In 2007, Sydney, Australia, cut the power for 60 minutes as a way to raise awareness about global warming. Call it a token gesture, but just that one small act alone slashed the city’s emissions by 10%. According to Earth Hour’s website:

[I]f the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.

This year, 370 cities worldwide took the pledge; and now Earth Hour 2008 has come and gone. Was it a success? While results seemed a little mixed, one thing is for sure: Sydney and Manila both earned gold stars. Just take a look at Boston.com’s photo gallery:

^{[photo courtesy the Associated Press]}

Inspiring, no? And the Earth Hour Flickr pool is filling up with some equally dramatic photos. (Way to go, Seattle!)

Even Google got in on the act.

^{[photo courtesy pirate johnny]}

OK, I worry that this post might be coming off as a bit breathless … but after seeing environmentalist Bill McKibben speak at D2E Boston, it’s hard not to be all fired up about climate change. Yesterday, McKibben dropped this sobering statistic: NASA researchers recently concluded that the maximum safe atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is roughly 350 parts per million. And we shot past that benchmark 20 years ago — we’re at 385 ppm right now.

McKibben offers this analogy: Let’s say your doctor tells you that your cholesterol is dangerously high. Sure, you may not be doubled over with a heart attack right this second, but unless you’re looking to become a young, well-marbled corpse, McKibben says, “you have to stop eating cheese.” Consider Earth Hour a slice of cheese not eaten.

McKibben’s latest effort is 350.org, a global-warming activist movement still in its infancy. Check it out!

Now that spring has sprung, the grass has riz (almost) and all that good stuff, it’s time to emerge from our down-comforter-filled caverns and start doing things outside again! If you’re looking for a new outdoor project, here’s a cheap, easy and awfully weird one: Wacky Archives shows you how to make your own ethereal apparition. No ectoplasm required — just chicken wire and a slightly twisted sense of whimsy. [Via Make]

^{[photo courtesy Wacky Archives]}

Actually, this reminds me of Nightshirts, one of the installations in the Forest Hill Cemetery. (New Englanders, if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you check this place out. Makes for superb picknicking.)

*Title of this post inspired my favorite IMDB find of all time.

Belly up to the Kunstbar, a cozy little watering hole where the White Russians are Chagall and Kandinsky. The brainchild of animation collective The Petrie Lounge, this short is a surreal(ist) love letter to Art History 101. [Via Neatorama]

Sorry for the lack of posts/erratic site behavior — we’ve run into a few technical difficulties this week. (Looks like I’m well on my way to filling out my “newbie blogger” bingo card!) Anyway, thanks for your patience, folks; things should be getting back to normal very soon now.

Eggs are everywhere you turn this time of year, in all manner of shapes, sizes and colors. We’ve put together a handbook to help you identify and distinguish between some of the more exotic varieties of eggs. (Click the pictures to see their original sources and contexts!)

Deluxe Chocolate Egg
Description: Noted for its authentic crackable shell and chocolate center. Two known species: Ovochoccolatus naturalis and Ovochoccolatus bling.

Vegreville Pysanka Egg
Description: Descendant of the much smaller pysanka, or Ukrainian decorated egg, and the cutting-edge (by 1974 standards) computer-aided geometric models of Ron Resch. Consists of 2,208 equilateral triangles. Commissioned as a tribute to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of Vegreville, Alberta.

Military Envoy Egg
Description: Always accompanied by a flock of symbiotic Doughboys. Although the Military Envoy Egg is nigh invulnerable around its circumference, predators can easily breach it from above.

Organically Dyed Egg
Description: Easily distinguishable by its unusual coloring, derived from various organic materials such as red cabbage, cherries, onion skins, coffee and green herbs.

Emotional Egg
Description: In contrast to its blank, stoic relatives, the Emotional Egg is capable of a vast expressive range — from sheer terror to absolute panic.

Woolly Egg
Description: Due to its soft, fuzzy exterior, the Woolly Egg is able to withstand falls from even the greatest heights. Enjoys being petted. May smell funny when wet.

Adorable Bento Egg
Description: The Adorable Bento Egg is an expert mimic, able to contort itself into a variety of forms.

Lego Egg
Description: Another master of disguise, the Lego Egg’s unusual camouflage allows it to infiltrate toy boxes and hobby shops; unfortunately, there’s not really much point to it.

Sprouting Egg
Description: A bizarre genetic anomaly, the Sprouting Egg’s shell hosts a variety of grasses and herbs.

Hope you enjoyed ZipiZen! This is the first in what is to be a regular series of theme-based posts that owe a huge inspirational debt to Web Zen. Stay tuned!

UPDATE 4.12.09: If you enjoyed this post, you’ll probably get a kick out of its sequel, A Field Guide to Recognizing Your Eggs, Part II.

By the time March rolls around, we New Englanders are through with merely being SAD — we’re exasperated. (Seriously; have you seen NH’s snowfall statistics?)

So, really, it’s no surprise that the New England Spring Flower Show is consistently packed to the gills with nearly 100,000 of the Northeast’s winter survivors, all straining to catch a glimpse of green to tide them over until the earth wakes up and starts blooming again. For this annual event, the Bayside Expo Center surreally transforms into a lush garden paradise.

Every year, the Flower Show takes on a new theme, and encourages its exhibitors to run wild with it. For 2008 (marking the 137th show), they chose “Rhapsody in Green,” a celebration of eco-friendly and sustainable horticulture. ” ‘Green’ doesn’t have to mean dull and practical,” exclaims the Mass Hort website. “This year, we’ll show the cutting-edge, sensual and colorful side of responsible gardening.” And the exhibitors delivered, filling the Bayside with battery-powered lawn mowers, solar-powered trash cans and rain gardens.

Here are the highlights. For the full image gallery, click here to view it at our Flickr page. (Note: If you enjoy this recap, stay tuned for our coverage of D2E Boston, which kicks off at the Hynes Convention Center next week. You might also want to check out our notes from our last trip to the Bayside, for Boston’s inaugural Going Green Expo.)

Upon entering the showroom, visitors were greeted by this massive metal spheroid made by sculptor Chris Williams.

Read the rest of this entry »

At this point, everyone knows what a powerful tool Google can be if you’re looking to dig up information on other people. Well, recently, I stumbled across a couple websites that allow you to use Google to spy on pretty much the entire world, all at once. But not in the way you’d expect.

I’m referring to two flashy mashups of Google Maps and Flickr: Flickrvision and Earth Album.

Earth Album harvests Flickr’s most interesting photos, then displays the results for a given country when you click on the map.

Flickrvision is something a little more startling: It shows you a satellite’s-eye view of photos being uploaded in real time, sending that little digital globe spinning with every new submission. (For an extra dose of voyeurism, you can also check out Twittervision — although in this case, I think a picture really is worth a thousand words.)

Happy gawking!

Other nifty map-related sites:
breathingearth.net | Watch the population rise and fall in real time! See the carbon emissions of countries around the world! This is how the planet “breathes.”
opentopia.com/sunlightmaprect.html | Shows what parts of the earth are currently goth-friendly, and which parts are subjected to the sun’s burny rays (or, if you live in Seattle, coated in a light gray drizzlemist).
google.com/sky | No longer do you have to download Google Earth to mess around with the digital heavens — you can do it right in your browser!

Now, I know I’m barely scratching the surface of this topic here (and intentionally so, since I could easily spend the rest of my life researching this). Got your own favorite map sites? We’d love to hear about them!

^{[photo courtesy megpi -- note the digits on the crust!]}

Yes, today is 3.14 … which means it’s time for math-flavored absurdity and geeky carbohydrates!

Historical food blogger The Old Foodie has decided to downplay the numbers to put together five neat posts examining the history of “pi(e)” itself. (Though she does note that, all punning aside, pi and pie are inextricably linked by their geometrical associations.)

Her first installment rounds up a strange bestiary of extinct, exotic or long-forgotten pies, including eel pie (1861), bride pie (1660) and pies with live birds and frogs (1665).

And if all this gastronomic archaeology really lights your fire, I should point out that The Old Foodie’s forthcoming book, “The Pie, a Celebratory History,” will (hopefully) be available in late 2008.

^{[photo courtesy Spanish-Living.com]}

Meet L’Hemisfèric, one of the five attractions that make up the dazzling, ultramodern City of Arts and Sciences (known as Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Catalan, or Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias in Spanish) in Valencia, Spain. This “city,” completed in 2004 by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, includes an opera house, a garden, a science museum and an oceanographic park. The cherry on top of this sensory overload sundae is, of course, L’Hemisfèric: an entertainment complex boasting the trifecta of IMAX theater, laserium and planetarium. And if you’re into creepy nicknames, feel free to call it the “Eye of Knowledge.” (According to Spanish-Living.com, “The eye even blinks with the aid of a steel and glass shutter operated by hydraulic lifts.”)

^{[photos courtesy Hipocondriaca, . Bambo]}

As it turns out, right now would be an excellent time to make a trip to Valencia, as the whole town is gearing up for Las Fallas. Held on March 15-19, this annual celebration welcomes spring in the very best way: with FIRE and NOISE. During the festivities, celebrants construct enormous firecracker-stuffed puppets (called ninots), usually grotesque or satirical figures, which get paraded around the streets and placed in tableaus (fallas). Every day at 2pm, pyrotechnicians try to out-muscle each other in La Mascletá, a fireworks competition that focuses on sheer bone-rattling percussive power instead of sparkly lights. (They refer to the finale as the terremoto, meaning “earthquake.”) As you might expect, the whole thing culminates in an epic conflagration: Nit del Foc (”The Night of Fire”). According to Valencia City Guide:

All Fallas burn all over the city the following night (including the winner of the competition) in a tremendous spectacle of fire and joy. Valencia is at that moment like Nero’s Rome, a city in flames.

And indeed, so it would seem:

^{[photos courtesy vanguardista, Fabio Gava]}

For more dazzling Las Fallas snapshots from Flickr, go here. [Thanks to Neatorama for inspiring for this post!]

^{[image courtesy Joshua Klein]}

The secret’s out: Crows are terrifyingly smart. What kind of intelligence are we talking about here? Well, for starters, the corvid family has demonstrated theory of mind (potentially) and tool use — cognitive powers once thought to belong solely to primates. Even more remarkably, scientists have observed that crows are not only capable of mastering complex behaviors (such as, say, dropping nuts into crosswalks and waiting for the red light to go retrieve their conveniently cracked snacks), but they also can teach other crows. Noting this ability to transmit newly acquired skills, some experts are claiming that crows are not just clever — they have a culture. And now, researcher Joshua Klein is giving them an economy. Well, sort of.

Crows might be bright, but unfortunately, they’re also really good at annoying humans. Instead of viewing them as pests to be eradicated, Klein proposes that we should be giving them something useful to do, thus promoting a mutually beneficial relationship between man and bird.

Initially, he wanted to teach crows how to pick up garbage, but imparting the distinction between, say, a piece of junk wood and a shingle attached to a roof seemed overly complicated. (”Crows are very good at disassembling things,” Klein adds.) So he devised a study in which crows learn how to use a vending machine — tasty peanuts in exchange for shiny coins. “Ostensibly, if we could teach one crow to use the vending machine, we could teach them all,” Klein claims. Sounds like just a stupid pet trick? Klein counters: “There is $216 million in lost coins every year.”

To hear more from the man himself, check out a video of his thesis presentation here; for the ADD set, here’s the 1-minute version.

[Thanks to BoingBoing, for pointing out his TED 2008 talk last month.]

A sobering thought: With these already-brainy birds just getting smarter and smarter, looks like they should be kicking humans off the World Supreme Intellect pedestal in no time.