Parking Lots

A wonderful series of photographs dedicated to the majesty of the oil based economy and our friend the car. Serene and painterly they remind me of my friend Jason Brockert's new series of parking lot paintings.

Branislav Kropilak via BLDGBLOG

Stock Art Anarchy

The folks at RadicalGraphics.org want you to have a more effective protest/rally/march/etc. so they've created a database of hi-res images relating to a wide range causes (from Anarchy to Zapatistas) that are FREE for the downloading. Plus you can help the cause by adding your own.

OS X mail geekery

So for those of you hanging out in OS X's mail client but sort of wishing there was a better way to manage all those incoming tasks from clients or friends. Or you want a nice way to tag and organize your email without having to sort into little folders. This little plug in is for you.

With one click you can easily add todos into iCal with link back to the original email, set a reminder, and tag the email. This really tuns mail into a new hub for managing your work and calendar.

Mailtags Software via 43 Folders

A message from the future...

Free Range Studios new short Climate: A Crisis Averted is a documentary from the year 2055 about the revolution in climate change that happened way back in 2006.

The Power of Positive Design

Bruce Mau Design and the Institute Without Boundaries have created the Massive Change site (in tandem with the book of the same name) as a place for people to discuss the positive possibilities of good design. The site is broken up into LEARN, with articles on the various inspirations behind Massive Change, and ACT, with a series of message boards for debate and discussion. From the site:

Design has emerged as one of the world's most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.

In order to understand and harness these emerging forces, there is an urgent need to articulate precisely what we are doing to ourselves and to our world. This is the ambition of Massive Change.

Thanks Nina Braun

2.8 Gallon Pineapple

The latest issue of Sierra magazine has a nice article on "why it pays to buy locally grown food", demonstrated with photos of various food items along side of the amount of gas needed to get them to the consumer (using Des Moines, Iowa as the example city).

Thanks Mim

Free Music: The EP

Can't believe I didn't hear about this til now...
50 Foot Wave (featuring Kristen Hersh of Throwing Muses) has released their latest EP "Free Music" as free downloadable MP3s and FLAC files. There's even album art. And it's all Creative Commons licensed! From their site:

The band is also encouraging fans to seed BitTorrents and set up CD burning trees to ensure that people without time or technology may also receive the free music...

The band's founder, Kristin Hersh, explains, "Money has so polluted the music world that my overwhelming urge right now is to divorce money from recorded music. Over the last 2 years we've been relying on standard 'industry' channels to help us educate listeners about 50 Foot Wave and we've met resistance every step of the way -- caused by little other than money -- and to an extent I've never seen before.

Placebo Prescription

Ode magazine has a great article on the Healing Power of Placebos in its current issue...

Placebos have also been proven successful in treating depression, anxiety, stress, warts and ulcers—sometimes in as many as 60 to 70 percent of the cases. People report they feel better, their appetite has increased and their general sense of well-being has improved...
Very little research has been done in this area of medicine. The pharmaceutical industry can’t profit; after all, they can’t make money from sugar pills. That is why many research funders look upon the placebo effect as an irritating variable in a study. It is often forgotten that the effect could help people and shave billions off spiralling health-care costs. If researchers could gain more insight into how the effect works, it would stand as one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in history.

Xtreme Hijab

Dutch designer Cindy van den Bremen has created Capsters: fashionable Islamic head scarves for women who participate in athletic activities, such as Aerobics, Inline Skating, Tennis and other activities, that make wearing a traditional Hijab difficult.

Segregate This

Man, this is going to be one of those things I'm going to have a hard time explaining to my kids. Like mutually assured destruction and Pauly Shore flicks. Not to make light though - this is a fantastically designed site, designed to make you a little uncomfortable, which is the whole idea in trying to understand the feeling of being segregated in the only society you know. Oops, Martin Luther King day was January 16th, but I've always prescribed to the idea that it's more important to celebrate the kind of anniversaries and events designed around remembrance throughout the year. Veterans and dead presidents and civil libertarians are worth remembering more than one day a year.

cluck cluck ka-CHOO!

Everyone's so paranoid about bird flu and Iraqi cooties that we've become numbed to the real reality of the bigger face of disease ravaging whole parts of our planet. In a nutshell, The Global Fund is a partnership of governments and private organizations fighting to rid the world the big three epidemics: AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. More to the point, the site does a good job of relating the cause-and-effect of how one person doing a little can have a big effect in the life of another. Cause and effect. It's important.

Feed Me Better

Of all the reality clatter on TV, there are a few programs with a smidge of ethical merit. A fine example was Jamie Oliver's single-minded campaign to improve the colonic and onocological health of students in the UK by replacing junk food with freshly prepared cafeteria feasts by his own hand. Feed Me Better wants to prove that school meals can be better and asks you to start a revolution in your school dining hall.

Water, Water, Everywhere

70% of the Earth is covered in it, yet up to 70% of the world's rural populations don't have taccess to it. Give up? It's water of course, and if you're not busy searching for it, drilling for it, selling it or standing in line for it, maybe you have some time to learn about it.

Subculture for Sale

Target's Red Hot Shop, which is selling Treehugger's first product, is also selling graffiti stencils.

The Anti-Advertising Agency

The Anti-Advertising Agency is:
A. A functioning inversion of the traditional advertising agency.
B. An ongoing series of art projects started by Steve Lambert.
C. A blog.
D. All of the above.

A Day at the Mall

The "A Day at the Mall" pamphlet, showing a consumer revolt and its results was "covertly distributed" at an actual mall by the folks at Centennial Society.

Packard Jennings ,who illustrated it, has also made a new pamphlet, to be sent via postage paid business reply envelopes, that encourage the folks that open them to start a revolution in their offices.

via Stay Free!

Cargo Cult

One of my favorite environmental/architectural ideas is the use of cargo shipping containers as raw material for housing.

For a range of prototype "Cargotecture" designs, for everything from a mobile medical unit to an entire town, check out HybridSeattle.com.

Thanks for the link Eric!

"The Good Food movement is leading the charge against expensive, nutrient-free, artificial, unhealthy, corporate crap-food."

He always says it best- Jim Hightower's recent article, "The Upchuck Rebellion", is a must read... check it:

http://www.alternet.org/story/33950/

It is time to start biking

Ok so time for a few sweet luxury bikes. So do you go for the brand name and lug around the extra 8 pounds? or do you go for that sweet, sweet carbon fiber crank.

Choices, choices...

Mercedes-Benz Bike 18 pounds

pk0r Bike 10.5 pounds

via Gizmodo

Linkology

New York magazine created this diagram based on technorati info, to show how blog linkage works.
It takes the current top 50 most linked to blogs and shows how they link to each other.
I love information visualizations of this type.
It should help clue people in as to why/how a blog can be as relevant, today as any mainstream media outlet.
Looks like a whole lot of blog-cest to me.
DOWNLOAD A PDF of this Diagram

The difficult choices of fighting corporate evil...

Activists often have to decide whether it is better to fight the beast from the outside or from within. For instance, I just turned down the opportunity to be a part of a local community event because of its corporate sponsorship by Philip Morris. Conversely, I just got this note from Women In Media & News, a feminist media activism group:

Veronica Arreola, an amazing Latina feminist activist and board member of Women In Media & News (WIMN), has been selected from thousands of nominees as one of ten finalists for the "Swiffer Amazing Woman of the Year"contest. This is not just a silly PR effort for a cleaning product company -- if Roni is chosen as one of the company's five Amazing Women, Swiffer will donate $5,000 to WIMN!

As a small, grassroots organization, WIMN can really put that money to good use. Roni, a passionate feminist and media activist (and I think the only woman of color on the Swiffer list) needs the support of the blogger community to make that happen. In addition to her work with WIMN, Roni is involved with
local women's rights and women's health projects in Chicago, is active one a national level as a leader with the National Organization for Women, and works with young women in science and engineering at the University of Illinois.

Please encourage everyone who cares about women -- and who cares about the media -- to vote for Veronica Arreola (she's Amazing Woman #7 in the list)...By the way, we recognize the inherent problem of a contest that presents household chores as primarily a woman's responsibility. But while the marketing message is unavoidable on the contest website, if Roni's chosen as a winner, not only will WIMN get some funding, but Roni will be announcing that it's actually her husband, Tony, that does all the cleaning in her household... thereby subverting the contest's emphasis on women doing all the domestic chores...

Ironic justice or supporting the system while trying to tear it down? You be the judge.

This park is sponsored by...

A plan to allow increased corporate sponsorship of US public parks is under consideration by the National Park Service and the Department of Interior. From the Christian Science Monitor article:

The change, expected next month, would expand corporate recognition - only modestly, says a park service spokesman - for companies whose donations help bolster a park system struggling to fund a maintenance backlog of more than $4 billion. The public comment period for a similar rule change for national forests ended Monday.

"We're considering nameplates for rooms inside visitors' centers," says David Barna, a National Park Service spokesman in Washington. "We're not renaming entire buildings after anyone."

National parks have long banned corporate logos from display on parkland. National forests had been less restrictive. Downhill ski races on national forest land, for example, had included corporate banners at the finish line.

On a positive note...

Three in 4 Americans oppose corporate advertising on park brochures and vehicles, a Zogby International poll reported last fall. A larger majority, 84 percent, oppose naming trails and park buildings after companies that paid for them...

Best SUV Commercials Ever.

In what was either a brilliant or incredibly stupid move, the folks at Chevy are giving the public a chance to make their own SUV ads online. The results, which are posted on their site, include several funny and pointed anti-SUV/political commentaries (check out some here and here). So far Chevy hasn't removed them, so perhaps they're enjoying the increased traffic to their site, let's just hope one of the parody ones win the contest!

Thanks again to Marc @ Houtlust.

Little Brother is Watching

An anti-Bush billboard in Boston featuring the URL Little Brother Is Watching.com is under attack by the local Outdoor Advertising Board. Is it just rules being enforced or politically motivated censorship? Read the Boston Globe story to get the facts.

Thanks Marc @ Houtlust for pointing this one out.

More Sustainable Blogging

From Design for Sustainability program at Delft University in the Netherlands comes the handy (written in English!) D4S blog.

National Sustainable Design Expo: May 9-10

The EPA's National Sustainable Design Expo will be held May 9th-10th on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The event centers around the awards for the student sustainable design competition: P3 (People, Prosperity, and the Planet). There will also be vendors showing off their environmental wares. For more info go here.

Save your prayers.

A new scientific study shows that praying for someone else produces no positive effects in the subject being prayed for.

You can read the entire report in the American Heart Journal.

Bob Ross the Video Game

The Bob Ross foundation has signed a letter of intent to produce a video game based on Bob Ross for the PC, Nintendo DS etc.

God bless this happy little video game.

Bob Ross via Gizmodo

Limits to emotional branding

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard did MRI scans to measure the reactions in their subject's brains to emotional terms applied to people vs. brands. What they found was that trying to imbue brands with emotional traits may actually not work as their subjects still processed the information in the sections of their brains associated with objects rather than people.

Interesting for all groups attempting to craft relationships with customers and could be bad news for brand managers who are seeking deeper, more emotional brand mindshare.

Seed Magazine

Parasitic Bike Pump

Cool way to stick it to the Hummer driver by getting a free ride all the while increasing his gas bill due to under-inflation. Somewhat limited in use since most cars run at 35-40psi but could allow you to get to your next bike pump without hoofing it.

Call it metaphorical justice at least: Instructables

via Make Blog

Kitt's Dashboard

Ever wonder what would happen if you did an extensive analysis of an iconic tv shows car dashboard? Mmm Knight Rider....

I wonder if any user testing was ever done on this? No love for the color blind.

Kitt's Dashboard via Information Aesthetics Weblog