Just Another Brick in the Wall

I finally got my hands on a brick of the famed light transmitting concrete...
here it is...
some friends of mine down in Eugene developed this for a product design class.
so, two things: it transmits some light, and there's a reason why they don't call it "translucent concrete".
Did I say I am thoroughly dissapointed? This is not what I was expecting.
Not that they didn't do a good job making it. It's about the coolest brick I have ever seen. However, I clearly was fooled by the promos at litracon.com that show the profiles of human and plant figures through the concrete.

I think it may have been the lighting that made the images I had seen look so compeling, compeling enough to specify this material for the ENTIRE EXTERIOR of the building I was designing...
so I did some testing of my own. clearly, the lighting helps. The lighting helps make it look like something that it doesn't under normal conditions, pretty much.

So perhaps it is for the best that I have begun to explore other ideas for the facade, aleeit way late in the game. I have been thinking about power transmission more, about the electrical grid and about circuit boards and such. And that's what lead me to take apart my classic TI-82 graphing calculator last night.

Funny thing is, I felt a little guilty about it because that calculator cost almost a hundered dollars at the time of it's purchase, and that was a lot to my family during those times. That and my soccer cleats were the two things I still have from my freshman year of high school that are still in use today... or, I mean, were still in use yesterday...
For design's sake I can sacrifice the calculator, but I won't forsake the soccer just yet. I am certain, however, that in a few weeks from now, this thesis project design will bench me from even the soccer field.
Seven weeks to go and it's time for some tunnel vision, but I feel like am still looking in all directions but straight ahead.