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Four short links: 4 September 2009

By Nat Torkington
September 3, 2009

Flood Maps -- what the world will look like when the oceans rise. Interactive, so you can dial up your preferred level of environmental horror. (via Hans Nowak) Citability -- making government accessible, reliable, and transparent with advanced permalinks, as Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability. Bootstrapping EC2 Images as...

Greener typesetting

By Rick Jelliffe
May 3, 2009

Consider that there may be one hundred million word processing documents printed every day (anyone know the real number?) That could mean a million extra pages per day generated because of page-profligate settings or algorithms. Now, paper is usually made from estate timber, so there probably is no SAVE THE TREES deforestation angle. But paper production takes energy, toxic bleaches are used, power is used to make it, fuel is used to transport it, if it is disposed by burning the carbon gets released, and more toner cartridges are used. A tiny effect for individuals, but a decent effect when aggregated. So can we green typesetting? Can word processing standards lead the way here?

Four short links: 27 Mar 2009

By Nat Torkington
March 27, 2009

Design, Perl, Heresy, and Ephemera: Product Panic: 2009 -- Bruce Sterling essay on design for recession-panicked consumers. As is usual with Bruce, I can't tell whether he's wryly tongue-in-cheek or literally advocating what he says. Great panic products are like Roosevelt’s fireside chats. They’re cheery bluff. The standard virtues of fine industrial design—safety, convenience, serviceability, utility, solid construction … well,...

Four short links: 26 Mar 2009

By Nat Torkington
March 26, 2009

Books, Money, Collective Despair, and a Dashboard of Doom: Will The Real iPod For Reading Please Stand Up -- Sebastian Mary argues eloquently that we're too focused on long-term writing because of the requirements and constraints imposed upon us by a mass-market paper book, whereas text online is basically an experiment in different lengths and sizes to find new balances...

ETech: Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?

By Robert Kaye
March 11, 2009

The second session today I'd like to share with you was presented by a personal friend of mine, Jeremy Faludi. Jer started his session entitled "Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?" by pointing out that if we want to change the world, we ought to know what the most important issues...

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 11, 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act...

Four short links: 4 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 4, 2009

Data, climate change, and location: Details on Yahoo's Distributed Database (Greg Linden) -- summary of Yahoo!'s PNUTS, "a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!'s web applications." Greg keeps up with the papers from the search engine companies, and the insights he offers are great. For example, "Second, as figures 3 and 4 show, the average latency of...

Help! The Polar Bears Have Fallen Down the Well!

By James Turner
November 24, 2008

This is an essay about human nature, and the way that the global warming (or global climate change) problem is encountering a "perfect storm" of human shortcomings. It is unabashedly an advocacy piece, and I'm equally unabashed in my support...

What good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?

By Tim O'Reilly
July 7, 2008

Two stories I read yesterday morning are worth sharing. The first, an editorial by science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg, was entitled The Death of Gallium, a meditation on the increasing scarcity of valuable elements like gallium, used in flat panel TVs and computer displays, which is estimated to be used up by 2017. Other less rare but equally important minerals are...