No zombies in Chernobyl, but plenty of other horrors

On Friday, the new horror flick CHERNOBYL DIARIES will no doubt have folks all over the country screaming and holding their hands over their eyes. Those of us old enough to remember the actual Chernobyl disaster, in which a nuclear reactor northeast of Kiev, Ukraine exploded, might take some comfort in this: the world’s worst nuclear disaster is far enough in the past that we can make scary movies about it. The nuclear industry might even embrace the film, as it allows them to figuratively pat us all on the head and remind us that radiation doesn’t really turn people into zombies.

Tatzoo: Wildlife advocacy meets tattooing

Got a tattoo of your favorite endangered species? If you’re my age, you’ll probably answer “No” with an annoyed look. However, if you’re a twentysomething, I may have you thinking “Heyyy – that’s a great idea!” Generation Y is into its tatts, as well as making the world a better place. If someone figured out a way to bring those two things together, they’d likely have plenty of people willing to pitch in.

Green tech finds: the clean development edition

If you can power your phone with sunlight, and carry water purification equipment on your back, is there any need for large-scale, dirty utilities in the developing world? Those ideas and more in this week’s green tech finds.

What’s your neighborhood’s Bike Score?: The five-year-old Walk Score online service, which rates walkability of neighborhoods, cities, and addresses, now offers a similar metric for bicyclists. The new Bike Score is available in ten cities (and, apparently, Minneapolis is more bike-friendly than Portland – who’da thunk it?). (via The Atlantic Cities)

Bicycling: a love story?

Most of us don’t give a lot of thought to the bicycle as an object of beauty: it’s purely functional, designed to get us from here to there. Any elements of design likely came from the marketing department. Describing it as “poetry in motion” seems, at best, clichè.

Texas playwright Tammy Melody Gomez dared to go there, though, expressing her love for her bicycle (her sole means of transportation) not merely in a few words, but in a full-length work of art. Her play She: Bike/Spoke/Love is, according to the author, “a love story about bikes and the people who ride them.” That emotion gets expressed through a variety of means: not only through typical dialog one expects from a stage play, but also through “poetry… freestyle and choreographed bicycling, video sequences, and a turntablist.” In the midst of all of this performance is a story line about a young woman and (you guessed it) her love for her bicycle.

DO I NEED THIS?: Pursuing happiness at the mall

Photographer and film maker Kate Schermerhorn seems obsessed with the notion of happiness: in addition to her previous documentary AFTER HAPPILY EVER AFTER (which, as you’ll probably guess, focused on marriage), she’s also the author of the photography book America’s Idea of a Good Time (which explores our “pursuit of happiness” broadly). If you’re going to dig into such a topic, and particularly its most American incarnations, you’re going to end up at the mall: we love acquiring stuff so much that we now refer to shopping as “retail therapy.” But how happy do the things we buy make us, and what are the larger costs associated with those moments of pleasure?

Green tech finds: the app-a-palooza edition

Planning to do some biking and walking in London, and want to get rewarded? Or spending time in Cambodia, and want to report illegal wildlife sales? We’ve got apps for that.