lmao i’m so happy and surprised to see how this thing blew up. this style of poetry is actually an entire genre in hindavi literature. it is a type of folk poetry called kahmukarni, and it involves two playful female speakers seemingly speaking about their lovers and ending in a wordplay. they’re very earthy-sounding in their folk performances, and they are traditionally sung by women. here’s another one by khusrow that i like:
p.s. these are all from sunil sharma’s translations (which is prob as good as it gets in translation)
A vertical forest is expected to be completed this year in Milan. There are two tower apartment complexes which contain a total of 400 residential units. The facade of the buildings will be covered with 730 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 perennial plants. It is expected to have the same ecological impact as 10,000 square meters of forest.
Aside from fighting smog and producing oxygen, the foliage is expected to provide insulation to the residential units.
It’ll be really cool to see how these trees grow in order to maximize access to sun, water, and nutrients. Also, a step towards a sci-fi solar punk future – I’m in.
I sure hope the structural engineers planned for the buildings to increase in mass as the trees grow.
Well, or else for maintenance labor to keep the trees rigorously trimmed to prevent too much increase in mass. Or both? (The wikipedia article says the engineering team consulted botanists and horticulturists in planning how much weight the buildings could bear, so it seems likely that the fact that trees grow would have come up.)
This is a pretty cool idea regardless and I hope they get it right. I wonder if anyone will do anything like this in New York.
This falls in the “I really hope they do it but I’ll believe it when I see it” category for me.
It’s been up for 2 years, inaugurated in October 2014, and still going strong. It’s won multiple awards.
yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it
but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!
apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!
The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!
another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system!
[screencap of a questionnaire from The New York Times: Why do you block advertising on websites you visit? Because like many other people I am trapped between the Scylla of knowing ad-blockers are asphyxiating high-quality writing online and the Charybdis of feeling that omnipresent surveillance-assisted display ads are toxic to the soul, and somehow I always seem to end up choosing the version of long-term spiritual impoverishment that doesn’t involve being condescended to by a CGI gecko.]
