Place-first reporting on Latin America's digital ecology: data centers, networks, devices, and the sensors watching its biomes — traced to measurable energy, water, mineral, and waste flows.
On the front of the shirt, a black-and-white speckled rectangle sits where a notebook cover would sit on a desk. A dark binding strip runs down the left edge. Inside the white ruled label, the word COMPOSITION is printed above an outlined ghost and pumpkin. The garment is a printed notebook cover, not a physical …
Continue reading “The Composition Notebook Shirt: A Familiar Writing Surface Worn as a Costume”
By Rui Mendes · Dateline: São Paulo, Brazil The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in the flat, all-caps lettering of a hazard placard. Above the words sits a yellow caution triangle. Beside or beneath them, a hand is crossed out — a palm with a diagonal bar through it, the same visual grammar …
Continue reading “The Not Friendly Do Not Touch Shirt: A Boundary Written in Public-Sign Language”
Four root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion — sit in a band of soil, each with a face and a visible root system, and the words LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW wrap around them. That is the entire graphic on the Let’s Root For …
Continue reading “The Rooting Shirt: Reading Four Smiling Vegetables as a Work-Culture Diagram”
Material Flow of the Month | Dispatch №7 By Rui Mendes | Porto Velho, Rondônia — September 2026 Monitoring Station MD-14 hits you with sound before anything else. Not the forest — though the forest is there, a wall of cicadas, frog calls, and tinamou whistles dense enough to feel in your chest. The sound …
A sensor network for ecosystem health is a set of physical instruments left in place — water-level loggers, gas analyzers, acoustic recorders, camera traps, soil probes — that take repeated measurements where the ecosystem actually is, then move the readings somewhere a human can act on them. The vocabulary matters as much as the hardware. …
Lifecycle analysis — most people in the field write it as life cycle assessment, or LCA — is the standardized method for measuring what a product costs the environment across its entire existence: extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transport, years of use, and disposal. The framework is defined by ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, and …
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The dirt road to the Emas National Park field station cuts through cerrado sensu stricto—two-meter woody shrubs, twisted cork bark, grasses that crackle underfoot when the rains stop. Dr. Carla Holanda, a bioacoustics researcher affiliated with WWF-Brazil, unloads six acoustic monitoring units from the back of a Toyota Hilux. Each one is roughly the size …
Blockchain energy consumption is the electrical load required to run consensus mechanisms, mining hardware, cooling systems, and network infrastructure across public ledgers. The most cited example is Bitcoin’s proof-of-work network, but Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake in 2022 changed the comparison landscape. For readers of e-guana.net, the question is not whether blockchains use energy, but how …
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Planned obsolescence is the deliberate design of products with a limited useful life, pushing consumers toward replacement before the device has exhausted its technical or material value. In consumer electronics, this takes the form of glued-in batteries, software updates that slow older hardware, proprietary screws, discontinued security patches, and repair monopolies. For a blog focused …
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Citizen science apps are digital tools that let non-professionals record observations of plants, animals, water, soil, and weather, then share those records with researchers. In Latin America, these apps sit at the intersection of biodiversity monitoring, infrastructure expansion, and supply-chain pressure on biomes such as the Amazon basin, the Cerrado, and the Andean páramos. For …
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