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Google.org

Has anyone else seen or heard much about google.org? It sounds pretty amazing.

Google.org includes the work of the Google Foundation, some of Google's own projects using Google talent, technology and other resources, as well as partnerships and contributions to for-profit and non-profit entities. While we continue to define the goals, priorities and approach for Google.org, we will focus on several areas including global poverty, energy and the environment.

Say founders Sergey Brin & Larry Page:

We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems.

Something to keep our eyes on.

Coming this March

Fans of the Meatrix will be pleased to learn that the sequel will be released this March. Check out the sneak preview.

And for those of you who're interested in the musical preferences and the like of Moopheus, visit his MySpace page. (And for those of you into the MySpace thang, add Grist to your friends list!)

How much can weary bleeding-hearts give?

This analysis of a Red Cross ad brings up some interesting points about altruism, competition, and people's increasingly limited time and focus.

That's all.

Kotkin: Still mildly annoying

Since most of you aren't subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, you won't have the pleasure of reading Joel Kotkin saying the same things he always says, again.

For the record, he's still pretending that the American preference for suburbs arises ex nihilo, reflecting only the original and uninfluenced desires of American families and not, say, half a century of infrastructure decisions, land-use policies, energy subsidies, anemic public transportation, corporate influence, and cheap foreign labor.

He's also still pretending that the choice is between unchecked suburban sprawl and "underused train systems, downtown condominiums, hotels, convention centers, sports stadia and 'star-chitect'-designed art museums, often at the expense of smaller business, single-family neighborhoods and local shopping areas." Way to use your imagination, Joel!

Beaver Theodosakis, founder of prAna, answers questionsBeaver Theodosakis, founder of prAna, answers

Beaver Theodosakis. What work do you do? I’m founder and president of prAna. What does your business do? prAna’s core business is men’s and women’s lifestyle apparel and accessories. The […]

We Know Kids Can Be Pests, But This Is Ridiculous

Home insecticides may double risk for acute childhood leukemia French medical researchers have discovered yet another reason to practice nontoxic pest control around the home: It may reduce your kids’ […]

Dude, Where’s My Crop?

USDA failing to keep track of gene-mod crop experiments The U.S. Department of Agriculture has failed to adequately monitor thousands of acres of experimental biotechnology crops, according to, um, itself. […]

Village riot highlights stress between development and rural land in China.

Like all rapidly developing nations, China is ripping into its countryside to develop industry and Western-style infrastructure (e.g., superhighways).

Over the weekend, cops cracked heads in a village in south China, not far from Hong Kong. Here's how the NY Times article on the story opened:

A week of protests by villagers in China's southern industrial heartland exploded into violence over the weekend with thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and using electric batons to put down the rally, residents of the village said today.

The lead emphasizes that the riot took place in an "industrial heartland." A few paragraphs down, though, we get the real story: rural villagers upset over unchecked development.

[T]he latest confrontation between villagers and a large-scale deployment of security forces has occurred in a rural enclave encircled by some of China's biggest and fastest growing industrial cities. Indeed, demonstrating residents of Panlong village said their anger had been sparked by a government land acquisition program they had been led to believe in 2003 was part of a construction project to build a superhighway connecting the nearby city of Zhuhai with Beijing. Later, the villagers learned the land was being re-sold to developers to set up special chemical and garment industrial zones in the area.

The article doesn't say, and I'd like to know, if Panlong is a farming village. I wish the villagers luck in stopping the government from turning their area into yet another production point for the global consumer and industrial markets.

A UK study links dietary change over the past 50 years with rising menl-illness rates.

I've written a lot about the environmental depredations built into our industrial food system.

Over in Britain, researchers are making a link between the ubiquity of processed food and rising rates of mental illness, BBC reports.

Here's the BBC:

The report said people were eating 34% less vegetables and two-thirds less fish - the main source of omega-3 fatty acids - than they were 50 years ago. Such changes, the study said, could be linked to depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Alzheimer's disease.

Sounds perfectly plausible to me. Then again, maybe my ability to reason has been compromised by all the Big Macs I ingested as a youngster.

Dolphins on a flippery slope

This is a photo of an eight-year-old female Homo sapiens hugging a five-year-old female Tursiops truncatus. According to my daughter (a dolphin enthusiast), killer whales are just big dolphins with really sharp teeth, and there are thirty-something species of oceanic dolphins and five river dolphin species (found in five different rivers).

Not too many years ago biologists were whining that this or that species was going to be extinct in the next forty or fifty years. The time frame has now shrunk to about ten years for many of these same species (gorillas, river dolphins, you name it).