The Vermont Eco Builder blog documents its project to make a kitchen floor from a patchwork of Marmoleum ends, rescuing them from a landfill. The effect is just lovely. Link (via Neatorama)

Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We weren't satisfied with the bogus "green" graduation gifts being hawked out there, so we decided to create the ultimate one. For a gift of $6,000, we'll offset the climate emissions of your favorite high school grad's whole childhood, giving them a carbon clean slate. It's only $7,500 for a college graduate. Expensive? No, discounted. The point is our impacts are much to big to change with some hemp sandals or a solar backpack, and it's time to get real." Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has discovered a delightful line of settees and sofas made from (unused) steel coffins -- elegant and practical!

I'm intrigued by these designer coffin couches... the perfect love seat for post-mortem seductions. According to the guys at CoffinCouches.com, they have managed to secure a number of unused 18 gauge steel coffins from South Californian funeral homes and convert them for use in your living room. Due to pesky South Californian anti-graverobbing laws (and I can attest to the fact that California's just maggoty with them), these coffins are entirely unused, so you don't need to worry that yours wasn't hosed off properly. The price of each couch is $4,500.

Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites. This handsome, lopsided li'l fella came from nearby the reactor at Gysinge, Sweden. Link (via Neatorama)

Seasonal Chef's farmers' market reports from across the USA come lavishly illustrated with beautiful photos of mouth-watering organic produce -- it's raw food porn!

It's still a little too early for strawberries, in my opinion. It's got to get hotter for them to sweeten up -- and that'll happen in about six weeks. But the price is coming down, so I figure it's time to try my first strawberries of the season. Blood oranges won't be around much longer. Time to buy a bunch, juice them, and boil the juice down to reduce it by half or more to make syrup for salad dressings that I'll freeze and use for months to come. Fava beans have been in the markets for some weeks now, but at $3 a pound unshelled, they're a pricy delicacy. They'll get cheaper until they vanish in about month. Today, I got these for $2 a pound -- a fair price for a fleeting springtime treat. Here are nine fava bean recipes that I like. The Catalan stew is time-consuming, but well worth it, once a year.

Link (via Waxy)

A Danish company called Agroplast has figured out how to turn pig-piss into plastic and into a cigarette "flavor enhancer":

Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch.

Tøttrup claims that the process could, conceivably, result in plastics that cost a third less than conventional plastics made from fossil fuels. That's a big conceivably. Traditionally, bioplastics made of vegetable matter have cost more than fossil fuel plastics. Evaluation of the pricing will have to wait until large volumes of this stuff are made. Agroplast is going into a pilot study now, Tøttrup said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

(Image: URINE: a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Salvez's Flickr stream)

Donation Dashboard is a new project from UC Berkeley's Center for New Media to match non-profits with individual donors. Developed by Ken Goldberg and his colleagues, it's based on collaborative filtering, the same technique used by Amazon, for example, to recommend books based on the "wisdom" of the crowds. The notion is that people who agreed in the past will likely agree in the future about certain things. From the project page:

Here's how it works: you are presented with brief descriptions of non- profit institutions and asked to rate each in terms of how interested you are in donating to it. The system analyzes your ratings in light of others' ratings and does its best to allocate your available funds in proportion to your interests. Your customized "donation portfolio" is presented in an easy-to-understand pie chart that you can save at the site for future reference.

The Donation Dashboard website is a pilot system that includes information on 70 non-profit institutions. If the system is successful, the developers hope to expand it with other features and partner with a third party that can streamline collecting and distributing funds.

"There's strength in numbers; the system should improve over time as the number of ratings increases, in this sense each person who visits the site contributes to the collective wisdom about good causes," notes UC Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg, who is developing the system with graduate students Tavi Nathanson and Ephrat Bitton at UC Berkeley, with conceptual input from Jim Buckmaster at craigslist.

Link

The folks at my daughter's preschool say they learned this trick on a kibbutz in Israel: plastic bags filled with water, and hung from tree branches to scare the bugs away. Does it work?

Alex sez, "At Worldchanging, we just did a post on how high a percentage of their monthly budgets many families are now paying for their cars, and why many "expensive" close-in neighborhoods are actually affordable when you factor in the gas pump. The centerpiece is a great new mapping ap from the center for neighborhood technologies that shows the interplay between the two in great clarity."

One factor that often doesn’t get considered in discussions of Seattle’s rising prices is transportation costs. It makes sense that if you have to “drive until you qualify,” as one common justification of living in the suburbs puts it, the cost of that driving ought to be considered as part of the cost of living far outside the city. Generally, though, it isn’t—allowing pro-suburban, anti-regulation, anti-density pundits and politicians to claim that Seattle’s housing prices are “out of control” and that the suburbs are the only “affordable” alternative.

According to CNT’s analysis of the Seattle region, the most affordable parts of our region are actually inside city limits—once transportation costs are factored in.

Link, Link to mapping app (Thanks, Alex!

Etsy seller Recycled Ideas makes greeting cards with embedded seeds; once you've read and appreciated the message, you can plant the card and watch it sprout.

Love the earth? Me too! My passion for primates led me to study them and in doing so, I learned of their precarious position on earth. So many are endangered because their habitat is being destroyed everyday. That's why I make green gifts - like plantable paper.

Link (via Craft)

See also: Business card that sprouts

The State of Florida has given a Nestle bottling plant the right to pump as much water as it can get out Madison Blue Springs State Park, which is presently in drought conditions. The right lasts until 2018, and cost Nestle $230 in permit fees. Florida is presently in bitter dispute with its neighboring states over a region-wide water-shortage.

The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians — hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park — at no cost to Nestle.

No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018...

The state did much more than fight to get Nestle the right to pump as much water as possible from the spring.

As an added incentive for Nestle, the state approved a tax refund of up to $1.68-million for the Madison bottling operation. To date, Nestle has received two refunds totaling $196,000 and requested a third tax refund.

Link (Thanks, Steven!)

See also: For Love of Water: infuriating and incredible documentary about world's water-crisis

(Image: The world of water, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Snap®'s Flickr stream)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel takes note of a Slate article by Alexandra Harney on the end of cheap Chinese electronics, led by unstoppable inflation

The era of cheap Chinese consumer goods may finally be ending, thanks to irrepressible inflation. Now when the Chinese present their lists, some American importers are conceding higher prices, meaning that American shoppers, for the first time in years, are starting to pick up the tab for rising costs in China. Some Chinese factories are now asking their American customers for price increases of as much as 20 percent to 30 percent.

Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

On WorldChanging, Alex Steffen gives a briefing on the Freeaire System, which pipes in cold external air when available to cut energy bills.

"...designed to provide such free cooling for walk-in coolers, freezers and cold storage warehouses. The system utilizes an electronic controller to finely tune the operation of standard refrigeration equipment, and this controller simply monitors the outdoor temperature and desired temperature settings and stops refrigerator evaporator fans when not needed, which also reduces the compressor's refrigeration load. Proper airflow is maintained when the evaporator fans switch off by operating one or more energy-efficient circulating fans.

Roughly half the electricity consumed by a typical convenience store is used for refrigeration. The Freeaire System is designed to save energy year-round by allowing refrigeration equipment for a walk-in cooler or freezer to run only as much as it has to. Once the system is installed, evaporator fans typically operate 50 to 75% less often, and reach-in door heaters operate 90% less frequently. Condensing units also usually experience a 10 to 20% reduction in operations. Moreover, a Freeaire System saving 20,000 kilowatt-hours annually can prevent 40,000 pounds of CO2 from being emitted to the atmosphere.

Link

Virgin Atlantic thinks it can green commercial aviation with biofuels:

When a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 took off for a 40-minute flight from London to Amsterdam Feb. 24, it represented an aviation breakthrough. For the first time a commercial airliner took aloft on other than fossil fuels. One of the plane’s four engines was fired on a 20 percent biojet fuel blend. The aim of the test flight was to explore how a biofuel performs in high altitude cold temperatures...

The next test aims to validate sustainability. When the Air New Zealand test takes place, it will be with a second generation feedstock. Of the possibilities, two are worth noting: algae and jatropha. Both grow on non-agricultural land. Algae can employ saline water, and jatropha grows in dry conditions on degraded lands, in fact helping accumulate carbon in the soil. There are solid indications that biojet from jatropha or algae could provide massive amounts of fuel, and at costs lower than petroleum-based jet fuel.

Boeing’s own presentation on alternative fuels shows that land use issues are part of the sustainable biojet program’s DNA. “If the world airline fleet used 100% biojet fuel from soybeans, it would require 322 billion litres,” the presentation says. At 560 liters of oil per hectare that would require 5,750 million square kilometers, about the size of Europe. But algae could produce up to 94,000 liters per acre, shrinking land requirements to 35,000 square kilometers, about a Belgium’s worth of land.

Link

I've just watched Irena Salina's incredible, infuriating documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, a film about the often-invisible and underreported global water crisis. Ranging from widespread US contamination to the tragedy of developing nations who are forced by the World Bank to sell their water companies like Vivendi, Suez and Thames, who get sweetheart deals to offer substandard, overpriced monopoly water service, at terrible cost to human life.

Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die.

In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pulls in billions to sell products that are more contaminated and toxic than what comes out of the tap. The result is a gigantic mountain of empty plastic bottles that toxify the environment -- and three times more money spent on bottled water than it would take to solve the world's real water crisis. The companies like Nestle that pump out our aquifers use private investigators to harass people who sign petitions to stop them from pumping.

But it's not all doom and gloom -- low-cost, sustainable purification technologies like ultraviolet water-health run by village cooperatives can make dramatic development differences for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world, who are able to maintain their own systems without foreign involvement. Local activists all over the world and fighting back and winning public, non-profit ownership of their waterworks.

The companies that control our water control our lives. Without us even noticing it, we've handed the planet's destiny to a few companies with a plan to line their pockets by holding our survival hostage.

Flow is seeking signatures for a petition to the UN: "Article 31: Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance."

FLOW is on the festival circuit -- if you get the chance, see this film. Link, Link to sign up for DVD release new

Here's a slide deck to accompany Saul Griffith's incredible talk on engineering solutions to climate change from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this month in San Diego. The talk was the highlight of the conference for me, dealing as it did with the engineering affordances of carbon, climate, and energy sources of all kind, and coming to a humane solution that invites us to live luxuriant high-quality lives that nevertheless massively reduce our carbon footprints to a sustainable level. Link (Thanks, Avi!)

See also: Engineering approach to global climate change

Bruce Sterling's "Revenge of the Slow" in this month's Metropolis Magazine is a thought-provoking history and analysis of the Slow Food movement, a massive, moneyed global phenomenon that aims to fight globalization by creating cachet for items that can't be scaled up to global prominence.

As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints.

The group is the suave host for massive international food events in Torino. Other Slow Food emanations include a hotel, various nonprofit foundations, and—in a particularly significant development—a private college. The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004, is the training ground for 200-plus international Slow Food myrmidons per year, who are taught to infiltrate farms, groceries, heritage tourism, restaurants, commercial consortia, hotel chains, catering companies, product promotion, journalism, and government. These areas are, of course, where Slow Food already lives...

Slow Food deploys its convivia to serve as talent scouts for food rarities (such as Polish Mead, the Istrian Giant Ox, and the Tehuacan Amaranth). Candidate discoveries are passed to Slow Food’s International Ark Commission, which decides whether the foodstuff is worthy of inclusion. Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Slow Food Vancouver Potluck May 10, 2005 - 4, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Roland's Flickr stream)

Brent sez, "I'm starting a new non-profit network of consumers called Carrotmob. We want to use our collective buying power as a bargaining tool in order to make corporations do environmentally friendly things. Our first 'experimental' campaign is this Saturday. We're going to get hundreds of people to show up at a liquor store in SF at 1pm and buy the place out. The store is spending 22% (they won a bidding war) of the revenue we bring in on environmental improvements to their store. Afterparty with free concert in Dolores Park. Please post or pass along if you like it..."

What sort of things are they going to spend this 22% on?

Well I assembled a team of energy experts, and we decided to go through the SF Energy Watch program. Their people are doing audits of the lighting and refrigeration systems at K & D to come up with a list of all the improvements they could make, as well as the likely cost of those improvements. Once we calculate how much cash we've brought in, they will choose which changes they want to make based on how much money they have to work with.

Link (Thanks, Brent!)

The Washup is a concept design for a "Greener Gadget" contest that incorporates a washing machine into a toilet, recycling wash-water as toilet water, and saving space by absorbing the washing machine's footprint into the basin's. Link (via Geekologie)

A Ghanian entrepreneur makes handsome carrier bags out of recycled disposable plastic bags:

In the Trashy Bags workshop a dozen tailors and seamstresses sit at manual sewing machines stitching together old plastic sachets. In west Africa tap water is not fit to drink so millions of half-litre "pure water" sachets costing only the equivalent of 2p are discarded by thirsty consumers every day. A storage room overflows with more than three million sachets that have been collected and cleaned ready for recycling...

Local people arrive at the Trashy Bags workshop carrying sacks stuffed with thousands of the sachets on their heads. They exchange 1,000 sachets for £2 – good money in a country where the average person earns only £254 a year.

"I collect sachets because I am jobless and this gives me money," said Hadiza Ishmael, a 55-year-old grandmother who had just arrived with 4,000 sachets. "It also makes the place look nicer."

Link (via Link

I'm at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego -- the highlight of my conference-going year, every year, for most of a decade now -- and I've just caught Saul Griffith's presentation of hacking and understanding energy consumption and production. Saul's a brilliant polymath geek, an MIT Media Lab alum who's responsible for everything from Howtoons to Squid Labs to a new alternative energy company (he was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant this year).

Saul's talk was a fast-paced discussion of the cold, hard, engineering reality of CO2 production, its relationship to energy consumption, climate change, and the human cost of all that. Saul sliced and diced the numbers every which way from joules per nanosecond to total wave-energy of the entire Earth, and laid out the program we need to adopt if we're going to do something about it.

This was a refreshing, engineer-oriented, can-do approach to climate, one that actually ended on an up note (if you do the stuff you want to do: exercise more, buy better stuff, do fewer business trips, live closer to your loved ones, and so on, you can reduce your energy consumption by 90 percent).

I took notes as fast as I could through the talk and I've put them online.

What does 2C mean?

Reports from BP and others are pretty conservative: 1.5 deg == 10% species lost, 3.5 deg 1-4 billion people in water shortage; 4.5 deg == entire cities and countries vanish

But none of these account for the environmental consequences of these consequences, e.g., what happens when 10 million people leave a drowned city and go somewhere else (war, famine, etc)

At 450 ppm CO2 temp goes up 2C.

We have to accept 2GtC into oceans/year, even though ocean acidification has its own grave consequences

There are long time-lags in the system -- CO2 is a lead indicator. Curve down the CO2 for 50 years, reap the rewards over 300 years.

It takes centuries after CO2 stabilization to reap temperature stabilization -- we've never deployed this kind of foresight before

2C gives you 7.3 GTCO2

Link to my notes, Link to talk precis

These "bicycle handcuffs" look like a pretty good solution to a lot of bike-locking problems (though they wouldn't be much help in locking your bike to a telephone pole or wide light-post). I can't evaluate the manufacturer's claims about the material's hardness or the lock's efficacy, but the theory appears sound:

The heavy-duty cuffs attach around the fork and disc rotor so would-be thieves can't make off with your bike unless they’re armed with some kind of Fort Knox-busting wonder weapon. This nifty arrangement means you won’t have to fool around taking off your wheel for full lockdown. You don’t even need to use the keys to secure your bike, just click the cuffs using the integrated buttons.

Link (via Red Ferret)

The TED Prize event is streaming live now. I watched it last year and it was very moving. I imagine it will be again this year.

About the 2008 TEDPrize

The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, and more importantly, a wish. A wish to change the world.

During today's session, webcast live from Monterey, California, the 2008 TEDPrize winners will unveil their wishes for the first time. Prize winners Neil Turok, Dave Eggars and Karen Armstong will be joined by singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela.

Link

Dwiff sez, "Universal Studio blocks proposed bike path for fear that aspiring screenwriters will use it to throw their scripts onto the lot. No, seriously."

As Los Angeles struggles to restore its namesake river, a considerable obstacle has arisen -- NBC Universal, which is trying to block a public bike path from traversing its property along the waterway...

One bike advocate said Universal executives told him they feared that people would use the path to lob unsolicited screenplays onto the studio's nearby production lot -- something that apparently happens at other spots when a Universal film scores big at the box office.

Link (Thanks, Dwiff!)

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine.

History of life is a history of replicators.

Language is a parasite we've adapted to. It may have started out being harmful, but we've developed a symbiotic relationship with it.

First replicators were genes. Then memes. We now have temes (tech memes) are a third repliciator on our planet.

Don't think of intelligence, thinnk of replicators.

New Drake equation. Start with number of planets -- what fraction of those get a first replicator, a 2nd replicator, a 3rd?

Getting a new replicator is dangerous. We need to pull through each time. The 2nd replicator (memes) was dangerous -= big brains are painful: kills a lot of mothers and babies. Brains uses 20% of body energy for 2% of body weight; it may have nearly killed us off.

temes are just information -- they use humans to suck up planet's resources. Don't think we created the internet to benefit us; we are being being used by temes. It convenient for temes to piggyback on us because we replicate. But when temes can replicate without us, they will carry on without us.

Bullfrog Ballet is a two-minute video of high-speed footage of bullfrogs -- unweildy burping monsters -- moving with grace and precision, catching bugs. It comes to us courtesy of Jeff from the Vancouver Aquarium, who notes,

It's actually a video we just put up featuring the clumsy insatiable eating machine that is the bullfrog.

We shot this over 3 days using a Phantom camera and seeing frogs eat at high speed really is dramatic...hence the awesomely over-the-top music.

Frogs of all kinds are in serious trouble. They're facing the largest mass-extinction since the dinosaurs. Up to half of the species could disappear in our lifetime.

As part of amphibian ark and the year of the frog, this is our little side project to bring some attention to these creatures.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)