Recycle Old Lightbulbs Into Salt and Pepper Shakers
via TreeHugger on Jul 31, 2007
Readymade has instructions for converting old incandescent bulbs into salt and pepper shakers using old bottle caps and a little wax.
Month: July 2007
Swaptree: New Online Trading System for Books
via TreeHugger on Jul 31, 2007
We have a lot of books, and getting rid of them is tough. We have tried eBay, garage sales and Freecycle, but books are different, They are the ultimate “long tail” product; somebody is interested in it but how do you find them? Jeff Bezos knew this. There are more books than any store could stock, or that one neighbourhood could aborb. Books are small and dense, catalogued by a universal numbering system and relatively easy to ship; he built Amazon around them and the rest is history. That is what is so interesting about Swaptree, a new trading system for books, CD’s and DVD…
http://www.swaptree.com/
Fairfax is Now a “Cool” County
Fairfax County, located in Northern Virginia outside of Washington, DC, has signed the “Cool Counties” declaration:
Fairfax County is helping to lead a national effort for counties to reduce global warming emissions 80 percent by 2050, an achievable average annual reduction of 2 percent. The Cool Counties Climate Stabilization Declaration also urges the federal government to adopt legislation requiring an 80 percent emissions reduction by 2050 and calls for fuel economy standards to be raised to 35 miles per gallon within a decade.
More here
Scary pix from a ventriloquism museum
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on Jul 23, 2007
Cory Doctorow: 
A Flickr user named Subspace visited Kentucky’s Ventriloquism Museum and documented the results in this chilling photoset — these dummies all seem poised to take on independent life and begin pronouncing oracular doom. Link
How to Turn 30 Days into 60
from Cincinnati.com
“A Hamilton County Municipal Court judge told an angry defendant “F— you,” an almost unheard of breach of courtroom etiquette.
Judge Ted Berry was responding to the same phrase that was uttered at him by Ivan Boykins, a defendant Berry had just sentenced to spend 30 days in jail after Boykins complained that he didn’t want probation because it would prevent him smoking marijuana.”
NASA Purchases $19M Russian Space Toilet
there are no words to say…the subject line said it all.
via Slashdot by CmdrTaco on Jul 09, 2007
Gary writes “NASA has paid $19 million for a Russian-built international space station toilet system. The toilet system, similar to the one already in use in the station’s Zvezda Service Mdule, is scheduled to arrive at the space station in 2008 and will offer more privacy for a crew expected to double from three to six by 2009. The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. NASA says purchasing the multi million dollar toilet is a bargain compared to developing one from scratch.”Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey
via Slashdot by Zonk on Jul 02, 2007
Bert de Jong writes “The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. ‘[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible – that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'”Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Al Gore Op-Ed in NYTimes
“Just in the last few months, new studies have shown that the north polar ice cap — which helps the planet cool itself — is melting nearly three times faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted. Unless we take action, summer ice could be completely gone in as little as 35 years. Similarly, at the other end of the planet, near the South Pole, scientists have found new evidence of snow melting in West Antarctica across an area as large as California….But there’s something even more precious to be gained if we do the right thing. The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge.”