Satirical World War One Maps

A Flickr set of some fantastic maps produced during World War One, which attempt to depict the mentalities of the countries. The maps vary quite widely depending on which sides produced them.

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Baking Soda Can Improve Athlete Performance

Maybe this is a little follow-up to my baking-soda heavy green cleaning guide from last week. Apparently there is some evidence that eating baking soda before certain athletic events can help increase performance. Is there anything it can’t do?

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Shower Quick Shut-Off Valve

I recently installed a shut-off valve on my shower, which I figured cut down my water use in the shower by about a third. You can buy one at the hardware store for around $5. Here are some instructions on how to install your own.

In an effort to keep my home as free of harsh chemicals as possible, for the last year or so I’ve been making my own cleaning products. I’ve found them to be just as effective as commercial cleaners, but a whole lot cheaper. They’re also much healthier, and avoid releasing chemicals like Phosphates into the environment. Some of them are dead-easy, and some need a bit of work to make.

As I experienced success with certain cleaners, I’ve slowly branched out and added more to my repertoire. This is a round-up of my experiences, which have been almost universally positive.

Note: Everyone may not get the same results. Test on a small section first. Tweak recipes as necessary. These should be safe, but could damage some surfaces so be very careful.

Spray Cleaner

Ingredients:
- 1 PartWhite Vinegar
- 1 Part Water
- A Pinch of Dish Soap
- Lemon Juice (Optional)
- Essential Oils (Optional)

Cost: About 25 to 50 cents a bottle

Uses: Counters, Appliances, Outside of Toilet, Tabletops (be sure to test in a small area first), as daily shower spray.

This is probably the easiest one to make. The smell took a little getting used-to, but dissipates very quickly. It can also be nicely covered by a few drops of essential oils of your desired scent. Lemon juice works well too, and helps cut grease.

Pure white vinegar also does a great job cleaning toilets. Pour a cup or two into the water and let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes. Come back and stains will come right off.

Pure vinegar can also work as a glass cleaner, though doesn’t do quite as good a job as ammonia-based cleaners on heavy jobs.

Tub, Sink & Stove Cleaner

Ingredients:
- Baking Soda. That’s usually it.
- Table Salt, if needed.

Uses: Ceramics, Vinyl Floors, Stovetops, Fridges.

Cost: About $3-$4 for 2 KG of Baking Soda

This was a resounding success. Turns out that it does a pretty great job cleaning anything that needs a bit of scouring. I put mine into a jar and poked holes in the lid with a hammer and nail, so I can shake it onto cleaning surfaces. I then scrub with a damp cloth before wiping the Baking Soda away with a damp cloth.

This also did an absolutely fantastic job on our ceramic stovetop. We had tried several other cleaners, and found that this was better than some dedicated ceramic stovetop cleaners.

Drain Cleaner

Pour some Baking Soda down the drain, then pour in some vinegar. Wait a few minutes and then pour in boiling water.

Doesn’t unblock all drains, but can help some slower ones move a little faster.

Toothpaste (Experimental)

Ingredients:
- Baking Soda
- Table Salt
- Food-safe Vegetable Glycerine
- Peppermint Essential Oil

View the Full Recipe.

Cost: About $1 to $2 for 100ml

I was very skeptical of this one, but it worked-out better than I expected. I’m too chicken to use it exclusively, but I hedge my bets by using this one at night, and a more conventional toothpaste in the morning.

It’s really refreshing, and leaves my mouth feeling very clean.

I’m still putting this one in the “experimental” category. I am not a dentist, and so can’t guarantee 100% that this is safe long term. I do know that my mouth feels just as clean after brushing with this as it does with normal toothpaste.

I put mine in a reusable toothpaste bottle, though I assume this might be harder to find for some people. I suspect a chef’s style squeeze bottle would work well too.

The State of Giving Music Away

I knew musicians made most of their money from touring, but this article suggests that things are more extreme than I ever thought:

Lyle Lovett recently confessed to Billboard that after two decades and 4.6 million albums sold, he’s “never seen a dime” in royalties and has made his living primarily from touring. That’s a sure sign that business-wise musicians must find new ways to survive.

Via Indyish.

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Seal a Chip Bag Without Using a Clip

A neat little way to seal bags. It’s easy and works very well

Stewart Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn, is one of the best design/architecture books I’ve ever read. It rails against the spartan, impractical, and wasteful aesthetic of “magazine architects” — those designers whose buildings are conceived more as a piece of art than a functioning building, like the MIT Media lab by IM Pei pictured on the right.

It’s a study of buildings and spaces after being built, an important and oft neglected facet of the architectural field.

The accompanying BBC series is similarly down to earth and practical. It takes someone with a particular straightforwardness and insight to interview the men who wash the windows on Frank Gehry’s Prague-based Dancing House, rather than the superstar architect himself.

The whole 6-part series has been put on Google Video. Watch parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six, all for free, of course.

Via Kottke.

When designing almost anything, there is a delicate balance between adding features and reducing complexity. The more features, the more complicated and harder to use the end product will generally be. The theoretical ideal design would be easy to use for the novice, but powerful enough for the most advanced user. This nearly impossible to achieve, and every program generally walks a balance between the two extremes of simple on one end, and powerful on the other.

I use the term freebie to denote those rare features that add functionality, but do not make the interface more cluttered or harder to use. They’re generally invisible until invoked. A keyboard shortcut is perhaps the most prominent example. They add very little to the user interface but provide a lot of power for the more advanced user.

Another example would be the two-finger scrolling on my MacBook Pro. Novice users can simply use the scroll-buttons in the GUI, while advanced users can scroll by simply dragging two fingers on the scroll-bar rather than one. Advanced gestures, which Apple has released on the MacBook Air, are even more of a freebie.

This does not mean that interface designers should simply hide their features. Even hidden, the best freebie still adds clutter to the documentation at the least, and can make the program unnecessarily complex even for the advanced users. The goal is to find those little extras that compliment what’s already there, or that provide a different way of doing the same task for users with different tastes.

Demolishing a Building One Story at a Time

Here’s an amazing video of a building being demolished by slowly lowering it to the ground and dismantling it one floor at a time.

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Do Gas Taxes Cover the Costs of Roads?

This article just barely scratches the surface of something I’d like to see a whole lot more about. They discus information released in Texas that reveals that gas taxes are not actually high enough to cover Texas’ expensive road system. I had the hunch that driving was subsidized by general taxes, but hadn’t seen any numbers. I’d love to see more on this.

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Lord of the Memes

David Brooks at the New York Times captures the changing state of intellectualism and taste: “prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever.” Nothing remotely groundbreaking, but this tongue-in-cheek article describes exactly what most prominent blogs have become.

Note: This is the first post in what might become a regular series of posts from guest writers. Our first writer is Montréal-based Sylvan Lanken, who has been deeply concerned with environmental and social issues for as long as I can remember. His pieces, as currently planned, will center around information culled from the Canadian Census.

The table below was constructed using data from the 2001 Census of Canada. I chose to include the largest city in each of the ten provinces, and arranged these cities in alphabetical order. In each category, I highlighted the “best” and “worst” values, according to my own views on the environment and society. The exception to this was in the last column, the percentage of commuters traveling by car as passengers. While a higher value is arguably better than a lower one, the fact remains that these commuters are traveling by car as opposed to more sustainable methods.

Commuting Methods in Ten Canadian Cities

Source: 2001 Census of Canada

Statistics used are for the cities proper, as opposed to those for greater metropolitan areas

Inadequate public transit is a chronic problem in Canada, and there’s no single reason why this is the case. A lack of transportation planning and vision at all levels of government, unchecked suburban growth, and an entrenched car culture, among other factors, are to blame. Even so, I was surprised to find that, except for Montréal and Toronto, less than a fifth of commuters in these cities use public transit. And, alarmingly, more than half of all commuters drive to and from their place of work in all cities except Montréal.

This is a very simple project which should take 30-seconds to do. It’s a bookend wrapped in a book, making it look like the row of books is dangling perilously close to the edge of a shelf without falling over. Not as striking an illusion as the Invisible Book Shelf, but still neat. It’s also the easiest DIY project ever.

You’ll Need:

1. A hardcover book. Anything will do, though there is some minor taping or gluing, so don’t use a book you really care for.
2. A stiff L-shaped metal bookend. The shape is very important. There are a ton of metal T-shaped ones, but to make the illusion work you’ll need an L-Shape of relatively thick and heavy metal.
3. Some double-sided tape, sticky-tack, or glue dots.

Did I mention that this is the easiest craft project of all time? All you need to do is stick the bookend inside the book, inside the cover of the book that will be nearest to the outside edge of the shelf. Use some sticky-tack or double-sided tape to keep the book cover from flapping around. The rest of the books should keep the other pages in check. That’s it.

I considered some more complicated ways of using screws and glue to keep the bookend firmly together, but decided this was both simpler and kept the book mostly intact.

You should end-up with something like this:

At my recent visit to the Long Now Foundation’s talk by Ed Burtynksy, the organization’s founder Stewart Brand, author of the great How Building’s Learn, made an observation about mundanity I thought was interesting:

In a nutshell, it was that when reading a contemporary magazine, people generally try to skip the ads. When reading a vintage magazine, however, people often skip to the ads.

What is it about the passage of time that makes something like a magazine ad so interesting, while the articles become less interesting?

There are a lot of answers to that question, but that isn’t the point. It was just a simple observation I enjoyed and wanted to share.

NYC Bike Rack Design Competition

A jury including David Byrne is judging a competition to come up with a design for bike racks for New York City. The finalists are up and the winner is going to be announced in October.

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Smart Cookie

A cookie designed with a small indent for removing it from the package without breaking it. Pretty dang smart.

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Trading Places - The Demographic Inversion of the American City

This article from The New Republic examines what they call Demographic Inversion, a process allegedly occurring in some American Cities where affluent middle-classers from the suburbs are moving back into downtown urban environments, while poor inner-city minority populations are moving outside the city. I don’t think Houston is going to turn into Paris anytime soon, but the author cites Chicago as a prime example of a city where the process is already underway. I can definitely see signs of it here in my home of Montréal, where small urban condos are getting ever pricier, and formerly-working class inner-city neighborhoods are gentrifying like lightning.