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Open-source thinking can also lead to open-source sniffing.

When you try to pull the wool over the world’s eyes, or in the case of Erik Nordenenkar, a Swedish artist who claimed to have created the world’s biggest drawing, flying a GPS device around the world using DHL weigh-bills and some good old-fashioned delivery man goodwill.

There have been plenty of skeptics, and since its a pretty big claim, people will sniff.

And discover the fake.

According to this report in The Guardian, London’s 2012 Olympic Stadium could potentially be dismantled after the event, to be re-assembled in Chicago.

Flatpack furniture may be easy to transport. But they are the true test of a relationship, when the assembly is attempted together. In fact, any couple who intend to wed, should build an Ikea wall-unit together.

I wish the mayors of Chicago and London well.

Chances are that laptops left overnight in offices/homes draw a huge amount of collective power, continuously re-charging already full batteries (probably diminishing their lifespan).

I suspect loads of old laptops have very old batteries (which is expensive to replace) so that they always draw extra power.

And because users wouldn’t want to just remove the old battery to save the power, exposing the insides of the computer to dust and dirt, wouldn’t it make sense for computer makers to make battery shaped non-batteries that can be installed in the computer, protecting the insides but drawing no extra power when the machine is turned off?

I have always been intriguied by the Millennium Clock – a project by The Long Now Foundation. On the project page on their Web site, the clock’s designer, Danny Hillis (from 01995), published an essay called The Millennium Clock. From that essay:

I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?

What a magnificent thought. That people lived in a paradigm where they thought hundreds of years into the future, and then did small acts to provide a massive solution for a potential future problem.

One of the scariest books I have ever read was The Ingenuity Gap, by Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon. It is a treatise on how we as humans lack the collective brainpower to solve the complex problems of the future. In it, Homer-Dixon recommends a curb in consumption as the only solution to averting global disaster.

He’s now written a new book called The Upside of Down. It discusses the forces that are at play in the world that are building up tectonic pressures which could change the world’s landscape forever. He discusses the possible outcomes and how it could benefit our societies.

I’m a great fan of his thinking. He’s a supporter of free markets and open-source collaboration.

To get a sense of the themes of The Upside of Down, listen to this talk he gave the World Affairs Council.

This has been a difficult few days for consumers of the news media.

Hillary Clinton, who now cannot win the Democratic Party nomination for the race to become General-commander-in-chief-of-the-World, still persists in her pursuit, (even if most pundits believe otherwise) “full speed to the White House”, because she believes that “I’m the stronger candidate against Sen. McCain, and I believe I would be the best president among the three of us running.”

The military Junta who runs Myanmar, are dragging their boots to let in emergency aid to prevent even further loss of life after a cyclone claimed tens of thousands of life in the country. They are creating a barrier of red tape which prevents expert aid workers to get in with supplies and prevent the spread of disease.

And Robert Mugabe, aged 84, the man who almost single-handedly guided Zimbabwe from being the bread-basket of Africa into a hole of hyper-inflation, despair and torture, refuses to let go of power – even after he’s been beaten in a general presidential election.

What is it that distorts Clinton’s perspective of reality? Or the Burmese Junta and Mugabe’s inability to actually care for their people? To place above the welfare of fellow countrymen, their own thirst for power?

The thread that connects the three are ego. Or the inability to sacrifice the self for the greater whole. There is no doubt that human societies and organisms function better when we diminish the ego. This is the main tenet of spirituality – as explored in this brilliant TED talk by Karen Armstrong.

If we are to progress as a species. Overcome the incredible challenges we have created for ourselves and prosper into the eons to come, we will have to evolve beyond our struggle for the one.

Perhaps the next step in evolution is not building on survival of the fittest, but survival of the whole.

My feeling is that a blog has to be about something. It has to have a single-minded proposition, so to speak.

So in the coming weeks I will roll out a few more blogs, but focusing them single-mindedly on the topic or idea I am interested in.

leonjacobs.com will remain a sort of edited version of the highlights of those blogs. Stay in touch here to know what is happening elsewhere, or feel free to be part of the conversation on the blogs you are interested in.

The first new blog is about my current hometown, Hong Kong. I call it Vertigo City. So much of Hong Kong is high up, on a tight-rope, suspended from disbelief. That blog is about my experiences of living in Hong Kong.

I’ve always had Kantlyn, which is a collection of some Afrikaans poetry and short fiction that I have penned – although to be honest – I haven’t in a while.

More to follow in the time to come.

There is a tiny hoo-haa about the violence in Grand Theft Auto IV – the game that has been compared to The Godfather in terms of artistic expression.

People don’t become evil because of video-games. People were evil before the computer was invented.

If a person doesn’t understand the difference between fiction and reality, should they be allowed to walk the streets? It’s also easy to argue that games/films/shows/books that exploit violence can act as a release valve. Since our modern society frowns on bloodsport, this might be a useful alternative.

And in other news (also via Boing-Boing), an outfit called BreakThrough has launched a game called I Can End Deportation that teaches kids how to navigate through US immigration procedures. The end-goal? US citizenship.

Using gaming to set-up real life simulations seems to be a useful strategy for teaching any skill. It almost seems that the same force that is driving reality TV could be slowly directing pressure on the gaming industry. Could this be the advent of reality gaming?