Scooters? Not a New Idea

Sun, Oct 8, 1916 – Page 58 · New York Herald (New York, New York) · Newspapers.com It turns out the urban scooter craze isn’t a new idea. From a story in an October 8, 1916 newspaper, “Skidding Through Fact and Fancy on an Autoped: Solo Devil Wagon Taken Up in a Serious Way Might Add New Terrors to City Life” is a description of motorized scooter not all that different than the ones we see today: You stand on the cute platform and get your feet n...

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Make Magazine: Online and Free

...co-founder Palmer Luckey’s interest in funding the company, and a GoFundMe page started for it.] I wrote an article on drip irrigation for Issue 18 and have to say that it was a pleasure to work with the Make editorial team. Unlike other publications I’ve written for, the editors at Make knew a lot about the technical details of the subject matter and worked hard to ensure accuracy. Speaking of technical details, the only thing I’d change if I wro...

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Fermentology: Mini Seminars About Cultured Food

...d will be recorded and available afterwards on the Applied Ecology Youtube page. Registration here! Follow us on twitter or facebook for updates. A closing note: I’m fortunate to be able to stay at home, with plenty of food, and watch fermentation seminars. Many are not so lucky. I have a friend and neighbor who runs several farmers’ markets through a non-profit called SEE-LA. They are soliciting donations to support families sheltering in place i...

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Sheltered

A page from Shelter. Maker, builder, publisher and author Lloyd Kahn left a great comment on my rambling review of the documentary Spaceship Earth. Lloyd said (in reference to the title of Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth), “In 1973, in our book Shelter, I wrote “Calling Earth a spaceship is like stepping out into a clear night in New Mexico and saying, “Wow, it looks just like the planetarium.” If you aren’t fa...

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By Hand and Eye

...lden section, for instance, and the shelf spacing came from an exercise on page 131 of the book. Far from being restrictive, I found the principles in Walker and Tolpin’s book liberating. I now had a starting point for any design project. For modern folks it’s difficult to imagine working without a ruler. Walker and Toplin explain, Instead of asking, “How high is this base dimension in inches?” pre-industrial artisans would have asked, “How tall i...

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