*What do you suppose happens when nanotechnology gets hijacked by Somali pirates?

"An explosion of the Latest western, Arabic and Asian hits, all Played non-stop. Yalla Bina means 'Let's party!' in Arabic, a very popular term the youth identify with and relate to...."

*This may be a positive boon for mental health.

(((Colossal green-buildings post here, whoa. Bahrain's idea of a World Trade Center has a windmill in it.)))

"Under pressure from other more sustainable buildings popping up around the world, such as the recently featured Bahrain World trade Center, London’s Gherkin Tower, designed by Norman Foster, has recently begun testing an innovative vegetated facade panel which promises to change the face of building design forever. This new “Green wall” product, known as the Core Hydraulic Integrated Arboury Panel, promises to bring the benefits of green roofs to any exterior surface of skyscraper.

"The panel works by obtaining moisture through the air and funneling through its specialized membrane properties allowing it to provide for enough water to allow for plant growth. The plants, mostly a mixture of lichens and grasses are expected to grow out of the panel and envelope the facade. Needless to say the benefits of the panels are many: Shading, increased internal daylighting, thermal insulation, reduced water consumption, energy generation for the entire building, recycling of materials, reduction of toxicity in the interior spaces, acceptance of the Kyoto treaty by the countries which have yet to sign, world peace, and a rise in property rental income.

((('Seductive nuggets of geeky jargon...' yeah, Britain encounters Seattle.)))

Almost every page offers some new and seductive nugget of geeky jargon. "Vampire power" is the energy drained by electronic devices left on standby rather than switched off; apparently, this costs most of us about a fifth of our household electricity bills. If you're wearing a "Hug Shirt" impregnated with electronic sensors, you can get a virtual squeeze from a buddy anywhere in the world, sent via their mobile phone. "Mycoremediation" is the use of mushrooms to purify polluted land. Oyster mushrooms not only flourish on an oil spill, but actually clean it up too.

All this information is sandwiched between thick slices of polemic. The wide-eyed gusto does sometimes get a bit irritating: "Changing the world is a team sport, and there's a spot on that team for every person on the planet." But if that type of thing sends an uncomfortable shiver through your jaded old bones, Steffen has a message specifically for you: "Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience."

((("Cynicism is obedience." If that's the only nugget of geeky jargon that seduces you today, well, take it to heart.)))

(((Okay, this is arch, bonkers Situationist gibberish, but I gotta forgive them anything for namechecking RFID, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges all on the same webpage.)))

(((Thanks to We Make Money Not Art, who are blogging up a storm over than Berlin Interaktion-design event. That was a very good event, but their coverage may be literally better than being there.)))

The Situated Game-Play of Real Play!

The difference to existing locative mapping games is that it is no Game, just play, according to the Ludic Society slogan: We sell Play – no Games!

This means that there are no fixed rules, negotiable outcomes of the play, but a clearly defined goal, namely de-pricing the networked world of marked things, and a flexible tool-kit for the play of tagging the city. The outcome of a tag set on the play-map is open. The Real Player actions cumulate in a collectively “Borg-like” constructed “Borges”-ian psycho-active play-map. Jorge Luis Borges (1941) describes a map that occurs at a 1:1 scale, as large as the territory which it represents. A Borgesian 'pata-active map displays a meta-game played 1:1 in the Reality Engine over the city, blowing up the most tagged sites with the value Zero.

As in the absurd fantasy of Italo Calvino's (1972) invisible city, the game-play of this Real Play focuses on things we don't normally name and see as play objects. This absence, marked with RFID stickers, defines the players' personal game map developed in the course of the play in the city - instead of adding another boring data layer to reality (like most Google Earth/ map applications do).....

(((I may not be blogging with quite my usual ease over in the United Arab Emirates, so I think you better feast your eyes on this totally biodegrable race car, which runs on totally biodegrable fuels. By the way, the pilot is also totally biodegradable.)))

Students at Warwick University in England have built a car out of biodegradable materials. The tires are made out of potatoes, the brake pads composed of cashew nut shells, and the body of the car is hemp. The car, which runs on bio-fuels, and bio-lubricants, has a top speed of 125 mph.

Ben Wood, studying for his Engineering Doctorate at WMG, the global innovation specialists based at the University of Warwick, said: "Almost everything on the car can be made out of biodegradable or recyclable materials. All the plastic components can be made from plants and, although the chassis has to be made from steel for strength, steel is a very recyclable material. We already have the shell, brake pads, fuel and tires sorted. My aim is to end up with a race car that's 95 per cent biodegradable or recyclable. If we can build a high-performance car that can virtually be grown from seed, just imagine what's possible for the average family car." The Eco One is currently on display at the Sexy Green Car Show in Cornwall over the next two weeks.

In 2002, a then-obscure academic named Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class, which argued that knowledge workers were attracted to cities that offered the rare combination of "technology, talent, and tolerance," and that high-paying jobs and economic vitality were following them to these hubs of creativity.

The book became an unlikely best-seller, turning Florida into the world's most renowned professor of regional economic development. He has since penned a follow-up, The Flight of the Creative Class--which posits that the United States stands to lose global talent to countries that are more open and inclusive--and he's now working on a third book about how people choose where they live. But nearly five years later, it's still Florida's original conceit that has legs. Everywhere you look, cities big and small are trying to get in touch with their inner Austin....

(((Most cities aren't real likely to get in touch with their inner Austin, especially by trying to attract people from Austin. I've got an alternate strategy for urban prosperity, though, and I think it might work great. Instead of trying hard to attract hip metrosexual creatives to your town, why not find stuffy, philistine breadhead creeps like the author of this FAST COMPANY article, and ride them out of your town on a rail? Housing costs would drop immediately and, in the sudden absence of him and his ilk, the quality of everyday life would skyrocket!)))