SuperForest

An amazing thing just happened.

I was sitting at home, watching some TV on the internet, when all of a sudden I got a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and I knew, right then and there, that Obama was going to be president.

And then I checked boingboing:

It’s all over the web. Sarah Palin believes that men and dinosaurs once coexisted.

Big thanks to Xeni over at bb for the heads up.

Obama/Biden ‘08.

Love to All,

Jackson & Team SuperForest

This just came in from the incandescent, unstoppable SuperForester Cass, (she of the mighty Gravel and Gold blog!) Absorb!

“Hiya Jack!

SuperForest is looking super great! I love your alphabet for peace drawings.
Also, I for one would buy the T-shirt for sure. And I would really, really buy the hoodie.

We had fantastic travels and it was good to take a break from it all, but so good to come home.
And now that we’re home, we can get down to the vital business of eating lots of sushi. It seems that no matter where I travel–even to France, the very heart of gourmand rapture–all I crave, seek, downright require is Japanese food. Which got me to thinking….Surely your devoted SuperForesters would agree that nothing covers the Japanese/lunchtime sustainability bases like a hearty bento box. So then, a this-and-that celebration of the ultimate this-and-that apparatus, the mighty bento box:

For a truly tiny bit of this-and-that on the go, it’s wise to pack an itty-bitty snack in your essential bento box ring, from the excellent CRAFT blog.

For an awesome kick in the the creativity pants, be inspired by the daily outpouring of one mother’s love, creativity, and bento artistry to be found on e-bento. Edible froggies, and octopi, and samurai, Oh my!

To join the whole universe of daily bento blogging, check in with one of the many suggested at cookingcute.com!

If it’s the bento accoutrements, (say a hand carved and lacquered Japanese elm bento box,) rather than the contents therein that really get you a-drooling, justbento.com has what you’re after.

Might there be something for SuperForest here?

Hope you are very well indeed.
Love!
Cass!”

-Cass,

Indeed there is! Thank you so much for the post!
Love,

Jackson

I just checked the spam folder in the SuperForest email account, and discovered a little “Spam Treasure!”

Under the subject heading: “That’s more meat for me.” someone has sent an email of the most insane, pseudo-Age of Innocence, literary hogwash I’ve yet encountered.

That was my first reaction anyway. Upon really reading it, I was pleasantly surprised to find a few nuggets of “Spam Gold.” The zen-like, near haiku phrases, obviously cobbled together by some text program, began to grow on me.

Like this:

That’s beautiful!

Check out this doozy:

And this one:

“When he gave his completely easy. Three thousand pounds!”

I must say, few times have I ever cherished a spam more, and few times have I ever read with such interest so much gibberish.

Thank you “E-Commerce in Finance, Vogt Kaitlin” “

I may not want to buy your generic Cialis, but I love your work.

Good Afternoon!

I was just marveling at the trailer for a new game coming out called Little Big Planet:

As you can see, a huge part of the game play is in designing the levels that you inhabit. This is especially cool because the processing power of the Playstation has gotten so fast that you can create and handle items with stunning real world physics behind their every move.

Create a log and push it over and it will behave like a log pushed over. Differently than, say, a board, or a log with a ball on top, or a sheet of glass.

So a game where you create and modify “real-acting” objects.

Couple that with CAD, the program that designers and engineers use to create 3D renderings.

So now you’re playing a game where you create pieces and assemble them into more complex machines, gadgets, buildings, clothing, armor, whatever you like.

I play this cute little game for a while and I assemble a new kind of skateboard for myself.

Wow, a digital rendering of a skateboard! Big whoop, right?

Imagine that after assembling this 3D model, I hit “print.”

Imagine that (either in my house or in a business nearby) my rapid prototyping printer hums to life and immediately begins printing a physical model of my skateboard, which I am then free to clean up, attach wheels to, and ride around my neighborhood, (with proper safety gear on of course.)

All I was doing was playing a game, and I inadvertently created a physical object.

That is a mind-boggling thing to be able to do, and yet you could do it this very day.

Imagine how easy it will be to train entire generations in the art of digital design and assembly?!

After all, they’d only be playing games!

It gets even better…

Imagine a complex, multi-player game where your team’s mission was to finish puzzle pieces and slide them into a communal digital space, where more players would kludge them together to form larger, more complex objects.

You could build anything.

Need an entirely new type of helicopter? Program the game to treat the object the teams are creating as if it were in a wind tunnel. This would allow real-time flight testing of our helicopter as it is assembled.

Now, do the same for a nuclear reactor. Make the game about efficiently using heat energy. Most efficient design wins.

This is about the inevitable crowd-sourcing of design and invention. By playing simple games, we can all be aeronautical engineers, nuclear reactor designers, fashion magnates.

Right now we have data and call centers in India, working for pennies on the dollar answering phones and dealing with reservations. Imagine the untapped potential of those petabytes of human processing power. Right now that power is being squandered, but give every one of those people a copy of the Make Anything Game and let them go to work collectively on every design and engineering hurdle known to man.

Massive parallel crowd-sourced design.

Now, imagine China getting really into this.
They make everything as it is, imagine if they designed it all as well.

What’s really noodle-baking is that this brave new tech will be quaint in 15 years. Quaint! Like a slow ride on a gentle horse.

What will the world be like when everyone is playing the Make Anything Game?

You want to succeed in the brave new world? Play lots of games and get used to working with others.

Amazing.

It’s a fact that only 5.5% of plastic bottles used in Great Britain are recycled. This is a pity since the plastics can be reused. Reused can be in a consumer way, like taking the bottle in, melting it and making a new bottle out of it. But reused can also be to use it in for instance an art project.

And this last thing was done in an excellent way by British design corporation LulaDot. This is the CAPtivate Lamp.

SuperForesters!

SuperForester Jon has just written in with a thrilling play-by-play of the recent Clinton Global Initiative Citizen Awards Dinner.

Take it away, Jon!

“Jackson,

I wanted to write you right away after coming home from the Clinton Global Citizen Awards tonight. I was so totally inspired and excited by what they presented as part of the Clinton Global Initiative.

First off, they honored Peter and Jennifer Buffett for commitment to leadership in philanthropy. They are co-founders of the NoVo Foundation. Peter is Warren Buffett’s son, and he described his father’s strategy of buying undervalued investments and watching them skyrocket when the world realized their value. He looks at his job as much the same – investing in something undervalued – girls – and watching the world change because of it. A huge return on investment. They’ve pledged millions to rebuild the education systems and address violence against women in post-conflict West Afirca, and they’ve joined a funding collaborative called “the girl effect” (not sure if related to girleffect.org) to promote the empowerment of adolescent girls as a way to end the cycle of poverty.

They honored Sheri Liao (for commitment to leadership in civil society), who is a huge environmental activist in China. After the recent earthquakes, she and her NGO Global Village of Beijing were able to work with the government to make new housing sustainable. That’s right – they’re working WITH the Chinese government, making a difference in partnership with what others might see as intractable.

They honored Julio Frenk (commitment to leadership in public service), who, as minister of health for Mexico, expanded health care to 50 million uninsured Mexicans.

And for commitment to leadership in the corporate sector, they honored Neville Isdell, the Chairman of the Coca Cola Company, for his massive initiatives worldwide.

All amazing examples of people choosing to make a difference and doing so.

The cool thing about CGI is that they require commitments, and the corporations and public figures (including many heads of state) that attend must make and keep their commitments in order to participate in CGI. CGI monitors them regularly too.

Check this out:

“Since 2005, CGI members have made nearly 1,000 commitments valued at upwards of $30 billion to impact more than 200 million lives in over 150 countries.”

“After attending thousands of meetings during his career in which urgent issues were discussed but no action was taken to solve them, President Clinton saw a need to establish a new kind of meeting with an emphasis on results.”

Their program is entirely based on real commitments:

It is entirely up to each CGI member to determine what they would like to do, and the commitment can be of a financial or non-financial nature. To date, CGI members have developed nearly 1,000 Commitments to Action that vary across sectors, geographical areas, and types of activities.

Members can develop their commitments throughout their membership year. CGI supports the development of commitments by facilitating dialogue across sectors, providing opportunities to identify commitment partners, recognizing and showcasing the actions taken by members, and communicating results. However, CGI neither gives nor receives funds associated with member commitments and does not engage in their implementation.
Commitments must meet the following criteria:

* New
CGI members address a wide array of challenges. Some commitments involve new approaches, while others draw on promising solutions that can be scaled up or replicated. CGI only asks that members add to their current efforts.

* Specific
Commitments should articulate a desired outcome and approach to tackling a specific problem, have clear and feasible objectives within a defined period of time, and incorporate an effective approach to implementation.

* Measurable
CGI commitments yield measurable results. Over the course of each commitment, CGI asks members to provide regular progress reports. By asking members to track and report the impact of their commitments, CGI can provide diverse audiences with useful information that will help inspire further action on global issues.

It’s incredibly inspiring stuff and it’s making a real, tangible, measurable difference worldwide.

The other thing about this event that totally rocked my world were the awards themselves. Goncalo Mabunda from Mozambique uses weapons and turns them into art. Seriously. The award itself is a beautiful sculpture made from bullet casings.

More of his work can be seen here:

Goncalo Mabunda 1
Goncalo Mabunda 2
Goncalo Mabunda 3

Swords into ploughshares.

GO BILL!”

All my best,

Jon

Good Morning All,

I was just reading up on wired.com and came across this marvelously prescient line:

“Of course, once the world is saved from global warming, we will need to be entertained…”

-Ryan Singel

I think that since “saving” the world from global warming is well within our reach, we can all begin to look forward to this Era of Entertainment.

Yayyy!

-Jackson

Dr. John Taylor has invented an entirely new species of clock, one with no hands at all, and a scary “grasshopper” that rides atop it!

“Known as the Corpus Clock, the machine has been invented by and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college’s new library building.

Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude.”

Here’s the wild beastie in action!

In most cities, where you see power lines you’ll undoubtedly see a pair of sneakers chucked over them, hanging in the breeze.

DesignBand has very cleverly upended this meme with their spicy idea: Bird Turf!

“an urban birdhouse inspired by the uniquely American act of throwing shoes over powerlines… Bird Turf proudly reclaims city space for natural habitat by manipulating a distinctly cultural typology.”

In other words, if you’ve gotta chuck something over a power line, donate those old Jordans to Goodwill and chuck these instead!

Nicey nice nice.

A chirpy chirpy “thank you!” to the good people at DesignBand.