The Resilience Science Blog points to this fascinating article from New Scientist about humanity’s ever-rising impact on the environment. The graphs are perhaps the most striking thing in the article—the one above plots population, water use, CO2 concentration, GDP, Species extinction and more. Which is which is almost irrelevant—the trend is clear.

Resilience Science has an even more extensive series of graphs from the article, which stresses the need to move from an economy of exploitation and growth to one that is truly sustainable.

Khoi Vihn at Subtraction brings up some interesting points regarding the ever-more pervasive “cloud computing” services in light of the current financial crisis. While Google and some of these other services look steady now, the recent stock plunges have shown how vulnerable some formerly invulnerable-looking institutions and companies might actually be. When it comes to cloud services, we are oftentimes without very good methods of getting our data off should we have to. If the services closed, or even if we just decide to go somewhere else, there may not always be a good way of getting our data back.

This is perhaps hyperbolic at this point — Google probably won’t be closing anytime soon, and some of the best cloud services do allow you to get your data off — but the point does have some merit. I want to have my digital documents, emails, videos, and photos for the rest of my life. Gmail will be around in 5 years, but will it be there in 50?

I have almost always favoured services that let me control my own data in some way. I have used an email client during a time where it seems most people are moving to gmail. I’m using a NAS instead of Amazon S3’s online storage. I use a privately-hosted WordPress because I can walk away with my data at any time.

The sweet-spot for me seem to be pieces of software that bridge the two. They let me keep a hold of my data locally while letting backing-it-up and letting me access it from elsewhere. Apple’s Mobile Me is going in the right direction, but is unfortunately marred by spotty implementation. Along with giving me more control of my data, I also get the advantage of generally having quicker interfaces, more things like drag and drop, and a standard mac-like interface consistency that makes it easier to move from application to application.

This American Life has a good rundown on the financial crisis. For those of you like myself who are outside of the U.S. of A, the TAL podcast is a must-listen, but this episode in particular helped explain a lot of things which were otherwise a little opaque and complicated.

Giant Cow Heads Found in Abandoned Building

Maybe it’s a sign that my “real life” commitments getting the best of me since I keep linking to Walking Turcott Yards instead of writing my own stuff, but I really liked this post about some old advertising icons that were discovered somewhere unexpected.

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Redefining Waiting

A neat little story about how a landlord stopped complaints about elevator wait times by installing mirrors, which proved distracting enough to keep people occupied.

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A Year of Heavy Losses

The New York times has a little interactive chart showing which American financial companies have lost what over the last few days.

Yesterday I went into my local, family-owned, print shop to buy some office supplies. I didn’t have any cash on me, and I paid by debit card. As I was walking out of the store I saw something else I wanted which sold for $2. I turned around and went back to the cashier, but was told there was a $5 minimum on debit purchases. I turned around to look for something else I might need, so I could pad out my bill, but he stopped me and just said “it’s ok, pay next time”.

I was floored. It’s a small thing, yes, but it was the sort of human gesture which made all the difference and made me all the more loyal to their store. It cost them nothing in the end, since I went back the next day to pay them back (and do some printing I needed to do anyhow).

I contrast that with experiences I’ve had at national chains, where the clerk has zero autonomy and can’t make any decisions. It can range anywhere from “I can’t make change for you unless you make a purchase” to the blatant apathy shown by too many retail clerks these days.

I don’t mean to pick on large chains - some of them have good service. Conversely, many family-owned businesses have awful service. If you take the time to find the good ones though, it really pays off.

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On the theme of being nice - I was downtown this morning, and happened to be looking at some ugly cigarette butts someone had thrown on the sidewalk. Just then a city maintenance worker just happened to come by to sweep them up. I know this sounds cheesy, but I said “thank you.”

His smile made me realize it’s probably not the sort of thing he hears often enough, even though it is important work.

Zinc Air Batteries

You’ve likely heard of what some are heralding as the coming Hydrogen Economy, which some think may replace the fossil-fuel economy we have now. Problem is, hydrogen isn’t a fuel source, it has to be created by electricity. That makes it more akin to a storage medium than a source.

Apparently some are also looking forward to a Zinc Economy, using Zinc Air batteries. They apparently hold a great deal of power, but they need to be recharged in a central location. Just like with hydrogen, there are a number of companies announcing miraculous breakthroughs which they say will revolutionize everything, but I’m a little more skeptical. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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Mini Moleskines

I really like my Moleskine notebooks, but I sometimes find them too large to carry in my pocket all the time. Luckily, I stumbled across someone who decided to simply cut theirs in half. Looks like it worked pretty well too. Here are instructions on how to do it.

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TED Talk: Robert Full: How Engineers Learn from Evolution

How he and his fellow researchers are making robots that walk, climb, jump and run by copying animals in nature. His solutions are often elegant and simple, but not always intuitive.

Analog Letter

A neat little idea of sending a letter rolled-up inside an analog cassette. Cute.

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10 Things You Shouldn’t Buy New

A very quick guide of things that make more sense financially to buy used. I would also expand “office furniture” to include home furnishings as well. There is a lot of low-quality furniture out there, but the old stuff is often the best.

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Church Windows Help Purify the Air

Gold used in old church windows helps purify the air when exposed to sunlight.

“For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colors, but little did they realise that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst,” Professor Zhu said.

My friend at Lake Jane has posted a profile of Les Touilleurs, the best cooking store in my town of Montréal. Aside from having an attractive space, they do a few things very right. In a certain sense it might be seen as the opposite of a big-box commodity store.

A few of the things they do which I wish more stores would copy:

- No packaging. You can pick everything up and see how it actually feels in your hand. It also lets you more adequately tell the quality of what you are going to buy, which can be difficult behind the thick packaging on many products.

- Small, but good, selection. They have been known to discontinue items that are selling well if they decide the quality isn’t up to snuff. This sort of editorializing makes sure you get something really good, and builds a great customer loyalty. Yes, you could buy something cheaper elsewhere, but you know the one from here will be great, and will probably last at least 10 years if maintained well.

- An Excellent Staff. They really know enough to help you find what you want. These aren’t apathetic Best Buy workers who don’t care about what they’re doing, they take pride in their work and it shows.

- Educational Courses. Cooking workshops are held often in the in-store kitchen. Many top chefs from the city take part.

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.

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.