Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." Bohr was a pretty smart guy, having been one of the folks who got the whole quantum physics thing going a century ago, and…
I'm writing this on St. Patrick's Day so let me tell you a wee bit about the O'Mearas. Kevin and Svetlana O'Meara live in a beautiful home in Utah that's oh-so-close to being a net zero energy home. After I…
E3 Innovate is hosting an event in Nashville this Friday called The Future of Building Is Now. Energy Vanguard's founder, Allison A. Bailes III, PhD, will give two presentations: E3 Innovate is hosting an event in Nashville this Friday called The Future…
When I wrote about the net zero energy home that Amy Musser and Matt Vande built, I was really impressed that they were willing to share the mistakes they'd made and what they would do differently if they could go…
The tragedy of this is that in the effort to sell Advanced Framing as a whole package, presenting it as an alternative to Western Platform Framing, the sensible housing industry has thrown out the very easy and productive suggestions from…
A few weeks ago Allison made a couple of quips that could be construed as critical of Advanced Framing methods, also often referred to optimistically as Optimum Value Engineering (OVE). I myself am generally critical of Advanced Framing, so perhaps…
Martin Holladay, the Energy Nerd of Green Building Advisor, is in Atlanta this week to speak at the Greenprints conference put on by Southface Energy Institute. He asked if I could take him to see some homes in Georgia so…
I loved the book,* A Beautiful Mind, the story of John Forbes Nash, Jr. It was fascinating to read about how he approached mathematical problems, and even more fascinating to read about his descent into paranoid schizophrenia. Nash, who later…
Ah, textbooks, those compendia of facts and figures that we lug around when we're in school. We do multitudinous homework assignments out of them and spend countless hours trying to make sense of the great collections of information within them.…
Do you really need to go to college? If your heart's not in it, you can't find a field of study that excites you, and your college degree doesn't help your job prospects, the answer may be no. But what…