Macro:

• Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth - so there's hope yet for polluting our atmosphere even more. Gosh, that'd be quite a mission.
• Laws of gravity wrong...? Probably not - but as I've written about elsewhere, scientists are a conservative bunch and spend years checking and re-checking their findings. So time will tell...
• Earthrise - a crap version of a hi-def film from a satellite circumnavigating the moon. Look! It's us, that little blue dot!
• Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? Reincarnation through probability. Hmm. Though they fail to mention that, if true, every other possible permutation of you and your friends and your mother's breasts attached to the side of your head is also possible. Gosh, paging Doctor Freud...
• Planets and stars in scale - really, really macro.

Micro:

• Nature - awesome
• Cellular memory hints at the origins of intelligence : Nature News - download the PDF here.

...memory stays in the slime mould for hours, even when the shocks themselves stop. A single renewed shock after a 'silent' period will leave the mould expecting another to follow in the rhythm it learned previously.

• Radio tags track wasp behaviour: 422 wasps RFID tagged. They were probably aiming for 500 but got bored. Zigmunt Bauman went on about these wasps at great length in a talk I went to: their surprise wasp behaviour of going into other nests said something to him about migration. I think this says more about the use of natural metaphors than anything else.

Foodie, both via the Stuffed and Starved blog:

• Look who owns lots of organic brands in the US.
• From the start of How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Genius. Some quantitative geographers are working hard at perfecting the tools for this kind of thing.

Economicky:

Mankiw and Rodrik's different takes on The Age of Milton Friedman, a paper by Andrei Shleifer. Unsurprisingly, I'm with Rodrik on this. Friedman is responsible for my favourite economic positivist idea: the stupid assumptions in your theory don't matter as long as it predicts stuff. But as Dani says, Shleifer can predict whatever he wants. Chinese success? Because of free-market reforms. Latin America's failings? Too much state control. If it had been the other way round, exactly the opposite evidence could have been presented from each country. It explains nothing. And its what the World Bank has claimed many a time when its policies have gone to shit.

There's an answer to be found by someone, though, and probably a very solid empirical one. Measures might have to be unusual though, and the problem's compounded by the fact that the Purveyors of Economic Truth are also the ones choosing the measures and building the states.

Also -

• Subprime primer.
• Fedex and the extended order - interesting one, this. A very binary view of reputation and guarantee mechanisms. Not sure if they've read anything by Avner Greif.
• "Make Mine Freedom!"

Random:

• The hub - 'see it, film it, change it.' Potentially a fantastic site - note films making their way out of Tibet over the past few days despite the media lockdown.
• The founder of zipcar talks about her company and mesh network plans. People pay for cars by the hour or day. As she points out, the genius here is that it changes the incentives. If you've paid for a car outright, there's little incentive (only petrol cost) to - for example - not drive to work every day, or even to the shop for milk. The result: one hundred thousand zipcar members drive 500 miles a year, not the 12,000 miles of the average commuter. (Though how much of this is because zipcar members would be less likely to drive anyway? That would be a really useful question to answer.)
• A product plug - DIY Kyoto dot com: as City of Sound points out, these can be used for collective monitoring. Blocks of flats could have rewards for lowest use.
• Where all those internet sea-cables are in case you need to avoid them with your anchor, or want to plot a Die Hard style e.endOfTheWorld1.0.
• FT.com: work starts on $22bn carbon-neutral city. Bloody hell!
• mobilelocate.co.uk - get a map of all your friends! Or, ideally if you're in The Party, use it to cross-reference with people's online behaviour and work out an algorithm to check when filthy radicals are clustering too close together. Yet to come with handy automatic predator drone bomb-dropping capability, but give it time.

Lastly, Cityofsound: The street as platform. An over-long but brilliant tale of one street's data:

This somewhat banal sketch of an average high street is very deliberately based on the here and now; none of the technology lurking in the background behind this passage is R&D. Most of it is in use in our streets, one way or another, and the technology that isn’t could be deployed tomorrow. As such, given the time from lab to street, it represents the research thinking of over a decade ago.

Instead, this is all everyday technology - embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the street, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. Each element of data causes waves of responses in other connected databases, sometimes interacting with each other physically through proximity, other times through semantic connections across complex databases, sometimes in real-time, sometimes causing ripples months later. Some data is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, some is open, collaborative and public.

arguably, this still underestimates significantly the size, shape and intensity of the data cloud immersing the street - it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Forty years ago, the British architects Archigram suggested that 'When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain.' The group’s David Greene subsequently asked 'So why draw the buildings and not the rain?' Why indeed? The sketch above tries to describe data rather than rain, but they’re similarly ephemeral. The work of Archigram, and others, may provide some useful prompts for thinking about this softer infrastructure - when critiqued - though Greene himself has noted that the importance of apparently permanent buildings has persisted, even for 'the electronic nomads of the global financial systems'. So the more relevant question is how do the buildings and the rain of data interrelate?

Informational systems are beginning to profoundly change the way our streets work, the way they are used, and the way they feel. This in itself presents a major challenge for the existing practice and vocabulary of planning. How much of this life of the street, this rapidly increasing torrent of human activity, is registered as a field of enquiry or activity in most planning activity? Imagine this street scene over the next few years of deployment of a more ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and the challenge to identify, understand, denote and plan for this environment is even more pressing.

The same point about ephemera applies to anything that can't easily be seen, including dynamic social networks and their results. What happens when data and social / economic ephemera all get mixed in a big pot? Maybe nothing that profound. The only thing that occurs to me is the combination of mobile calls and glowstick waving as a means of locating one's friends at festivals. So it also makes us less beholden to the clock. I wonder, though - if you tagged every festival-goer in pre- and post-mobile world, how different would the movement patterns really be?