San Francisco has long had plans to extend the Bay Area’s Caltrain line into the heart of its Financial District. Now, recent designs show that the transit facility could be extremely (and uniquely) green — which makes it even better news that the project just landed a $171 million loan from the federal government under the banner of the Transportation Infrastructure and Innovation Act.

The new building, which got approval for construction almost two years ago, would replace the old Transbay Terminal located in the crosshairs of Mission, Howard and Beale Streets. Right now, it serves as a hub for long-distance buses, and those running regular routes to the North and East Bay regions. Caltrain would be a major addition to its services.

Slated to cost $4 billion, the revamped Transbay Transit Center would integrate several ambitious green concepts. Not only would its 5.4-acre roof double as a city park — covered in grass and other plant life to aid with urban carbon capture — it would also be home to city-suited wind turbines (consistent with a report released last year encouraging S.F. to make wind turbines part of its famous skyline). The current blueprints also call for geothermal heating and cooling systems and plumbing engineered to recycle used water. It’s ventilation structure also breathes in fresh air automatically.

The federal funding is being used for phase one of the project, which includes an upgrade to Bay Bridge ramps, construction of a bus storage building, and preliminary preparations for underground transportation. This first phase is expected to cost $1.19 billion alone. Phase two will be the 1.3-mile extension of Caltrain, which has yet to be approved for government funding. Ultimately, it will also link Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), MUNI and even California’s proposed high-speed rail line.

The project has also applied for $400 million in stimulus funds, arguing that altogether, the construction and completed facility could generate thousands of jobs.

Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the Transbay Transit Center is expected to be finished in 2014. It could serve up to 45 million passengers every year.

We can't remember seeing a tree house we haven't liked. Even the one our dad built us in the 80's, it could only hold two kids at a time but we thought it was the best. Now, having grown up, our tastes have matured but our interests in tree houses have only grown stronger.

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Name: Jenny Rinzler and Cristina Espinosa Location: Mission Dolores, San Francisco Size: 1,000 square feet Years lived in: Cristina for 8 1/2 years, Jenny for 5 years (they had roommates until 3 years ago) It's one thing to make a home out of your rental. It's another to make a home out of your 100+ year old rental with poor wiring and insulation. Now that the years of roommates are over, Jenny and Cristina finally have their charming abode to themselves and have made it their own. With a hands-off landlord (both a blessing and a curse), they've had the freedom to paint the walls and update storage systems in order to make their home both friendly and functional for its many uses.

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We were excited to blog The Most Useless Machine Ever on January 1st, but now we see it show up made in Lego. Though it doesn't pack quite the charm punch of the original, it's pretty awesome to see the concept rendered in bricks.

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Every once in a while, people encounter things on their radio, TV, or interstellar wave detectors that no one can explain. Is it a secret military message? A prankster hacking just to see if it can be done? Aliens trying to contact us? Cracked has five cases that still haven’t been settled. Take, for example, the case of UVB-76.

It is an irritating, electronic noise, not unlike the sound of a truck horn played through a cheese grater. It is broadcast over a certain frequency, constantly, and has been since at least 1982. But the weird part isn’t the tone, but what happens when it stops.

In its 20-something year run, the sound has been interrupted only three times, the earliest known time being Christmas Eve in 1997. Each time a voice comes on and lists several Russian names and numbers before returning to the foghorn. The most recent occurrence was 2006, a mere three years before the time of this writing. It is clearly becoming more active after remaining quiet during the Cold War.

Link

Light Stage is a special effects system for films that records how people and objects look when lit from every possible direction. That way, virtual versions of actors can be accurately "lit" to perfectly match the background set. You've probably seen the magic of Light Stage (and not realized it) in fils like Spider-Man 2, Peter Jackson's King Kong, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and many other films. The Light Stage systems was first developed by Paul Debevec, a brilliant graphics researcher at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies who I first met (and wrote about) when we were grad students at UC Berkeley in the 1990s. Now, Debevec, and his colleagues Tim Hawkins of LightStage LLC, John Monos of Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Mark Sagar of WETA Digital received a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for their work. I'm really proud of Paul. I distinctly remember when he first blew my mind with a demonstration of a photorealistic virtual fly-through film he had made of UC Berkeley's Campanille tower from photos acquired using kite aerial photography. The technique was later used in The Matrix's "Bullet Time" sequences. Congratulations, Paul and team! More info and Paul's demo video from TED after the jump.

From the ICT press release:

Based on original research led by Debevec at the University of California at Berkeley and published at the 2000 SIGGRAPH conference, the Light Stage systems efficiently capture how an actor’s face appears when lit from every possible lighting direction. From this captured imagery, specialized algorithms create realistic virtual renditions of the actor in the illumination of any location or set, faithfully reproducing the color, texture, shine, shading, and translucency of the actor’s skin.

While the first Light Stage had just one spotlight which spiraled around on a wooden gantry, Light Stage 2 built at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies featured thirty bright strobe lights on a ten foot semicircular arm which rotated to capture detailed facial reflectance in just eight seconds. 

"Academy Award Honors Developers of USC ICT’s Light Stage Technologies"

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John Lasseter shares 30 tips from legendary Disney animator Ollie Johnston. Some of my favourites:

• It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action interesting.
• Concentrate on drawing clear, not clean.
• Everything has a function. Don’t draw without knowing why.

(via Frank Chimero)

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, disney, Ollie Johnston, pixar

Gary sez, "@Issue has posted Disney's 1943 organization chart. It's actually more correct to call this an operations flow, but it does show an organization built around the gravitational pull of a central genius. The one thing to note his where Special Effects lives in the 1943 Disney Universe: it's a tiny function within the Camera function. Today, it'd be at or near the center of the universe!"

Walt Disney's Creative Organization Chart (Thanks, Gary!)