When called on to babysit, I’ve found it helpful, indeed necessary, to have a good supply of felt tips, paper and crayons. The crayons in particular evoke a certain nostalgia. Maybe it’s the pleasing feel of them, the spectrum of colours, or their distinctive, familiar smell.

Here are some things I didn’t know about them. 

In the last 98 years, more than 100 billion Crayola crayons have been made.

And,

The average child in the United States will wear down 730 crayons by his 10th birthday. Kids, ages 2-8, spend an average of 28 minutes each day colouring. Combined, children in the US spend 6.3 billion hours colouring annually.

And,

According to a Yale University study, the scent of Crayola crayons is among the 20 most recognisable to American adults. Coffee and peanut butter are 1 and 2.

An illustrated index of Crayola colours, in alphabetical and historical orders, can be found here. There is, of course, a Virtual Museum of Crayon Collecting, with a section devoted to Crayola products and a helpful essay on how to display your collection of crayon boxes. Some, like Pete Goldlust, prefer to carve their crayons.

See also: The Thrill of Pencils and The Thrill of Carpeting.

Writing on the Guardian’s eco-blog – titled, somewhat presumptuously, Ethical Living – Adharanand Finn touches on another great moral conundrum of our time. 

If you take a bicycle, one of the greenest forms of transport available, and put an electric motor on it, is it still green?

The answer, apparently, is yes.

In the battle to get commuters out of their cars, electric bikes are regularly cited as an eco-option, particularly for those who live too far away from work to cycle, or those with injuries or fitness problems, or those who are just too lazy to cycle. They also get rid of the excuse that you don’t cycle because you don’t want to arrive at work dripping with sweat. One enthusiast even suggested to me that the energy saved by not showering cancels out the energy used to power the bike, making it just as green as regular cycling.

A comforting thought for our cyclist’s friends and colleagues. Sadly, Mr Finn’s 13-mile test ride didn’t go terribly well.

After a while, however, as the motor began to lose its charge, the bike began to struggle. Hills needed pedalling up, and were almost as much effort as on a normal bike – the now feeble pull of the motor being virtually cancelled out by the added weight of the bike. I wouldn’t want to get caught out and about with a flat battery. By the end I was sweating.

Which brings us to the thorny matter of deodorant and the agonies of making the most Gaia-friendly choice. Thankfully, there are numerous eco-conscious personal hygiene products to fret over, including hemp seed oil and, perhaps surprisingly, bicarbonate of soda, which is applied either by hand or with a brush and can be bought by the kilo. However, the most remarkable product is almost certainly Dr Mist, which “flushes out toxins” while healing minor flesh wounds and is described by its makers as “a concept to respect human self-esteem.”

Mr Finn has previously wrestled with the cultivation of a green CV and such pressing moral questions as Are Ceramic Cups Really More Ethical Than Disposables?

As regular readers will know, the Guardian has long been a home to unpleasant political appetites and revolting apologia for murderous idealists of an approved political stripe. The most recent example, though by no means the most dramatic, comes from Peter Tatchell, who recalls, a little too fondly, his youthful romance with Maoism:

In response to the Australian media’s deranged and often racist anti-Chinese propaganda, a few of us organised a ‘Be Kind to Mao Month’, where we promoted the ‘good’ aspects of the red guards’ rebellion against what we saw as the privileged, arrogant and authoritarian communist elite in Beijing.

Over at the Joy of Curmudgeonry, Deogolwulf shares a few thoughts:

Now, I have little interest in what Mr Tatchell’s youthful sympathies were, or in what they are now, still less in what claims he might make for the purity of his intentions. Another political fantasist to add to the pile makes little difference. What interests me is how the ideal of communism has enjoyed so charmed a life in the West, eking out a fanciful existence in the heads of such men, wherein it has remained unsullied by the reality of its application or even of its theoretical expression…

But how is it that anyone can be so brazen as to claim compassion as the very basis of his politics, and yet not bother to find out whether those politics might actually be good for others? To advocate a scheme for the whole of society, and to have made little effort to find out what effects it might have, other than that it makes one feel warm inside, is not to show compassion for others, but rather to show passion for oneself. Here, ignorance may be a defence, though not of any claim to compassion.

Indeed. And there’s something almost surreal about one-time enthusiasts of a blueprint for violation and horror speaking of their former affiliations as if they were simply fashion gaffes or a taste for embarrassing pop music.

The whole thing.

Takeshi Miyakawa designs things. Like this bureau, for instance. 

Charge your phone with a solar-powered bra. // The tobacco-free rechargeable cigarette. // Lovely, toxic nudibranchs. (h/t, io9.) // Enduring hardship in a darker age. // Joshua Hoffine’s nightmares. // Turkey’s evil Spider-Man. He’s evil, and cheap. // The museum of black superheroes. // Iron Man titles. // Iron Man fan. // Crotch weapons. More. // The barbecue sword. // Abandoned Russian tank base. // Robot oddments. // BSG: Guess What’s Coming to Dinner? // Pixelporn. (sfw.) // Brian Micklethwaite on an age of political landslides. // Norman Geras on the Guardian’s fondness for Hamas. // WorldWide Telescope™. // Lunch Inside the 12 Galaxies. (h/t, Candice.) // James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed. Western civilisation and the habit of invention. (h/t, Maggie’s Farm.) // Self-balancing electric unicycle. // The a.frame.fix concept bike. Or the Strida, which folds. // Vintage broadcast microphones. (h/t, Coudal.) // Music and Life. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Astrud Gilberto.