Swine Flu 2009 on Wikipedia. Here’s the skinny. 1> The Mexican Cluster has (as of Saturday April 25 AM) about 1000 cases and about 70 people have died so far. This gives us two pieces of data. It’s not likely to be more than about 7% fatal, which is bad, but basically within the planning [...]
Read more →Click to Play A beautiful social center in Surbiton, on an island rich with history. http://ravensait.org.uk/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Ait
Read more →There are two different global food brands which epitomize the difference between top-down brand-driven franchising, and the bottom-up “open source” ideas we all know and love. In almost any city anywhere in the world you can find both of these options. There will be McDonald’s which is part of the corporate entity headquartered in America, [...]
Read more →Physically, it is quite simple to re-paint a street for a horde of bicycles. One small, determined adult could do this useful task in two or three nights. If they asked no permission from anyone. If they demanded no money for doing it. If they carried out that act with cool subterfuge and with crisp [...]
Read more →There is little doubt that the occupational self-image of the police is that of “crime-fighters” and that this is not just a distortion of what they do, it is virtually a collective delusion. A mountain of research has indicated that police have little impact on crime rates, are responsible for discovering few crimes and detecting [...]
Read more →As the global financial crisis sinks Japan into its worst recession since World War II and hundreds of thousands of jobs are slashed in factories and offices, farming has emerged as a promising new career track. “Agriculture Will Save Japan,” blared a headline for a business weekly magazine. Farmer’s Kitchen, a popular new Tokyo restaurant, [...]
Read more →Two or three times this year I’ve stepped into situations where a team had hit an absolute brick wall at a policy, strategy or business level, and half a day or a day later the problem has been cured and the path forwards has been made clear. This is not a service that I’ve made [...]
Read more →Jim pointed me at this NYT article on Twitter. “Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.” I think I know why this is happening. I could follow maybe 30 blogs. Every day or two, [...]
Read more →(SketchUp & other files) The Tribike is an attempt to create a “hexayurt for transport” – something minimally functional that can be made with common parts. The core idea is to use a tetrahedron as the basic form – the most minimal shape for enclosing space, and one of the strongest. Steel tube would be [...]
Read more →(thanks for the pic, Jonathan) At the Maker Faire Newcastle, we made a new kind of Solar Funnel solar cooker. The design is very simple but very effective: take a 4×8 sheet of thin corrugated plastic (2mm is probably ideal, we used a light grade of 4mm) and cover one side with ordinary tinfoil using [...]
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