Emily Davidow

One minute I’m checking messages in Facebook, the next I’m frolicking through olive orchards in Sardinia with John Borthwick wearing an astronaut suit. Oh what a world we live in…
More compelling than Scrabulous, Unype is a Facebook social network application that lets people see, chat and Skype with each other in Google Earth. Unype [...]

Questioning Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey in SEED
To understand consciousness and its evolution, we need to ask the right questions.
(tags: consciousness mind qualia)

BIL conference wiki
Sounds like an excellent adventure! BIL is the self-organizing unconference across the street from the TED conference, overlapping by a day.
(tags: unconference conference BIL TED)

The Citizenship Exchange Project
CEP proposes a resolution to highly bureaucratized and political systems of immigration. The Peer-to-Peer immigration network makes alienating systems of human migration personal, and expands P2P [...]

The surreal romance of aristocratic expat Lucy and castaway Jack enchanted me as I strolled through Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens in early January, following their love story on a handheld HP GPS device preloaded with Anita Fontaine’s spooky sweet Ghost Garden, part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. As I traveled through the gardens, certain locations [...]

From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs – legally – Times Online
Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.
(tags: music mp3 p2p qtrax drm free filesharing)

Update: apparently not…

Funky Forest, interactive ecosystem installation by Emily Gobeille and Theodore Watson
Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the typ
(tags: [...]

Tuna Troubles
Though some mercury in the atmosphere occurs naturally, roughly two-thirds is produced by industrial sources — especially coal-burning power plants. It settles into the water in a form called methylmercury, is absorbed by bacteria and then makes its way up to the very top of the food chain — to humans. It is a [...]

High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
(tags: fish tuna mercury food safety health)

Iraq: The [...]

Pixel cookies! – a photoset on Flickr
I <3 pixel cookies! What a great use of a playdough extractor.
(tags: food cooking howto geek recipe pixel cookies)

Cory Doctorow: why personal data is like nuclear waste | Technology | guardian.co.uk
We should treat personal electronic data with the same care and respect as weapons-grade plutonium – it is dangerous, [...]

uweek.org | Bionic eyes: Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision
Oh yeah, my bionic lenses have arrived!
(tags: science technology Bionic display tech contactlenses)

Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical assemblies (LOC) from the Library of Congress Flickr Commons

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?
Are we not both “a momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space and a person with a real past born through billions of years of [...]

Big Think – We Are What You Think
New launch aims to be YouTube for ideas. Compared in several places to Fora.tv but seems more like Dropping Knowledge at first exploration (with a healthy dose of TED & Poptech sites). All of which are great. Looking forward to seeing it grow.
(tags: video ideas community interviews experts)

The [...]

The World Bank projects, news, and more… on google maps
Fascinating mashup of Google Maps with World Bank data gives a visual entry point to browse their projects, news, statistics and public information center by country.
(tags: maps mashup worldbank development visualization)

Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful (our viral origins)
Base for nucleic base, he said, [...]