Yesterday in snowy Manhattan I fell on the sidewalk, like some kind of freaking invalid. Half of the sidewalk was covered in that blue-colored chemical salt. Since that burns my dogs’ paws, I was walking with them on the snow-covered half of the sidewalk—unaware that there was a layer of slippery ice underneath the powder. I went down like a soccer player trying to get a flag thrown. As my dogs stared at me with big eyes, I sat there in the snow, infomercial-style, thinking There’s got to be a better way! When it snows on my block, it’s up to whichever store owners are afraid of getting sued to shovel off the sidewalk in front of their businesses. Most do a feeble job and instead prefer to throw chemical salt. We residents then track this stuff inside our buildings, creating a disgusting slurry on our lobby floors. But there is a better way. Heated sidewalks! They have them in places like Iceland , Chicago , Utah , and in New York some businesses and luxury buildings pay top dollar to have them installed around their buildings. Couple years ago we even caught wind of a snow-melting footbridge in Sweden , and Holland has considered installing geothermal-powered snow-melting bike lanes. Geothermal power is probably what Iceland is using as well. But according to the links above, the heated sidewalks in use in Chicago and New York are fiendishly expensive to install and expensive to run, and probably not eco-friendly; some work by heating electrical wires beneath the sidewalks, others by running hot water through embedded pipes, like outdoor radiant-floor heating. Even more mind-blowing is that out in the suburbs, there are folks with heated driveways . Can you imagine? It snows, they flip a switch, and the driveway melts its own snow while the owner’s snowshovel sits untouched in a closet. Still, I know my building and my block will never get this technology. And as I wrote in the original post on the Swedish bridge, heated sidewalks would be impractical in New York, even aside from the cost. Because they’d be covered in sleeping homeless people. So for now, here’s my $17.29 solution:
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Snow-Melting, No-Shovel Sidewalks and Driveways Sound Amazing
An anonymous reader writes During his second expedition to Antarctica, British explorer Robert Scott—and most of his team—died from overexposure to the elements. Over 100 years after their deaths, an artifact from his journey has surfaced. New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust reports that they have found a notebook which tracked Scott’s last Terra Nova Expedition. According to the Antarctic Heritage Trust, the notebook belonged to a surgeon, photographer and zoologist named George Murray Levick, who accompanied Scott at the unfortunate Terra Nova expedition. Executive Director Nigel Watson said, “It’s an exciting find. The notebook is a missing part of the official expedition record. After spending seven years conserving Scott’s last expedition building and collection, we are delighted to still be finding new artifacts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
First time accepted submitter noahfecks writes “After the Linux 3.11 kernel was codenamed ‘Linux for Workgroups’ in memory of Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Linus Torvalds is using ‘Suicidal Squirrel’ as the Linux 3.12 kernel codename.” Seems only fitting. (The list of kernel names should reflect this soon.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.