of this writing, the Twitter username @oprah has 30,000 follwers, all anxiously awaiting her first 140 character announcement.

Her guest tomorrow is Ashton Kutcher, one of the biggest celebrity Twitter users out there, who will likely talk about his race for a million followers on the service and his pledge to help fight malaria in Africa if he crosses the million mark before CNN.

This begs two questions: One, can Twitter possibly handle the influx of new users tomorrow — which could number in the millions — surely the fail whale will rear its ugly head at some point. And second, how might Twitter itself change once the soccer moms get on board?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams tweet from earlier today:

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First of all, let’s get the big question out of the way first: Is Resident Evil 5 a racist videogame? Not really. It’s just racially insensitive and culturally clumsy. More on that in a bit. The second big question: Is Resident Evil 5 a good game? Yes it is, depending on how you play it, except for the parts that suck.

Capcom had a daunting challenge to follow up the almost universally adored and acclaimed Resident Evil 4, a fun, cool, strange, challenging game that re-wrote a lot of the rules of the standard survival horror series and was almost the only reason to buy a Nintendo Gamecube. Resident Evil 5 tries to build on that success, and it definitely feels like a successor. It controls much the same way, has some enemies that carry over from the last game and has just as nonsensical a plot. It’s also shorter, more streamlined and maybe more racist (again, more on that in a bit).

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I had a dream the other night that I was on a transatlantic flight on its way to Africa. I was sitting next to a man in a brown jacket, clown pants and Jesus sandals who kept repeating, “Down we go.” That should have given me a clue to the unfortunate end to my dream, or nightmare, but it didn’t. Suddenly, the no-smoking sign started flashing a blood-red color and the pilot got on the intercom and said something along the lines of, “We are going down, hold on to your fucking hats.” I couldn’t really make out what he said, but I’ve always thought that would be the best way to break the news to the passengers. If we’re going to die, I don’t want to hear, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to bring an unfortunate situation to your attention. Blah, blah, blah.” Cut to the chase, man! Anyway, to make a long story short, we plummeted thousands of feet into an island and, magically, I was the only survivor. That is the point when I woke up. And for some batshit crazy reason, the first thing I thought of was an episode of The Office when the employees play Desert Island. This taught me something about myself: Apparently, if I were the sole survivor of a plane crash on a deserted island, the most important thing to me would be what movies I was carrying on me and how I could watch them. So, if that were to happen, and if there were a television and DVD player on this said island, these are the movies I would take… Read the rest of this entry »