Jawbone Uses Sleep Data to Gauge Wake-Ups From Napa Earthquake | Re/code

As a Jawbone UP24 user, this is pretty damn cool to see in action.  Granted, I stopped wearing my UP24 band recently because of the, ahem, smell, but that's a conversation for a different time.  re/code brought this very cool stat to life, showing how the recent earthquake in Napa awoke the masses:

Jawbone Uses Sleep Data to Gauge Wake-Ups From Napa Earthquake | Re/code:





'via Blog this'

The Friggin' Airport; Another Reason For Trains

Here’s a rant that takes me back, the friggin’ airport. I’m biased, I admit it upfront, because I travel at least a half dozen times per year by plane. I get the airport, I understand where my shoes go, and I generally don’t get frustrated by the inefficiencies of how it works. Having said that, this morning at SFO was astonishing. One guy is walking into the security line with a shopping cart full of luggage. Another guy is trying to scan his boarding document at the bag check station by pressing his printed ticked against the screen (little did he know directly to his left was a large sign that read “Scan Here.” What’s really so astonishing to me is how razzled everyone is. It’s like herding a bunch of panicking cats. No one knows what to do, and they are all absolutely losing it. It seems most people at the airport don’t know whether to shit or go blind. They have a ticket, a bag, and can’t be held accountable to do anything with those items. I wonder if I can commit a civil arrest of some kind, maybe administer a timeout for the person acting the most atrociously. Lastly, THE ATTITUDE of some of these people. [Ed’s notes: Digicrest once got thrown out of airport security for telling a security guard to go eff himself (you wouldn’t believe the day I was having, and even the F bomb wasn’t warranted]. So I’m an offender, and can recognize it when I see it. You see people questioning the airport staff on the most ridiculous of points. “What do you mean I have to get back in line? I have my ticket right here?” Well honey, your truck sized piece of luggage isn’t making it into the overhead so get your ass back and check it. This is why we need bullet trains immediately, that’s a medium I can get behind.

As long as we are one the subject, here's a great piece on the American high speed rail situation...http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2039897,00.html

San Francisco's Dogpatch Biofuels Showcase

As a huge supporter of the Green movement, from home products to commercial production in sustainable fashion, it's always important to pay respect to the people pushing this movement forward. Everyday I park my car right outside of Dogpatch Biofuels before I jump on the train, and I finally was able to pull together some research on who they are and what they do.

The long and short of it, they are San Francisco's ONLY public biodiesel filling station. They carry B100 biodiesel from local and recycled sources, and also host a residential cooking oil collection site on behalf of San Francisco Greasecycle. [the latter is a sub-division of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission]

Having been started by two ordinary citizen who wanted to take part in the weening off of foreign oil and products, DB was recently taken over by Incredible Adventures, a Bay Area touring company that powers their entire fleet on biodiesel.

Here's a quick tour of the location, and be sure to head over to http://www.dogpatchbiofuels.com/ for more info:

Open Source Government In San Fran?

It was only a matter of time, but San Francisco has opened up it's information pipeline in a more accessible fashion to the fine residents of this city. For people in the ad biz, 'open source' is not a new term. A former client of mine is an open source platform for creatives. An advertiser can submit a proposal to an online community (a similar user interface to Facebook), and people from all over can collaborate to submit a project to the advertiser. A director from LA could find a guy with a green screen in Burbank, while their graphic designer for the new logo is in San Fran.

Wikipedia defines open source as "the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content."

Long story short, the idea has come to the business of running SF....

courtesy Fast Company

It's a good thing Gavin Newsom checks his Twitter feed during meetings. Otherwise, San Francisco's mayor would've missed a life-changing missive about ... potholes? "It really made me wonder," he says. "What if we used social media to make our city services work better?" That stray tweet led to the city's first-of-its-kind Twitter account (@SF311), which encourages residents to send queries and messages about nonemergency issues. But it also underscores the city's open-source stance on government. Just as Google, Facebook, and Twitter released their programming interfaces to app makers, San Francisco opened its arsenal of public information -- train times, crime stats, health-code scores -- to software developers. "There's a tremendous amount of tech talent here," Newsom says. "We'd be fools not to leverage it." To date, more than 140 data sets have been liberated, spawning roughly 30 smartphone apps, such as Crimespotting (browse interactive city-crime maps), Routesy (see real-time train schedules), and EcoFinder (locate the nearest recycling spots). But San Francisco's open-source stance doesn't stop at the city limits: In February, it launched an idea-sharing site, which blueprints everything from citywide health insurance to banning plastic bags. And in March, it released the API for its 311 city-service center. Boston; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C., have already pledged to adopt the new standard.

San Francisco Is The Least Wasteful City!

I love calling this place home....

Do you spend your days traipsing around San Francisco? Then congratulations, you live in America's least wasteful city according to a study conducted by Nalgene. The water bottle company questioned 3,750 people in America's 25 largest cities about their transportation use, waste, sustainability efforts, shopping habits, and reuse of items. Nalgene weighted the results to give preference to behaviors with an immediate and significant impact like driving less, recycling more, and reducing trash. The survey's index is based on a scoring system with a potential individual high score of 1930 and a low individual score of 193.

San Franciscans topped Nalgene's list thanks to widespread habits of recycling, turning off the water while brushing teeth, and only using cars for short trips. 86% of San Franciscans also reported that they live an "extremely" or "somewhat" eco-friendly lifestyle, though the definition of an eco-friendly lifestyle is not made clear in the study.

Atlanta came in at the other end of the spectrum, with residents ranking the worst at recycling, throwing out less than two bags of trash a week, using reusable containers, participating in sustainability programs, using energy-efficient lightbulbs, and borrowing books from the library.

Nalgene, of course, had its own motivation for conducting the study. The company recently came under fire for using Bisphenol A (BPA), an estrogen-like chemical, in its water bottles. Nalgene did eventually pull BPA-filled water bottles from the shelves, but the wastefulness study could be the company's attempt to get back in the good graces of eco-minded consumers.

The full list of America's least wasteful cities is below:
Rank City Weighted Score
1 San Francisco, CA 1025.45
2 New York City, NY 1004.01
3 Portland, OR 1001.66
4 Seattle, WA 985.03
5 Los Angeles, CA 960.46
6 Denver, CO 943.77
7 Minneapolis, MN 943.17
8 Washington, D.C. 941.81
9 Boston, MA 941.29
10 Philadelphia, PA 932.59
11 Chicago, IL 931.03
12 Baltimore, MD 927.26
13 Detroit, MI 911.59
14 Pittsburgh, PA 909.42
15 Orlando, FL 901.71
16 Cleveland, OH 900.77
17 Sacramento, CA 899.78
18 Miami, FL 898.49
19 Tampa, FL 896.01
20 Phoenix, AZ 887.48
21 St. Louis, MO 883.38
22 Houston, TX 879.16
23 Indianapolis, IN 872.75
24 Dallas, TX 860.60
25 Atlanta, GA 857.51

courtesy FastCompany

A Ping Pong Club In The Heart Of NYC?

What I would give for this joint to have a sister spot in San Fran...

SPiN New York...a private table tennis club.