EA is using one of the coolest marketing gimmicks I have ever seen to promote Mass Effect 3. The company has taken copies of the game, attached them to weather balloons, and then sent the weather balloons way up into the Earth’s atmosphere. The balloons will be launched in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Berlin, London, and Paris.

If you’re in those cities and can find the balloons once they come back to earth, you get keep the copy of the game. How bad would it suck if you found the balloons only to discover it was the wrong format for your console? Each of the games has a GPS tracking device and the fans can track where they land using the Mass Effect website and then go find a copy.

Via SlashGear

EARTH 2.0™ – Re-establishing a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature, using art, science and digital creativity.

Despite their need to trademark the phrase Earth 2.0, and the heavy post-production, the content in the following videos is spot-on. To soften the blows a bit further, I’ve added some matching quotes from my own unfinished writings on these subjects.

What our cities need today to survive in the midst of climate change and increasingly heavy weather is Aikido Infrastructure.

Any sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from nature.

Here’s Adam Greenfield‘s excellent, thought-provoking keynote at the recent Cognitive Cities conference in Berlin – On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City

Related:

• Incidental Media vs Invasive Advertising

Via OM2 Photography’s photostream.

Source: Unknown. Mike Hedge. Click through for higher resolution.

..is the provocative title of another interesting talk from 27c3.  It does a great job breaking down a lot of the problems we’re facing and, while I don’t agree with all the conclusions and suggestions, there’s definitely some pragmatic ideas in there that are food for thought. It does get very technical in a few places, but don’t let that dissuade you.

Background Material – it’s hard to go past Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. There’s a condensed version in his Long Now talk or an even further condensed version in his TED Talk.

Further reading – John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas, in particular his posts on: Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.

If you want a preview of life in New York after an apocalypse, check out this manual just released for the legal system, with the rather sedate title Public Health Legal Manual.

Lastly, the title says it all: Cities and Resilience: The Year Climate Started Hurting Politicians.

Via OM2 Photography’s photostream. Special thanks to Chris “Ruz” for the link!

Via Digitalyn’s photostream.

Making these machines, the group explains, is 8 times cheaper than buying them from manufacturers, on average. And in a world where resources might be scarcer than we anticipate more quickly than we anticipate, their ambitious project could prove to be a vital one. They’re publishing the full schematics and diagrams on their Wiki, so anyone can use them once shit goes Mad Max. If the internet still works, that is. OK, maybe you should print them out now just to be safe.

Via Gizmodo.

City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas,” said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.

Via disinfo.

Check out this inspiring short documentary about the rebirth of Detroit, filmed by Johnny Knoxville.

Jason Tester finds Utopia in the remains of Detroit.

The QR cloud project is a recent temporary installation by the amsterdam based design group golfstromen. The project began in july 2009 and is still running in the west end of their city. the project consists of embedded QR codes in the urban environment, linking to pieces of artwork. the project features seven large QR codes that when photographed on a web-ready cell phone link viewers to small stories, poems or proverbs by dutch writers and poets. Each written piece was commissioned for the project as a short inspirational message to users. The QR codes were placed on a soon to be demolished building and focus on making the public aware of QR codes in contexts outside advertising.

Picture and words from DesignBoom.

The following is a selection of photos taken from National Geographic’s annual photo caption contest. Actually it’s a sub-selection of the photos Boston.com’s The Big Picture ran.

Regardless, it’s our world and if you frame the photos just right, it’s an amazing place.

A supercell thunderstorm rolls across the Montana prairie at sunset. (Photo and caption by Sean Heavey)

The Serra da Leba Road near Lubango (Huíla, Angola). This is Serra da Leba, a landmark in Angola. A road built in the 70′s, it’s been in the country’s postcard images for decades, but all shots were taken by day. I wanted something different and tried a night shot. But it seemed impossible: pitch dark, foggy, altitude of 1,800m (5,000ft). I wanted no more than 60sec of exposure, max, to avoid digital noise. But a car takes a few minutes to climb or descend this section of the road. The fog was dense and blocking the view! Suddenly the fog cleared, a few cars went down, others went up, they met in the middle in under 60sec… Painting done! (Photo and caption by Kostadin Luchansky)

Pure Elements. I drove my 4×4 over rivers to get a view of the Volcano eruption at “Fimmvorduhals” in Iceland. It was a full moon and strong winds gave me problems standing still outside the truck. I had my camera with me and zoom lens but no tripod, suddenly there was a magical moment, I was experiencing a display of nature rarely seen by man. I found my camera with the zoom lens, rushed out of the truck, trying to fight the strong wind. I pushed the camera on to the hood of the truck trying to stand still, holding my breath, I shot 30 frames, and only one shot was good. (Photo and caption by Olafur Ragnarsson)

Lightning Crashes. A lightning bolt strikes the antenna of The Center building in Central Hong Kong during a storm on September 13, 2009. (Photo and caption by Michael Siward)

Cloud and ship. Ukraine, Crimea, Black sea, view from Ai-Petri mountain. (Photo and caption by Yevgen Timashov)

The archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, Brazil is considered a wildlife sanctuary, but today, even in this isolated archipelago dolphins are victims of the bad habits of consumption. (Photo and caption by João Vianna)

Liquid Planet. Another picture from the Liquid Vision Series, which shows a different point of view of waves. An angle that people are not used to seeing. (Photo and caption by Freddy Cerdeira)

Thanks to Bruce Sterling’s twitterfeed we now a have a word for those things we see around us on a daily basis, but couldn’t concisely describe.

Thomasons: Stairs leading to nowhere. Protruding pipes and tubes connecting to nothing. The silhouette of an older building left in the one that consumed it.

It’s how the past haunts the present.

The name is taken from this Flickr pool:

I’m curious. What, if anything, have others previously used to describe this?

How about a selection of takes on the future, seen from completely different angles – a few general takes, two very specific ones and one bonus survival guide.

General looks ahead:

• Douglas Coupland’s A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years:
  

  The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

  It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong

• PARC attempts to look 40years ahead with The best way to invent the future is to predict it:
  

  …this next set of predictions takes the next, huge leap: from interaction, to seamless integration between humans, machines, and information. Enter neuro-bio-bionic-whateveritscalledthesedays computing.

  Some of the predictions involved synthetic biology and simulating the human brain, but most of them were focused on various means for direct inputs, cybernetic implants, and neural interfaces to the human brain – including “augmented perception prosthetics devices that you attach directly to your nervous system to provide data about your surroundings at the touch of a thought”.

• The Institute for the Future’s Map of the Decade (9MB PDF):
  

  The future is a high-resolution game. Never before has humanity been
  able to explore the emerging landscape in such detail, to measure the
  forces of change at such vast scales, and to fill in the details with
  such fine grain. But this high-resolution grid is not complete. It
  challenges us to envision and build the future we want. As both gamers
  and creators of the game, we will fill in the grid over the coming
  decade.

Specific looks ahead:

• The Future of the Televison Industry – My provocation to Channel 4: TV in a low-carbon, meaning-rich, networked era by Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic:
  

  If we move beyond our consumerist identities, what are the opportunities for ingenuity, for learning new skills, for developing new lifestyles, for finding pleasure in other people in new ways?

  …can that be done while your business model depends on super-fantastic car ads and sofa promotions between the shows, stoking up exactly the same kinds of escapism-through-positional-goods that caused the problem in the first place? Or in concert with the industry, will you have to also start rethinking entirely the very function and purpose of advertising itself? What kind of information about products and services should people have in a post-consumerist society?

• The Future of Friendship – as seen from kids in “violent crime neighborhoods” – Chicago Kids Take on Bunker Mentality, No ‘Friends’:
  

  …they found that a kind of “bunker mentality” held sway at both schools, even to the point that the children, both boys and girls, routinely tested their peers and were conducting “background checks” to see whether they could be trusted, cross-checking their dependability with classmates and watching them for months and years.

Bonus:

• Mark Shepard’s Sentient City Survival Guide:
  http://www.vimeo.com/14205709

Another great Augmented Reality concept video from Keiichi Matsuda, the maker of Domestic Robocop.

Note: requires old school blue/red 3D glasses for optimal viewing pleasure.

The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.

via BLDGBLOG | Chris Arkenberg

Blockquoting for GreatJustice this very simple and clear explanation of the Google/Verizon Net Neutrality proposal, and just what a turnabout for Google it is:

In 2006 Google produced the following public service announcement to help sway legislative opinion leading up to the vote on the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007 (S.215). Senator Barack Obama was a cosponsor of this bill. The PSA aired in key districts for approximately one month leading up to the vote.

http://www.vimeo.com/14099243
Early this week Verizon and Google issued a joint statement to U.S. legislators titled “Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal.” In this statement, Verizon-Google suggests exempting wireless broadband access from net neutrality. This was not an oversight. This is a departure from Google’s public stance and advocacy for net neutrality.

Increasingly, technology companies are shipping devices with access to wireless broadband networks pre-installed. It’s not just smart phones any more: laptops, tablets, gaming devices, entertainment systems, navigation tools, automobiles… And while the term “wireless broadband” has come to mean wireless phone services like 3G and 4G networks, the term also likely includes wireless city initiatives. So… what could have caused Google’s founders to abandon the principles of net neutrality just as the web begins entering its wireless era? Could it be that they have the opportunity to control and to profit from a web user’s wireless experience in a not so distant future when being “wired” will be like saying you use a rotary dial phone?

Keep reading on the Voogle Wireless site for ways to encourage Google to reconsider their proposal. Don’t be EVIL!

What follows is Jamais Cascio, who we’ve mentioned here a few times before, presenting a condensed, thirty-minute version of the Institute for the Future‘s forecast for the next ten years.

This is what Futurism looks like today; not rabid predictions of jetpacks and flying cars, but sane, measured statements that pick up recent trends and forecast their result.

From daily tonic:

In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.

Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.

This brings to mind the excellent post on the Kowloon Walled City by David Forbes, over on Coilhouse.

thanks for the tip-off Vertigo Jones!