David Lidsky's Blog, page 4584

Coast Guard "Safety Zones" Keep Media Away From BP Disaster Sites

BP has shown no shame over the past few months in keeping reporters away from oil disaster sites with both local police and hired mercenaries. But up until now, the Coast Guard has made a pointed effort to separate itself from BP's policies--in late May, Lieutenant Commander Chris O'Neill, the Chief of Media Relations for the U.S. Coast Guard, told us that BP's threats to arrest crews venturing too close to oil-covered beaches aren't "reflective of policy for media access to the spill site...

Fast Company Cover Subject Soraya Darabi Becomes Cofounder of Foodspotting

"We need more young women starting companies," Soraya Darabi told me last month, and after sharing onstage and offstage conversations with her, Ray Kurzweil, Jesse Dylan, and Scott Belsky at our Most Creative People event, I left convinced that she was on the brink of her next step.

Now Darabi is ready to announce what that is. She's leaving drop.io and will be coming on as cofounder and head of business development and marketing of a startup called Foodspotting. It's Urbanspoon meets...

101 Things to Do With Outlawed Speedo LZR Wet Suits: Architecture

Designboom has got a nifty little post on a project by some platform 2 students from the Chelsea College of Art & Design. The s_pavilion is an external structure made from LZR Racers, those Speedo wet suits that gave Michael Phelps his edge at the Beijing Olympics, and Flavia Zocarri the bum's rush a month earlier.

There's something very HR Giger meets Battlestar Galactica here. The team that turned it from its sartorial roots into something more architectural come from different departments...

Greening Up the World's Cell Phone Towers

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Within five years, something like 5% of the world's cell phone tower base stations will be powered by one form or another of green energy. If that doesn't sound like much, the figure's just 0.11% today. And with cell phone use growing, the number will be significant.

A new report today from Pike Research (a "market intelligence" business that specializes in green tech) is the source of this data, and the raw figure is actually that by 2014 4.5% of the cell phone base stations dotting the...

Abengoa, Abound Solar Score $2 Billion From the U.S. Government

President Obama made a bold pronouncement in his first Oval Office speech last month: "Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America's innovation," he said. It's not too big of a project, because "the same thing was said about our ability to land a man safely on the moon." The government's clean energy push may not be man-on-the-moon scale yet, but this weekend's nearly $2 billion loan guarantee for solar power is a decent start.

The U.S. Department...

U.S. Air Force Takes On Dangerous Space Trash With Surveillance Satellites

There's a lot of space debris up there--and we're not talking moon dust: Smashed rocket fragments, dropped tools, flakes of paint even all orbit the planet at dangerous supersonic speeds. There's so much of this detritus, in fact, the USAF is planning a satellite to track it.

An automated Russian cargo ship nearly missed docking with the International Space Station last week, and if it had it would've turned into a seriously large addition to the cloud of space debris--albeit short-lived...

Hebron Means Business: Rebranding War-Torn Palestine

Hebron lies on the southern reaches of the West Bank, and thus on a
major faultline in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has to be one of
the last places on earth in which anyone would want to do business.
That's why a couple of designers have proposed what might be the most
quixotic rebrand in the world.

Psychonomics: Connecting Hands and Hearts

Tucker Viemester proposes a new term to address how designers can connect their minds with what they make.

Coast Guard "Safety Zones" Keep Media Away from BP Disaster Sites

BP has shown no shame over the past few months in keeping reporters away from oil disaster sites with both local police and hired mercenaries. But up until now, the Coast Guard has made a pointed effort to separate itself from BP's policies--in late May, Lieutenant Commander Chris O'Neill, the Chief of Media Relations for the U.S. Coast Guard, told us that BP's threats to arrest crews venturing too close to oil-covered beaches aren't "reflective of policy for media access to the spill site...

US Air Force Takes On Dangerous Space Trash with Surveillance Satellites

There's a lot of space debris up there--and we're not talking moon dust: Smashed rocket fragments, dropped tools, flakes of paint even all orbit the planet at dangerous supersonic speeds. There's so much of this detritus, in fact, the USAF is planning a satellite to track it.

An automated Russian cargo ship nearly missed docking with the International Space Station last week, and if it had it would've turned into a seriously large addition to the cloud of space debris--albeit short-lived...