A few weeks ago, Michelle reported on Guy Kawasaki and his site Alltop.com, which I am now surfing on a weekly basis. I’ve always found it peculiar that once you start to pay close attention to something, you’re suddenly seeing it everywhere.

Guy Kawasaki’s talk “The Art of Innovation,” presented as one of the Avenue A | Razorfish summit videos that were recently made public, is one of the funniest and most inspiring talks for those taking a stab at entrepreneurship.

Check it out here: Mac and Windows version.

Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has introduced a vastly different approach to addressing climate change. Rather than scheming ways to stave off the apparently inevitable, he designed floating, disaster-ready cities able to safely house 50,000 future victims of impending ecological disaster.

The self-sustaining “Lilypad” city is described by its creator as a true amphibian: half-aquatic and half-terrestrial, with marinas and mountains, its own flora and fauna, and a central fresh-water lagoon that serves as a ballast for the structure. Callebaut also claims that it would produce zero carbon emissions by integrating all renewable energies — including solar, thermal, hydraulic and wind energy.

The Ecopolis’ goal, in addition to providing housing for displaced persons, is to create a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature. Even without rising oceans and melting glaciers, it’s a breathtaking and novel idea for providing new and sustainable living space for our ever-growing population.

More information on the Vincent Callebaut Architectures website.

Via the Ecolect blog.

My name is Geeta Dayal and I’m the incoming blogger-in-chief for Pop!Tech. It’s good to be here. One of the many things I like about Pop!Tech is that it’s so interdisciplinary.

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging out with scientists in research labs. I wasn’t just interested in the nuts and bolts of their experiments; I wanted to understand the impact of what they did. When I was 14, I landed my first job doing experiments with nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Then I spent the summer before my senior year of high school trying to make a molecule that didn’t exist. When I was 17, I went to MIT. After I graduated, I realized that I didn’t want to be a scientist for a living; what I really wanted to do was to show people why science mattered. I also wanted to understand how science and technology interacted with culture, and with the world at large. I worked on science documentaries for PBS, and went to grad school for journalism at Columbia. In the years since, I’ve worked as a newspaper editor, a biology lecturer, an arts correspondent, a technology researcher, and many other things. I’ve gotten to travel a lot, and I’ve met many fascinating people along the way, including many former and current Pop!Tech speakers. I’m even writing a book about one of them–the musician and artist Brian Eno.

In the weeks to come, I’ll be interviewing many of these folks, and posting the interviews on this blog. Watch this space!

If you’ve ever wondered how a modern-day Shakespeare’s tweets would read, or what Emily Dickinson’s Flickr stream might have looked like, you may enjoy reading George Orwell’s new blog: the Orwell Diaries.

Published by The Orwell Prize, Britain’s esteemed prize for political writing, the blog is based on Orwell’s diary from August 9th, 1938 through October of 1942. The entries are published chronologically and as Orwell originally wrote them, spelling errors and all. They have, however, been modernized by the additions of hyperlinks, tags and footnotes by Orwell scholar Peter Davison.

The blog is divided into two categories–”Domestic,” which focuses on the daily details of Orwell’s life such as the weather and how many eggs his chickens laid, and “Political,” which will soon begin  exploring emerging political themes that became central to both his fiction and non-fiction work.

Here’s a sample entry:

August 22, 1938, Southwold*

Cool this morning & raining most of the day. Most of the crops in & stacked. Blackberries in Suffolk much less forward than Kent, otherwise little difference in the vegetation.

When clipping fowls’ wings, clip only one wing, preferably the right (left wing keeps the ovaries warm.) Cold tea is good fertilizer for geraniums.

It’s interesting to see that even 70 years ago, writers were essentially noting what they had for lunch.

If you agree that the world is a mess, watch this video on girleffect.org to learn about their proposed solution. Here’s a hint: it starts with a girl.

ReWalk, a newly-invented robotic suit, allows paralyzed persons to stand, climb stairs, and walk. Using a design based on the exoskeleton of a crab, the suit allows people paralyzed from the waist down to move using crutches and changes to their center of gravity or upper body movements.

Engineer Amit Goffer, the founder of Argo Medical Technologies and himself paralyzed, created the suit as an alternative to wheelchair-based mobility. The company claims that ReWalk can help exercise muscles and alleviate many of the conditions associated with long-term wheel chair usage. It also gives its users the psychological benefit of being upright and enabling them to make direct eye contact with others.

The device is now in clinical trials in Tel Aviv.  See it in action here.

Source: BBC News

Image from Wired

Nick Veasey photographs familiar objects, but he’s able to capture incredible details we’ll never see with our eyes.  That’s because his camera is an industrial x-ray machine.  Wired recently ran an article on his work.

The 46-year-old Englishman estimates that over the past decade or so he’s x-rayed more than 4,000 objects: flowers, football players, alarm clocks, tractors, even a 777. “I’m interested in how things work, and x-rays show what’s happening under the surface,” he says. “Plus, they look cool.” To get his pictures, Veasey uses industrial x-ray machines typically employed in art restoration (to examine oil paintings), electronics manufacturing (to inspect circuit boards), and the military (to check tanks for stress fractures).

Check out the office scene and his portfolio of work for commercial clients.

Via Core77

This was going to be a post about a telescope, or rather a computer that mimics a telescope.  Specifically Microsoft Research’s Worldwide Telescope, which uses data from the Hubble telescope, as well as ten other earth-bound telescopes, to allow users to fly through outer space, zooming out or swooping in as close as the data will allow.

But when I read on Microsoft’s website that the Worldwide Telescope project was dedicated to Jim Gray, my world tipped a bit off-kilter. Jim Gray was an award-winning research scientist at Microsoft who, on a short solo sail just off the coast of San Francisco, was lost at sea in January of 2007.

I became aware of Jim’s disappearance when a friend from Seattle asked if I could help with the rescue efforts. Through Amazon’s human-powered, computer-managed Mechanical Turk service, I and countless other people from around the globe scanned thousands of satellite images of the ocean near where Jim was last seen — looking for the tiniest sliver of white that could possibly be a boat.

The Mechanical Turk, named after an 18th century chess-playing “robot” that turned out to be a human in disguise, served up image after image of the ocean, which I dutifully scanned and logged. It also displayed a sample photo of what the boat might look like, should it be there. The satellite images were the same endless, patternless gray swirls. A few times, there was a small blip of white buried deep within an image and I logged that, too — nervous it could be a false alarm but hopeful that it might not be.

Reading Jim’s name on the Worldwide Telescope site made me again think of his last hours, and the huge honor and responsibility it was to have looked for this lost man from the safety of our offices and homes. According to Coast Guard reports, he disappeared on a calm, clear night. I wondered if he found any comfort in the stars he studied for so long. And where, on Earth, did he go?

Sadly, Jim’s boat was never found. In May 2007, UC Berkeley held a tribute in honor of his life and accomplishments, which were many.

Jim’s legacy lives on through his work. The Worldwide Telescope project enables us to gaze into space, shot through bright threads of wonder and hope, just as I once searched pictures of the sea looking for Jim.

Photo credit: Latitude38.com

TreeHugger has a great post on how the city of Monterrey, Mexico is using methane gas harvested from landfills to power their rail transit system by day — and light up city streets by night. And this is just the beginning.

Read more at TreeHugger.

children with XOs in South Africa (credit: Reuters)

The One Laptop per Child project has truly lived up to its name in Niue — a small island nation in the South Pacific — where every child now has an XO laptop, reports the BBC.

It is not the first time that Niue has proven to be ahead of the technological curve; in 2003, it became the first territory to offer free wireless internet to all its inhabitants.

Besides instant wireless websurfing, the schoolchildren will also be able to communicate with each other within a radius of one kilometre without going online.

Secretariat of the Pacific Community director general Jimmie Rodgers was quoted by the AFP news wire as saying that the laptops “have the potential to revolutionise education in ways that are difficult to imagine.”

More news about OLPC’s distribution can be found on their news wiki.