Sale on Rain Forests, Aisle 24

Oh what an strange turn of events looking back over the last 5 years of sustainability and the board room.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com Environmental Activist Adam Werbach Used To Call Wal-Mart Toxic, But Now He Works For Them Once the youngest president of the Sierra Club, Adam Werbach used to call Wal-Mart toxic. Now the company is his biggest client. Does the path to a greener future run through Bentonville? By Danielle Sacks How Green is Wal-Mart? In October 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott outlined audacious environmental and sustainability goals for the company. Here's the status of some of the company's major initiatives. By Charles Fishman Wal-Mart's Personal Sustainability Project The Personal Sustainability Project, or PSP, that Werbach and his firm, Act Now, are running for Wal-Mart is intended to help the company's 1.3 million employees see how sustainability--defined very broadly as "having enough for now, while not harming the future"--relates to their own lives. Here's the strategy. By Fast Company Staff

Pentel Pocket Brush Pen

clipped from www.kk.org Leave it to the Japanese to create a brush pen. This pocketable pen has a super fine brush tip of actual bristles, perfect for tiny Kanji characters, or of course, doodling in your journal, or sketching in your Moleskine. While it's hugely popular with comic book folks and cartoonists, artists of all stripes have picked one up for their paper work. The feel is incredibly tactile and lovely. It works like a fountain pen, with replaceable rich ink cartridges. Once capped it doesn't leak as far as I can tell. (There's a moment of panic when you first assemble it since the instructions are 100% in Japanese, but just insert the ball-bearing end of the ink capsule into the tip.) You can purchase other color inks as well. Pentel Pocket Brush Pen $18 Available from Wet Paint Artists' Materials

Reading Comics

More on the most universal of art forms.

clipped from www.kk.org Comic books, comics, graphic novels, or whatever you call them are not a genre, they're a medium. Wolk emphasizes this from the outset of this vivid examination of the form and many of the geniuses and misfits of the American mainstream and avante-garde. Always frank, always insightful, Wolk, a former comic book store clerk, covers a lot of ground: pregnant moments, metacomics, parallel Earths, disposable Sunday strips, and, of course, how the world of comics can be "annoyingly male." The first half of the book tackles history along with an overall assessment of what comics mean and how to read them. There are great bits about what makes a "superreader" and how the form blossomed despite the economics of limited shelf space. The second half is a series of precise essays on specific artists, including Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Charles Burns and Steve Ditko.

Making Comics: How to communicate visually

clipped from www.kk.org Magnificent! A work of genius. The best how-to manual ever published. I could keep piling on the superlatives because this book is simply a masterpiece. At one level, it is a comic book about how to make comics, and for that it is supreme; the best. It will walk you through every step of making a comic, including how to make them on the web, digitally, or in pen and ink. I've been working on a near-completed graphic novel, and every page has told me something important and spot on. With brilliant graphics, Scott McCloud combines the most profound insights from his two previous books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. But in this book he raises your understanding of graphic communication further by making every lesson utterly practical and useful for both novice and expert. I can't imagine anyone ever doing a comic manual better.

Stinky? It's Not His Sweat, It's Your Nose

Dang. Finally, some support for the big, sweaty feller! I remember that, starting at age 13, I received the Brut or Olde English cologne seasonal gift box throughout my college years.

clipped from www.reuters.com CHICAGO (Reuters) - When it comes to a man's body odor, the fragrance -- or stench -- is in the nose of the beholder, according to U.S. researchers who suggest a single gene may determine how people perceive body odor. The study, published online on Sunday in the journal Nature, helps explain why the same sweaty man can smell like vanilla to some, like urine to others and for about a third of adults, have no smell at all. Matsunami and colleagues at Duke and Rockefeller University in New York focused on the chemical androstenone, which is created when the body breaks down the male sex hormone testosterone.

Themes How the Mind Works

A fantastic collection of video presentation by the best thinkers and presenters on the planet.

clipped from www.ted.com If you're going to hold a conference about ideas, from time to time you need to step back and look at the mysterious engine that creates them: the human mind. What goes on in there anyway? How can our strange, gray, gooey brains create inspired inventions, the feeling of hunger, the experience of beauty, the sense of self? And how reliable are they? Might there be strange quirks in the ways our minds work, given that they were optimized for the needs of a savannah-roaming hunter-gatherer? Our speakers offer numerous insights. Dan Dennett argues that brains are the ecosystem in which a new form of life, the meme or idea, can flourish. Meanwhile Peter Donnelly, Al Seckel and Dan Gilbert, in three very different ways, highlight bizarre quirks in the way we think, perceive and experience. Yes, it turns out our mental programs are a little buggy. These talks will help you take countermeasures!

A big corporate thumbs-up for Google

I admit it: I am a iGoogle junkie. I have been experimenting with Google Docs, but tend to use the writeboard feature in Basecamp for collaborative draft documents. Plus, OpenOffice, the free open source equivalent to MS Office, can be installed on my laptop for off-road writing and spreadsheeting.

But this endorsement could mean billions of dollars in savings for global firms who have to dish out for installation and support of every knowledge worker at a terminal (anybody still using Office 2003?).

clipped from www.publicradio.org You may not have heard of Capgemini, but the technology consulting firm has some big-name clients, like drug maker Eli Lilly and the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers — big corporations that spend big money on office software and technology. So it's no small deal that Capgemini is endorsing Google's suite of office software. Capgemini will continue to support business software made by other vendors, including Microsoft and IBM, but this is the first time one of the world's top technology consulting services will recommend Google Apps to its corporate customers.

Japan eyes robots to support older population

Researchers racing against time to build humanoid workforce.

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com TOKYO - It looks like a washing machine on wheels, but the bulky contraption vacuuming the hallways of a Tokyo high-rise is a robot. Japanese researchers hope that robots like this one will be the answer to a pressing question hanging over the country -- how to cope with an aging population and a declining labor force. The vacuuming machine developed by Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd is already cleaning floors in about 10 buildings around the country, including a 54-floor skyscraper in central Tokyo.

Staying awake difficult for workers

clipped from www.cnn.com Asleep on the job Speaking of nodding off, turns out American's aren't so good at keeping their eyes open in the workplace. A whopping 50 percent of those surveyed say they've caught someone sleeping at work, not to mention the 28 percent who admit they've fallen asleep at work themselves. Little-known-fact: Auto mechanics (65 percent) have the highest rate of self-admitted snoozing on the job, followed by 51 percent of government workers. Having trouble staying awake? Follow these pointers from "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Work," by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, on how to cover if you're caught sleeping at your desk. Blame work. Say, "I'm so exhausted; I was here until midnight last night!" Do not attempt this if your boss works late and you do not.