Month: July 2007

Sixty percent of the world’s fresh water is used for irrigation. An important trend in managing diminishing freshwater supplies as well as sustaining crop productivity is automating irrigation control.

Farms will be the first to feel the heat from global warming. Crops requiring irrigation will also require innovation to better control overwatering or underwatering.

link
constantly take the temperature of the plants and soil around them. Bluetooth enables the sensors to wirelessly transmit data back to the base station, which then instructs individual sprinkler heads exactly how much water to dole out.

The new system washes away one of the biggest challenges facing irrigators: the endless variation in soil types that can exist across a field.

Take, for instance, clay and sandy soils, which have nearly opposite behaviors: one practically repels water, while the other sucks it in readily. But in a given field, these soils may be close neighbors, leading to an inevitable underwatering or overwatering scenario.

However, Evans and Kim’s system treats a field not as a “one-size-fits-all” soil zone, but as a collection of smaller, individual plots, each with its own set of organic idiosyncrasies.

Constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein states:

“Most important thing for the American people to know is that the great genius of the founding fathers, their revolutionary idea, with the chief mission of the state is to make you and them free to pursue their ambitions and faculties. Not to build empires, not to aggrandize government. That’s the mission of the state, to make them free, chart their own destiny. And the burden is on the government to try to understand why that freedom has to be curtailed for a security purpose or otherwise.”

Are we using a disabled internet?
It’s time to write letters to everybody!
The post at Raw Feed announced: World’s Fastest Broadband.

A 75-year-old woman in Sweden who has never owned a computer before now has the world’s fastest home internet connection — a whopping 40 Gigabits per second.

A demo of a residential fiber installation in Sweden is able to deliver 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously and download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.

The secret behind Sigbritt’s ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders. Peter Löthberg, now at Cisco, said he wanted to show how you can build a low price, high capacity line over long distances. “I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has.”

From dreamFlesh from an Anthropik.com post ’In Praise of Laziness‘ 

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions—then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

We’re overwhelmed with chain store production and the mediocrity they propel. Seth Godin fashions these words to help us steer our way toward a satisfying culture.

“Overhauling a single example of what you do is almost always a better way to spend your time than in trying to double the number of places you do what you do.”

We are called to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of intuition, common sense and other deceits of this nature.

Indeed, those who pit science against sacred texts or science against art do so in error.

Respective boundaries of autonomy aside, everything forms a part of the same prodigious struggle. The pursuit of the real which, in a sense, is also the pursuit of the absolute. The absolute that is intuited, though it remains inaccessible.

A fusion of fields as was seen in the Renaissance is certainly no longer possible; the mountain of specialization has grown too high. However, one might demand that the different fields of knowledge communicate with one another and without undermining each other. – Salvador Pániker

This portrait of Eddie Lawrence on his 1950s LP cover speaks for today’s edgy social climate.

“The whole world’s eating the same skinless frankfurter.

“The whole world’s patching up the same pair of faded blue jeans.

“Is that what’s bothering you, bunkie?

“The whole world’s pulling the same rayon rip cord.”

Eddie Lawrence – a beat guru in a smoky coffeehouse – will always be best remembered for his hit 1956 comedy recording of “The Old Philosopher” and perhaps it’s many follow-ups. [wiki]

Found at a wise and wonderful ephemera site, I’m Learning To Share!, by an ex-DJ of Berkeley’s KALX and a dedicated web curator.

Aaghhh!! You’re a bad, bad person for not taking proper care of these amazing original albums from the past! Are you even ashamed??

…mutter, gripe, wheeze… why i oughta… mutter, mutter… if it was ME… shuffle, mutter… piece of my mind, grumble… Okay, back to work…

So what the world needs now? A jazzy philosopher.

Adages! Adages!

Listen to: Eddie Lawrence – The Visitor (play & download)

Found at neatorama,
“Human Footprint compiled hundreds of statistics of what an average human being in the Western world will consume/do in a lifetime.”

The Human Footprint | Story from Telegraph | Cups of tea from the Daily Mail

Vice-President Dick Cheney was personally responsible for American policies that subjected terrorist suspects to cruelty and denied them the right to a fair trial. [link]

Vice-President Cheney went behind the backs of the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to deny foreign terrorist suspects access to a court.

In a private dinner with President Bush, Mr Cheney presented him with an order written by his own lawyer, David Addington, denying suspects a civilian trial or a court martial and ordering that they could be confined indefinitely without charge.

Within an hour of the meal, the document had been signed by the president, having been whisked straight to his desk on Vice-President Cheney’s orders, without being seen by senior White House staff. Miss Rice was described as “incensed” and when Mr Powell learnt of the decision from television news he snapped: “What the hell just happened?”

Mr Cheney then ordered his legal team secretly to draw up orders for intelligence agencies to intercept letters, telephone calls and electronic communications to and from America, without a warrant – something forbidden by federal law since 1978.

He personally commissioned legal opinions that would maintain a ban on torture but permit “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation methods.

Mr Cheney is accused of continuing to try to bypass international law.

The revelations paint a picture of a man obsessed by secrecy and the accumulation of power.

Standing in line with neither shoes nor dignity, here’s a thought:

Only 17 countries currently systematically check the passports of visitors against a global database that contains 7 million stolen passport numbers.

Switzerland checks the database 300,000 times per month to achieve 100 hits on stolen or lost passports. Britain checks the database only 30 times; the USA, only 80.

Declaring that a sheet of paper is a prison, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext.

In this interview, the BBC asks:

“Could you take me back to your original ideas around how you might view text in new ways and when that was?”

Common phrases on a t-shirt might help speed translations.

Might not.

[via]

“The Skier”

Wiki says: …(allegedly) used to measure lunacy in an asylum; depending on how long it took the subject to see why it is funny.

neat-O-rama provides these links:
Link NYT login
Link to Wikipedia

We are all better artists than we realize. – Nietszche

The aim of his work, he tells us several times, is to destroy the rationalization of the Revenge motive, to lay bare every hidden resentment in every philosophy that provides justifications for intolerance and hatred.

says Robert Anton Wilson:

“The Buddhists seem to be pretty hip in saying that if you regard what remains as One (the Hindic Atman, etc.), you have not gone far enough. If you go far enough, they say, you will see that the One also implodes, and only Void remains.

“That is all good enough, for c.400 B.C., but the void never seemed quite the right metaphor to me. I think Nietzsche is more contemporary by saying that what remains is Chaos, infinite meaning in infinite flux, and Will to Power, the spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but just the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos.

“The existentialists know that we create ourselves, but Nietzsche knows that we create our world, too, “We are all better artists than we realize”.
…
“The existentialists whine, mutter and complain.
Nietzsche laughs, jokes, flashes with wit and capers like a clown.”
…
Our values. Infinite possibilities.

the thunder of beauty
not memories
not dreams

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“There is no such thing as nature untainted by people”, writes Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

“Protecting nature through national and state parks has only domesticated these regions.

“Recreational use of wilderness land has increased 10 times in the past 40 years. Half of all wilderness areas are within a day’s drive of America’s 30 largest cities.

“Half of the world’s surface area is used for crops or grazing. More than half of all forests have been lost to land conversion. Six times as much water is held in artificial storage worldwide as is free-flowing.

“Facing this reality should change the scientific focus of environmental science.” [story, oops, link broken at PhysOrg. Peter Kareiva is the Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy]

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Extra graphics to help visualize our world’s remaining wilderness areas, the first from Conservation International and the second from the 2004 Living Planet Report at WWF.

We love life here every instant.

Every second is so good that it would knock you unconscious had your mind not been strengthened beforehand.

My contemporaries and I bear witness, and we are requesting your aid.
Please, help us come into existence! Please, join us!

Whether this tremendous possibility becomes a reality depends on your actions. If your empathy can perceive at least the outlines of the vision I am describing, then your ingenuity will find a way to make it real.

Human life, at its best, is fantastic.
I’m asking you to create something even greater.
Life that is truly humane.

original link: http://www.nickbostrom.com/utopia.html

Fast Company: Message in a Bottle

Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence.

We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon.

Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.

Anil Dash adds:

It’s worth reiterating that Aquafina and Dasani are just tap water. There’s nothing wrong with that, since tap water is very good water — it’s just not worth paying 500 times as much for. I don’t have any argument against the convenience factor, either, since it makes perfect sense to take water with you when you’re on the go. You’ll just get something that’s got less bacteria and generally better quality if you fill your bottle from your tap.

I’d encourage everybody to take a look at the Fast Company article — it makes it clear that the costs of bottled water, aside from its extraordinarily expensive price, are simply not worth it.

Schneier on Security
Many people — along with our politicians and press — believe that al Qaeda is out to kill us all.

This paper [pdf] examines this belief: where it came from, how it manifested itself, and why it is wrong. This study analyzes the political plights of twenty-eight terrorist groups — the complete list of foreign terrorist organizations as designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001.

Correspondent inference theory can explain not only why terrorist campaigns rarely work, but also perhaps why counterterrorism campaigns tend to breed even more terrorism. – Max Abrahms

I had planned to ignore the entire matter until caught by the cadence of this rant.

So there you have it. Bush shrugs and smirks and then commutes the easy soft-focus sit-on-your-ass-all-day-and-knit white-collar prison sentence of a hollow political lackey who, in turn, took a bullet for his sneering mafia thug of a boss, Dick Cheney, who in turn was complicit (along with lead flying monkey Karl Rove) in the appallingly illegal outing of a CIA operative, which itself was a tiny but particularly nasty link in the giant chain of lies and deceptions undertaken to lead our wary and tattered nation into an unwinnable impossible costly brutally violent war that will now last, if current estimates are correct, until the goddamn sun explodes.

You have to laugh. You have to laugh because if you do not laugh you will likely be overcome by a mad desire to stab yourself in the eye with a sharp feral cat and/or shoot yourself in the toe with a high-powered staple gun, over and over again, all while tearing out pages of the United States Constitution and crumpling them into tiny little balls and hurling them into the smoldering firepit of who-the-hell-cares as you shiver in the corner and swig from a bottle of Knob Creek and wail at the moon. Or maybe that’s just me.

But really,

Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column at the SF Chronicle

It’s time to know what’s in pet food.

Pet food formulator Dr. Lisa Newman and Mike Adams of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center have analyzed the ingredients of 448 popular pet food products sold in the United States – 570 ingredients.

“As you view these lists, keep in mind that most popular pet food products are made with extremely poor quality ingredients. As recent pet food scares have clearly demonstrated, pet food is a dumping ground for meat byproducts unfit for human consumption.

“Even many so-called “natural” or “premium” pet food products are made with ingredients of dubious quality. The pet food industry, by and large, is driven solely by profit, and most pet food manufacturers source the cheapest possible ingredients to put into their products, regardless of the detrimental health consequences on pets.

“The huge rise in diabetes and cancer in dogs and cats over the last two decades, for example, is almost entirely due to the toxic ingredients commonly used in pet food and pet treats.”

Do not be fooled by claims of “natural” or “wholesome” on pet food product packaging.

Virtually any pet food product can claim to be “natural,” even ones that use synthetic petrochemicals that cause cancer.

There is virtually no effective regulation of pet food health claims…

This is a somewhat unwieldy posting. The ‘list’ ranks ingredients and provides a simple explanation. It seems to be an excellent reference to cross-check and learn about labels. This work certainly points out the need to pressure manufacturers to improve their products, to improve compliance standards and disclosure requirements, and to hold firms liable for damage and costs.

[All About Feed]

A new type of career may be on the horizon that integrates sustainability into the business strategy of an organization.

That person’s main responsibility needs to be capacity building so that the whole institution can learn to be more sustainable and can be self-organizing while it changes.

Environmental management has grown over the years and can become a part of a organization’s strategic objectives.

Harvard Green Campus Initiative

link to World is Green

“retired weapons“

A design project to help the 21st Century toward an era of dialogue and peace.

[via Labour of Heart]

It’s not for me to say. I really do not have the facts. Yet for those not speaking, one young man says:

I am a young muslim living in the UK I am ashamed and vey very angry with these Fanatics/Extremists. I would like to apologise and say how sorry I am to be co-religionist with these guys. I went to Pakistan when I was 17 and came back when I was 22. I been to a (Madrassa 2 years), Islamic University 3 Years. After completing my studies I went to Saudi Arabia for the Umrah(small Pilgrimage) I was shocked when I bought books because they taught hatred towards Jews and Christians. I was taught mainstream Islam which is traditional, Sufism Love, poetry, Music, integration, assimilation of other cultures. Saudi Arabia Unfortunately is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism they teach hatred, there form of islam is Wahabbism/Salafism they believe I am not a muslim! and 95% of muslims are not muslim! they believe shia are not muslim! thats why you got them killing shias in Iraq they have no tolerance of mainstream Islam or other religions. They probably hate Jews because of Israel! I got a lot of Jewish friends who are like me and you. Osama Bin Laden is from this school of Wahabism look dude who made him a scholar? he has no authority to call for Jihad he is not a scholar he is a Yo Yo first he was hedonistic then he became an extremist preaching hatred. We need the world Governments to confront Saudi Arabia regarding their version of Islam before its too late. If any readers who are young muslims please do not think I am crazy I am telling you the truth Bin Laden and his henchmen have no Authority to declare fatwas, They are misguided and are exploiting Islam for political purposes the entire muslim faith has been hijacked. There is no justification or reasoning behind suicide bombings. World needs to sort out the mess in Middle East. State Torture should be banned in all countries especially in the Middle East it radicalises people. Muslims need to wake up. Posted by Mohammed Suleiman on July 1, 2007

Way down the comment thread… Speaker’s Corner, “What can be done to make our country safer from terrorism?”

Pins of perfection:

‘I’m perfect’ was Leonie Janssen’s graduation project at the Design Academy in Eindhoven last year.

Leonie has a fascination with the human body, especially with all the small imperfections and differences between our bodies, so… fat legs, thin waist, big breasts, broad hips, round bellies (anything sound vaguely familiar…)

…unlike many other designs that like us to believe there is something as a ‘perfect image’, Leonie wants us to see that there are many other possibilities than this so-called perfect image… so she translated her pictograms into products… the beauty of different proportions! Check out her website to read more about the I’m perfect concept

Link from bloesem.blog

Thomas Jefferson:

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights.

Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself.

Erecting the ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

Many people are aware that Bush is “the most aggressively religious president in American History, but most remain without a clue to what this actually means.