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Road Sage project drawings – Madeline Zen

I did a project a while back – an Interactive Project for an Urban Art Show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and it won the digital award.  It was a cute project that uses Flash – sorry iPad/iPhone losers (unfortunately your leader was a lying greedy ass – but he did make a nice product).

http://danzen.com/sage

The project imagines a time when cars and vans would disappear around homes and be replaced with garden paths.  The vehicles would be parked around the outside of the survey and carts would be used between homes – sort of like in the Village in the Prisoner show from the sixties.

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In this mash of Zen Mix mixes, we see examples of Car Curling an environmentally friendly driving game where you try not to use your brakes. So as you approach a group of stopped cars, you stop accelerating and glide towards them seeing if you can glide to a stop just behind them.

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Flash vs Sudoku

We have heard that puzzles are good to keep the brain healthy but it is too bad that all that brain power is producing nothing.

The thought of millions of people spending countless brain hours playing Sudoku, solitaire, crosswords, etc. makes me want to weep. Perhaps we are relaxing… but perhaps we just did not think about alternatives.

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1980’s

Personal Computers | Bank Machines | Networks | MiniVans | CD ROM | e-mail | KB

1990’s

Internet | Online Shopping | Search Engines | Portals | Pictures | SUV | DVD | Webmail | MB

2000’s

Environment | Social Networking | Mobile | Broadband | Hybrid Cars | video | Thumb Drive | Messenger | GB

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A reminder to consider the environment when making vehicle choices. Of course public transit, bicycles, etc. also work ;-). http://banvan.blogspot.com

-08-

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We should factor in our time with respect to energy calculations.  For instance: our time should be a factor when we are riding a bike to work rather than driving.  Another example is if we turn off our computer and then later have to wait two minutes to turn it on.  We might even examine our past-times like what is it costing to do that Sudoko! (Yikes… not to put a damper on our relax time!)

The proposition is that we require energy to live and that we waste this energy by wasting our time.  So we need an amount that we can attribute to our personal energy.  We call this:

PEV = Personal Energy Value

It is comprised of three parts:

• Sustenance Energy (Electricity, Gas, Food)

• Environmental Solution Energy (Originate, Promote, Influence)

• Cultural Worth Energy (Creation vs Consumption)

Before going into details of PEV – let us look at turning off and on the computer as an example.  It might be that we can do something else while we wait for the computer to come on but I suspect that the majority of us just sit there in a daze or worse yet, grumble that we are having to wait!

EXAMPLE CALCULATION

Imagine that it takes a minute to start the computer and that the computer uses 50W (Watts) in sleep mode.  I am on my computer about 6 hours a day and might go to and from my computer 10 times.

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A friend of mine and I wanted to sit down and figure out what age we are in. Has the “Information Age” passed? Has the “Space Age” been put on hold?

So just today, it came to me – this is or should be the Environmental Age. I was all excited and asked a few friends and they had not specifically heard the phrase. I came home and found about 11,000 entries in Google with the quotes on (how I determine originality).

• Information Age: 9 million Google results
• Space Age: 3 million
• Atomic Age: 360,000 (Surprisingly small)
• Environmental Age: 11,000

This also finds the words with punctuation between which is not usually the same. But the phrase Environmental Age has definitely been used for instance in the 1989 book, “The New Environmental Age”. This also implies that there was an old environmental age – the Hippie movement probably. So while I did independently come up with this illuminating proposal, I guess I did not invent it.

Having said that, I do not get the sense that people in general have realized that this is or should be the Environmental Age. This post is to encourage and recommend that we officially all agree that this is the Environmental Age.

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Welcome to another episode of Car Vlog… I’ve got a bunch of these backvlogged so I thought I better get posting. Here is a mash dealing with synchronized lights.

I really pay attention to driving. I almost became a civil engineer because I like the concept of city planning. Ideally without cars but if we have them we may as well not make them sit around idling.

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This title can be interpreted as a good thing that the girls stopped the cars – what activists! But unfortunately, the cars were still idling.

I am not for driving and would encourage people to walk, skateboard, skate, ride or take public transit. But since currently people do drive we should try and let them do so as efficiently as possible. Now it may be that in doing so, we encourage driving. Well there are ways to discourage driving without actually adding more harm to the environment – taxing drivers or gas is one way to discourage driving and if the money is used towards environmental solutions, then even better!

That aside… one way to let people drive efficiently is synchronized lights. Hamilton has synchronized lights which greatly reduces idling. Once again, perhaps the ease of driving through Hamilton encourages drivers to do so and so more people drive. But as mentioned, there are other ways to discourage driving. For the people that must drive, synchronized lights help – please see the synchronized lights post.

They have just put in a new light at a new supermarket and have added a cross button. There is another down the way at the Tim Hortons. Now, on occasion, a pedestrian presses the button to cross the road rather than wait for the light to change naturally. So on average, they get to cross a minute earlier.

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