OK, we’ve been seeing consumer-oriented bar-code scanner technology around for years now. Can I ask you activists something? Why haven’t we done something with this yet? Wouldn’t it be useful to have a bar-code scanner in your cel phone which you could use which would tell you that the manufacturer of an item pollutes rivers, abuses workers, sends jobs overseas, contributes to antiabortion terrorists, doesn’t abide by safety rules for the product, etc? Hell, I can tell you *I* would use it. Seems to me the big costs would be legal and in maintaining a database of information. Please, discuss.
I’m attending a lecture by the founder of MaMaMedia right now. She’s of the intellectual lineage (?) of Seymour Papert at MIT, who has written a lot about Logo. In passing, the MaMaMedia founder mentioned a fantastically geeky site called SodaPlay which puts me in mind of the Kinetic Sculpture Race which Evan used to tell me about.
I dig the various philosophies of MaMaMedia (not seeing a good link for that, poke around), and I am impressed that the company was so forward-thinking about their technology. They are currently re-orienting, post-crash, to a nonprofit, open-source model.
“What can one say about Tottenville, except that it is less bohemian than the Fresh Kills landfill.” Dorothy Gambrell’s geographic analysis of bohemianism in New York City! Informative and funny.
