Nov 8, 09
Tell Jamais Where To Go
I will be in London, England from February 4th through February 10th. What WorldChanging-type sights or activities should I hunt down? Whom should I seek out for wisdom? What will wake me up out of a jet-lagged stupor and kick me for a paradigm-breaking loop? Send me email or post here. I may be taking a day trip through the Chunnel and hitting Paris, so I wouldn't mind suggestions for quick WC-related activities there, too. I'll be bringing my camera and laptop (and will be posting my...
Good News India
Written in a typically direct Indian manner, Good News India is surely a Worldchanging sister site - providing us with "News from India : of positive action, steely endeavour and quiet triumphs ~ news that is little known." It's a one man site but despite resource constraints does a good job. The stories range quite widely, from a piece of Sankskrit as an untapped source of knowledge to a story on a professor who is pioneering the use of natural vegatable alternatives to diesel. Also check...
How to Survive a WMD
I personally don't think that terrorism is the largest long-term threat to the health and well-being of myself and those I love. But it is a fact that the spread of technology has made us all at least slightly more vulnerable to weapons of mass destruction. So what do you do if there's an attack? Kevin Kelly suggests the booklet Individual Preparedness and Response to Chemical, Radiological, Nuclear, and Biological Terrorist Attacks: A Quick Guide. It's a straight-forward guide to how to...
Pop!Tech
This October's Pop!Tech conference's focus is the "sea-change," "the dramatic transformative changes that are being (or are about to be) wrought in our lives, our societies, our planet, and our understanding of the universe." The list of topics being considered (in the extended entry below) includes many close to our own hearts.
Pennylender
SmartMobs is reporting the creation of a new open-source, collaborative, peer-to-peer international lending system, called Pennylender. Details are still sketchy, but it sounds interesting: "What Pennylender hopes to achieve is too enable bottom-up capitalism in 3rd World developing countries and the not-so-wealthy in tier 1 and 2 countries. We plan to do this by creating a financial service that will allow any individual to loan and/or borrow money in a self-contained community-based...
Harare's Eastgate Building and the Perils of Thinking Small
Worldchanging ally Andrew Zolli has some really smart things to say about the Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe, the ways in which it was biomimetically modelled on a termite mound, and the interplay of investment cultures and sustainability: "[M]uch of the sustainability movement seems stuck in a local minima of 'now-ist' free market capitalism: a tight focus on the short term prevents companies from investing in longer-term sustainable (and cost reducing) measures, which in turn leads...
From Antarctica to Forty Signs of Rain
I think Kim Stanley Robinson rocks. His Mars series was outstanding, I liked Years of Rice and Salt, and I'm almost done with Antarctica (about which, more soon). He's both one of those writers who manages to make science fiction a literature of ideas and one who understands fully the sort of times in which we live. So I was pleased as heck when I found that SciFi.com has posted a great interview with him: You've become famous in the last decade for your future and alternate histories, but...
Stewart Brand's Clock Update
The Clock of the Long Now is an amazing project, an attempt to draw the human mind into thinking in spans of thousands of years. It is partly an art project, partly an archival effort, and partly propaganda of the deed, trying to shake us into a mindset which can imagine radical sustainability - not the kind of sustainability which might help our global society outlast the century (though that'd be a welcome relief), but the kind which might help it outlast the year 10,000. And now they're...
Zephyr Teachout
Zephyr Teachout is one of only 20 or so people I can think of who feels genuinely 21st Century. I just don't think the 20th was up to inventing a farm girl, Yale track star, collaboration true-believer who went on to essentially run an electronic presidential campaign while barnstorming around the country in an old Airstream trailer. But I'd never actually heard her speak before. So I was pleased to find this Chris Lydon interview with her (MP3). It's an interesting window into her...
"Bionics" and Sustainability
Worldchanger Dan Cooney writes in with an excellent recommendation: the paper Bionics: Nature as a Tool for Product Development (PDF). In it, Motorola's Franco Lodato discusses ways in which using natural systems as design models (he calls it bionics, though we prefer biomimicry) can help designers do much more with less (dematerialization). His discussion of how he designed an ice axe based on the biomechanics of a woodpecker is alone worth the read. "Bionics, could be classified in five...
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