We've been waiting for this one, imagining the day when we can pick up a product at the grocery store, scan the bar-code, and discover, for real, what the product is about. Sure, we can read the froofy language on the side of the can – quote Eddie Izzard – “This jam was made by groovy people, out of fruit that agreed to be in the jam in the first place.”{mosimage}

But we want to tap into an international database of consumer opinions with a boop of our bar-code scanner. Bill Tomlinson , a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, has made just such a database available. It's called “GreenScanner.”

Quoting Greenscanner: "This site is a public database of opinions about the environmental friendliness of various products. It has been designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices so you can use it at the food store."   Unfortunately it has not been designed to be easy on the eyes.  Be Careful.

Of course, there's no hundred-person-strong team of researchers finding all this information and typing it into the database (yet.) But Tomlinson feels that leaving it in the public's hands is probably a better idea anyway.

So now, standing in the aisle is no longer a passive process. We can discover information and, where there is no data, we can rate the products as we choose. It's cool technology, it's empowering individuals, and it's allowing us to more environmentally informed decisions. This...GreenScanner... is the essence of EcoGeek.

 Via: WorldChanging

{mosimage}The lessons we learn from nature...
Zach Barth has coded a simple package that can be used to create evolving algorithms. When introduced to a certain environment, the algorithm pays attention to what works best, randomly alters itself with Zach's code, and when something works out better, it keeps the change. The rapid response of computers makes this a much faster process than traditional evolution, making me fear for the superiority of the human race.

Luckily, these programs generally more interested in increasing WiFi signal strength than in multiplying endlessly until all of the resources of the world are consumed.