• Neeson Murcutt’s winning entry for the 2007 Think Brick competition. A reinvention of the Sydney School for empty nesters somewhat in the vein of this thing, with its courtyards and double height spaces. 

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• Recent This American Life episode on Mapping. The first story featuring the neighbourhood mapping by Denis Wood is particularly interesting. 

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• Hell yes. Small Bar licencing laws have been passed by the NSW Government. Licence fees will be cut from $15,000 to as little as $500 as well as a much simpler application system will encourage smaller operators to set up local bars. 

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• A fascinating (and lengthy) story about a killer lake in Cameroon. In August 1986 approximately 1800 people living around Lake Nyos died overnight after being suffocated in an enormous explosion of CO2 that had been accumulating in the base of the lake. 

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• Greg Lynn building or Monster From The Deep? 

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• A new map of London. 

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• Lebbeus Woods is calling for contributors to his blog. Just drop him a line. 

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• Floating Utopias – China Melvielle “In these times, utopian imagination for its own sake has a bad rap, so some unconvincing instrumental rationale must be tacked on—yeah, save the planet, whatever. Among the rather cautious purposes architect Eugene Tsui lists for his proposed floating city of Nexus are the development of mariculture, clean energy and “experimental education programs”: Reading these bullet points, one might almost forget that Nexus is a five-mile-long, self-propelling mountainous island shaped like a horseshoe crab. Its sheer beautiful preposterousness shouldn’t be an embarrassment: It is the point of the dream, whatever the design specs say.” via BLDGBLOG. 

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• Welcome to a Sydney you probably can’t afford. 

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• Teaching a spam filter to play chess. I do not pretend to have ANY understanding of the unix babble contained within, but love the idea of spam filters playing chess in their spare time. 

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• Pacman The Text Adventure. “You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.” 

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