The birth of four Cheetah cubs on 24 July at Zoo Basel demonstrates the importance of inter-zoo cooperation and keeper knowledge to help an endangered species reproduce — via ZooBorns
Rowan Machine, a resident of Albury.
Originally aired on ABC TV: 16/10/2014 — via Youtube
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour working week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’s promised utopia — still being eagerly awaited in the 1960s — never materialise? The standard line is he didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the 1920s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones or fancy sneakers.
Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture. Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers
tripled, growing from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment
. In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the service
sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries such as financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors such as corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza-delivery drivers) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call bullshit jobs
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
When someone comes into my office, I want that person to adopt an attitude most conducive to a productive working relationship. And now I know what is the perfect design for that purpose: the Scorpion Chair (translation) by Vyacheslav Pakhomov. It costs 230,000 rubles, which is about US$5,749 — via Neatorama
A little tinkering from me that shows what you can do with 3D printers today. Most parts of this paper airplane machine gun had printed by fabberhouse.de (the rest of them are to buy via Internet or hardware store). By the way, I use a cordless screwdriver from China for driving — via Youtube
— via Beatrice the Biologist
3-week-old lion cubs are feisty but cute during a routine weight check at the Oregon Zoo — via Youtube
A simple pattern for scale mail gloves, worked entirely in knit stitches and slightly modified knit stitches (photo tutorial for the technique included) to knit the scales right into the fabric of the gloves — via Ravelry
Recently, a keeper from Cotswold Wildlife Park, in the UK, became foster parent to an abandoned Clouded Leopard Cub. The young female cub was found, at one-day-old, shivering and close to death. Jamie Craig, a zookeeper at Cotswold Wildlife Park, decided to care for the orphan at his home. With the help of his young children, Mr Craig diligently tended to the cub, named Nimbus — via ZooBorns
If you think maps are a boring relic of a bygone age since the arrival of GPS, you obviously haven’t discovered the work of Herb Lester Associates. Which means you probably need to invest in the company’s latest work, The Raymond Chandler Map Of Los Angeles.
It’s another gem of a design, this time by Paul Rogers, with words by Kim Cooper. As you might have guessed it is a guide to Chandler’s LA, as well as the world of his alter-ego, private detective Philip Marlowe. So a mix of locations from the books, the films and Chandler’s personal life.
All of that on an A2 (folded to A6) map, which is litho-printed in England on 100 per cent recycled paper. If you want one, it’s new on, retailing for just £4 — via Retro To Go
We love Tom Baker. And we needed a new runner carpet for our hallway. Enter this easy DIY Doctor Who rug (for under $30). Our first project in our new house. This is a plain ol’ cheap beige runner carpet from Home Depot, painted to look like Tom Baker’s iconic Doctor Who scarf — via Our Nerd Home
There’s so much instant gratification on the internet it can feel like torture having to wait for a physical item to travel to my house. Can’t Amazon.com have an orbital warehouse that shoots objects down to your place? That sounds totally feasible with no possible downsides — via Minimumble
The publishing world may finally be facing its rootkit scandal
. Two independent reports claim that Adobe’s e-book software, Digital Editions
, logs every document readers add to their local library
, tracks what happens with those files, and then sends those logs back to the mother-ship, over the Internet, in the clear. In other words, Adobe is not only tracking your reading habits, it’s making it really, really easy for others to do so as well.
And it’s all being done in the name of copyright enforcement. After all, the great promise
of Digital Editions is that it can help publishers “securely distribute” and manage access to books. Libraries, for example, encourage their patrons to use the software, because it helps them comply with the restrictions publishers impose on electronic lending.
How big is the problem? Not completely clear, but it could be pretty big. First, it appears Adobe is tracking more than many readers may realize, including information about self-published and purchased books. If the independent reports are correct, Adobe may be scanning your entire electronic library. Borrowing a copy of Moby Dick from your public library shouldn’t be a license to scan your cookbook collection.
Adobe claims that these reports are not quite accurate. According to Adobe, the software only collects information about the book you are currently reading, not your entire library. It also collects information about where you are reading that book, how long you’ve been reading it, and how much you’ve read. Still disturbing, if you ask us.
Second, sending this information in plain text undermines decades of efforts by libraries and bookstores to protect the privacy of their patrons and customers. (Adobe does not deny transmitting the information unencrypted.) Indeed, in 2011 EFF and a coalition of companies and public interest groups helped pass the Reader Privacy Act, which requires the government and civil litigants to demonstrate a compelling interest in obtaining reader records and show that the information contained in those records cannot be obtained by less intrusive means. But if readers are using Adobe’s software, it’s all too easy for folks to bypass those restrictions.
Third and most depressing: this flaw may have been unintentional, but we probably should have seen it coming. As our friend Cory Doctorow has been explaining for years, DRM for books is dangerous for readers, authors and publishers alike. Whether or not Adobe actually intended to create this particular vulnerability, if your computer is collecting information about you, and then transmitting it in ways you can’t control, chances are you’ve got a security problem — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This cross stitch pattern is the Babel Fish entry from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, inspired by Rod Lord’s animations for the 1981 BBC television adaptation — via Etsy
Finland isn’t exactly known for hot weather. But as the climate changes and summer heat waves become more common in northern Europe, don’t expect to see more air conditioners in Helsinki: The city is pioneering a huge cooling system that uses cold water from nearby lakes and the sea instead of electricity.
Hundreds of feet underneath an ordinary-looking park in downtown Helsinki, a local energy company built a huge reservoir filled with nearly 9 million gallons of lake water. When the system is fully operational next summer, the water will be pumped to local buildings in the area to keep them cool. At night, the water will flow back underground, where waste energy will be used to cool it down again.
The tank is the latest piece of the city’s quickly growing cooling network, which already uses seawater to keep buildings comfortable. 300 buildings — mostly offices and commercial spaces — are connected to the network now, and as summers get hotter, the city plans to keep expanding the system — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rica, the Southern Three-Banded Armadillo was only the size of a golf ball when she was born 24 August at Edinburgh Zoo, but she is progressing and developing, as she should, and now weighs in at 450g — via ZooBorns
The Prism coffee table, designed by Maurie Novak of MN Design in Melbourne, Australia, is an absolute stunner. The stainless steel frame surrounds strands of brightly coloured, loosely woven elastic, perfectly visible through the clear glass top. Like a true prism, one’s vantage point determines each unique, beautiful view — via Neatorama
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