Could “craigslist”:http://craigslist.com/ be in trouble? Social giant facebook’s new “marketplace”:http://facebook.com/marketplace feature will combine the social function of its site with an internet-based community marketing forum in which individual users can buy and sell anything from each other. Of course, this function is perfect for facebook users who are already self-organized into local city, company, or university networks. By combining the business functions with the social network, facebook could bring even more people into internet bartering/trade, assuring everyone on both ends of the transaction accountability. If you’re a facebook user, check out your local marketplace “here”:http://facebook.com/marketplace and see what’s for sale.
Category Archives: Original Duenos
Graphical goodness
My alma mater, the “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign”:http://www.uiuc.edu, recently removed “Chief Illiniwek”:http://www.uillinois.edu/chief/index.html as its mascot. The appropriateness of The Chief as a mascot has been a hotly contested issue for decades, but at long last Illinois students have a solution to the mascot situation that they can all rally behind. Believe it or not, bike helmets are not universally loved. In fact there are big groups of people in the biking world who think that they bring more harm than good. As a bike advocate, I’ve often found myself in the middle of this conversation but never knew what to believe, but now there’s more data. If you’ve ever seen Fox’s hit medical drama “House MD”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/, you know that every installment is just an exercise in further improbability than the previous episode (a patient’s skull explodes in the most recent episode). But occasionally reality is just as strange. Near the end of the first season, House treats a malnourished baby whose vegan parents are unwittingly starving it by keeping the infant on the same strict diet as they are. I thought the whole thing was a bit contrived, but apparently not. Yesterday, Lamont Thomas and Jade Sanders, vegan parents, were convicted of gross neglect and sentenced to life terms in prison. As always, there’s more at “the BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6642543.stm. Also if you’re interested, the episode in question was “season 1, episode 18”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0606013/
http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/ (fakeisthenewreal.org) is full of great maps. For example, the above pictures are to-scale drawings of subway systems in New York, London, and Madrid respectively. More cities can be found at their "world subways":http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/ page. I like it when people reorganize information and maps in new ways. Other cool cartographic remixes found on fakeisthenewreal are "Chicago Mile by Mile":http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/milexmile/ in which one picture representing every square mile of famously grid-like Chicago is shown on the city map, and "Public Schools in Order":http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/ps/ (shown below) in which all of New York's public schools are connected in numerical order.
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Askville, a new website from Amazon
http://answers.google.com/answers/, "Askville":http://askville.amazon.com/askville/CIndex.do?id=5#answers is a community-based general question and answer forum. I found out about it this morning by e-mail from Amazon, and already they have some great questions that have been answered. For example, one person asked "How long does it take to heal a sprained ankle?":http://askville.amazon.com/askville/ClosedQuestionViewer.do?requestId=1502847&avctx=index.greatanswers (it depends on a lot of variables) and this other woman asked "how to brush her cat's teeth?":http://askville.amazon.com/askville/ClosedQuestionViewer.do?requestId=2158075&avctx=index.greatanswers (very carefully). In answer to both questions, the answers seemed very competent, well-researched and not at all flippant (like mine). Also, for added kitsch value, question respondents can link to Amazon product pages for items that could help in solving the question at hand.
Have a few spare minutes? Help someone out by logging onto "Askville":http://askville.amazon.com/askville/Index.do#answers and lend your expertise.
Let's Cornhole 'Em!
That solution is Farm Bot.
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Farm Bot represents Illinois’ rich, agricultural tradition and its commitment to excellence in engineering via its unique, “Mega Man-style”:http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/4766/xpw8.jpg corn cannon, Abraham Lincoln hat that shoots fireworks, and jetpack that also pops popcorn. Not convinced? Let Farm Bot come to life in this nine-minute masterpiece!
The sweet irony of bike helmets
Ian Walker, a psychology professor from the University of Bath, has been conducting research about how motorists react to him riding on his bicycle with and without his helmet. By attaching ultrasonic sensors to his bike that measured just how much room cars give him while passing. He found that when NOT wearing his helmet, drivers gave him an average of 3.35 inches more room while passing. In fact, if he didn’t wear his helmet AND wore a wig to look like a woman, he got an additional 2.2 inches.
I’d always heard that you get more room when you don’t wear a helmet, but it was cool to see that assertion backed up by the numbers. Is the extra respect worth the sacrifice in protection? That’s up to you to decide. More about this research at “Scientific American”:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleid=778EF0AB-E7F2-99DF-3594A60E4D9A76B2.
Nerd Alert!: Finger Boarding
Even if the content of this article may not interest you, it will certainly make you feel way cooler then people who like “fingerboarding”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerskate. There’s a group of dexterous tabletop surfers who use 96 mm (~3.75”) skate boards to use their fingers to perform tricks like grinding, ollies, and…well, do you really even care? These finger freaks have small scale “ramps & parks”:http://www.blackriver-ramps.de/, “DVDs”:http://www.blackriver-ramps.de/, and “dozens of fansites”:http://www.techdeck.com/links/othersites.htm. Scary enough, the infection has spread worldwide to the “US”:http://www.usfbshop.co.nr/, “UK”:http://www.empirefbs.co.uk/arctic/homeindex.htm, and even “Germany”:http://www.berlinwood.com/. If you are a finger-sk8r 4life, you need to re-evaluate yourself, pronto. Try some other hobby like “collecting rubber duckies”:http://duenos.net/article/242/RubberDuckieyouaretheone, “dumpster diving”:http://duenos.net/article/233/BarelyUsedInfoonDumpsterDiving, “ballooning”:http://duenos.net/article/225/InterestedinBallooning, or “finding friends for you pets”:http://duenos.net/article/147/AFriendsterfortheFamilyPet.
Peer-to-peer parking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge but who still want to drive into the city have a new option. Drive most of the way into the city, park in someone's driveway and then take public transport the rest of the way. Reacting to an intense shortage of public parking spaces in crowded London, "ParkatMyHouse.com":http://www.parkatmyhouse.com/ is a web2.0 approach to solving everyone's problem. London residents with parking spaces to let can list them and the times they are available on the "website":http://www.parkatmyhouse.com/ and wannabe commuters can rent (or let) it.
This is a really cool application of appropriate technology with people helping people. We've profiled similarly-spirited projects here at duenos before, including: "social lending at Zopa.com":http://duenos.net/article/136/ZopacomItslendingwithoutthebanks and "third-world direct lending at Kiva.org":http://duenos.net/article/106/lend-money-online-to-third-world-entrepreneurs.
Governments shame property owners for heat waste
“Hotmapping”:http://www.hotmapping.co.uk/ is a company that uses spy-plane infrared technology to conduct surveys of municipalities looking for buildings that are losing heat. They have been hired by a number of local governments in the UK to create maps of their areas that they then have posted online in an effort to publicly shame property owners into not wasting heat energy. “This article”:http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/article1744293.ece for more about one government’s efforts to make their more wasteful residents accountable and also offer energy saving ideas and advice. People don’t often know when or how they’re going wrong when it comes to waste, so I think this program could produce some good results.
First Nat'l Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament in Las Vegas
It’s American superficiality at its best in Las Vegas today as the World Rock, Paper, Scissors final tournament is being held. The prize? $50,000.
Oh yes, the same method you used to decide who had to go over the fence and get the baseball as a kid can earn you more than the annual income of most people in the industrialized world. There’s some very well-written commentary about the event in “The New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/us/14rock.html?ex=1336795200&en=4ced52bb8421bf8f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss or you could just watch it on ESPN as it happens. Seriously.
For more about the world of Rock, Paper Scissors I found the “RPS Society website”:http://www.worldrps.com/ to be very helpful. They also have up to the minute tournament coverage on their main blog.
Episode of House MD comes to life
