LOLrio Kart ~ Charles Guan's Hilarious Build-Epic!

Charles's LOLrio Kart build-project at MIT is a "work" in "progress" as you too can see from his still unfolding epic saga! Note his thoughtful addition of a warning light up front...

Miniatur Wunderland ~ World's Largest Model RR!

Thanks to UniqueDaily for hinting at the remarkable work of German entrepreneurs Frederik & Gerrit Braun, Stephan Hertz, Gerhard Dauscher and team of ~150 in building up the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg since 2000! This Wunderland is my childhood hobby-fantasy play-space come true...

Skinny Blonde ~ Aussie Beer w/ Surprise Label ;-)

Ooh, how naughty! Crazy Australian brewers Richie Harkham, Jarrod Taylor and Hamish Rosser are using thermochromic ink on their beer bottles to spread a little bit of natural humanity for the joy and delight of all, except, I suppose, medieval misanthropic religious wingnuts! According to painstaking reporting by Sophie Tedmanson in her London Times article Skinny Blonde: rock 'n' roll beer with a naked twist as many women as men enjoy Skinny Blondes! Why? In addition to the all-beer content...

"The Skinny Blonde bottle features a 1950s-style pin-up called Daisy whose red bikini disappears as the beer level drops and the bottle warms up, thanks to the modern ink technology used on the labels."

It should go without saying, but we all would benefit from having more Skinny Blondes around!

Rural African Women ~ Day In The Life Of...

I had a great discussion earlier this week at MIT with Zubaida Bai who's currently at Colorado State working with Paul Hudnut and colleagues on Global Social and Sustainable Enterprises. Zubaida is especially interested in empowering rural women globally. So we got to talking about what such women need most -- how do they currently spend their time and scarce resources, what are their prime burdens, what do they wish was easier or cheaper -- and so forth. This is an ongoing market research project, but there are some aggregate data available. The Rehydration Project, in particular, has a set of graphics about Women-at-Risk including this chronograph of a day in the life of a typical rural African woman... And this Division Of Labour chart...

Lighting the Grill ~ New Use for LEDs as Bodmods

Thanks to UniqueDaily for delivering the oral action! These are some pimp LEDs lighting up this joker's grill... I await the wirefree version and, of course, underskin implantables next;-)

True Pricing ~ A Gallon of Gasoline's Real Costs

While surfing Wikipedia about Amtrak and inter-city rail transit generally, I found the term "Recovery" which turns out to mean the "Farebox Recovery Ratio of a passenger transportation system: the proportion of the amount of revenue generated through fares by its paying customers as a fraction of the cost of its total operating expenses." But why does such a seemingly prudent, energy efficient, and pleasingly comfortable transportation mode as passenger rail require such subsidies? The answer seems to be the lack of True Pricing in other modes. If the total Real Costs of building roads, subsidizing automobiles, and guzzling gasoline were actually and properly accounted for -- and charged to the beneficiaries -- then the situation would be rather different. This means Internalizing Externalities -- so-called "side-effects" like pollution currently dumped into the environment at no cost, or costs borne equally by everyone thus unfairly including non-users. The particular case of Gasoline is fascinating...

"A study by the International Center for Technology Assessment found that after accounting for government subsidies, pollution cleanup and other costs, the real price of gasoline is estimated to be somewhere between US$5.60 and US$15.37 per gallon. Were gasoline sold within this range of prices, people might voluntarily drive less, choose more fuel-efficient vehicles, and use mass transit."

Predictably Irrational ~ Dan Ariely's TED Talk...

Thanks to In Demo Veritas demoguru Daniel Rosenberg for spotting MIT Professor Dan Ariely's TED talk about one slice of his work on predictable irrationality... FYI, Venkat Rao summarizes Ariely's Predictably Irrational book nicely.

Prosperity Gardens ~ Local Sourcing, Organic, DIY

Interesting to read in the NYTimes today that America's First Family, the Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House, as reported by Marian Burros...

"While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern."

Burros notes that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt cultivated a Victory Garden during WWII, a time of national crisis and need for extra self-help and citizen solutions. Perhaps today we too can rally around the promise of urban harvests, educate our offspring, and help deal with contemporary crises by seeding Prosperity Gardens, grow-it-yourself agri-DIY zones!

Underwater Volcanoes ~ Extreme Geothermal;-)

I had just read Thomas Massie's latest post on Geothermal in his timberframe home when I happened upon The Big Picture spotlighting this amazing underwater volcanic eruption off of Tonga in the Pacific. Talk about extreme geothermal! Maybe I'm overly cautious, but aren't these people and photographers ridiculotastically close to a major geo-tectonic event?! Read about Krakatoa and its tsunami aftermath!

Susan Murcott ~ Pure Home Water & MIT H20-1B

We were really pleased to have Susan Murcott from MIT's Civil & Environmental Engineering Department join us in our SP.713 Social Entrepreneurship seminar tonight. Susan's a passionate pioneer of off-grid clean water solutions for the over 1 Billion people worldwide who drink water contaminated with especially biological and chemical impurities -- i.e. microbes and poisons. She runs the H20-1B Water & Sanitation projects at MIT and teaches a class on that theme as well as 11.953/SP.723 D-Lab III: Disseminating Innovations for the Common Good with Professor Alice Amsden. Susan also collaborated for years with the wonderful Professor Don Harleman, champion of inexpensive wastewater treatment technologies (and who with his wife Martha were my next door neighbors for years). For this past decade, Susan's been working in rural and underserved urban communities on technologies to clean water -- to go beyond "improving" water (in UN parlance) to actually making it safer to consume. In Nepal, treatments included arsenic chemical removal. More recently in Ghana, the core challenge is removing particulates as well as coliform and microbial contaminants. Especially interesting about this most recent work in Ghana is Pure Home Water, the social enterprise she co-founded which concentrates on commercializing a Nicaraguan innovation -- clay pot filters for water. Susan's experiences serve as a live-case study, a compelling learning lens to help our students appreciate both the troubles and triumphs of starting and building a development venture. Check out this one of her several TechTV videos...

David Merrill ~ Inventor of Siftables Interfaces!

It was great to catch up with MIT Media Lab PhD student David Merrill tonight on my MaximizingProgress.tv show (f.k.a. HighTechFever) where he shared his personal pathway from tinkering as a kid, through computer science and music at Stanford, to time in the research groups of both Professor Joe Paradiso and Pattie Maes. Most recently he's famous for Siftables, simple sensor-networked tangible user interfaces built into dominoes-like display widgets. These are a platform for many possibilities, from play toys to physical games to brainstorming tools and more. Check out David's TED demo talk...

Terrafugia Flies! ~ Roadable Aircraft is Flying Car

Congrats to Carl, Anna, Samuel, Andrew, Alex and the Terrafugia team for taking off for real! Is the Transition a roadable aircraft or a flying car? Both! And here you see it flying on the 'Tube...

Really Baaaaad ~ Totally Sheepish Art in Wales;-)

LED's and livestock make for a really baaaaad combination...

Little Cities ~ WIRED Spotlights Physical Models

Very nice piece by Terrence Russell in WIRED on the Biggest Little Cities: Models for Urban Planning...

Post #1,001 ~ Wow, I Blog A Lot! Too Much?

It sprung up on me, but just looking at my Blogger dashboard, I realized this is Post #1,001! Is this stuff really interesting? Are you reading?

Cajun Crawler ~ Eat Your Heart Out, Segway!

Whoa, creepy! Wheels? Who needs wheels when you've got crawlers!

Population Growth ~ Hans Rosling's Overview...

Gapminder's Hans Rosling introduces global population dynamics... I'm especially curious, however, what happens when gerontechnology enables ever more dramatic longevity for ever more people.

Local Venturing ~ Emerging Market Entrepreneurs

It's great to see two recent examples of African local development venturing, the targeting of in-country markets by organizations which either or otherwise would be primarily export-minded. First we have Blue Skies, written about by Will Ross, of the BBC in Ghana, in his article Ghana's juicy economic lesson...

"What do you do when your buyers in Europe start cutting their orders? Target the local market. That is the strategy being used by Blue Skies -- which exports pre-packed fruit salads and juices to Europe but has now realized their products can also tickle the taste buds of Ghana's more affluent customers."

And second we have Zambeef, written about by Ian Brimacombe of the BBC in Zambia, in his article Zambia's agri-business powerhouse...

"The company that runs this processing plant, Zambeef, began as a small butcher shop in the capital, Lusaka in 1991. Since then it has grown to become one of the biggest food production businesses in Africa. Place "Zam" in front of just about any food product, and there is a pretty good chance this company is producing it."

Especially worthwhile is BBC reporter Komla Dumor's video-interview of Francis Grogan, the managing director of Zambeef. Fantastically entrepreneurial efforts! These folks are transforming areas of Africa for the better through business. The BBC's on top of this entirely -- I'm impressed & delighted -- including their spotlight on Top tips from Africa's entrepreneurs featuring great advice from designers, brokers, restauranteurs, florists & more.

Mapping Impact ~ Visualizing Environmental Hits

Reading in the BBC about Australia Coast Half Clear, got me thinking about ways to map environmental impact, either forecasting future consequence, or as in this case, simply conveying the dramatic consequences of an oil spill and similar environmental disasters... This is only one case, but I want to salute BBC for conveying the essentials so clearly.

Ebtihal Mubarak ~ Fearless Female Saudi Journo

Fascinating to view this CNN Inside the Middle East piece on the 'Tube about Ebtihal Mubarak, a female Saudi journalist who reports on everything from scandal, corruption, and civic incompetence to rather more touchy subjects like discrimination, basic human rights, and the role of women in her society...