Crossing the sea on a bottle raft Video
Crossing the sea on a bottle raft Video Transcript
[ Music ] ^M00:00:03 [ Saw ] ^M00:00:07
>> From a distance, it looks just like another boat being built on Pier 31 along San Francisco's waterfront. But this is no ordinary catamaran.
>> Very simply, the idea is to construct a boat made entirely of plastic bottles. We've got ten thousand of these. These will be used in the hull, and that will make up the bottom of the Plastiki. The 60-foot catamaran called Plastiki is named after a Norwegian adventurer, Thor Heyerdahl, and his Kon-Tiki raft expedition in the 1940s. But this raft is made of recycled soft drink bottles.
>> Basically what we're doing is adding dry ice to these recycled bottles, and inflating it to a certain pressure -- pressure range in order to float the Plastiki boat.
>> The decks and cabin are built from a woven fabric made from reused plastic.
>> Now, what we've been exploring with is bio composites, bio blues, biopolymers, things that are gonna be positive, not just for this project, but have ongoing implications. When you think that the boat industry is very reliant on toxics like epoxies that have a massive impact on the environment. If we can [inaudible] a clean substance, that's a huge win.
>> How will you be sure that this is gonna work?
>> We're not sure. That's why it's an adventure.
>> The mastermind behind this unusual boat is David de Rothschild. He is an adventurer, and one of the few who has been both to the North and South Poles. Now, he wants action to save the planet.
>> I think the time has come that we start to actually act and create solutions. If we really want to move from planet .10 to planet .20, we need to really start taking action and stop just talking.
>> What if it fails?
>> It's not -- it hasn't failed. It can't fail. It's impossible to fail. Right now, we've succeeded already.
>> Why?
>> Because we've created materials that have never been seen before, never been used before.
>> How good a swimmer are you?
>> I'm a great swimmer, actually. I really am. You know, I sort of think that, you know, that's gonna be my biggest strength.
>> In just a few months, David de Rothschild and his crew will try to sail this strange catamaran across the Pacific Ocean, all the way to Australia. This could either be a huge sensation, or a very long swim. From Pier 31 in San Francisco, this is Erik Palm for CNET News. ^M00:02:22 [ Music ]
Related Videos
Congress votes (again) to delay the transition to digital TV, Google Health knows your vital signs before you do, and Motorola builds a cell phone with recycled water bottles.
popSiren - How to create fire from a pair of eyeglasses
Dr. Kiki creates fire from a pair of glasses, Moujan transforms an empty wine bottle into a lamp, and Heather reveals an underground band that hails from Tokyo.
Conductor started as a collection of songs written in the winter of 2003 at house on the North Carolina coast. Cold winds blowing in from the Atlantic would often rustle palms and wind chimes on the porches of of empty beach houses. The steady noise made it a little easier for a string of break-ins to continue. Baffling local authorities. Although most of the houses were boarded up that winter, a few remained occupied. One of these, lit almost exclusively by candle light in the evening, housed a 4 track recorder, an acoustic guitar, a small city of wine bottles (both full and empty), and Andy Herod. At the end of a 2 year relationship and faced with having to find a new place to live in 6 weeks, the songs began to come out. Loss of love and identity and all that. Eventually each night he ended up on the couch watching the only movie that made sense or mattered, Dark City. Upon each viewing finding new meaning, symbolism and hope that seemed to apply directly to his own life. Some felt that this period may have gone on a bit long... At the end of the winter several cassette tapes where passed along to band mate Nicole Gehweiler as well as friend and producer Alan Weatherhead. A record was soon underway. Recorded at the Sound of Music studios in Richmond VA, Conductor ended up a swampy mix of pop and fuzzed-out rock songs. But when it came time to sequence the record, the band was stumped. Finally one smoky evening in the studio around 4 am, a story line began to reveal itself in the music they were hearing. Almost instantly, the track order fell into place and plans to animate the story began. Six weird months later came Conductor, a monument to the suicide of love erected by robots against a wintry sci-fi back drop of dark towers, moonlit skies and a cast of lost characters. Or perhaps it is just a break-up record. It is not yet known. What is known is that it's here, and it's massive.
Conductor started as a collection of songs written in the winter of 2003 at house on the North Carolina coast. Cold winds blowing in from the Atlantic would often rustle palms and wind chimes on the porches of of empty beach houses. The steady noise made it a little easier for a string of break-ins to continue. Baffling local authorities. Although most of the houses were boarded up that winter, a few remained occupied. One of these, lit almost exclusively by candle light in the evening, housed a 4 track recorder, an acoustic guitar, a small city of wine bottles (both full and empty), and Andy Herod. At the end of a 2 year relationship and faced with having to find a new place to live in 6 weeks, the songs began to come out. Loss of love and identity and all that. Eventually each night he ended up on the couch watching the only movie that made sense or mattered, Dark City. Upon each viewing finding new meaning, symbolism and hope that seemed to apply directly to his own life. Some felt that this period may have gone on a bit long... At the end of the winter several cassette tapes where passed along to band mate Nicole Gehweiler as well as friend and producer Alan Weatherhead. A record was soon underway. Recorded at the Sound of Music studios in Richmond VA, Conductor ended up a swampy mix of pop and fuzzed-out rock songs. But when it came time to sequence the record, the band was stumped. Finally one smoky evening in the studio around 4 am, a story line began to reveal itself in the music they were hearing. Almost instantly, the track order fell into place and plans to animate the story began. Six weird months later came Conductor, a monument to the suicide of love erected by robots against a wintry sci-fi back drop of dark towers, moonlit skies and a cast of lost characters. Or perhaps it is just a break-up record. It is not yet known. What is known is that it's here, and it's massive.
Hollywood favorites Billy Bob Thornton, Bernie Mac, and John Ritter star in the comedy hit, "Bad Santa". You'd better watch out -- Santa Claus Willie T. Stokes (Thornton) is coming to town and he doesn't care if you've been naughty or nice. Willie's favorite holiday tradition is to fill his sacks with loot lifted from shopping malls across the country. But this year his plot gets derailed by a wisecracking store detective (Mac), a sexy bartender (Lauren Graham, from TV's Gilmore Girls), and a kid who's convinced Willie is the real Santa Claus. Directed by Terry Zwigoff (who also directed "Ghost World" and "Crumb").
iPhone 3G buzz around the world
From Australia to Japan to San Francisco, Apple fanboys and girls are buzzing over the iPhone 3G's release. CNET.com's Kara Tsuboi takes us on a spin around the world to gauge the pandemonium from some of the 70 countries hot to get their hands on the new Apple smartphone.
Love Trio in Dub feat. U-Roy: "Lovers Rock"
Hearing a compilation containing a track by U-Roy, the legendary Jamaican dub master in Sweden when he was 13 years old, Ilhan Ersahin, in what was one of his first record purchases was transformed by his experience, realizing in that moment that music would be his calling. With the accusation of a tenor saxophone and a latter ticket to gotham, his fate was sealed. A nine year apprenticeship at downtown Gotham's then?famous Sweet Basil led to association with outstanding denizens of the jazz world and weekly workshops with the like?minded. These nine years were to culminate in a shift to the Lower East Side and Nublu. The genie was now out of the bottle. From this long gestation, Love Trio was born. Among those making the trek east with Ersahin were bassist Jesse Murphy, a young California native who would become bassist with Brazilian Girls, and drummer Kenny Wollesen of Tom Waits renown. The music the trio would make would seek to defy genre. It would be, as Ersahin would insist - just music - his music: "It's the city - its also where we live. I live here, and on the road, and there is the night life mixed with studio life; in a way also DJ life gotten to our compositions because every where we play there always electronics and DJs. In the culture now, it is really a part of everything. I am just trying to live in the moment, in what is now." Borrowing from the dub and rock steady beats of his earliest influences in programming the various keyboards and electronica added to his oeuvre as well as the jazz legacy of his apprenticeship and the sonorities of his ancestral Turkey, the result of the varying styles as an approach to the music the trio would make has been broadening of the possibilities of his composition and trio's improvisation. Working often with guest artists among whom have been the aforementioned U-Roy, trumpet legend Eddie Henderson, vocalist Marla Turner and DJ Logic as on their seminal, eponymous recording, Love Trio, the music arrived at suggest a hypnotic journey through a spare yet muscular landscape that might best be described as a quest in a minor mode - the ethereal quest for the fabled Nublu. A land far away from Tin Pan Alley.
Molly Wood prepares for CES 2008 and ticks off some of the things we're hoping to see this year.
"The VICE Guide to Travel " DVD trailer
The VICE GUIDE TO TRAVEL is the first installment in VICE magazine's new DVD series. The series will feature short documentaries arranged around a different theme. For this edition we went to the kinds of places that nobody else wants to visit. We traveled to the corners of the world where news is happening, the forgotten locales where strange people and stories lie and where history is being made every day. This is the VICE idea of a vacation. Spec on the DVD: - Places visited: Chernobyl, Pakistan, Paraguay, Rio, Beirut, Congo, Bulgaria -Bonus Footage that includes New Year's Eve in Kabul and David Cross and Gavin McInnes in China -72 page full color book with photos from the countries and interviews with correspondents
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi tour a home that gets 40 percent of its power from the wind. After the homeowner installed a 45-foot-tall turbine in her backyard, not only was she the talk of the neighborhood, but her home was named one of the 12 greenest houses in the world, according to the Discovery Channel.
