Links to articles on low-tech and obsolete technology

  • Forestry Machines Diverity of species (see) (via)

  • Media Slow blog manifesto (read) (via)

Popular mechanics cover small 

 

  • Energy optimists In order for a resource to be an actual source of energy, the energy spent to find, extract, refine, transport and utilize that resource must be less than the energy produced by burning or consuming it (read) (via)

 

  • Travel time Due this year: trains that can go 150 mph (see & read)

 

  • Solar panels You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming? (read)

 

  • Practical skills Our grandparents didn’t exactly enjoy the Depression years, but they had excellent skill sets — sewing, gardening, canning, carpentry, neighboring and squeezing the most out of a dime (read) (via)

 

  • The future It is an article of faith that modern industrial society is robust and resilient, that any setbacks will be temporary, and that we can look forward to an ever-increasing standard of living (read) (via)

 

  • Low-tech flying car All you need is a propeller and a parachute (see & read)

 

  • Going digital One of the great ironies of the information age is that, while the late twentieth century will undoubtedly have recorded more data than any other period in history, it will also almost certainly have lost more information than any previous era (read) (via)

 

  • Fake cheese A composition of palm oil, starch, milk proteins, E339 and E452. Enjoy your pizza (read)

 

  • Nanotech Making carbon-based nanomaterials is up to 100 times as energy-intensive as aluminum (read)

 

  • Lost formats Say what you will about the quality of VHS tapes, but at least they could be resold and lent to friends (read)

 

  • Aquaculture One-third of the world's marine fish catches are ground up and fed to farm-raised fish, pigs and poultry (read) (via)

 

  • Temples of doom The Maya had their rituals and sacrifices. Magic, in other words. And we also believe in magic: that money and innovation can get us out of the inherent limits of our system, that the old rules don't apply to us. (read)

 

  • Los Grumildos
    Low-tech mechanical puppets on the fringes of society (see)

 

  • Debt
    The economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch. But they have the same cause (read)

 

  • Economics
    Money grows on trees (read)

 

 

  • Saving the seeds
    The world’s heritage of seed diversity is the product of thousands of years of experimental plant breeding by millions of farmers across the world (read)

 

  • Plug-in
    A future of all-electric cars coasting along streets and highways may be illusory, given that their range may be cut in half by aggressive drivers speeding along with the air conditioning blasting (read)(via)

 

  • Activism
    I have robbed 492,000 euros to whom most rob us in order to denounce them and build some alternatives for society (read)

 

  • Education
    Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists (read) (via)

 

  • Pedal power
    Microcars (See & read here and here)

 

  • The need for speed
    Car versus skateboard, downhill (watch) (via)

 

  • Maps
    An impressive collection of maps and city drawings from the 16th to the 19th century (see) (via)

 

  • Obsolete toys (2)
    Tri-ang toys catalogue from 1937 (see)

 

  • Obsolete toys (1)
    Corgi Toys and Dinky Toys catalogues (see) (via)

 

 

 

  • Toe socks
    Gadgets that never made it (see)

 

  • Theatre of machines
    Early modern machine drawings from the late Middle Ages up to 1650 (see) (via)

 

  • I=PAT Too many people are under the delusion that a disastrous end to the modern human enterprise can be avoided by technological fixes that will allow the population and the economy to grow forever (read)

 

  • Sailing for fish
    Commercial fishermen are reverting to wind power in response to soaring fuel prices (read) (via)

 

  • Keep cool
    Other cultures have perfected low-tech ways of dealing with the heat (read)

 

  • Energy independence
    Russia set to dominate world uranium supply (read)

 

  • Housing
    They don't build them like they used to do (read)

 

  • Sustainable energy
    We need numbers, not adjectives (read) (via)

 

  • Autobahn speed limit
    The fastest your car can go while burning 8 liters per 100 km (around 35 miles to the gallon) (read) (via)

 

  • T-shirts
    If biofuels are so bad, why aren't we campaigning against cotton? (read)

 

  • Walking
    My shoes get 220 miles per gallon (read)

 

  • Cities for living
    Paris is a miraculous city in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it (read) (via)

 

 

  • Marconi news
    Retro-tech juxtapositions & encyclopedic image mechanix (see) (via)

 

  • Home
    Now that's what I call a tree house (see)

 

  • The good old days
    I'm not interested in retro, I'm interested in better (read)(via)

 

  • Get an upgrade
    The energy required to produce a computer is enough to run it for 10 years (see & read) (via)

 

 

  • Where's the fish?
    Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has led to ecological meltdown (read)

 

 Fitness

 

  • Help in case of an atomic bomb attack
    One reason to get down flat is to let the worst of it pass over you (see & read) (Via)

 

  • Build an electric car
    Retrofitting a 1970s Fiat 500 (read)

 

  • Minerals
    “Peak oil” is just one of several cases of worldwide peaking and decline of a depletable resource (read)

 

  • Travelling light
    Airships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials (read)

 

  • Farms became factories Chemical corporations continue their propaganda efforts to convince farmers that they cannot make a profit without using chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, and genetically manipulated crops and animals (read)

 

Take it easy
A 0.5 horse power car (see & read)


Robot wars
Airstrikes from unmanned aircraft over Iraq hit record levels in April (read)


TV
A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken (read)


Privacy
How to kill an RFID tag (read)

Insurance versus nature
In the past five years, London councils alone have chopped down almost 40,000 street trees (read)

 

Long-term storage (2)
How to make a Moleskine notebook (make)

 

Long-term storage (1)
It only takes five years and archived data is obsolete (read)

Monsanto rules (2)
Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops (read)

 

Monsanto rules (1)
Intellectual property thuggery is not restricted to the IT and entertainment industries (read)

 

Time is money
From New York to Los Angeles in 48 hours (read)

 

Solar
One of oldest forms of energy used by humans -- sunlight concentrated by mirrors -- is poised to make an astonishing comeback (read)

 

Food crisis
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? (read)

 

Green cars (2)
Cars like the Aptera are severely impeding humanity's faltering steps towards creating a sustainable society (read)

 

Green cars
From rainforest to rubber plantation (read)


School_retrofuture

Time capsule
2000 A.D. (see)


Time capsule
2063 A.D. (read)


Green buildings (2)
It takes 90,000 kWh of energy to construct a single family dwelling (read)


Green buildings (1)
Even if 40% of the materials in a new building are recycled, it would take 65 years for a green, energy-efficient new office building to recover the energy lost in demolishing an existing building (read)


Dc_3_aviation_history

Flying
The revival of propeller-driven planes (read) (picture)


Water
Low-tech lemonades (make)

 

The front lawn
What is that chasm between house and street? Why is it there? Or rather, why is nothing there? (read)

 

Ethanol
The road to hell is paved with good intentions (read)

 

Wheels
The car of the future (see)


Communications
Build a telegraph (make)

 

Housing
Build an eco village (make)


Magnetic levitation
Germany ditches Transrapid project (read)


Writing
Emoticons on paper (see)

Emoticons_2


Trees versus solar
What happens when one neighbour with solar panels sues another with big, shady trees? (read)


Public transport
A bus to keep pace with other transportation (see)


Obsolete skills
People would actually have to hold what they called Pens or Pencils if they were very old, and put this in contact with paper, which would make marks that they called "writing" (read) (edit)

 

The new black
Clean coal is a combination of two technologies, one of which is expensive and the other completely unproven (read)


Bat phones
The low-tech hearing aid is an update to simply cupping your hand to your ear (see & read)

Bat_phones

 

Space travel
After travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football/soccer pitch (see)

 

Food miles
There is only one way of being sure that you cut down on your carbon emissions when buying food: stop eating meat, milk, butter and cheese (read)

 

Who killed the bicycle?
Young men used to save up their money to buy a horse or a watch. Now, they save to buy a bicycle, and there are thousands who are cutting off unnecessary expenses in the way of clothing, cigars, and amusements and luxuries, so as to possess a wheel (read)

 

Water crisis?
Only 10 to 30 percent of the available rainfall is being used in a productive way (read)

 

Access to information
All UN statistics in one database (search)

 

Leapfrogging
Emerging economies are better at adopting new technologies than at putting them into widespread use (read)

 

SimCity
Dubai is nuts (see)

Dubai_is_nuts

 

Soil
Terra preta might just save modern agriculture (read)

 

Global warming
For those who insist on seeing only technical problems with technical solutions, the forest remains lost from sight behind a single tree (read)

 

Saving the planet
Moves by green consumers and nations to cut energy use will prove pointless if oil-producing states simply maintain production (read)

 

Biodiesel
The discharges, which can be hazardous to birds and fish, have many people scratching their heads over the seeming incongruity of pollution from an industry that sells products with the promise of blue skies and clear streams (read)

 

Gardening
You need 297 square metres of wheat to provide your family with bread (read)

 

Attack
Hacking a pacemaker (read)

 

Education
About a motor car (see & read) (via)

About_a_motor_car

 

Identity crisis
On average science unveils a new invention every day, and almost without fail these days, that daily invention disrupts the notion of ourselves (read)

 

Car versus man
If you want to see some powerful environmental technology, you don't have to look any further than your big beefy quadriceps (read)

 

Do it yourself
Build a small Savonius wind turbine (make)

 

Fotomo
Snap, print, fold, paste (make)

 

The real problem
We may have too much energy (read)

 

Child labour
Powering African schools with playground toys (read)

 

Solar energy
Investors and utilities are increasingly turning to solar thermal power, a comparatively low-tech alternative to photovoltaic panels (read)

 

Power
There is no Moore's Law for batteries (read)


Lowtech_killer_robot_van_elbit_syst

Robot wars
We are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race (read)


Sign of the times
Little does the city dweller realize the extent to which his life depends on the fragile arteries by which he is supplied food, gas, electricity, water, milk, fuel, and communication with his associates (read)


Agriculture
Insects can feed the world. Cows and pigs are the SUV's; bugs are the bicycles (read)


Encryption
Want to break into a computer's encrypted hard drive? Just blast the machine's memory chip with a burst of cold air (read)


Cargo traffic
French ship their wine under sail (read)


Man and machine
Bill Gates still believes speech will replace keyboards (read)


The flywheel
It's striking how many of civilization's energy and environmental problems can be traced back to inadequate energy storage (read)


Plan B 3.0
Mobilizing to save civilization (read)


Electronics
Most laptops are like SUV's. You're using most of the energy to move the car, not the person (read)

 

Green your life (2)
Going green? Easy doesn't do it (read)

 

Green your life (1)
We are constantly being told that easy personal actions will save the climate (read)

 

Biofuel
A new generation of biofuels turns out to be another environmental disaster (read)

 

Information technology
How our multi-channel, multi-tasking society is making it harder for us to think (read)