Month: September 2016

The Best Way to Understand Earth’s Temperature Changes Through History

- Adam Clare

2016 has been the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, and every month this year has broken records for being so dang hot. It’s hard to put these records into context since they seem so abstract since it’s just what we’re used to. You might even be sick of hearing about how hot it’s getting and brush all those recent articles about the heat aside.

Despite all of this climate changed induced temperature escalation there are too many people who think that temperature changes like this are natural. They are, but not at the rate of change we’re seeing. Randal Moore of XKCD fame put together a fantastic infographic/cartoon/image of why we should care about climate change and how fast the temperature is increasing.

It’s worth scrolling through and sharing with anybody who thinks that we don’t need to act on climate change. Spreading knowledge in a fun way about a serious topic is a good thing.

Visualization of the history of Earth's climate temperature. XKCD is amazing!

Get Some Rest

- Adam Clare


You might think that productive people never stop working and don’t get any rest, that means you might be wrong. All of us need to take breaks to refresh ourselves and permit our bodies and minds to reset. In the modern working environment it’s easy to get pressured to always be busy, but you should try your hardest to not be. Take a breather and relax on a regular basis and you just might find that (almost ironically) you’ll be more productive.

Why does modern work culture undervalue rest and encourage nonstop busyness?
It seems self-evident that more work equals more output. This is true of machines, so why shouldn’t it be true of us? Well it’s not. We have adopted industrial-age attitudes, and they don’t really work for us. There is also a long-standing assumption that not working hard is morally suspect.

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Thanks to Delaney!

An Ad Campaign That Sells More Than a Product

- Adam Clare

It can be hard navigating the world as a person with a disability, be it mental or physical, and it can be even harder to make friends. Unfortunately there is a lot of social stigma around people who look different, fortunately in the UK a company launched an ad campaign to sell chocolate and social acceptance. The ads are in support for the Paralympics which are currently underway in Brazil.

All three spots are based on real-life stories from disabled people. Another spot concerns a woman in a wheelchair who ran over another guest’s foot at a wedding. In the third, a disabled woman laughs with a friend about an embarrassing moment with her new boyfriend.

Cat Collins, strategy partner at AMV BBDO, explained in a statement: “Rather than creating distance by putting disabled people on a pedestal, we believed we could achieve more by showing disabled people simply as … people. For Maltesers, that meant seeking out the hilarious stories from their lives that they look on the light side of, just as the characters in the rest of our campaign do. It meant using a powerful weapon to break down discomfort, division and prejudice — a good laugh.”

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A Playground Where Kids Play With Tools

- Adam Clare

NYC playgroundKids need places to play, and those playgrounds need to encourage community, exploration, and more. Designing a good playground can be harder than it sounds, it’s not as easy as putting a slide in a park and hoping that’s enough. A good playground has risk and challenges the players.

In New York City there is a new spot for kids called play:groundNYC that is unlike other modern parks. This park has tools so kids can try to build things and the grounds are designed to encourage kids to try and experiment with the tools and obstacles present on the site. It’s like an adventure park!

The adventure or “wild” playground movement has risen in response to this overprotectiveness. Its advocates argue that less adult supervision may be more developmentally rewarding for children. There are hundreds of adventure playgrounds in the world, most of them in Western Europe. (The concept was invented in Denmark in the 1930s.) There are about a half-dozen in the United States, with twice as many in the pipeline; numbers are imprecise because the definition of what exactly qualifies as an adventure playground varies. One that undoubtedly does qualify is Adventure Playground in Berkeley, California, a 37-year-old local landmark.

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Trams Win For Moving People

- Adam Clare

Traffic is a problem in every city, and more and more people are concerned with the most efficient way of getting people from A to B. It turns out we already know the answer: mass transit. The issue in traffic planing is slowly changing from how much space should cars get to how much space should the car give up. Bicycling and mass transit are the most efficient way to move people through cities and now urban planners are thinking of how to divide up space that the car once dominated for those modes of transportation.

Cars, as you’d expect, came dead last, taking over four minutes to move just 200 people over the line. In the city, the superior acceleration and speed of a car give no advantage. Busses and trams come first—no surprise, they’re called “mass” transit for a reason. But bikes come in far behind pedestrians, taking two minutes to get 200 people over a line, compared to just 38 seconds for walking. Obviously, over longer distances, things change a lot, but it’s interesting nonetheless, as much city travel is stop-start.

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