Ed Dowding is a systems-thinking entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience using technology to tackle existential risks and promote sustainability. https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddowding/
When you make a big vat of soup – and with root veg being so cheap at this time of year you’d be crazy not to – you can freeze the remainder so you’re not eating leek and potato or carrot and parsnip every day. It makes sense to freeze in one- or two-person portions, ...
After a day and a half of driving rain, which seemed very befitting once the mountains and forests were made dark by the thick cloud cover, the weather cleared up on Sunday afternoon so we went out to the garden to do some pruning, since it is the season. We read up about it in ...
We’ve just been working in the garden for a bit of post-lunch constitutional. It’s been blue sky all day, lovely and warm in the sun. The first compost bin I’ve built is a third full from last year’s banana tree growth. Ali has cleared one of the vegetable patches, Lola has been digging for mice ...
Time flies, it really does. Today is Saturday. We arrived here on Wednesday night. And this is the first time I’ve had my computer out to write something. In part, this is because we don’t have internet yet, despite our best attempts. And in many ways, what a relief. It has allowed us to get ...
Latest estimates suggest that 200,000 people died in the Haiti earthquake, 7 days ago. The world population increases by 200,000 people in just 1 day. So on the plus side, we’re still up 1,200,000 people in the past week. On the downside, of those newcomers 200,000 will be malnourished 400,000 won’t have access to a ...
Yeah like we didn’t know that already! Any man in the world will confirm that. But it’s even more quantifiable than you might think. We’re talking about actual distances to objects here. Sexy girls may be further away than they appear. The participants who had been given pretzels to eat during the experiment reported feeling ...
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I’m reminded by a conversation that I’ve just had that the Hierarchy of Needs is about as succint and powerful and true and psychological models get.
It’s probably time for an update on the details. So often the day to day things change and we forget to mention them. Or for various reasons we don’t mention them until they’ve become an ingrained part of our lives, so we forget to relay them as news, and civility / humility / fear of ...
Imagine how different the world would be if we didn’t have geographic allegiance, and just social / ideological allegiance instead. Oh.. wait.. that’s right – that’s how it is. Well.. imagine how different it would be if the geographic borders aligned with the ideological ones. I’ll bet we could have some really really HUGE wars ...
http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/
Does what it says on the can: http://freedocumentaries.org/
I love this graph. WOT = Well Off, Thoughtful LIL = Low Income Lifestyle Basically it says “Yes, you may recycle and think you’re green and lovely and one of the people who should survive The Great Reckoning, but actually you’re about 3 times more environmentally impactful than that fat TV watching pikey you feel ...
China pays 280,000 commentators to skew online conversations. Their activities were described by Chinese President Hu Jintao as “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance”.
This is what happened to the Biosphere. A great metaphor (is it a metaphor if it’s so literal?) of what happens to a neglected Earth.
What a great idea, and fantastic use of liberated data: [The Postcode Paper] gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics. It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for ...
I’m so glad we live in an age where people are doing large scale psychology studies, trying to discern the facts about our behaviour which our perceptions mask. This has fed into the mainstream thanks to books like Nudge and Freakonomics, and is being used politically to great effect (viz Obama). (There are fears that ...
I’ve been thinking for a while what we do when Copenhagen fails. And then I waited to see if it actually did. And it did, so no surprise there. But no points for calling it correctly, either. I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to get involved in, and here’s my criteria: It must amplify ...
