Purple has been taken...

The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green

Kermit was correct, being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”

This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.

Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/arts/05iht-design5.html?ref=color&pagewanted=all

News Corp Bans Cablevision Customers From Watching Hulu

News Corp. and Cablevision are currently stuck in a classic cable vs programming "we pay too much, you pay too little" fight. But this time around News Corp. is flexing more muscle by banning Cablevision Internet users from accessing Hulu too.


When the clock struck midnight on Saturday, Cablevision customers could no longer watch FOX on their TV. That's because News Corp. (which owns FOX) and Cablevision couldn't come to an agreement on the fees that Cablevision should pay News Corp. It's something that's happened before with other networks and other cable providers but the new twist is that News Corp. is using their stake in Hulu to ban Cablevision Internet users from accessing FOX content on Hulu as well.

The problem this raises is that if programmers are using a ban of accessing Hulu (an internet website, after all) as leverage against a cable provider for TV fees, it's only going to kill the hope and promise of net neutrality. If cable providers and programmers continue to have their way, the web could turn into the big fucking mess that cable is.

And even worse, what happens when a cable provider and progammer, like for example Comcast—which owns NBC and thus has a stake in Hulu—one day decides that in order to access NBC content on Hulu, you need to have Comcast and other cable providers get locked out? It's a messy situation that's bound to get messier with the new and different avenues of content we can access now.

from Gizmondo

Debate on Twitter

Can Twitter Lead People to the Streets?

Introduction

 

Alexandra Zsigmond 

 

In The New Yorker this week, Malcolm Gladwell offers a bracing critique of the notion that social media like Twitter and Facebook are reinventing activism -- claims that were broadly made after Twitter became identified with protests in Moldova and Iran last year.

"Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires," he writes. And the "weak ties" created by these platforms, he adds, cannot promote the discipline and strategy that true political activism requires.

Can social media tools like Twitter nurture political action? What are their limitations and how might that change as social media mature?

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/09/29/can-twitter-lead-people-to-the-streets?ex=1301457600&en=6a8f91b2b47adcc6&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=OP-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M169-ROS-1010-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click