- 🇫🇮 How a card game can help city residents suggest new ideas. “Participatory budgeting weaves through all of that. Helsinki has set aside €4.4 million for residents to use as they wish. While that’s just a fraction of the city’s €4 billion budget, it’s enough to fund dozens of small but locally impactful projects like new playgrounds or bus shelters. It also represents an entirely new way to get residents engaged and thinking about how they can improve their city.”
- We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normal. “The only way I can possibly conceive of humans living in a New Cretaceous age is as a rump of scientists and technologists working in artificial, protected shelters, rather like the denizens of the novelist Italo Calvino’s invisible city of Baucis, in which people live up on stilts above the clouds ‘contemplating with fascination their own absence’.”
- 🏙 Shahrukh Wani شاہ رخ on Twitter “I have found the most awesome thing ever - the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500”. Then tomhannen at the FT made a version with running commentary for more context.
- ☀️🌍 Mercury, Not Venus, Is the Closest Planet to Earth. “Indeed, they found that Mercury was the planet closest to the Earth for the most time, on average—and to every other Solar System planet.”
- 🇨🇳🚎 Forget Tesla, It’s China’s E-Buses That Are Denting Oil Demand. “By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China… That’s more than three times the displacement by all the world’s passenger electric vehicles.”
- 🧤📹 Gloves that Transliterate Sign Language into Text and Speech.
- 🍎 California’s Right to Repair Bill, killed by Big Ag and Apple, has been reintroduced
- 〜The Genderless Digital Voice the World Needs Right Now
Note — Mar 24, 2019