Do the British love their children too? – Two girls run over while biking to their school 3 miles away. British (and probably American) "solution": re-allocate a school bus to their area (removing the bus from somewhere else). Dutch/German/Danish solution: provide better cycling infrastructure for everyone. Guess which one I think is better. (tagged: bicycletransportationinfrastructureaccidentbike )
LEED Platinum Prefab Home Now Available – Taking all the design work out of building zero energy homes should make it a lot easier to build them, but the contractors doing the actual construction still need to understand what they're doing, and how their application of building techniques will affect the end performance of the building (and their profits need to be tied to that performance somehow) (tagged: greenarchitectureleedconstructionbuildings )
Kidnapping Chrysler – Of course Cerberus (private equity firm that owns Chrysler, not three headed dog guarding hell) has a "fiduciary obligation" to seek a handout from the Feds. And by Jove, the Feds have a fiduciary obligation to refuse to give it to them! (tagged: bailoutchryslercerberuscrisiseconomygm )
Where data goes when it dies – Following from the Ma.gnolia implosion, Chris Messina muses on data loss and recovery… kind of an information grieving process. What are we going to do with all of this information anyway? 100 years from now, all historians will have to be AI. (tagged: dataarchivebackupslossmicroformatsrecovery )
What really happened at Ma.gnolia – The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia was, despite its surprisingly large user base, basically run like Ideotrope – one guy with a server, and some (in retrospect) pretty janky backups. A couple of weeks ago, the 500GB MySQL database file got corrupted, the backups failed, and the site imploded. Lessons to be learned indeed: number one is don't do your own IT, now that S3, EC2, the Google Apps Engine, and other such scalable enterprise systems are available. We gotta get that server retired… (tagged: backupsmagnoliadataservershosting )
Baseline Scenario for 2009-02-09 – A rundown of the current global financial situation, and governmental attempts to get things under control. These guys aren't particularly optimistic at the moment about our ability to acknowledge just how beholden our supposedly powerful and developed governments have become to the banking industry. We're acting like Indonesia or Russia with their oligarchic overlords. (tagged: financeeconomyeconomicscrisis )
Greenest City2010/02/05 Vancouver, BC seems to understand the magnitude of our unsustainability, and have the guts to do something about it. They've already met their Kyoto obligations, and have the right goal for emissions: zero, and solid waste: zero, they want more than 50% of all trips to be by bike, foot, or transit by 2020, all new buildings to be carbon neutral, mostly use passive energy systems... etc, etc. It's almost as if the city government believes what the physicists have been telling them, and have decided not to argue with the sun and the sky.
A Rant About Women2010/02/03 Clay Shirky thinks that part of why women remain behind in the workplace is that they're less willing to engage in blatant self promotion, and potentially public failure, than men are. I could see this being true. Not exactly sure if I like the idea that the solution is to just normalize self-promotion and overconfidence for everyone... but that's one option.
Picture China2010/02/03 A photographic exploration of modern China.
State lawmakers take aim at free parking2010/02/02 CA SB 518 has passed, encouraging cities to curb the supply of so-called "free" parking. It sounds like someone in Sacramento has been listening to Don Shoup. "The problem with free parking is, it isn't free."
They Rule2010/01/27 An application that lets you explore the social network of corporate and institutional board members which control, well, pretty much everything...
What Could You Live Without?2010/01/24 Wealthy family back east sells house, gives away half the money. Most stuff isn't worth what it's worth.
Cisco's Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities From Scratch2010/01/23 Korea is trying to build a medium sized city (300,000 people) from scratch, to emit 1/3 the greenhouse gasses of a normal city, with smart infrastructure from the get go. Who knows. Maybe it's possible to get it right...
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