This Icelandic cardboard table from Liborius Reykjavík looks fantastic -- I've seen plenty of flatpack cardboard furniture, but never one that was this elaborate (drawers!) nor one that was meant to be repeatedly disassembled and reassembled. This lightweight, portable cardboard table aims to assist on-the-go creative types like designers and students, who are often limited to work on low desks or floors. Made by Sruli Recht from flatpack cardboard pieces, this lightweight, sturdy design offers creatives an ergonomic plane on which to cut, fold, draft or design. Adding even more appeal to this smart and useful design, the table is biodegradable and can easily be folded up to pack into a portable carrier. Link (via Cribcandy)...

I took these photos of five- and six-year-olds' wishes for the Earth....

Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We weren't satisfied with the bogus "green" graduation gifts being hawked out there, so we decided to create the ultimate one. For a gift of $6,000, we'll offset the climate emissions of your favorite high school grad's whole childhood, giving them a carbon clean slate. It's only $7,500 for a college graduate. Expensive? No, discounted. The point is our impacts are much to big to change with some hemp sandals or a solar backpack, and it's time to get real." Link (Thanks, Alex!)...

Seasonal Chef's farmers' market reports from across the USA come lavishly illustrated with beautiful photos of mouth-watering organic produce -- it's raw food porn! It's still a little too early for strawberries, in my opinion. It's got to get hotter for them to sweeten up -- and that'll happen in about six weeks. But the price is coming down, so I figure it's time to try my first strawberries of the season. Blood oranges won't be around much longer. Time to buy a bunch, juice them, and boil the juice down to reduce it by half or more to make syrup for salad dressings that I'll freeze and use for months to come. Fava beans have been in the markets for some weeks now, but at $3 a pound unshelled, they're a pricy delicacy. They'll get cheaper until they vanish in about month. Today, I got these for $2 a pound -- a fair price for a fleeting springtime treat. Here are nine fava bean recipes that I like. The Catalan stew is time-consuming, but well worth it, once a year. Link (via Waxy)...

A Danish company called Agroplast has figured out how to turn pig-piss into plastic and into a cigarette "flavor enhancer": Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch. Tøttrup claims that the process could, conceivably, result in plastics that cost a third less than conventional plastics made from fossil fuels. That's a big conceivably. Traditionally, bioplastics made of vegetable matter have cost more than fossil fuel plastics. Evaluation of the pricing will have to wait until large volumes of this stuff are made. Agroplast is going into a pilot study now, Tøttrup said. Link (via Gizmodo) (Image: URINE: a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Salvez's Flickr stream)...

The folks at my daughter's preschool say they learned this trick on a kibbutz in Israel: plastic bags filled with water, and hung from tree branches to scare the bugs away. Does it work? Map It: Tarzana, California...

Alex sez, "At Worldchanging, we just did a post on how high a percentage of their monthly budgets many families are now paying for their cars, and why many "expensive" close-in neighborhoods are actually affordable when you factor in the gas pump. The centerpiece is a great new mapping ap from the center for neighborhood technologies that shows the interplay between the two in great clarity." One factor that often doesn’t get considered in discussions of Seattle’s rising prices is transportation costs. It makes sense that if you have to “drive until you qualify,” as one common justification of living in the suburbs puts it, the cost of that driving ought to be considered as part of the cost of living far outside the city. Generally, though, it isn’t—allowing pro-suburban, anti-regulation, anti-density pundits and politicians to claim that Seattle’s housing prices are “out of control” and that the suburbs are the only “affordable” alternative. According to CNT’s analysis of the Seattle region, the most affordable parts of our region are actually inside city limits—once transportation costs are factored in. Link, Link to mapping app (Thanks, Alex!...

Here's a slide deck to accompany Saul Griffith's incredible talk on engineering solutions to climate change from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this month in San Diego. The talk was the highlight of the conference for me, dealing as it did with the engineering affordances of carbon, climate, and energy sources of all kind, and coming to a humane solution that invites us to live luxuriant high-quality lives that nevertheless massively reduce our carbon footprints to a sustainable level. Link (Thanks, Avi!) See also: Engineering approach to global climate change...

Bruce Sterling's "Revenge of the Slow" in this month's Metropolis Magazine is a thought-provoking history and analysis of the Slow Food movement, a massive, moneyed global phenomenon that aims to fight globalization by creating cachet for items that can't be scaled up to global prominence. As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints. The group is the suave host for massive international food events in Torino. Other Slow Food emanations include a hotel, various nonprofit foundations, and—in a particularly significant development—a private college. The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004, is the training ground for 200-plus international Slow Food myrmidons per year, who are taught to infiltrate farms, groceries, heritage tourism, restaurants, commercial consortia, hotel chains, catering companies, product promotion, journalism, and government. These areas are, of course, where Slow Food already lives... Slow Food deploys its convivia to serve as talent scouts for food rarities (such as Polish Mead, the Istrian Giant Ox, and the Tehuacan Amaranth). Candidate discoveries are passed to Slow Food’s International Ark Commission, which decides whether the foodstuff is worthy of inclusion. Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!) Link (via Beyond the Beyond) (Image: Slow Food Vancouver Potluck May 10, 2005 - 4, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Roland's Flickr stream)...

These "bicycle handcuffs" look like a pretty good solution to a lot of bike-locking problems (though they wouldn't be much help in locking your bike to a telephone pole or wide light-post). I can't evaluate the manufacturer's claims about the material's hardness or the lock's efficacy, but the theory appears sound: The heavy-duty cuffs attach around the fork and disc rotor so would-be thieves can't make off with your bike unless they’re armed with some kind of Fort Knox-busting wonder weapon. This nifty arrangement means you won’t have to fool around taking off your wheel for full lockdown. You don’t even need to use the keys to secure your bike, just click the cuffs using the integrated buttons. Link (via Red Ferret)...