Environment
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Portland Indymedia (pdximc) has a long and interesting post on the ecological costs of shifting from fossil fuels to biodiesel in particular that is very interesting. In short, it states that we use 1 billion gallons of fossil fuel per day and that we only generate 1.5 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year. He [...]
Wired talks about the demand outstripping supply for both diesel vehicles and hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and how that will likely lead to diesel/hybrid vehicles. The problem is that diesel is still fossil-fuel based, stinky, sooty, and toxic. VW has also publicly declared that they are reversing their stand on hybrid cars and will [...]
Okay, so it has to use human poop to attract the flies and it still can’t actually catch the flies – it has to have them fed to it’s little mouth – but all the same, the interesting parts of this equation are: • it is self-powered • it uses microbial fuel cells to generate [...]
This looks like a blast! Check out the video of somebody goofing around on the prototype Centaur. It uses the Segway balancing technology to allow the user to do perfectly balanced wheelies. What a blast this would be to have around town! (I’m thinking that the posties will like this one WAY more than the [...]
I am extremely interested in this field of bio-energy and am excited by all the possibilities of using microbes to convert solar power into useable hydrogen as well as to store energy similar to traditional batteries. Here is a great Wired Magazine article on some of the upcoming possibilities.
If you have a love of architecture, green homes, virtual reality, and Dilbert, and you have a good half hour to waste spend, I recommend that you visit Scott Adam’s new Virtual home tour at http://www.dilbert.com/duh and be prepared to be blown away. The house design was the result of thousands of Dilbert readers collaborating [...]
I saw one of these Smart cars down at the Concord Festival on the weekend and had the chance to sit in it. It was incredibly roomy up front for the two passengers. I totally fell in love with this car. There is not much room in the back. Less in fact than I had [...]
I thought that corn being turned into bio-diesel was cool but Toyota is experimenting with using sweet-potato-derived materials for some parts of new cars. The biomaterial is strong, light, and totally biodegradable. Maybe when we’re done with our cars, we’ll be able to break them into parts and toss them into the farmer’s fields…
How cool is this? Metin Sitti, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Nano-Robotics lab has built a robot patterned on water striders, that can walk – not float – on water and that can propel itself forward the same way that water striders do. The “bug” contains about $10 worth of material. Mike Crissey, writer for [...]
Okay, THIS is coooooool. Martin Tobias from Ignition Partners, found it on Gizmodo. (Can you say echo chamber????)
This article at Newsday.com talks about the release of the findings of a major study being presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cardiology. The research [...] followed 29,000 people in 52 countries. It took a decade and 262 scientists to complete the work, which, according to the editor of The Lancet [...]
Similar to my post yesterday on swarming algorithms, Steve Jurvetson, head of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also believes in the wealth of knowledge that we have yet to tap simply by exploring nature’s many inventions. Nice to see he agrees with me!! I’m kidding of course. The area of bio-mimetics has been discussed for quite some [...]
Here are a couple of articles on the new report from the Inspector General of the EPA where he states that the White House directly changed the language in the press releases before they were releaased to the public around the time of 9/11. Now there is still a huge amount of pollution, possibly including [...]
This looks like an interesting energy project being opened in Toronto. Enwave Systems has built a three pipe system that pulls low-temperature water from the bottom of the lake Ontario, extracts the coldness from the water (the process is not mentioned), and then puts the water into the drinking supply. I would be interested to [...]
It’s Deja vu all over again. Renewable energy seems to be the topic of the day. Some odd combination of forces are driving interest in renewable energies (many of the things that I discussed in my previous posting on bioproducts). The web is cluttered with noise about bioproducts, solar energy, and other non-petroleum based energy [...]
Everything old is new again. It’s all about timing. These are only two of a few choice phrases that may describe something that is afoot here in British Columbia. Some major global, national, and provincial forces are in play that are driving the development of a new (to us) association that may be created in [...]
I love Craig Venter for his long view, his burning curiousity, and his adventurous spirit. And probably because he pisses so many people off in the scientific community for being a dilletante. And yet, he has done more for the development of the various *omics (genomics, proteomics) than almost all others to date. This article [...]
This article on the Science & Consciousness review discusses the fact that brains appear to be persistent and consistent but their actual physical molecules are recycling in days, hours, and minutes. This makes me think of Steven Johnson’s excellent book Emergence: The Connected Lives Of Ants Brains Cities And Software wherein he discusses the life [...]
Richard Smalley recently testified to the U.S. Senate on how how nanotechnologies and distributed power grids are the future of power.
Here is a wonderful article on Laurance Rockefeller, philanthropist, philosopher, mediator, venture capitalist, conservationist. It is inspiring to say the least.
This is a great article from SF Gate on a whitewater rafting and paddling park that has just been built in Reno. And here is the photo gallery.
I have been seeing a lot more of these inane new products arriving on the market. You know the ones, disposable dish washing pads (my old cloths have been working fine for YEARS), and now disposable toilet cleaning units. Clean it once and then toss it into the landfill. This was really starting to grate [...]
Here is the mission statement of Happy Planet Foods. I found this on their Abundant C drink and I smiled all the way through as I read it. If only all mission statements could be so human: Our mission is to astonish your taste buds, nourish your body, unite you with the best sources of [...]
Check out this cool house design from an architect in San Francisco. I love the simplicity of the design. The architect and her husband wanted to buy a place in SF but the prices were too high. So they decided to build but it was going to cost too much. So she designed a simple, [...]
The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent [...]
