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- Google Maps Mashup Tracks Swine Flu – When the pandemic comes, we can rest assured that we'll be able to watch its spread in real time via Google maps. I guess that's comforting. Right? (tagged: map flu health pandemic )
- Power Hungry: Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid – Very cool interactive map showing the sources of (electrical) power in the US, and our current transmission system. (tagged: energy electricity power nuclear solar wind coal sustainability design green )
- End the University as We Know It – I can only imagine that the end of the University as we know it is well underway. We should start building its replacement now. I don't know if I could honestly encourage anybody to go to grad school. (tagged: education academia gradschool research )
- Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture – Take a dune, and inject into it Bacillus pasteurii, with water, nutrients, a calcium source in solution, and oxygen, and it turns sand into sandstone. Figure out a way to do this precisely, and you can "print" buildings in 3D inside the dune, and then let the wind excavate it for you… if you've got your fluid dynamics right. Pretty incredible idea. Still very challenging at scale though. (tagged: architecture sustainability buildings science green bacteria desert dune sand )
- Three Degrees – The Law of Climate Change and Human Rights Conference – Legal aspects of climate change, treaty negotiations, and the probable human rights outcomes of a warming world. (tagged: law climate green sustainability )
- Postopolis LA – Presentations, films, talks slideshows, discussions and parties, centered around architecture, design, and the future of cities. Wish I knew someone who was going… (tagged: losangeles architecture design urban )
- Seville Orange Marmalade Recipe – Going to get a bunch of naranjas agrias from Jon and try making a batch of this. (tagged: recipe seville orange food cooking canning marmalade )
- Dear A.I.G., I Quit! – One might hope that all the executive collateral damage would provide a future incentive in other companies for people to call bullshit on each other when doing things that will get the whole company into trouble. (tagged: nytimes AIG bailout politics )
- Make Textbooks Affordable – Student-Faculty alliance to put the textbook publishers out of business (or, at least, force them to update their business model!). $100 textbooks are a joke. We should be providing grants and prizes for people to write free and open textbooks, that the whole world can use (and translate) instead of extorting cash out of the education system. (tagged: copyright openaccess creativecommons open education )
- skeptic etiquette – OMG, this woman should open a charm school for scientists and engineers. What *is* the right way to respond when somebody asks you at a cocktail party "What's your sign?" (tagged: science funny pseudoscience skeptic astrology )
- If You Want to Know Bike Laws, Don’t Ask the California Highway Patrol – A great rundown of traffic laws as they apply to bicycles in California… and how unfortunately uninformed the police are. (tagged: bicycle transportation police law california )
- R3project: Sustainability in Barcelona – A blog recounting the story of remodeling (and living in) a previously abandoned 18th century apartment in Barcelona's old town, as sustainably (and cheaply) as possible. Available in English or Spanish! (tagged: green sustainability design architecture urban barcelona buildings )
- The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds – 4.6 billion years of Earth history, boiled down into 60 seconds, showing the spectacularly non-linear nature of evolution. (tagged: non-linear video science evolution biology earth darwin history )
- EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project – A tutorial from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on what you can do to protect yourself against snooping, government and otherwise. Now if only these things would become standard, default practice, around which all of our applications and workflows are designed. (tagged: politics technology privacy surveillance security law )
- Human flesh search engines – A phenomenon of internet vigilantes, kind of like paramilitary morality cops, in China. We've been doing this kind of thing to spammers and other "internet criminals" for a while now. Strange to see it leak out into the real world. A potentially interesting propaganda tool. Mob justice on command? (tagged: internet technology china vigilante politics )
- Fight against terror 'spells end of privacy' – Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness is alive and well, and living in the front bedroom. Privacy is dead. Long live privacy! Transparency is our only hope. (tagged: transparency privacy surveillance police terrorism )
- FairShare — Watch how your work spreads. Understand how it is used. – A system for tracking how your content is re-published across the web, and potentially monetizing that re-use, or just making sure that people are abiding by your creative commons license. (tagged: copyright creativecommons technology openaccess )
- Dmitry Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices – I'm sure I won't agree with Orlov on a lot of things, but I want to watch this just to see what the Dark Side is talking about. And he's reportedly funny too. (tagged: collapse economy crisis bailout longnow )
- Designing a Zero-Waste City: A Visit to the San Francisco Dump – San Francisco has a stated goal of zero waste to landfill by 2020. They currently divert 70% of their municipal waste stream, composting yard and food waste, taking in construction materials, sending usable furniture, clothes, plants, etc to thrift stores. The dump even has a coveted "Artist in Residence" program. (tagged: green urban design landfill compost waste sustainability sanfrancisco )
- Highway to hell revisited – A conservative commentator railing against… highways? Barring the political crap at either end of the article, I think he's got a pretty good critique of our national obsession with massive roads projects. Too bad we're just dumping a ton more cash into them. (tagged: transportation policy stimulus highways cars )
- This Old House – Conservative columnist David Brooks (from late last year) talking about how one might reasonably go about using the stimulus to re-invest intelligently, instead of just gushing cash at the construction industry. Sadly, his fears appear to have been largely realized. (tagged: transportation policy stimulus infrastructure obama urban nytimes )
- Tinkering School – An awesome experiential school, at which kids are allowed to do dangerous things with power tools, in the name of learning to create things that work, and how to deal with frustration and failure. (tagged: education design ted school tinker )
- Interactive Atlas of the World's Endangered Languages – Most of the world's surviving human languages (of which there are currently about 6000) will go extinct in my lifetime. Here's a map of where they are, who speaks them, and what they're called. (tagged: language extinct culture human atlas maps )
- Mo(NU)mentum: a future urban drill core – A hypothetical drill core from the future, showing urban sediment through the ages: stone, to brick, to concrete, to asphalt, and finally plastic. Ever more refined and energy intensive materials, in thinner and thinner layers, until the present, at which… we note… sedimentation stopped. (tagged: art green construction urban )
- Final CA Budget Cuts Gas Tax Increase, Still Nothing for Transit – Happy St. Fuckers day: the republican senator from Orange County finds sales and income taxes more acceptable than gas taxes. All state funding for public transit nixed. Gas to remain cheap. What a crock. (tagged: streetsblog california politics energy transportation taxes )
- Los Angeles Bike Summit March 7th, 2009 – Los Angeles Bike Summit! Networking cyclists and bike advocacy organizations. Being put on by the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. (tagged: bicycle advocacy los angeles bike transportation )
- 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: bicycle transportation infrastructure accident bike )
- MIT open prototype initiative – A project to produce modular, open (freely available, non-proprietary) prototype designs for energy efficient buildings. MIT is so awesome. (tagged: green architecture design building )
- 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: green architecture leed construction buildings )
- 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: bailout chrysler cerberus crisis economy gm )
- 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: data archive backups loss microformats recovery )
- 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: backups magnolia data servers hosting )
- 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: finance economy economics crisis )