Monthly Archives: August 2006

The Green Menace

iceThe BBC is reporting that the media is shilling ‘climate porn‘ and that this new kind of fetish is actually making people feel bad. People feeling bad for their actions? Whoa! Well, they feel so bad that they aren’t doing anything to change it: they feel powerless.

“The style of climate change discourse is that we maximise the problem and minimise the solution,” she said.

Apparently not enough people are reading ThingsAreGood.com, because readers here know that people canand are – making a difference. Here are some more examples of change in action:

Nutrition Facts & Calorie Counter

apple Ever wondered what you are putting in your mouth? I know I have and now I can find out using NutritionData. At the site you can find out what foods are best for your health or for weight loss.

It presents the information in very visual manner making it easy to understand how much fat something really has.

This is one place you can compare apples and oranges

Put on Your Muscle Suit

A new robot suit has been made that can increase the wearers power by up to 10 times their natural muscle strength. It’s called HAL or Hybrid Assisted Limb and is being perfected at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The suit is powered on command signals from the brain being transmitted to musles and in some cases works faster than the human brain does when reacting to such signals.

This technology can potentially help thousands of people including those with muscular disabilities, people with injuries and the elderly. Not to mention the possibilities for superheros. Want your own robot suit?? Put aside about $20,000 and wait a few years for it to come on to the World market. Before you know it people will be robot wrestling all over the place!

More Parks, Less Parking

Smog kills and that isn’t good, what is good is when people try to stop smog. I’m assuming that you can figure out what this post is about. In Toronto yesterday I joined an intrepid group of people who used a car to protest the lack of green space in the city.

A dead car was given new life as a petition at Pedestrian Sunday in Kensington Market in Toronto. Tons of people signed it to show their support for the simple idea of more parks and less parking. On Monday the car was towed away.

We met at 8am to push the car-turned-petition to cIty hall about 2.5 km away. We were quite a fun parade since we had drummers and a great attitude! At city hall a representative from the mayor’s office accepted our petition. Check out the pictures on flickr.