“You care about the environment and factor it into your daily choices. But how do you know if your decisions actually make a difference? Knowledge is power: PEIR lets you see how your daily choices affect the environment and how the environment affects you.”
fascinating take.. PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is a new kind of online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you. |
What’s unique about PEIR? Taking a step beyond a “footprint calculator” that relies only on your demographics, PEIR uses location data that is regularly and securely uploaded from your mobile phone to create a dynamic and personalized report about your environmental impact and exposure. |
PEIR gives you greater control over your environmental impact and exposure by allowing you to interactively explore how it creates its results from your activity patterns. |
interesting change of perspective Which messages would you rather see while you were browsing online?
Buy a Chevy Malibu! Get the New American Express Gold Card! Watch the Real Housewives of New Jersey on Bravo! Eat ReddiWip!
Or:
Ride your bike to work. Support urban farms. Fertilize your garden with used coffee grounds. Donate your old phone. Pee in the shower. |
| DoGooder, a new browser plug-in, hopes you’ll choose the latter option. The Canadian company empowers its users by giving them the choice to replace the advertising on the websites they view in favor of something more reflective of their lifestyle and values. |
“It’s difficult not to think that there’s a double standard involved in the complete indifference to accuracy when it comes to scientific information.” When the news industry catches its own making up the content of a news story—especially involving politicians—the result is typically scandal, firings, and some public soul-searching. Why isn’t the same true when it comes to science? |
The year is only a couple of weeks old, but it’s already been a strange one for science news. With a steady flow of coverage on a huge range of complex subjects, it’s easy for things to go wrong, and for journalists to come up with material that doesn’t get the science right. But a few recent cases appear to involve news organizations that have gone out of their way to get a science story wrong. The news industry tends to respond badly to cases where people make up the contents of their stories—witness Jayson Blair and the fake Bush National Guard records. But, so far, the response to the recent science news-related events has been complete indifference.
Read more at arstechnica.com |
100 MILLION ENLIGHTENED PEOPLE EMBRACE NEW VALUES, A NEW CULTURE, AND A NEW WORLD |
| The purpose of Lee’s Earth Citizen Movement is to get people to declare themselves citizens of Earth. Rather than identifying with their nationality, race, or religion, they accept that they are human first, living together on Earth. The members believe human beings are all connected, and that realizing our common values will be the first step in recovering our humanity. |
What is an Earth Citizen? |
The Philosophy of the Earth Citizen Movement |
| The Earth Citizen Movement claims it is devoted to “recovering our humanity and hope for the Earth.” They believe the first step is for people to identify themselves as Earth Citizens, and to put that identity above nationality, race or religion. There is hope for the Earth, they state, because humans are able to changeRead more at brainworldmagazine.com |
“The sustainability benefits of level or falling human numbers are too powerful to ignore for long”
The question remains however, in what fashion can we individually change the sustainability balance. important article. Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People? |
Slowing the rise in human numbers is essential for the planet–but it doesn’t require population control |
It’s not surprising that this kind of predicament brings back an old sore topic: human population and whether to do anything about it. Let’s concede up front that nothing short of a catastrophic population crash (think of the film Children of Men, set in a world without children) would make much difference to climate change, water scarcity or land shortages over the next decade or so. There are 6.8 billion of us today, and more are on the way. To make a dent in these problems in the short term without throwing anyone overboard, we will need to radically reduce individuals’ footprint on the environment through improvements in technology and possibly wrenching changes in lifestyle. Read more at www.scientificamerican.com |
This is a fascinating and quite fresh view on a possibly groundbreaking view on the evolution of the human specie.
“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.” (emphasis mine) Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole. |
The title of Mr. Wrangham’s new book — “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” — sounds a bit touchy-feely. Perhaps, you think, he has written a meditation on hearth and fellow feeling and s’mores. He has not. “Catching Fire” is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution, one he calls “the cooking hypothesis,” one that Darwin (among others) simply missed. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
This work is fascinating for many reasons, chief amongst which is the visualization of cities as living organisms, a fact we too often tend to forget. | Warholian city maps, or what a Parisian lover has to do with urban infrastructure. |
 Cities are living organisms. And their veins — the interconnected streets and walkways and alleys — are what keep the city’s vitality in flux. Each city has a different “circulatory system,” a different flow of its livelihood, a unique pattern that holds its cultural DNA.
|
In ComplexCity, Korean artist Lee Jang Sub explores the concealed aesthetic formed by the infrastructure of the city and its evolution across time. |
Although the project started in the artist’s hometown of Seoul, he has since dissected the street patterns of other global cultural epicenters. |
Something intangible about the shape and color of each pattern seems to capture an inc(red)ibly authentic piece of the city’s vibe and uniqueness — the rose bushes of Florence, the black lace on the stocking of a Parisian lover, the aristocratic iciness of winter in Moscow. |
as I see it,there is no danger that humanity will divide, however speciation is an option that need be considered seriously WE ARE on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic “plug-ins” or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity? |
This was the theme of a recent Neuroscience in Context meeting in Berlin, Germany, where anthropologists, technologists, neurologists, archaeologists and philosophers met to consider the implications of this next stage of human brain development. Would it widen the gulf between the world’s haves and have-nots - and perhaps even lead to a distinct and dominant species with unmatchable powers of intellect? |
Malafouris also believes such augmentation is the next logical stage in human development. “If we accept that tool use was part of the reason we came to develop language, then why should we perceive neuro-engineering as a threat rather than as the new stone industry of the 21st century?” Read more at www.newscientist.com |
“I get the utility of using the idea of the Anthropocene to provoke recognition of the mind-bending reality that we are transforming the very planet on which we walk. (emphasis mine)
Where the Anthropocene as a concept breaks down, it seems to me, is in the implications it raises, particularly among certain crowds who seem to be saying with increasing frequency, “well, dude, we’re in the Anthropocene, anything goes.”
A worthwhile and important read It’s a catchy (if grim) concept, but one whose utility I find myself seriously questioning. I don’t doubt the magnitude of human impact on the planet. Quite the opposite. I think we consistently underestimate the degree of disruption we’ve already caused by altering the raw biological function of nearly every corner of the Earth and changing the chemistry of its atmosphere, oceans and soils. Very little “wild” anything remains, and all that does remain exists at our sufferance and will endure only with our conscious commitment. None of this, it seems to me, is really a matter of much debate. It’s just how the world is now. Read more at www.worldchanging.com |
European Coachbuilding Goes Electric |
The European tradition of coachbuilding”the manufacturing of carriages”dates back to the 1700s. These days, it refers to the high-end auto design firms, such as Rolls Royce and Ferrari, which build custom-designed specialty vehicles. |
Like nearly every automaker in the world, coachbuilders are going green, by designing and building all-electric vehicles. Their electric cars are well suited to the congested streets of Rome or Paris, but don’t hold your breath for these cool electricity-powered rides to make it across the pond. By nature, the coachbuilders produce vehicles in limited runs intended for local markets. |
1Pininfarina B0 (”B Zero”) |
The Quicc DiVa is an all-electric urban distribution van. The body is made of plastic.
|
|
