More by luck than judgement, I have become Mr. Survey at Sustainable Seattle, which I'm actually rather pleased about. We have this happiness survey that we're trying to get everybody to take (fairly successfully - we had more than 6,000 responses the last time I checked), and I am the main person doing both tech support for the online survey ( Read more... )

A report came out recently claiming that cellphones have been conclusively proven to be the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (the mass failure of beehives that's a serious threat to agriculture around the world). I've seen so many "OMG mobile phones give you cancer" scare stories that turned out to be based on a hopelessly flawed study and/or ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, I had the great privilege of spending a couple of months in central/Eastern Europe as a tourist. I learned many interesting things along the way, the biggest of which was just how completely World War 2, the Molotov-Ribentrop Pact and the Cold War had shaped the destiny of many millions of people, but right now I feel like ( Read more... )

About an hour ago, the sun set, not that anyone here in Seattle would have known the difference in today's unusually stereotypical weather. This marked the start of Yom Kippur, for which I will be fasting until sunset tomorrow ( Read more... )

I'm sitting at the back of a class I've been particularly excited about promoting: How To Bring About Large-Scale Behavior Change. The instructor has a really strong cognitive science background, and the core idea underlying the class is that we (*) will do a much better of job of persuading people to respond to our messages if we understand and ( Read more... )

Prompted by a couple of friends' interest, I recently read the Dark Mountain Manifesto. It's long but worth a read, because it's a beautifully written expression of some important ideas. In spite of this, it didn't quite sit right with me.

( Go and read the Manifesto first, then click here for my reaction to it )

I've been doing a lot of cooking lately, and getting more ambitious and more confident with it. I think I finally understand ingredients and techniques well enough to have a reasonably good idea of what substitutions will work the first time I try a new recipe, and I'm getting better at throwing something together with whatever's around. The ( Read more... )

Melinda and I just watched this great (if also comically old) documentary about the tube map. You should watch it too, and not just for the obvious delight one of the interviewees takes in the word "CockfostersApart from all the graphic design stuff that gets talked about, the biggest thing that struck me watching this was the change in mindset ( Read more... )

In a lot of ways, the cyclists' protest against the streetcar has been a failure. On the one hand, we didn't get quite enough attention; perhaps because only 40-odd of us showed up, as compared to the hundreds who turn out each month for Critical Mass. On the other, a lot of the attention we have had is symptomatic of a serious messaging failure ( Read more... )

Last week I went to an interesting event hosted by ONE/Northwest, about the potential usefulness of online social networks to activist groups. Jon Stahl liveblogged the occasion, and his post functions as a handy minutes of the meetingI hadn't really taken the idea seriously before hearing these speakers. I mean, unlike about a third of the ( Read more... )