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 )
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. — Mark Twain
Incoming Memes
Twitterfeed
I think it's time to get out into that dusty, dusty Bat Country... 5 days ago
Just about packed... gonna nap until grocery and hardware stores open, or thereabouts. 5 days ago
Right. So I'm supposed to be all packed up and ready to go in 24 hours. Uh huh. We'll just have to see about that! 1 week ago
Thank goodness for coffee, waffles, dynamos and LEDs. Headed out to inspect 18km worth of bike lanes for @bouldergobldr on @burningman time. 1 week ago
Indulging in a little camouflage and para-aramid fiber lust, fashion bedamned! 1 week ago
How could I be anything but happy to have inspired someone else to go on a bicycle date? 1 week ago
Helping Kerry put up onions and tomatoes and other garden fruits for the long harsh winter. 1 week ago
Way up north it's the perfect temperature for moonbathing and stargazing with the crickets, cicadas, and toads. 1 week ago
Anybody up for another playa "training ride" tonight? Would it be absurd to try and ride to New Belgium and back by moonlight? 1 week ago
Biked on Boulder's paths all night with a mischievous girl in the moonlight and a waffle iron in my panniers. 1 week ago
Russia in color, a century ago2010/08/20 Incredible full color photos from all over the hinterlands of the Russian empire, around the year my grandmother was born. Just before it all disintegrated into chaos.
Profile: Viktor Bout2010/08/20 Viktor Bout, one of the arms dealers that served as a model for the protagonist in Lord of War, is set to be extradited from Thailand to the US. Russia is not pleased.
Poligraft | The Sunlight Foundation2010/08/18 Poligraft is an awesome tool from Sunlight for looking at the political influence and connections of people and organizations mentioned in news stories and press releases. A kind of digital political x-ray machine.
Federal R&D Agency Funding Profiles | Proposal Exponent2010/08/13 Good overview of where federal research dollars are spent. No surprise that it's dominated by DoD (more than half). And about half of the non-DoD funding goes to the NIH. The rest of us bicker over less than a quarter of it. Climate change? Renewable energy and efficiency measures? All in that quarter. Along with all geologic hazard research, the search for Earth crossing asteroids, habitable planets, life, and intelligence elsewhere in the Universe. All space exploration. All efforts to understand how ocean circulation works. All basic research into producing salt and drought tolerant crops, as well as soil and water conservation techniques. All archival sequencing of the world's extant species. All in that quarter. Eventually DoD will realize these things are security threats. Maybe they already have.
Cartoneros del Primer Mundo - lanacion.com2010/08/11 Box people of the first world? La Nacion, an Argentinian newspaper, wanted to use one of my dumpster diving pictures. Strange days.
Zoom into your Roof: Checking the Thermal Performance of Homes2010/08/11 Some cities in Belgium pooled resources to create a thermographic map of the buildings within their boundaries, for use as a resource to homeowners and building managers interested in doing attic insulation and infiltration retrofits. Awesome
With My Own Two Wheels2010/08/08 A documentary in progress, following various pedal powered projects around the world. With all the energy and technology we have access to in the US, it's easy to forget that for billions of people, access to this wonderfully simple 19th century contraption is still a bit step in the right direction. And actually... in many cases it would be for us too.
Deconstructing the groovy Bicilicuadora2010/08/08 Blender hooked up to a bike with a makeshift sidewall dynamo. Direct mechanical drive, and beautiful photos by Cass.
Clean Energy Action2010/08/03 Boulder may be deciding where its energy will come from for the next 20 years tomorrow... here's hoping we have the guts to do the right thing in a Long Now context. Rally at the Municipal Building 1777 Broadway, 5pm Tuesday 8/3!
