This is pretty geeky…but i like the idea

Although, applying light saber logic, shouldn’t these nunchucks vaporize his armpits and groin and hands?

(via geekologie)

Why are black women shrinking?

This is a totally crazy:

Young black women today are nearly an inch shorter than white women their age and about half an inch shorter than black women born in the late 60s, according to an analysis of CDC data by John Komlos, a professor of economics at the University of Munich in Germany.

Heights by gender, class and race in Komlos’ study rise and drop in waves over the years, but on the whole, every other group besides black women has remained the same height or gotten taller than their parents since the 60s.

Public health experts can’t say exactly what’s behind the reduced height, but medical anthropologists, economists and epidemiologists agree that whatever the cause is, it’s important.

I hope they figure this out.

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Maybe it’s got something to do with black women having babies when “societal collapse, terrorism, and environmental destruction” (and possibly a mortgage meltdown) renders everybody else infertile…

History of Warfare in Food

Be sure to check out the video’s legend.

(via TBT)

This is really creative

I think this site’s ad was the first ad in Facebook that actually caught my interest enough to click through:

http://fiftydollarhouse.com/

You pay 50 bucks to enter a lottery for a million dollar home. (These days a ‘million dollar home’ probably means many things to many people, but it looks like a nice spot.)

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I like the idea of applying the lottery structure onto something other than a pool of money, especially if it helps your odds quite a bit.

It’s kind of a mashup of the philanthropic microfunding model and a traditional lottery.

I don’t think I’d ever play the lottery (unless in a work pool), but I am really thinking about buying a ticket or two for this…

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Here’s some local news coverage and some info on the charity some of the proceeds go towards:

What is food?

Wired’s got a really interesting interview up w/ a chef that’s doing some cool work w/ algae.

Wired.com: What have you been working on lately?

Homaro Cantu: We’ve been trying to incorporate food from the green world, and started growing microalgae. You can get 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of algae per acre. It can be grown in salt or fresh water, in a whole variety of temperatures. It increases the food supply rather than depleting it, and it’s a net energy gain.

For $300 we built a photobioreactor that produced 15 gallons of food per month. The idea was to take algae, process it into sushi and fuel, and deliver it it in a truck running on algae biofuel. And we’re just a bunch of chefs. If we can figure this out, I don’t know why others can’t.

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Wired.com: What is food?

Cantu: It’s what enables us to live — and more than that, it’s dense energy storage. If you look at it from that point of view, you start shooting two birds with one shot.

How can we get something new into the food supply while serving another purpose, such as making plastic? We’re going to start working with things that grow easily in varied climates, and the end result will be printed food that grows on your roof. Decentralizing food is the wave of the future.

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Wired.com: Are you aware of what’s going on, at the molecular level, with your dishes?

Cantu: Yes and no. We think of things in simple terms: how can we end world hunger? And then you investigate that.

Recently I started thinking about how people can eat the stuff they don’t eat now, that already grows around them. If you can turn that into food and make it taste good, you’ve got an answer. I can’t tell you more about this, but let’s just say I’ve had my neighbors eating twigs and branches by giving them a supplemental product that makes it taste good.

You have to have some understanding of chemistry, of how taste receptors work, of how people perceive food. But it starts with that initial crazy question: What is food?

I think he’s absolutely right about decentralized food.

Everyday I am more convinced that it’s the tinkerer in his garage/dormroom/kitchen that will save the world if we let him/her.

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This interview makes me want to go to Tinkering School.

Post-modern fitness…

My friend Justine sent me a link to some pics of this rock climbing wall at a fitness center in Tokyo, Japan.

When I first saw these pictures, they registered like I was looking into a dream…

It reminded me of Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, where Alice’s physical environment permeated heavily with symbolic meaning.

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Just this week, I had an interesting conversation about creating a gym experience that consciously leveraged virtual reality/videogame technolgy to graft new narratives onto getting into shape.

I am constantly amazed by people – who you wouldn’t catch working out in the gym – who for hours will jump around playing DDR, swing away with virtual light sabres, or play some sport game on the Wii.

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As a personal trainer, I think what the gym experience is lacking is narrative.

Through the lens of our hunter gatherer past, there would be no ‘getting into shape.’

‘Being in shape’ would have been embedded in our lifestyle. And the overarching narrative animating our physical activities would have been survival.

The modern world no longer supplies the survival narrative.

A gym that not only supplied the physical apparatus for exercise but also a narrative apparatus for exercise would open up some interesting possibilities.

I think this climbing wall is a move in that direction.

The wall couples fitness with subconscious exploration, which has all kinds of narrative potential.

Israel literally/figuratively using 'Iron Fist' against Hamas

I came across these today:

1) Headline: Israeli losses grow as Ehud Olmert promises ‘iron fist’ against Gaza

2) A protection system Israel uses actually called “Iron Fist‘.

You can’t make this stuff up:

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Sometimes I wonder if technology will eventually fight entire wars on our behalf.

The movement on the ‘armed robotics’ front is pretty crazy. According to Wired, these things are operating in Iraq.

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In any event, it sounds like this stuff in Israel is really ramping up.

This is really well done

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

American economy as Ponzi scheme

A Ponzi scheme is a ‘fraudulent financial operation that pays returns to investors out of the money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit.’

Honestly, I had never heard of a Ponzi scheme before news of Madoff’s financial activities broke.

However, I think the concept of a Ponzi scheme is intuitive…

Instead of ‘pay it forward’, it’s more like ‘debt it forward.’

Kind of like Social Security.

It works beautifully until the influx of new money stops.

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Anyways, I’ve been getting pretty into the work of Andrew Bacevich. I recently heard him on BBC Radio talking about his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

I found an interview he did w/ Bill Moyers, and the idea that the American economy is run as a ‘de facto ponzi scheme’ comes up.

Moyers and Bacevich get into it a little bit at about 14:00 into this video:

American policymakers “been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme, intended to extend indefinitely the American line of credit.”

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Bacevich goes on to track the tipping point of living beyond our means to the 1960s under LBJ and talks about what consumerism has done to American freedom.

It’s worth checking out. He lays stuff out really brilliantly.

I think his delivery is pretty interesting on a performative level too. You can tell he’s deeply passionate but extremely tempered and disciplined.

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He also inserts Jimmy Carter as a kind of retrospectively prophetic voice.

Bacevich talks about Carter’s Malaise speech as a clarion call for a more self aware, culturally aware America.

Check out this excerpt:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.

It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The police might get a lot scarier soon

New Scientist has an article up about police possibly getting new ‘pain beam’ weapons…

These ‘laser rifles’ are part of the “Active Denial System” project out of the Pentagon.

CBS/60 minutes did a piece on the technology a while back that made the rounds (if you wanna see a painful example of a journalist putting himself into the story check it out):

It’s definitely possibly these laser rifles make more sense for law enforcement use than tasers, but either way I’m still very scared of them.

Starting to wonder if we’ll see a ‘laser proof vest’ downstream.