If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
- Putting the Future Back in the Room – A valiant Earth Day call to arms, 40 years on. One man cannot stop the dust from blowing, but one man can start it. One generation cannot restore the ice caps, but one generation can melt them.
- Design For the First World – I can't tell if this is a real competition, or a parody, or both. It's a play on several existing design and engineering competitions, aiming to create cheap, elegant, scalable solutions to problems in the "third world", like clean drinking water, refrigeration, mosquito borne illnesses, etc. The twist here is that the problems to be solved are first world: obesity, overconsumption of disposable crap, immigrant population integration and "low birth rates". That last one set me off… and made me wonder if the whole thing is for real or not. But certainly in combination with the conjugate problems in the developing world (malnutrition, lack of affluence, high birth rates, and, uh, immigrant population integration) an interesting dynamic is on offer. To be made all the more interesting, should the high latitudes become profoundly more habitable than the low in the coming century or so.
