Scatter, Adapt, Remember

Humankind has survived many disasters and several close calls with extinction. How have we done this?

From the preface: "Earth has been shattered by asteroid impacts, choked by extreme greenhouse gases, locked up in ice, bombarded with cosmic radiation, and ripped open by megavolcanoes so enormous they are almost unimaginable. Each of these disasters caused mass extinctions, during which more than 75 percent of the species on Earth died out. And yet every single time, living creatures carried on, adapting to survive under the harshest of conditions."

In Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, author Annalee Newitz gives us convincing evidence that calamity is on the horizon and also argues that it does not have to spell doom for our species. Her book chronicles what the past victories looked like. It also imagines what our path to continued existence will be.

Here's a link to the full preface.

iPhone "Tricorder" Does The Work Of A $50,000 Lab Machine

There is an X Prize competition to create a device like Star Trek's medical tricorder, a noninvasive tool doctors can use diagnose a patients ills and although this iPhone cradle made up of about $200 worth of electronics falls somewhat short of the goal, it is getting close.

Developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by a team led by Prof. Brian Cunningham, the phone is able to detect toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.

You start with a sample on a slide and then insert the slide into the cradle. The device then uses light reflected from the sample to determine its composition.

Travel Photo of the Week

Eastham, MA - David Torn

Quantum Entanglement Of Photons That Don't Exist At The Same Time

Here's how you do it!

Yes, you read that right and it's not April 1st. It seems that experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time.

One of the researchers on the project, Hagai Eisenberg, said. "There is no moment in time in which the two photons coexist," he says, "so you cannot say that the system is entangled at this or that moment."

Yet, the phenomenon definitely exists.

Although they've only done this in one temporal direction, into the future, can it be long before they try to figure out a way to test if works the other way, too?

Stay Sharp: Eat A Mediterranean Diet

I've basically been eating a Mediterranean diet for years and I do have to say that it has served me well. This article in Time online, claims that it might also good for your brain as you age.

Rounds of cognitive tests were done on 522 people in three groups, in a Spanish study over a 6½ year period. One group consumed a Mediterranean diet with extra-virgin olive oil, another ate a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts, and the control group was assigned a low-fat diet.

The results? On average, those consuming either version of the Mediterranean diet scored significantly higher than the low-fat dieters on cognitive tests.

Interesting, but more study still needs to be done.

Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD

Diagnosis of ADHD in children is becoming ever greater, year by year. Right now, in the United States, the numbers say 9% and pharmaceutical substances are generally prescribed.

In France that number is .5%. That's right, one half of one percent. Why the big difference? This article by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D, online at Psychology Today, gives some pretty plausible answers. Most of it seems to be in professional attitude: in the US, ADHD is considered a biological affliction. In France it is looked at as a medical condition with psycho-social and situational causes.

It should also be noted that French and American parenting styles are very different.

Fun Time! Life Size Star Wars' X Wing Made From LEGOS!

Yeah, the photo above pretty much says it all. If you need the whole skinny, click HERE.

WikiHouse 3D Printed Structures

WikiHouse is an open source construction set that allows you to design and print out habitable structures which can be assembled and finished with minimal training.

All the parts of a structure can be "printed" from standard building materials and then cut on CNC machines.

The site has an open library of the shapes needed to making your building and tools for the design stage. There is also a sign up page for a community of hacker/builders.

The Plan To End Hunger With 3-D Printed Food

Imagine really ending hunger.

Imagine going up to a device somewhere and saying, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.", and shortly thereafter picking up your beverage with food that was printed by a 3D printer. This is certainly the most audacious idea that I've seen so far out of the 3D printing crowd.

This really could end hunger.

Travel Photo of the Week

Iceland

Hovercraft Golf Cart

Just what you need, next time you're on the golf course. You can get one HERE.

Northern Pike Decimating Salmon And Trout

Northern Pike, a non-native invasive species, are threatening salmon and trout stocks in the Northeast.
Apparently the problem started in Alaska and has now spread to Washington state, Idaho, Montana and beyond.

The pike like to hang out in shallow, reedy areas where they prey on the fingerlings of these species. In some areas they have wiped out the other fish. They have been implicated in the crash of king salmon runs in the Deshka River.

Some anglers are defending the pike saying that they make good fishing.

Here are links to two articles reporting on this. The Peninsula Clarion. United Press International.

Buycott Helps You Vote With Your Dollars

Are you tired of buying products from businesses whose policies disgust you? Tired of  funding the Koch brothers assault on American politics? Tired of paying Monsanto to poison the food chain?

This is the app for you. Buycott lets you see the entire product chain right up to the company that owns the works. As the Buycott's webpage states, "It will look up the product, determine what brand it belongs to, and figure out what company owns that brand (and who owns that company, ad infinitum). It will then cross-check the product owners against the companies and brands included in the campaigns you've joined, in order to tell you if the scanned product conflicts with one of your campaign commitments."

That's the way you can make real change happen. Vote with your dollars.

Fun Time! Ambiguity!

"Ambiguity is a game that makes the brain squirm. The concept is simple—roll eight letter die, set the timer, jot down as many words as players can make out of the letters—but mastering the game isn’t easy. The letter dice are designed, as the game's title suggests, to be confusing. Many of the die faces represent more than one letter, and it's not immediately obvious what they are."

A 2013 Parents Choice Award winner.

Think Unemployment Is Bad Now? By 2045 Everyone Will Be Out Of Work!

It's everybody's dream: not having to work!

It's everybody's nightmare: 100% unemployment!

Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University, believes that by 2045 this dream/nightmare scenario might come to pass. He thinks that artificially intelligent machines may be capable of  doing all our jobs. He says, “if not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”

As a child growing up in the '60s, a future where automation relieved humans of the burden or work was viewed as a positive thing. Then as time passed, it became obvious that the benefits of such a utopia would not be spread around evenly. The robot owners could relax. The replaced workers could starve.

As we move towards an economic singularity such as a world without work, we must ask ourselves, "How do we spread the benefits around more equitably?"

130 Square Foot Paris Micro-apartment

Here is a photo spread on an elegantly designed Parisian micro-apartment.

Travel Photo of the Week

Mexico City, Mexico

Ken Robinson: How To Escape Education's Death Valley

Sir Ken Robinson discusses the irony of No Child Left behind in this 2013 TED talk. He argues that the Bush era policy stresses conformity (in a culture of compliance) and that is what is turning our kids off to the potential of education. He says that in some parts of America 60% of kids drop out of highschool and 80% of Native American kids drop out and he adds that if these numbers were halved it could create as much as a net gain to our economy of a trillion dollars.

Isn't that what's at stake? The future of our children AND our economy?

Mattel Designer Builds Dream Home From Shipping Containers

Debbie Glassberg is a toy designer for Mattel and she has designed and built this absolutely stunning house for herself and her family out of five shipping containers.

In this recent piece on Inhabit, we get a tour of her 2600 square foot home. The first floor has the kitchen, an open-plan living/dining room and an Asian themed spare room for entertaining. There are two bedrooms, an office and bathroom on the second floor and a vegetable garden on the roof.

If you're interested, she designing for others.

Formlabs 3D Printer

Formlabs is just about to start shipping their new 3D printer. Here's a video showing it in action.

Fun Time! TV And Movie Characters On Their Day Off!

This hilarious set of illustrations by Kiersten Essenpreis show us what TV and movie characters do in their off time.

Gozer at the dog park.

Timelapse Films Of Environmental Degradation

Have you ever wonderful just how much the area that you live in has grown over the last three decades?

Time Magazine's website has published a searchable database showing what has happened to the Earth as populations, and the inevitable development they create, have exploded over that time period.

These are Landsat satellite images that have been assembled into three second animations. There are eight examples offered, but you can pop a location into the search box, bring up any area on Earth that you choose and see what's happened between 1984 and now.

The Sketchbook Project

As their website says, "The Sketchbook Project is a global, crowd-sourced art project and interactive, traveling exhibition of handmade books." It is made up of over 26,000 sketchbooks and is located at the Brooklyn Art Library in Brooklyn, NYC.

They also operate a traveling library that tours the country. Anyone, anywhere can participate by submitting a sketchbook for inclusion in the library and your work will see at least three cities on a tour.

Here's a short video they've produced. Traveling art. What a great idea.

Travel Photo of the Week

Keawakapu Beach, Kihei, Hawaii - Charles Laquidara

Note: Mr. Laquidara also has the distinction of being one of Boston, Massachusetts most beloved disc jockeys, helming a morning show, The Big Mattress, on the legendary WBCN from 1969 to 1996. I once had the honor of being on his show and providing sound effects for one his many zany flights of fancy.  Thanks Charles. We all had a great time.

The Infinite Resource: The Power Of Ideas On A Finite Planet

"The world is facing incredibly serious natural resource and environmental challenges: Climate change, fresh water depletion, ocean over-fishing, deforestation, air and water pollution, the struggle to feed a planet of billions."

So begins a two-part guest blog post from Ramez Naam, on Scientific American's website, challenging conventional views on the limits of the carrying capacity of the Earth.

His new book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, addresses the five basic problems that we face if the human race is to continue living successfully on the planet.

Part one outlines them as: feeding the world, deforestation, fresh water, ocean overfishing and climate change. Part two offers a plan to deal with each.

In her seminal work, Patterns of Culture, the great cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that no civilization had ever woken up and realized that they could change the laws and rules by which they lived, that they could change the very culture that defined their ideas and behavior. The 1960s proved that idea wrong, but also showed the deep intransigence of any challenged culture. So deep in fact, that the so called culture war is still being fought today. The polarization of American politics is proof of that.

Whether we will fix our problems or they will fix us, as Sherlock Holmes once said, "The game is afoot."

Stewart Brand: The Man Who Changed The World For The Better

I've written before about The Whole Earth Catalog and how it changed my world. It gave me, as the subtitle promised, "access to tools and ideas."

I cannot underestimate how much its creator, Stewart Brand, has enriched my life and changed it and me for the better, through the Catalog and his other projects and ideas. I still have copies of all the editions (except for the first) and I have given many away to friends I thought would benefit from its wisdom.

Now comes support and confirmation from a new generation. Below are some quotes from an article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian.

"Stewart Brand didn't just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he's the one who put "personal" and "computer" together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn't just a member of the world's first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it."

"For nearly five decades, Stewart Brand has been hanging around the cutting edge of whatever is the most cutting thing of the day. Largely because he's discovered it and become fascinated with it long before anyone else has even noticed it but, in retrospect, it does make him seem like the west coast's answer to Zelig, the Woody Allen character who just happens to pop up at key moments in history. Because no one pops up like Stewart Brand pops up, right there, just on the cusp of something momentous."

"He has a sort of genius for being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time."

"It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a 'vernacular technology' that was doing the same thing."

"Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists."

"No one was more influenced, or inspired by, Stewart Brand, than the founder of Apple. And while many credit Jobs with being one of the most creative agents of change in the late 20th century, Jobs credited Brand."

It's a long article and I could go on and on cherry-picking its passages, but I think it's time you go get inspired yourself.

Thanks to Lloyd Kahn (another person who constantly inspires me and a friend of Brand's) for putting me on to this article.

If Smartphones Are Making Us Less Productive, Why Are Employers Demanding You Bring Your Own?

Here are two articles, that taken together, beg the question: "Are trends in technology adoption making us less productive?"

The first comes from Computer World and it states that soon the company you work for will require you to provide your own smartphone for work. Undoubtedly your boss will also demand unfettered access to its files and other data.

The second comes from the Wall Street Journal and offers evidence that smartphones make you less, not more, productive at work.

I can hear the boss say, "Yes, you must subsidize my wealth by providing your own smartphone for work and if it makes you fail, we'll reward you with termination."

And people think they have to worry about government intrusion in their lives.

Fun Time! Slow Motion Exploding Lego House!

America's Pig Explosion

Although it started in southern states like Texas, there is a feral pig population explosion that has moved into northern states. The New York Times describes them as eating machines that "roam city streets, collide with cars, root up cemeteries, rototill fields, dig up lawns, decimate wetlands, kill livestock, spread diseases like pseudo-rabies, occasionally attack humans" and weigh 200 pounds or more each.

Between 1990 and now, their numbers have risen from 2 million to six million and although they are recognized as the blight that they are, there are no local, regional or national policies to deal with them.

That might be about to change, but that doesn't mean that the hogs aren't going to become the latest political football. If this concerns you, read the linked article for more details.

I say between snakeheads, nutria and the pigs, we could easily take care of some of our hunger problems in this country.

Reducing The Environmental Damage Of Doubling Food Production

This article in Scientific American states that to feed the world's growing, affluent populations, food production must double by 2050. The downside is the ecological destruction that must inevitably follow using current agricultural methods.

To do this we must change the way we farm and the way we eat. A research team from the University of Minnesota has proposed five ways to do this: improve crop yields, consume less meat, reduce food waste, stop expanding into rainforests, and use fertilizer and water more efficiently.

35% of crop yield is consumed by animals we use for food. As the article states: "If the world's top 16 crops were grown only for human food, instead of the current mix that includes animal feed and biofuels, a billion tons more human food would be available—roughly equivalent to three quadrillion kilocalories."

Travel Photo of the Week

Portland, Maine