As somebody who works in the green sector, this made me laugh particularly hard: apparently those “good” consumers who buy green and environmentally-friendly products tend to balance out their “good behavior” by deciding it allows them to be total dicks in other parts of their lives. From the Guardian:

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.

The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

Now THAT is f*king funny.

(Guardian: How going green may make you mean)

 
Update: It was removed! Enjoy this version instead.
 

Jamais Cascio weighs in on the encroaching problem of methane leaking out from under the Arctic permafrost. Sounds scary… BUT THEN, I first heard of this in the context of a potential energy source. Apparently there’s enough methane under the Arctic permafrost to keep civilization going indefinitely. Iiiiiinteresting… any thoughts, oh readers?

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect—warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios—perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth’s geologic past.

(Here’s one piece of mitigating information: it’s unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we’re lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on “if we’re lucky” is not very wise.)

(Open the Future: Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point)

 
From Youtube user Kamoni:

Tectonic creates music and maps in real time by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A system using Max/MSP, Google Earth and Ableton Live processes a stream of real-time data that is translated into and audio ’sculpture’.

When an earthquake occurs, seismic data is relayed to the system, sound is produced and Google Earth immediately flies to the coordinates of the latest earthquake giving us a visual representation of the newest developments. As multiple earthquakes occur daily, the sculpture builds, enmeshing itself in a complex soundscape of textures and tones that constantly changes and evolves.

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future weighs in on another middle-class myth: the idea that “free range” is somehow a perfect solution for being nice to animals. This is another of those Whole Foods-style hairshirts: buy something slightly more expensive, with fuzzier, nicer packaging, and your hands are clean. Not so.

Having been both vegetarian and vegan at times in my life, and often returning to eating meat, I don’t have a clear answer on this one (although I recently heard a great NPR interview with a woman who designs machines to help cow slaughtering be more humane, who made the salient point that had these animals not been bred for food, they never would have lived at all). I do know that factory farm conditions are appalling, and a great unspoken shame of our civilization. Sadly, though, it seems that “free range” is not the easy answer.

Meat and egg companies often try to sell their wares to unsuspecting SWPLs (”socially conscious” educated bourgeoisie Americans) by using the “free range” label. Unsurprisingly, this label is a lie. To quote the Wikipedia page on “free range”:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) requires that chickens raised for their meat have access to the outside in order to receive the free-range certification. There is no requirement for access to pasture, and there may be access to only dirt or gravel. Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means. Many egg farmers sell their eggs as free range merely because their cages are two or three inches above average size, or because there is a window in the shed.

The USDA has no specific definition for “free-range” beef, pork, and other non-poultry products. All USDA definitions of “free-range” refer specifically to poultry. No other criteria-such as the size of the range or the amount of space given to each animal-are required before beef, lamb, and pork can be called “free-range”. Claims and labeling using “free range” are therefore unregulated. The USDA relies “upon producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims.”

Basically, the label is a farce. It conjures up images of old time family farms, when the reality is the exact opposite. Factory farmed chickens are routinely debeaked, and starved to cause forced molting, which shocks them into entering another egg-laying cycle. They live in filthy, shit-strewn cages and suffer from respiratory diseases due to inhaling large quantities of nitrogen released by their feces. “Free range” chickens spend most of their time in cages.

(Accelerating Future: Free Range is Bullshit)

 
Apparently this little guy really enjoys his smokes. From Metro.co.uk:

You don’t want to deny Po the pit viper his regular morning cigarette - he’s guaranteed to throw a hissy fit.

That’s because the three-year-old reptile from Taipei in Taiwan has become hooked on nicotine, thanks to his owner Sho Lau 20-a-day habit.

‘He is very tame and one day when I threw a cigarette butt away he went for it and seemed to enjoy having it in his mouth,’ said 33-year-old Lau.

‘One thing led to another and before long he was having one cigarette in the morning and another at night.’

‘He gets very agitated if I don’t have any to spare,’ he added.

(via Unique Daily)

Via GOOD magazine, this Planetizen article argues that living in the suburbs is fine—but working in the suburbs, in office parks, is the kiss of death.

Most attempts to regulate suburban development have focused on containing the growth of suburban housing. But such regulation, by restricting the supply of buildable land, risks incresing housing prices. And from a more libertarian perspective, an individual’s interest in choosing to “drive to qualify” may seem quite appealing. Attempts to regulate commercial suburban development do not involve the same sentimental considerations as limits on residential development, but do risk increasing prices for commercial land, thus increasing prices for everything else.

But these considerations do not justify the form of suburban office parks. I can think of no reason why an office building (other than, perhaps, one where the Ebola virus is routinely handled) should be behind a 500-foot driveway with no sidewalks. The arguments for allowing offices to locate in suburbia do not justify the office park form, because 500-foot driveways do not reduce rents in any obvious respect.

(Planetizen: Taming the Office Park)

(Office Space: Special Edition with Flair)

 
Freakish discovery in Denver:

A Silt, Colo., man made an amazing discovery this week: a coyote frozen solid in its tracks, standing upright next to a road near his home.

Seth Wettlin told TheDenverChannel.com that he ran out of gas on the way home Wednesday night and saw the coyote caught in his headlights on a dirt road, south of Silt.

At first, Wettlin thought it was frozen in fear, but upon closer inspection, he found it was literally frozen solid. The dead animal was standing in snow up to its chest, with its tongue hanging out.

Silt Man Discovers Upright Dead Animal Next To Dirt Road
 
(via Unique Daily )

 
You’ll never have to fear your cellphone running out of juice again as long as you’re near a 7-Eleven or a vending machine, thanks to brilliant London-based designer Daizi Zheng. But maybe “juice” is the wrong word; Zheng has produced a cellphone that runs on Coca-Cola. Or Mountain Dew or Pepsi or whatever sugary, fizzy beverage you happen to have handy. Yes, you read correctly, this is a cellphone that runs on soda. It’s the call that refreshes!

As Zheng explained to Tree Hugger:

“Through my research, I found that phone battery as a power source, it is expensive, consuming valuable resources on manufacturing, presenting a disposal problem and harmful to the environment. The concept is using bio battery to replace the traditional battery to create a pollution free environment. Bio battery is an ecologically friendly energy generates electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar) and utilizes enzymes as the catalyst. By using bio battery as the power source of the phone, it only needs a pack of sugary drink and it generates water and oxygen while the battery dies out. Bio battery has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium batteries and it could be fully biodegradable.”

Three to four times longer than a lithium battery? Sounds good to us. Now all Zheng has to do is come up with a way to run a cellphone on booze, for a sort of unholy cellphone/hip flask hybrid.
 

 
Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Seeking to redefine our notions of both personal rest and space, the Sleep Suit is made of EVA foam chosen for its compressive strength, and features pleats that conform to the sleeping positions common to most people.

It is inspired by Buckminster Fuller?��Ǩ�Ѣs practice of Dymaxion Sleeping, which involves four 30-minute naps over a period of 24 hours, and the material requirements for such conditions.  Architecturally, the very close relationship between the human body and the suit acts as the generator of form as well as tool to negotiate between the occupant and his or her surroundings.  The structure of the material, a structural pleat, is used as a means to create feelings of connected and disconnectedness as well as provide varying levels of support for different parts of the body.  By thinking of the cut pattern as sections of the body, the structure can act as a semi-permeable outer skin.

 
(via BOJ)

 

 

 
Really insane and/or terrifying humanimal sculptures by artist Kate Clark. This sorta reminds me of a post I did a while back on Alex Kovas: Freaky Manimal Model.

From Kate’s website:

Offering a heavy hand of irreverent wit striped with compassion, Kate Clark’s sculptures ask viewers to disregard pretense and to apprehend the idea of emotional uncertainty. Although the artist embarks on a journey towards shocking and repelling viewers as they recognize and reject the thing?��Ǩ�Ѣs presence, it is because she works with previously living creatures that Kate is also able to infuse an odd warmth and familiarity into the piece.

Kate Clark
 
(via everlasting blort )

Via Treehugger, check out these potential design solutions for solar powered EV stations. In the (non-Skynet, non-Halliburton) future, you’ll plug your electric-powered bike or car into these at convenient times to fuel up and keep going. Much needed here in gas-godawful southern California…

Sanyo thinks its joint strengths in solar and in batteries make solar charging stations an obvious market to pursue. Here’s one solar station - Sanyo is unveiling its HIT prototype charging station at CES this week and plans a more modest canopy to be unveiled in Portland within the first quarter of this year.

The idea of solar-powered charging stations is enticing. Sanyo, one company preparing many solar canopies and parking lot panel solutions, believes a 10 ft. by 20 ft. solar canopy parking space cover can generate enough electricity to run the electric vehicle annually. Here are three other visions for implementing solar charging for electric vehicles either in the works, or already out on the streets.

(Treehugger: 4 Solar Powered Charging Stations)

 

 
From Bldgblog:

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself?��Ǩ���the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph?��Ǩ���unintentional land art visible from airplanes?��Ǩ���not a thriving community at all.

 
via Sara & Adam, thanks !

 
Instructables has a DIY step-by-step tutorial on HOWTO make a duck-footed mouse. Here’s a taste:

Step 1 Obtain and dry duck feet

Find yourself some fresh duck feet. If you or your friends hunt or raise ducks, you’re all set. Otherwise you could visit your local asian grocery, butcher shop, or live poultry source and ask for the leftovers. These feet came from a green-winged teal I shot myself. I ate the rest.

Instructables: Duck Mouse

 
February 2010 is when the Chinese Year of the Tiger starts, but alarming news about the world’s tiger population might mean that by 2022, the next time the Year of the Tiger rolls around, there might not be any left. ...

Due to deforestation and poaching, the tiger population has fallen more than 40% in the past decade, which translates to just 3,200 of them left in the wild, worldwide, mostly found in India. That’s not a typo; there are but 3,200 wild tigers left, period. Can you imagine a world with no tigers in it? Unless drastic measures are taken, it will most likely take place during your lifespan. There are six subspecies of tiger: Bengal, Amur, Indo-Chinese, Sumatran, Malayan and South China, the latter of which is already functionally extinct, as there have been no sightings of it in the wild for more than 25 years now.

Much of the problem lies in the poachers of Nepal and the nearly insatiable desire for tiger parts in China, where things like “tiger glands” are supposed to have rejuvenating health qualities, although this is considered bunk by medical science. The World Wildlife Fund, the World Bank and other organizations are putting pressure on the Chinese to crack down on tiger poaching and to end the cruel “tiger farms,” where the big cats are bred, then slaughtered for their skins and parts. The farmers claim the farms are helping increase the tiger population when, in fact, they are serving only to enlarge the market for illegal tiger poaching by increasing demand.

What’s surprising is that the largest population of tigers in captivity is found in the United States, not Asia, where their population exceeds 5,000, with just 6% of them living in accredited zoos; the rest are in private hands with almost no government oversight.

Cross posting this from Brand X