Glad you asked. If you sign up before August 30, you’ll receive a fancy Per Square Mile t-shirt in addition to the regular member extras. You’ll also have my gratitude for supporting this site (which costs a pretty penny just to host, not to mention the time I spend writing and producing it.)
Only two weeks remain in the drive. After that you can still sign up and receive the member extras, but you’ll be missing out on one sweet shirt. You know you want one.
It’s hypothesized that as devices become more energy efficient, we’ll use them more because they’ll be cheaper to use. Called the rebound effect, it’s one reason why some people don’t think efficiency will do much of anything to curb carbon emissions.
Well, the American Council for Energy Efficiency thinks otherwise. They put out a white paper (summarized at the page linked above) that says the rebound effect exists, but that it’s not big enough to worry about. Ultimately, they say, we’ll still end up netting 80 percent of whatever efficiencies we gain. Sounds good to me, but I’ll reserve judgement until I see results that a) don’t come from a group with a vested interest in the matter and b) have passed peer-review muster.
Brandon Keim, writing for Wired:
In experiments published August 12 in Nature Climate Change, psychologists found that telling people about carpooling’s money-saving benefits seemingly makes them less likely to recycle.
In short, appeals to self-interest backfired, accidentally encouraging people to behave selfishly in other areas.
Heartening, in a way. Maybe it’s time environmentalists get back to their roots.
(If it seems like I’ve been linking to Keim’s work a lot lately, there’s a reason for that.)
Henry Grabar profiles designer Tom Loois and his new app, BlankWays, which doesn’t tell you where to walk, but where you haven’t walked. It’s the 21st century equivalent of what I did as a kid—pore over the city map in the phone book looking for streets I hadn’t yet explored.
New collective blog written by a host of ecologists, designers, academics, and writers. Check it out.
What to do with Olympic buildings after the event is over is a perennial problem for host cities. This photo roundup by Claire Cottrell shows what I imagine are worst case scenarios.
The ruin that’s befallen these sites, though, doesn’t happen to every venue. I vividly remember visiting Munich’s Olympic grounds in high school, looking out over the vast, swooping acrylic canopies, and walking through the Schwimmhalle, which was holding open swim. And until 2006, the Olympiastadion was home to FC Bayern-München. But not every venue was well used. Even one of the most charismatic parts of the park—the acrylic canopies—were costly to maintain, and some questioned their longevity.
London’s plan for the Olympics kept this in mind, though some still question whether the emphasis on “legacy” is enough. Time will tell.
Ai Weiwei, being interviewed by Jonathan Landreth:
Twitter is my city, my favorite city. I can talk to anybody I want to. And anybody who wants to talk to me will get my response. They know me better than their relatives or my relatives. There’s so much imagination there; a lot of times it’s just like poetry. You just read one sentence, and you sense this kind of breeze or a kind of look. It’s amazing.
David Biello is on a new island hunting mission or something. In addition to today’s earlier post, he found this one over at Time. Congratulations, Pacific Ocean. You’re proud parent to another new island.
Not something you see everyday.
Ed Yong, writing for Nature:
Black cottonwood trees (Populus trichocarpa) can clone themselves to produce offspring that are connected to their parents by the same root system. Now, after the first genome-wide analysis of a tree, it turns out that the connected clones have many genetic differences, even between tissues from the top and bottom of a single tree.
Renee DiResta:
In the months before a US Presidential election, the quality of political discourse hits new lows. Blue State/Red State tropes dominate the news cycle as the media gins up outrage over perceived injustices in the culture wars. It’s all about our differences. So I started wondering, how do Americans really think about “those people” in other states? What are the most common stereotypes? For each of the fifty states and DC, I asked Google: “Why is [State] so ” and let it autocomplete.
Great fun.
According to Rebecca J. Rosen at The Atlantic, our cars won’t be chauffeuring us around anytime soon:
This technology is still at its very early stages and 300,000 miles is not all that big of a sample. According to a “cursory” analysis by Bryant Walker Smith of Stanford Law School, “Google’s cars would need to drive themselves (by themselves) more than 725,000 representative miles without incident for us to say with 99 percent confidence that they crash less frequently than conventional cars. If we look only at fatal crashes, this minimum skyrockets to 300 million miles.” We’re still a long way away from there.
Ed Yong, writing for Nature:
At the Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Belfair, Washington, inmates are helping to save the endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha taylori). Under the supervision of guards and graduate students, a small group of prisoners is breeding the beautiful orange-and-white insects in a greenhouse outside the prison. They have even carried out research to show what plants the butterfly prefers to lay its eggs on — information that will be crucial for boosting its dwindling numbers.
The prisoners benefit, too. Recidivism is down significantly among inmates who attended just one lecture.
Emily Badger, reporting for the Atlantic Cities:
One of the most telling findings of the paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, is that just about everyone Bardhi and Eckhardt interviewed hopes to one day own their own car. In the meantime, they feel no sense of shared ownership over Zipcars. They aren’t particularly connected to each other and don’t want to be. And they view Zipcar itself as the enforcer that keeps other drivers from screwing them over, not as the facilitator of a community.
This is all despite Zipcar’s best efforts to build exactly that, a community.
Makes sense. Zipcar is a company. Some companies have been successful at building communities. Most haven’t. When a for-profit tries to build “community”, there’s often a whiff of insincerity that accompanies it. That the company doesn’t actually care about the community, that it’s just using it to its advantage, whether that be for marketing purposes, cost cutting, or something else.
Oh, and don’t forget Zipcars are fundamentally rental cars. Nobody gives two poops about a rental car.
William G. Moseley, writing an op-ed for the New York Times:
From where I sit on the north end of America’s grain belt, I can almost hear the corn popping to the south of me. The drought threatens to drive up global corn prices beyond their level in 2007-8, when food demonstrations broke out around the world. But such crises often lead to change — and transformation is what is needed to make our food system less vulnerable.
Brandon Keim, writing for Wired:
For more than a decade, academic and industry scientists have promised crops that would endure hot, dry weather. That weather has arrived. The crops have not. In a land where corn is king, the king is stunted and withered.
Keim rightly points out that drought resistance is a tough nut to crack, especially on the plant level. Not only is the trait difficult to produce, the results aren’t desirable to farmers—”[a] slow-growing plant with tiny leaves that shutters its metabolism in the absence of rain”. That’s a recipe for survival, not for a bumper crop. As a result, seed companies have largely ignored drought resistance.
Instead, they have spent the last few decades investing heavily in “blockbuster” plants like Bt corn. Those have made them buckets of money, but climate change could nullify the advantage of such seeds. Who needs pest resistance if your crops are parched, wispy stubs?
But there are other solutions, Keim notes:
That makes non-genetic approaches, such as using cover crops to manage soil characteristics and fine-tuning planting times, all the more important. But those methods are knowledge-based, and it’s much harder to monetize knowledge than genes.
Harder, but not impossible. It sounds like an opportunity for seed companies: Deemphasize their seed lines and strengthen their consulting staffs. Other companies have navigated such dramatic shifts before. IBM did it in the 1990s. They shifted their focus from hardware to software and services, with much success. The market for ag services and consulting may not be significant now, but global warming could quickly change that. To quote Wayne Gretzky, whose father once told him, “Skate to where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.”
AP:
Across American agriculture, farmers and crop scientists have concluded that it’s too late to fight climate change. They need to adapt to it with a new generation of hardier animals and plants specially engineered to survive, and even thrive, in intense heat, with little rain.
AP:
The federal government says corn growers could end up with their lowest average yield in 17 years as the drought continues to take its toll.
Gus Trompiz and Colin Packham, reporting for Reuters:
U.S. corn futures rose to a new record high on Friday ahead of closely watched government estimates that are expected to show a severe drought will slash the U.S. crop to a six-year low, highlighting weather-driven tensions in global grain supply.
Annalee Newitz, writing at io9:
If humans follow Curiosity to Mars later this century, we’ll need cities modeled on ones that already exist in extreme climates on Earth. Here are six high-tech (and a few low-tech) cities that would have a passing shot at survival in the Martian climate.