The Electric Shoe Company is working on capturing electrical power generated by walking feet. Quoth the BBC:

“A British team have invented a pair of walking boots which could be used to power mobile phones, personal stereos and other electrical equipment. The shoes were invented by Dr Jim Gilbert, a lecturer in engineering at Hull University, who was asked to develop an idea by Trevor Baylis, the inventor of the clockwork radio.”

Says Wired: Testing two prototypes in the desert,

“Baylis is wearing a pair of experimental boots with soles made from a piezoelectric material, which generates high voltages of electricity when compressed. A companion, John Grantham, an engineer with Texon International, is wearing boots with a tiny dynamo built into the heel. Each time the heel hits the ground, the dynamo spins, generating a small trickle of current.”

“The ‘Fighting Pencil,’ a group of graphic artists and poets, started as a real fighting unit during the war with Finland in 1939. Artists B. Semyonov, V. Galba and others, together with poet E. Ruzhanski, created the first poster-broadsheet for the troops at the front, targeting their satire against the enemy and its allies. Later, during the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany (World War II), more posters were made calling for defense of the Motherland, portraying heroic deeds of soldiers, inspiring courage and encouraging hatred toward the enemy. After the war, the ‘Fighting Pencil’ shifted its satire to ‘opening the boils on the body of Soviet society’ Their targets now were the vices of bureaucracy—negligence and abuse, red tape and indifference to clients, corruption and incompetence. They also addressed ‘negative phenomena’ encountered in the everyday behaviors of ordinary people, such as alcoholism, abuse at the workplace, family violence, and environmental pollution.”

Found via coudal partners.

In 1999, Daimler-Chrysler unveilled a fuel-cell concept car. On June 5, the car completed a 16 day trek across America. Check out GM’s fuell-cell concept car, too.

Found via slashdot.

“The Netherlands is struggling with a vast manure surplus. Although a small country, we have an enormous livestock industry and a correspondingly huge dung mountain.” So Andreas Muller, of Droog Design, created a package for tulip bulbs is made from compressed cattle dung. “The interesting thing about this packaging is that it eats into the surplus and acts as a fertilizer at the same time.” Check out the sculpted gourds, too, on o2.org.

Public Lettering: A Walk in Central London “is based on a walk by Phil Baines for his graphic design students which was then written up for the 1997 ATypI conference. The text has been updated and expanded to include other examples. This walk concentrates on larger examples of public lettering and doesn’t mention incidentals — stop—cocks, manholes, dates on buildings, builders marks, &c — of which there is much en route.”

Found via xblog.

“For nearly 55 years, the Bulletin [of the Atomic Scientists] clock (a.k.a. the ‘Doomsday Clock’) has been the world’s most recognizable symbol of nuclear danger. The first representation of the clock was produced in 1947, when artist Martyl Langsdorf, the wife of a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, was asked by magazine co-founder Hyman Goldsmith to design a cover for the June issue.... This simple design captured readers’ imaginations, evoking both the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of military attack—the countdown to zero hour.... The idea of moving the minute hand came later, in 1949, as a way to dramatize the magazine’s response to world events.”

See the current time.

I love a good rant. Lars Pinds has a couple on the voice, turnstiles, and Metrocard vending machines of the New York City Subway.

Ben Rubin has his own proposal for the subway’s audio cues.

“Joe Paff tells me that when he grew up in the late Thirties in a steel town on the edge of Pittsburgh, ‘as long as my father was unemployed and we were dirt poor, we ate very well. My father made his own beer. My mother baked bread and canned her stewed tomatoes, and my brothers brought home rabbit, pheasant and other game. As soon as my brothers and my father got jobs in the booming steel mills, we were now well off. My father had a new car. We ate Wonder Bread, store-canned tomatoes, and my father drank Iron City Beer. Moral: The victory of these debauched foods was the product of American prosperity and TV advertising that made my mother and father think that’s what they ought to eat to emulate the middle class they saw on TV shows. My mother finally denied having actually baked bread.’”

See the column by Alexander Cockburn.

“For the first time ever, the UK Parliament is taking online consultation on a piece of legislation. The Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Bill is collecting public comments on the Draft Communications Bill via e-mail, and an online forum will publish the comments from June 10.... The public can now read the bill online, watch the Committee hearings in a webcast, and comment on the draft. As Julian Glover notes in [the] Media Guardian, pre-legislative scrutiny itself is rather novel for Parliament, so this online forum is quite a leap.... One potential problem seems likely to arise in the moderating of the e-mailed comments. All comments will be screened and summarized before being presented to the Committee, and that gives the moderator quite a bit of power as gatekeeper.”

From Andrew Stroehlein, E-media Tidbits.

Why was Tony Blair’s speech to the Royal Society so full of “misconceptions and logical elisions?”

“The Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, had invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which PR companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech debate over the past few years.”

See George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian. Monbiot identifies several “research” and “activist” Web sites as PR fronts for corporations including the influential AgBioWorld site, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Food and Agricultural Research, Alliance for Environmental Technology, ActivistCash, Center for Consumer Freedom, and Stop Eco-Violence. See also this TomPaine article from March, PR Watch’s Impropaganda Review, “a rogue’s gallery of industry front groups and anti-environmental think tanks.” From also not found in nature.