If you are in the innovation business, or the intellectual property (IP) law business, check out IP.com’s Global Patent Search. They are the only service I know of that has searchable databases of both US and Chinese (PRC) patents. You can also browse patents by International Patent Classification (IPC), going back several decades. Brilliant.

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Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) Mike Salmon said: “It is a low cost strategy to get motorists to slow down as they approach the bike trail and pedestrian path. While at first motorists may be a little disoriented, the main point is to get them to pay attention and slow down through that area.” [Source: [...]

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From the great, great Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s amazing novel All The Names comes this passage that echoes very closely Philip K. Dick’s formulation of kipple mentioned before: “There are people like Senhor Jose everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs…

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Hamish Fulton understands the connection between art and walking…

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Many of you who sit all day in front of a computer will probably agree that too much sitting is bad, bad, bad for you — bad for your back, bad for your neck, and bad for your overall health and well-being. So why would we force kids, who also have energy to burn, to sit still and be quiet all day in school? Well, 20-year…

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The Times of London has a great interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the guru of uncertainty and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Black Swan is a great book, and especially valuable as a wake-up call to the critical importance of randomness and uncertainty in the modern world. And Taleb has proved very prescient in his prediction several years ago of all the trauma our economy is currently mired in…

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Kipple is a word invented by the science fiction author Philip K. Dick for a concept similar to entropy. Here is the passage explaining kipple from Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the film Blade Runner:

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s home page. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

The novel’s philosopher of kipple, J. R. Isidore (who became J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner), explains…

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