Rent or buy? That’s it? Are you kidding? We are talking about where we live our lives and we only have two choices? Seems like the streets or life on the road would be better at times.

Then why not have a Real Estate product that puts a portion of current rent towards a slowing growing chunk of (pseudo-)equity in owning a (potential) future home from the same property owner.  In other words, you wouldn’t be pissing away all of your rent money knowing you’re getting nothing except more and more rent coming due.

Say your rent is $500 a month. $10 of that $500 would go (into a fund) toward owning a home from the same property owner — if you ever decide to buy later. Best of both worlds.  Participating property owners would have a great edge by offering such incentives while renters wouldn’t constantly lose money keeping someone else’s roof propped up.  Renters would get a tiny slice of what they are hopefully trying to do anyway: gradually striving towards a real stake in owning a home.

Potential markets may spring up to roll over this pseudo-equity from one property ownership company to a different property ownership company.  And time would tell if such a product could fall victim to its own version of messes pivoting the current housing crisis like default credit swaps and mortgage backed securities.

Sure this is kind of a radical housing product, but it may take something a little different to pull us out of this crisis and restore faith and credibility to how and where we live.

Please chime in on why this wouldn’t have a chance in hell, or what you believe needs to happen before a scheme like this could take hold.

By the way, the awe inspiring stuff below deals with building new and innovative structures. I credit this for spawing the question, “This is awesome, but what do we do with the houses here today?  And how are we to better finance all of this?”:

Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff — Dan uses building and construction waste to build unique dwellings.

John Gerzema: Liquid Living And Modular Homes — Definitely not mobile homes. These energy-efficient, low-cost homes comprised of green materials fold up into shipping containers to go anywhere for quick and easy assembly.

Lookotels — “LOOKOTELS is a new concept in the design and construction of hotels for a cost effective price, thanks to reduced construction times and raw material costs.”

Corn Waste Transformed Into Versatile Building Material — “a proprietary corn-based composite board that can be used as a construction material instead of plywood or fiberboard.” Creating building material from corn stover (the corn husks and stalks remaining after harvest) seems more profitable than letting it rot in the fields like it often does.

The Multi-part postings “The dreaded ‘Idea’” addresses minor world needs that I’d like to see happen but don’t believe any single one is important enough (for me) to go to anybody with.

Part 1 spouts freely about Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas in general.

Part 2 explores needs in the web media landscape.

Part 3 tackles eReading and Music.

Jeremy Wood makes digital marks — drawings if you will — by walking around with a GPS.

From his site GPSdrawing:

Jeremy Wood is a multidiscipline artist and map maker whose diverse work is an expression of the poetry and politics of space and reflects upon how we treat our travels and interact with location.

The New York Times mentions Wood and his tech:

Mr. Montelongo shares his maps on everytrail.com. The iPhone is the fastest growing GPS tool of the site’s user base, according to Joost Schreve, the site’s founder. “But if you look at the quality of the maps, the best trips still come from traditional GPS devices,” he said, noting that the iPhone tends to draw less precise lines and to lose its signal under trees and near large buildings.

Jeremy Wood, an artist based in London, coined the term “GPS drawing” nearly a decade ago and continues to maintain gpsdrawing.com, a Web site compiling his and other GPS-produced images from around the world. Whenever he leaves his house, Mr. Wood takes his GPS device with him. He has mapped all of his movements since 2004 and views GPS drawing as an extension of a long-standing human tradition.

“People have been doing this for centuries, making big drawings so they could be seen by the gods,” he said, citing the ancient Nasca geoglyphs in Peru as an example.

This is 16 seconds of what a Mimosa Pudica or “Sensitive Plant” does when you touch it. It wilts. Minutes later it returns to normal.

(Please select the HD option so you can see it.)

The title of this seven minute TED Talk from Dan Cobley is “What physics taught me about marketing.”  Dan draws parallels between marketing and four major principals in physics.

1.  Rearranging Newton’s Second Law gives us acceleration equals force over mass. Meaning the larger a particle is, the more force it takes to change direction.  The same applies to brands.  The bigger it is, the harder it is to reposition it.

2.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says it is impossible to measure the position and momentum of a particle because the very act of measuring it, changes it.  In marketing, the act of measuring consumers changes them.  Marketers should measure what consumers actually do, not just what they say they do.

3.  The scientific method says you can’t prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove a hypothesis.  In marketing, tons of time and money can be used to build a brand, but one event can devastate it.  Use caution to avoid faux paus.

4.  The second law of thermodynamics addressing entropy says that disorder (with)in a system will always increase. With all the tools and distribution channels, especially those online, it is very hard to control your message and brand.  Marketers need to accept this and work with it.

This visualization at i-am-bored.com puts the Mariana Trench into (some) perspective:

Recently rediscovered ArXiv.org — an online repository for free papers on Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.

Nearly a 100 percent of everything on the site makes me feel stupid so I just glean the site’s very specifically focused papers for buzzwords and neato graphics, like the ones below.  With titles like “Effective Inner Radius of Tilted Black Hole Accretion Disks” and “The late jet in gamma-ray bursts and its interactions with a supernova ejecta and a cocoon” my head just starts swimming.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “Run Run Run” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

• Beck covers the Velvet Underground & Nico album in one day. (via Brain Pickings)

• The NIH sets a goal to complete a region-to-region map of the brain in five years by encouraging collaboration among neuroscientists.