Month: March 2013

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tidbititis

all customers are mayors

▶ Cities Weigh Taking Electricity Business From Private Utilities ◀

stand up and bill like a utility

▶ States look to a “tire tax” to have you pay for the miles you drive. http://www.enotrans.org/eno-brief/transportation-as-utility ← the web often loses pieces of itself

do not plant trees

▶ Increased planting of trees such as eucalyptus, willow and poplar near urban areas for biofuel can lead to human deaths due to increased ozone inhalation.

shake that thang

▶ Solid gold can be deposited in Earth’s crust “almost instantaneously during earthquakes“

how to get charisma

▶ Power & Warmth & Toes: People actually learn charisma. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/03/interview-olivia-teaches-charismatic/

the p. u. patent

▶ Pine Oil repels mosquitoes more effectively than DEET
http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/patents/patents.htm?serialnum=11777795 and repels ticks as effectively as DEET

power grid telecom mesh

▶ Networks are as important as your country.
https://commotionwireless.net/blog 

well, don’t take it from me.

▶ Corporations told that all their computers have been hacked. http://blog.amitaietzioni.org/2013/03/cyberwar-and-the-private-sector.html
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we so orthodox radical silent

Jason Pontin at MIT declares what cannot be said in polite society in 2013: 

“The non-legal constraints upon free speech are real and, in many cases, justifiable. The number and range of ideas about which I may not speak or write and still hope to be employed or loved are large and various, and continually expanding. In the middle-class, heterosexual, educated-but-essentially-philistine milieux of knowledge workers in Boston, the Bay Area, Seattle, New York, Washington DC, and London such unmentionable ideas include belief in innate racial differences or the superiority of men at any mental activity; the sexual attractiveness of young adults or the delights of sadomasochism; the inalienable property or privacy rights of corporations and the State; and the justice of the Confederacy’s cause or of a Jewish state. Without opprobrium, I cannot say that fat people are disgusting gluttons or transsexuals fetishistic self-mutilators. I may not write that marriage is a grim gulag or children boring barbarians. Under no circumstances may I express the fugitive thought that the only things other than our fellow humans that matter at all are novels, poems, plays, paintings, and sonatas, and a handful of very beautiful mathematical proofs, scientific theories, and computer programs. More generally, it is unacceptable to speak or write about many ordinary events in human life, including abortions, disease, depression, the experiences of real poverty or wealth, or how our loved ones actually die. Without specifying, I have believed a few of these ideas, and experienced most of those events, but I cannot be candid.”

free.speech

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that morning, that night

 

When I hear them call
in the morning, before
I am quite awake,
my bed is already traveling
the daily rainbow,
the arc toward evening;
and the birds, leading
their own discreet lives
of hunger and watchfulness,
are with me all the way,
always a little ahead of me
in the long-practiced manner
of unobtrusive guides.

By the time I arrive at evening,
they have just settled down to rest;
already invisible, they are turning
into the dreamwork of trees;
and all of us together —
myself and the purple finches,
the rusty blackbirds,
the ruby cardinals,
and the white-throated sparrows
with their liquid voices —
ride the dark curve of the earth
toward daylight, which they announce
from their high lookouts
before dawn has quite broken for me.

–Lisel Mueller, “Why I Need the Birds”

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baseline citizenry

There’s too much to learn to do anything other than learn. Sometimes I’m imagining zero spending for everything we can cull, raw elimination of all adornment, hallways but no hotel lobbies, dimming all street lights, do not repair paint on walls, in order to impose education to history’s new top. States were spending $8500 per college student, now it’s $5500. And a pittance dribbles to ubiquitous floaters or dropouts. What about $30,000? $50,000, $100,000? Hold on! The US already spends enough on aid to cover tuition of every college student in the country. Why isn’t college free? You see? I’m not crazy. This study asserts we can triple our GDP; that lousy learning means we’re losing more than $50trillion….

Will any society survive or prosper until the first thing we are doing is learning? Ahhh, he breathes, a fleeting thought.