More cars, less bikes. how?
I’ve been thinking bike-positive thoughts of late, and thinking about ways to motivate people to walk/cycle/public transport their way around. It’s a challenge, particularly since my city (Canberra) is highly optimised for car transport. The roads are more direct, wider, better lit and better maintained than the bicycle paths. I can drive 13 kilometres in 17 minutes (average speed: 45.9 km/h) to get to work, whereas the same trip on cycle paths is 18 kilometres in 45 minutes (average speed: 24 km/h). So I need to spend an extra hour each day to commute back and forth by bike.
How can we start to change that equation? Conventionally, only economic incentives have been proposed to help reduce private car use – but people have repeatedly shown that economic incentives are ineffective. We should instead be thinking of using the currency which really matters: time.
Prioritise cycle routes over roads for cars: If the cycle paths were as direct as roads (or I could safely ride on the roads), I’d save almost half an hour (13km @ 24km/hr = 32.5 minutes each way).
Slow cars down: one way to make it safer for cars to coexist with bikes on the road would be to limit their speed, say, 40km/h, saving weight (smaller, less powerful engines), fuel, pollution, and noise. This would reduce the incentive to drive, help the environment, and make the roads safer for everyone. And before you think this is politically impossible, consider that we already have quite arbitrary speed limits already.
Worth thinking about?
On the permeability of the individual
We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as atomic, indivisible entities. I am me, and you are you, and that’s that. I’m coming to see that this is only approximate. When people live and work together, sometimes—when it’s good—a gestalt entity emerges. Who can say who’s responsible for this piece of work, this meal, this idea, this experience? And as we offload more of our sensory and cognitive apparatus to a distributed digital armamentum, we share more of that apparatus with others. How long till the world mind?
I want to move in right now
Cultured (and beautiful) meat
James King’s Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow proposes an aesthetic dimension to “victimless” meat-eating.
The mobile animal MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] unit scours the countryside looking for the most beautiful examples of cows, pigs, chickens and other livestock. Once located, the creature is scanned from head to toe, creating accurate cross-sectional images of its inner organs.
The most interesting and aesthetically pleasing examples of anatomy are used as templates to create moulds for the in-vitro meat (we wouldn’t choose to eat the same old boring parts that we eat today). The result is a satisfyingly complicated and authentic form of food.
If there is a victim in all this, it is ourselves? What does it mean, to eat meat grown in a vat? Is this better than conventional carnivorousness? Probably.
[via we make money not art]
Tofu: the Food of Tomorrow, Today
In the future, assuming we’re not grubbing around for rats in the radioactive remnants of post-industrial civilisation, we will all be vegetarians. Population pressure, environmental concerns and ethical awareness will eventually make eating meat unacceptable, and future-oriented souls would do well to prepare to wean themselves off the flesh of beasts. To this end, I, hitherto an habitual omnivore, have started to experiment with a range of ‘tarian products. Tonight I’ve been snacking on the Sanitarium Vegie Delights range, in this case the Chicken Style Deli Slices, grayish circular slices of compressed solidity which approximate a chicken taste no less closely than does the more traditional chicken product – which is to say, not very closely at all.
In their chickeny quasi-verisimilitude, however, I detect a lack of ambition. One of the benefits of virtual meat is that one needn’t restrict oneself, tastewise, to domesticated or societally approved species. In the same way as virtual sex will no doubt lead to esoteric erotic experimentation, virtual meat could transcend the quotidian: chicken, beef, ham and pork, you bore me. I ‘d rather try okapi, armadillo, or capybara. While one’s at it, why stop at extant species? The dodo was reportedly a fine bird. I would enjoy a trilobite as much as a modern crustacean. And the bird-hipped Tyrannosaurus would, I presume, taste like giant, giant chicken. So think of virtualisation as a freedom from the traditional limitations of good taste, in both senses, and an opportunity for new taste experiences.
The next step, of course, is Hufu™. What diverse delights might await a committed Hufu gourmand? A textured-protein meal based on a steatopygous African buttock? A lean, intense Inuit loin? A wagyu Midwestern couch potato?
In the moist, warm future
Bioengineered vines snake in and out of buildings, their huge phototropic flowers gathering sunlight outside, sending it via optic fibers to bulbs inside each room, glowing with channeled daytime.
Some of the vines store the light as sugars, reconverting back into light at night. Hungry inhabitants who would rather eat than see pierce the swollen sacs and feed on liquid light.
Somewhere in Tokyo
Somewhere in Tokyo is an underground workshop where Aibo robot dogs are recombined with power tools and consumer electronics. Aibos with nightvision and angle grinders stalk alleyways, gleaning parts from dumpsters and parked vehicles. Bluetooth-connected Aibo swarms pool their vision streams, reconstructing 3D spaces and exhibiting emergent behavior. At the heart of the hive, an Aibo queen, fibreoptically tethered to a server rack and a T1 line, downloads Google search data and reimagines the world: drones connect to her switched hub and suck on distilled knowledge.