Women In Art

This is a beautiful, kind of hypnotic video of women in art throughout the ages. Really worth watching (via Casting Out Into the Deep).

Walking neighborhoods

Sci-fi author Orson Scott Card has some great ideas about building "walking neighborhoods" (via Dom Bettinelli). I think that this concept could be absolutely huge in terms of improving the daily happiness of women who stay at home. As I've said a thousand times, it's totally unnatural and mentally wearying for moms and their kids to be cooped up in an isolated house all the time -- it's hard on the moms and their children. I think these sorts of neighborhoods would also have a lower turnover rate, giving people the opportunity to really know their neighbors and not feel like they're surrounded by strangers all the time.

One thing I really like about this article is that Card offers specific, concrete suggestions for how to make this a reality. He notes that the idea would not work without a neighborhood store (I agree), and has some interesting thoughts on how that could work economically in the era of the Super Wal Mart:

Mixed-use neighborhoods need grocery stores or they will not work.

The trouble is, with cars ruling our lives, the giant supergroceries make us drive farther and farther because they offer a better selection at a competitive price. Nobody wants to return to the tiny corner grocery.

We don't have to. We already have all the pieces in place for a new retail model that will affect, not just grocery stores, but most retail outlets.

Computers make it possible.

At the moment, grocery stores are doing almost nothing with the data they collect using their frequent shopper cards. They know which stores we shop at and what we buy. But they still don't use that information to tailor their grocery stores to fit the neighborhood and the shoppers.

Idiotically, they still make decisions about what to stock based on the big numbers, as if they were still doing their figures on paper with quill pens. They could develop just-enough stocking practices that would allow small neighborhood stores to stock only what they actually sell to regular customers, plus a little more of the most popular items for walk-in trade.

They could make special-ordering quick and easy, using the internet, so that customers can get extra quantities for special occasions. The profitable corner grocery is easily within our reach.

Whether or not these particular suggestions are perfect, I think he's really onto something here. If a walking neighborhood opened in my area I'd start packing my boxes to move in tomorrow.