Dec 2, 08
Transhuman Space
Cyborg Democracy had a post yesterday about the game series Transhuman Space. I note this for several reasons. The setting of the game is interesting and provocative. A game like this is a different way of thinking about the future. And I'm one of its authors. Transhuman Space is a role-playing game setting. (No, not on a computer. This is old-school paper & dice role-playing, kind of like Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, people still play games like these, although the number of players is way...
Bhutan's Future
Bhutan, the tiny Buddhist kingdom nestled in the eastern Himalayas, has long had a policy of "selective modernization." Seeing the effects of colonialism (and, later, development policies dictated by the First World) on the cultures and societies of neighboring countries, the Bhutanese government has put strict limits on technology, private enterprise, trade and tourism (they only got television in 1999). In some ways, these limits have worked: Bhutan retains its distinctive culture, and by...
Wireless for the Masses
If we're certain about anything around here, it's that the future will be wireless. These days, "information wants to be free" has little to do with cost, and everything to do with getting off the leash of an ethernet (or phone) line. Swimming untethered in the infosphere is revolutionary. If you live in Portland, Oregon or Seattle, Washington, you're lucky: both cities have rapidly-growing open-access distributed community wireless "metropolitan area networks." Portland's is the Personal...
Green Consumption
I generally distrust the "50 things you can do to [insert social good here]" approach. It seems to me that too often the steps offered are too small, too cautious to actually do much good, and that they run the risk of lulling us into a false sense of nobility. So when I got an email recommending the Conscious Consumer Marketplace, I almost roundfiled it automatically. I'm glad I didn't, because it's actually the best of these efforts I've seen so far. First of all, it's a readable and...
G20+ and the WTO
The New York Times today took the rare step of devoting its entire editorial column to a single issue: the need for the developed world to make concessions on eliminating subsidies (especially for agriculture) if world trade is to continue to grow more open. "There was a time when the European Union and the United States could jointly dictate terms to the rest of the World Trade Organization, but not any more. Washington's betrayal of its free-trading principles outraged not only the poorest...
Earthquakes, Culture, and Design
With the ongoing revelations of the scale of the disaster in Bam, Iran, it's easy to forget that the magnitude of the earthquake in Iran -- 6.6 on the Richter scale -- was quite close to that of an earthquake just a few days earlier, the 6.5 quake in Paso Robles, California. In Iran, the quake killed as many as 40,000 people, and destroyed thousands of buildings; in California, the quake killed 3, and while early 100 buildings were damaged enough to require safety inspections, only one...
The Fall of the Green Wall of China
Deserts are spreading everywhere around the world, but the problem's particularly bad in China. There, government officials say, 3,600 km2 of former grasslands and farms are overtaken by the sands every year - and they're probably downplaying the problem: one recent remote-sensing study suggests that the area being lost each year to complete desertification now exceeds 4 million hectares/ year (about 15,500 square miles - an area larger than the Netherlands). Whole towns and cities have been...
CLIWOC
Sometimes, the sites we find for WorldChanging just make us sit back with a big grin and say, "wow." CLIWOC is a program sponsored by the European Union for creating a database of the world's ocean climate -- temperature, wind, precipitation -- from 1750-1850. The research, headed up by a team at the UK's University of Sunderland and combining the efforts of universities in Spain, the Netherlands, and Argentina, takes the daily (sometimes hourly) log entries from thousands of ships over...
Personal Pollution Index
Got a spare $5,000 and a serious masochistic streak? Then you, too, can undergo biomonitoring to find out just how many biotoxins have taken up residence in your body. If you're anything like the 9 people in a new study by Commonweal and the Environmental Working Group, you're in for a nasty surprise. The 9 subjects -- including journalist Bill Moyer -- were found to have an average of 91 different industrial compounds, pollutants, and other potentially unpleasant chemicals in their blood,...
Worldwatch on the Tech Bloom
Worldwatch - the thinktank of record on all matters sustainable - says that cellphones and cheap computers are revolutionizing the developing world and helping bridge the global gap between rich and poor: "In 1992, only one in 237 people worldwide used a mobile phone, and one in 778 used the Internet; by 2002, the numbers had soared to one in 5 and one in 10, respectively." "Cheap computers with nonproprietary software, designed to be shared at public libraries, cyber cafes, and...
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