Reader Eric Reuter points to a nifty visual art project with (naturally) a green twist: Chris Jordan of Seattle has put together a series of gigantic photo collages—er, I think the term is photo collages—that try to give some sort of graphical heft to those doomsday environmental statistics you always hear tossed around about humanity's overgorged consumption habits. So, for instance, this one shows "426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US each day":
The actual photo's 60" x 100"and, up close, you can make out the individual cell phones. Check out the whole exhibit here. And, if anyone's wondering what actually does happen to the 426,000 cell phones that got retired each day, here's a fantastic piece Jon Mooallem did on the subject earlier this year. (It's a complex story, but my favorite factoid: Half of all Americans, it turns out, just stick their obsolete phones in a desk drawer and leave them there.)
--Bradford Plumer