tingilinde

on challenge and optimism

Al Gore's latest TED talk

teach the controversy

a great response to the Intelligent Design lunacy

(a tip of the hat to Bjarne!)

citizen science

When there is no substitute for having thousands of good observations... amateur science has been a solid companion to the "real" thing through the years and sometimes is spectacular. Astrophysics started as an amateur effort in the mid 1800s.

There are a growing number of organizations monitoring the planet. A great way to learn and help at the same time.

what is a car in 2030?

Believe it or not it is nearly reasonable to think about what a car will be like in 2030 - certainly 2020.

Here is a synopsis of a new MIT based study that looks at emissions as a function of various power sources. The bottom line is getting serious greenhouse gas reductions - to the levels that most climatologists suggest is necessary - is somewhere between difficult and impossible with conventional form and driving cycles found in today's cars.

Work is being done on optimizing the electric/non-electric configuration, but moving to much lighter vehicles and driving them less is probably the winning path. We need to become more Danish rather than only trusting technology.

One of the worst paths is ethanol as currently produced. Of course this is a big political issue and all of the major presidential candidates are dramatically wrong. Steve notes a great posting by the "fake steve jobs" on the subject.

for the grace of china ...

The economic woes of Iceland as told by James Surowiecki at The New Yorker (thanks for the link Steve)

snip

Iceland is now a hot topic of discussion for a different reason: many people suggest that it could become the “first national casualty” of the ongoing credit crunch. Until last year, Iceland’s economic track record in this decade had been phenomenal—its annual growth rate averaged close to four per cent over the past decade, and its per-capita gross national income is now higher than that of the U.S. This year, though, the country’s currency, the króna, has fallen twenty-two per cent against the euro; the economy has stagnated; and a global rating agency has put the nation’s three major banks on a credit watch. Now analysts are wondering whether the new Nordic Tiger will end up, instead, as “the Bear Stearns of the North Atlantic.”

universal healthcare around the world

Frontline on universal healthcare in other nations - watch online.

The US is very third world.

social networking and green consumers

From CMU's Footprints Project: paper on the use of social networks to motivate people to reduce their ecological footprints (pdf)

abstract:

What role can social networking websites play in supporting large-scale group action and change? We are proposing to explore their use in supporting individual reduction in personal energy consumption. Here we summarize some existing uses of social networking on the web and propose an approach thatintegrates feedback about ecological footprint data into existing social networking sites and Internet portal sites. Integrating such feedback into popular, commonly used sites allows frequent feedback about performance, while enabling the exploration motivational schemes that leverage group membership. We propose to compare different motivational schemes in three ways: Reduction in CO2 emission; lifestyle changes; and ongoing use by users who join the site
(retention).

A difficult task as the public has a poor grasp of the issues involved and is easy prey to conventional advertising and greenwashing. Some of these tactics are probably good.

Folks at Berkeley's Infolab have produced a few interesting concepts. One is a phone that looks at UPC codes, goes to the Net and produces consumer scores. The idea has been around for a long time and some variations have exited (scan a product in a store and compare with Amazon prices). Making a properly weighted and trusted database is a more interesting problem.

symmetry breaking and tail wags

So the dog is looking at you and wagging his tail mostly to his left. What do you do?

It turns out that left wagging is different from right wagging...

Ferrets show the same behavior.

___

The answer is not "give the dog a beer"

folding bikes

A very interesting looking prototype from Pacific Cycles. (video)

No information other than this video. It certainly breaks down easily.

windows live maps

I haven't tried Microsoft's web-based mapping tool for some time, but it is greatly improved.

Give it a try and see if you are in the image. Lots of aerial photography in our area.