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Bucky Fuller once said that people never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching. One of the reasons it is so hard to act on climate change is that most of us are afraid of what we’ll lose, but uncertain at best about what we’ll gain.

Yet, I’m convinced that the gains far outweigh the losses here. I think the gains are so great, we’d want to proceed with many of the boldest climate plans even if climate wasn’t the biggest threat facing humanity. In fact bold action on climate may be what separates the world’s most successful cities from ones that fail; in short, we’re going to love our carbon-neutral, zero-waste, leafy green, car-free, unrecognizably ecological, economically booming urban futures… or envy someone else’s.

Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City’s Future by Alex Steffen — Kickstarter
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zoetica:

If you’ve been looking for a way to directly help Japan, you can – by making a contribution to Safecast. Safecast aims to donate personal geiger counters to the people in Japan, as well as to create an open data sensor network, with the information gathered with these devices accessible to anyone.

The folks at Safecast have been on-site in Japan, gathering data themselves – you can read about their setup and what they’ve found on their first recon mission, here.

Check out Safecast’s “About” video and donate if you can. There is just one week left to help, and this valuable project won’t get funded at all if their goal isn’t reached.

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My guess is that they removed it because a company out there declared they had the right because of trademark. This kills me. I’ve been using the handle “zephoria” online since around 1998 when I started signing messages with that handle while still at Brown. It’s actually a funny blurring of two things: zephyr and euphoria. Zephyr was the name of the instant messaging service at Brown and the name of the dog that I lived with in 1997, two things that I loved dearly. And talking about euphoria was a personal joke between me and a friend. I registered the domain name zephoria.org to create a private blog that would be separate from what was at danah.org. I chose .org because I liked to see myself as an organization, not a commercial entity. A few years ago, I learned that there is a technology consulting company called Zephoria.com. And apparently, they’ve become a social media consulting company. In recent years, I’ve found that they work hard to block me from using the handle of zephoria on various social media sites. Even before the midnite land grab on Facebook, they squatted the name zephoria, probably through some payment to the company. But this is a new low… Now they’re STEALING my accounts online!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!

danah boyd | apophenia » Tumblr disappeared me…
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