Future History ~ Chart of Heinlein's SF Universe!

Epic SF author Robert A Heinlein created this great Future History chart to both map out socio- and techno-changes and temporally index his wonderful stories...

Geography of Faith ~ Linking Church and State...

God sure lets geography really influence how people worship she/he/it here in the US of A. Are all religions really region-lions?!

Selling Federal Lands ~ Settling the US Debt...

The US Federal government has a lot of assets, including...

"Direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) -- nearly 30% of its total territory."

Bathtub! ~ Videos From Model City Sydney...

Funky video effect by photographer Keith Loutit with tilt-lens and time-acceleration! Very cool... That's Bathtub II, which looks even more stellar on Vimeo directly in HD. Also check out Keith's Beached and Bathtub III!

Fungus Cannon ~ Massive Natural Accelerations!

Thanks to Miss Celania for spotting this Fungus Cannon shooting spores away! The scientific paper describing the results, The Fastest Flights in Nature: High-Speed Spore Discharge Mechanisms among Fungi, noted...

Launch speeds ranged from 2 to 25 m s−1 and corresponding accelerations of 20,000 to 180,000 g propelled spores over distances of up to 2.5 meters.

Wow! Check it out...

EnergyNight @ MIT Museum ~ Fall '08 Showcase!

I'm delighted that this Friday 10/10/2008 from 5:30-8:30pm is the next incarnation of EnergyNight @ MIT Museum, this time organized by Matt Denman and Melissa Webster! MIT Energy Club founder Dave Danielson and I started the MIT EnergyNight event in Spring 2006 and had a mere 250 attendees. Last Fall 2007, organizers Fergus and Matt attracted over 1,000! This MIT energy community social event brings together the science, engineering, policy, and business energy communities at MIT to showcase several dozen of the most exciting energy activities at MIT, including...

• Nuclear (Advanced Reactors, NanoFluids)
• Solar (Thin Film for Fuel Cells, Photovoltaic Lab, Sol Solution, Solar Turbine)
• Geothermal (Geothermal Systems)
• Wind (Floating Turbines)
• Coal/C02 (Coal Sequestration, C02 Sequestration, Syngas Combustion Dynamics, Gasification)
• Biofuels (C3 Bioenergy, C02 Systems)
• Green Buildings/Development (Retrofit MIT, Live dorm electricity metering)
• Batteries/Automotive (MIT Electric Vehicle, Nanofluids)
• Grid Management (MicroGrids, EnerNOC)
• Energy Policy (Environmental Programs Office)

Mapping the Real World ~ Ballooning Cartograms!

The UK Telegraph has a sequence on the Atlas of the Real World. These map our Planet Earth with surface areas weighted by important variables, for instance GDP/capita or HIV Prevalence/capita or Emissions/capita or Migrants/capita. Here's the baseline map... And here's Migrants-weighted map... And HIV-prevalence... And projected-wealth in 2015...

The Artifactorium! ~ Jay Walker's Lovely Library

Wow, I'd love to have borrowing privileges at Jay Walker's library!

Harish Hande ~ Sustainable Energy Venturing!

I was delighted to have SELCO co-founder Harish Hande join us in our MIT Development Ventures seminar today. SELCO started by deploying solar photovoltaic electric lighting systems in underserved and especially rural areas -- basically a 10 Watt panel, battery, charge controller, and lightbulb. This very modular basic system can be expanded by just buying more panels and components. Such systems enable a growing suite of accessories like TV's, radios, fans, and other consumer goods. He told of the frugal early days with almost no capital, running out of money, and personally installing every solar electric system. Harish also described several operating challenges, including the market-interfering consequences of European solar panel subsidies and incentives. And he shared the really interesting business opportunity where SELCO sells to entrepreneurs who charge up batteries by day and rent their use for light at night to a growing set of customers -- e.g. hawkers in the bazaar, midwives helping deliver babies, rose pluckers who cut bulbs before dawn, and many others. Nearly a dozen Micro-Finance Institutions (MFI's) such as SEWA -- the Self Employed Women's Association -- play a key third-party role by loaning the money allowing the entrepreneurs to purchase the systems. Founded in the mid-1990s, SELCO now has some 150 employees in nearly two-dozen service centers in Southern India, and has an installed-base of over 100,000 solar electric systems in households, organizations, and businesses. The next phase of growth has Harish and colleagues thinking even more creatively and holistically about supplying sustainable energy solutions across the board -- including biogas, alternative cooking fuels, more efficient stoves, and beyond. One example of out-of-the-box thinking is their Light & Knowledge program where they give a few practical books to read along with each solar light installation -- that way the kids and parents have immediate access to ideas; it's part of the purchase! Stay tuned for more news from Harish and SELCO! In the meantime, check out this Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy video...

Soda or Pop ~ What Do You Call a Cola ?-)

Thanks to Paul at GeekPress for spotting this mapscape...

IDEAS @ MIT ~ Kickoff to Fall '08 Events & Action!

I was very pleased to see the well-attended MIT IDEAS Competition Kickoff event tonight, the Generator Dinner in Walker Memorial. MC and Competition Impresario Lars Torres rallied a full-house of folks around the core IDEAS themes of Innovation-Development-Enterprise-Action-Service. They spotlighted this year's Yunus Challenge -- off-grid low-cost energy storage solutions -- as well as other emergent and promising themes. Afterwards, Lars and volunteer Gwen and I decamped next door to the Muddy Charles Pub to decompress and brainstorm about future IDEAS events and connection mechanisms. I'm exceedingly impressed with Lars and how things are going with IDEAS so far. Lots of great ideas, enthusiastic participation, connection-making, and emergent innovations. Very cool!

On an important side note: To conclude the night, I helped Lars schlep a big bunch of stuff back to the IDEAS office. This exercise gave me entirely renewed appreciation for the logistical grief that handicapped folks -- especially wheelchaired people -- face in navigating the MIT campus. I admit I have been a naysayer skeptic in the past about the merit (and expense) of retrofit designs, but now I am entirely in their camp -- MIT must be totally mobility empowered and do whatever design and retrofits are needed, ASAP! And in this light, I'm also convinced MIT IDEAS Winner Amos Winter's Wheelchair Design class and Mobility Lab are more important than ever!

Ethan Zuckerman ~ MIT Soap Box'er Delights!

I'm at the MIT Museum right now for the first of their Fall 2008 series of Soap Box conversations -- all about aspects of social technology -- formally speaking, Grassroots and Global: Technologies & Social Change -- I highly recommend these! The guest tonight is Geekcorps founder and now Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman. Ethan's an incredibly funny and humble guy who builds bridges between us in rich countries and those in developing countries. I really resonate with his notion of educating and inspiring Xenophiles, those who love -- i.e. "phile" -- foreigners -- i.e. "xeno" -- and who are intensely engaged with people of the world, with different cultures, communities, and ultimately compadres. Let's get radically beyond parochialism! Among other things, he tells the fascinating story of Tongans in Texas and what concatenation of events and influences begat this fascinating phenomenon. This is an example of a collective joint project, something several of us are all in together. A critical thing to do! Another humorous example Ethan gives: pregnant women blogging together connected by their common anticipated delivery date! This means women with totally different backgrounds -- conservative, liberal, etc -- get mixed up, engaged with one another, and cross-connected!

Maker Faire Africa + IDDS 2009 in Ghana !?

It's great how a seedling idea can take root! Specifically, I've been a big fan and supporter of both the IDDS -- the International Development Design Summits, which have been organized by Amy Smith and colleagues at MIT for the past two summers -- and the growing set of Maker Faire's -- orchestrated by the maestros at Make 'zine! So when my colleague Lars Torres, who runs the MIT IDEAS Competition, told me of emergent plans for a Maker Faire Africa -- proposed by Emeka Okafor of Timbuktu Chronicles -- I immediately suggested coinciding the timing of the event with the finale of IDDS 2009 which will be in Kumasi, Ghana at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Well, it's bubbling up, and will most probably happen! (It's not yet a done-deal, but surely the folks at Make will love it!) Check out AfriGadget's supportive post -- Maker Faire: Africa 2009!

Sophisticated Surgery ~ Double Arm Transplant!

Remarkable story today about Karl Merk, a German farmer who lost both arms in a harvester accident, now speaking publicly about what appears to be a successful double arm transplant surgery! Says Merk...

"It was really overwhelming when I saw that I had arms again," said the 54-year-old, who wore a sleeveless black shirt showing clearly where his new arms had been grafted." "These are my arms, and I'm not giving them away again," he told reporters. A total of 40 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other support staff carried out the 15-hour operation on July 25-26 to graft the donor's arms on to the body of Merk... There is also still a risk that Merk's immune system will react, though doctors said so far there was no sign of them being rejected.

Amazing medical progress!

Green Malawi ~ African Agricultural Progress...

The BBC's James Morgan writes a compelling series called Seeking Africa's green revolution about agricultural progress in Malawi in south-eastern Africa. Morgan writes...

From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus -- a minor agricultural miracle. By applying a mixture of crop breeding, soil management, irrigation and diversification, agro-science experts are helping subsistence farmers to cope with climate change and buck the trend in neighbouring African countries.

Fowl Play ~ Bunny Meets Bird, Bird Eats Bunny!

Developmental Entrepreneurship @ MIT ~ Update!

I'm pleased to have founded the formal Developmental Entrepreneurship (DE) activities at MIT back in 2001 together with MIT Professor Sandy Pentland. And, of course, I have been involved in Entrepreneurship @ MIT since the late 1980s -- entering in and ultimately serving as Lead Organizer of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, conceiving of and running the MIT Founders Project, and even naming (and building the first website for) the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Continuing in that vein, I helped start the Metcalfe Salons, the Tech Breakfast Series, the Venturefests, the IAP JazzLinks, multiple classes, including the first credit-bearing offerings over IAP including the Nuts & Bolts of Business Plans, and much more. The center of my efforts in International Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT has been a combination of starting and running our MIT Development Ventures classes, supporting and engaging with over a dozen DE alum ventures, co-founding the MIT International Development Network (IDN) which just ran the latest MIT-wide International Development Fair, serving as Board Member on the MIT Enterprise Forum Global organization (as well as here in Cambridge), collaborating with the ever-growing International Development Initiative (IDI) at MIT, co-creating the Development Track by expanding the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and starting-running the DE-IDRC Seed Grant program. As ardent readers of Maximizing Progress know, this Developmental Entrepreneurship theme is something I've commented on frequently. A lot is happening, including tonight we hosted AfricaNight at the MIT Muddy Charles Pub in partnership with the MIT Sloan African Business Club, a newly founded club I'm honored to help by serving as an Advisor. And it's good to see MIT's Energy Initiative hosting a real developmental entrepreneur, SELCO founder Harish Hande, this Tues October 7th 4:15p-5:45p in 66-110 to speak about providing Energy Services for the Poor. This is an area where actual practice counts most -- which is usually not something people win Nobel Prizes for, alas, certainly not in Economics! And it's also a domain where one must look at who really did the work, since there are, unfortunately, at least one too many "famous" people who are most well known for "founding" companies which became successful after they left and whose legacy is neither legitimate nor worth emulating!

BLEVE's ~ LPG Tank Failure Mode Explosions!

I've become very interested in liquid fuel alternatives to petro-gasoline and petro-diesel, including bio-diesel, bio-gas, and others. It was the MIT C3BioEnergy team which first exposed me to Liquid Petroleum Gas or LPG. Which is a fine fuel and quite widely used in various developing countries because of its containerizability. And I was very interested to meet the folks from high-end hiking gear supplier Jetboil when they visited MIT last year at the kickoff of the 2007-8 Yunus Challenge on Indoor Air Pollution. Jetboil also uses an LPG mix to fuel their FluxRing cooking system.

Anyways, once you start getting curious about these things you discover the failure modes. And LPG's most dramatic failure mode is surely the BLEVE or Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion. (Which, I want to emphasize, happens under pretty unusual and extreme conditions, so this is not to cast a negative light on LPG or either of the folks mentioned above.) Check out this one short video BLEVE example -- and go online for many more...

Spock's Casa ~ Star Trek Cribs!

Thanks to Miss Celania for spotting this delighter...

MIT International Development Fair ~ Fri Oct 3rd

The MIT International Development Fair
Friday, 3 October 2008, 11 am – 1 pm
Lobby 13

I'm proud to be one of the co-founders and ongoing organizers of the MIT International Development Network (IDN)! We connect everyone who engages in practical and ethical international development at MIT and beyond. To kick off this 2008-2009 academic year, on Friday October 3rd, we host the seventh annual MIT International Development Fair to help introduce incoming students and other members of the MIT community to the many student groups, classes, centers, programs and academic departments at MIT who, through their activities, have demonstrated an interest in sustainable international development. Throughout the year we organize large-scale Institute-wide events spotlighting and celebrating aspects of International Development at the Institute, including an end-of-semester Fall Celebration on December 10th, the International Development Night in the early spring, and the end-of-semester spring showcase event featuring all the student projects from the D-Lab family of classes.