Category: interesting

Sometimes it’s good just to spill the beans.

We are now in one of the most significant periods of cultural and technological change in history, probably greater in scope than those associated with Newton and Einstein.

Developments in quantum mechanics are leading to quantum computers that gain their prodigious power through harnessing their siblings throughout the multiverse.

Biotech and genetic engineering are bringing about new species and perhaps the alteration of homo sapiens.

Materials engineering and nanotechnology are altering the object we use and how they are made.

Communications technologies promise that eventually everything can be connected to everything.

Cosmologists place us in ever expanding infinities of multiple universes.

And individuals will have unprecedented opportunities for education, knowledge and achievement and the prospect of cognitive powers we cannot yet imagine.

From Future Feeder’s longer post discussing Computational Architecture

The ribbed vault was not just a structural technique, but also a means of putting the human soul in touch with God. Perspective was not just a means of organizing pictorial space, but also a means of asserting the human observer. Industrial materials were not just economical, but also a means of finding the human place in a democratic world.

The next time you find yourself lost in a fog of boredom during an endless, rainy Sunday afternoon, consider this new research by John Eastwood and colleagues, showing boredom has little to do with lack of external stimulation and everything to do with being out of touch with our emotions.

Two hundred and four undergrads completed questionnaires about their susceptibility to boredom, and about their emotions, including questions on describing feelings and being externally focused.

Researchers suggest treating boredom as an opportunity to “discover the possibility and content of one’s desires”.
read the full story…

1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
2. Don’t worry about what people think; they don’t do it very often.
3. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than standing in a garage makes you a car.
4. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
5. If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you’ve never tried before.
6. My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.
7. Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
8. A person, who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention! It never fails.)
9. For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
10. If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.
11. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.
12. A conscience is what hurts when all of your other parts feel so good.
13. Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.
14. Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.
15. No man has ever been shot while doing the dishes.
16. A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.
17. Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.
18. Opportunities always look bigger after they have passed.
19. Junk is something you’ve kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.
20. There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
21. Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
22. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
23. Thou shalt not weigh more than thy refrigerator.
24. Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world.
25. It ain’t the jeans that make your butt look fat.
26. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”
27. There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
28. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
29. You should not confuse your career with your life.
30. Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.>
31. Never lick a steak knife.
32. The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.
33. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.
34. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
35. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.
36. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.
37. Your friends love you anyway.
38. Thought for the day: Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.
39: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

via bits and pieces

Few ecologists have studied the ways in which species make life easier for their neighbours.

“People weren’t really looking at the big picture of why a group of species is found together. Often it’s because of the positive effect of some other species,” says Andrew Altieri, a marine biologist at Northeastern University.

A “foundation” species can underpin an entire ecosystem by creating a suitable habitat for all the other species that live there.

“There are not just facilitators and species that get facilitated. There are facilitators of facilitators.” Each link in the chain may be essential to the survival of the whole system.

from New Scientist, When co-operation is the key to survival

In this forum edited by Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters, experts discuss the politics of food, and how it may be poisoning our bodies and our planet.

She writes,

“It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825 when he wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that “the destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.”

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Alice Waters became instantly popular in Berkeley when she served fresh herbs, salads and vegetables, along with farm-raised poultry, lamb, pork and beef, hand-made baking and local creams and cheese. At first, she developed a route of farms to gather her items, grew many in friendly plots all around the neighborhoods, and took delivery from farmers driving to town. She revived what had been almost buried under industrial food chainstores. She showed us that local fresh quality is both truly wonderful and available.

About the same time I was operating a similar farm route, a “food conspiracy” in Marin County officially called the Family Food Co-op.

Twice a week, two or three pickups would circle the Bay Area for bundles of produce, cured meats and cheeses, and boxes of fruit and juices. Some farmers were surprised that we would appear down the driveway, eager to load as much as they could provide.

We were “exposed” in the newspaper as un-American hippy socialists bypassing the retail stores! We were merely looking for good value and good stuff. With the help of a local seminary, we carried on under the umbrella of a big church group helping a few hundred families save money and eat well.

Many folks cross the farmer’s gate. And like many cities, the Bay Area has farmers coming to market and publishes maps along various Farm Trails for tasting and sightseeing.

Supermarkets are improving quality and selection — even if it seems to be taking so-o-o long.

Alan Kay’s most frequently quoted statement is

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

While I was working with Anson Bilger over several years on pre-fab housing and the Bilger Monorail, one day he told me a pretty good story.

I had written a two page synopsis of an industrial manufacturing proposal. He read it. He said he liked it. And then he said, “Reminds of a labor of love I began in the 1940s…”

Anson tells a story about shrinking the complex into the simple.

“I was asked to Washington D.C. to deliver my DEW line radar concept to a General of the Chiefs of Staff. Humbled, I knew I would need time to write a good report. I left home a day early after I gathered up my little Remington typewriter and searched for some sheets of paper. Paper was rationed during the war and in short supply so I found only two legal size sheets.

When I arrived in Washington, I rented a small hotel room, with a small bed, a chair and, I’ll never forget, one coat hook on the door. I put the typwriter on the bed, pulled up the chair and started drafting my ideas on one sheet. I was proud to get the story on one side of the other piece of paper and down about half the back side. I carefully folded the sheet and placed it in my coat pocket.

The next morning an olive green Army Chevy arrived to pick me up. We drove up a long driveway to a large house with white columns and wide front steps, and blackout curtains. There were many military folks getting out of Chevy’s, jeeps and limos. I sheepishly followed the Colonel accompanying me.

The Colonel greeted a couple officers and then parked me along a wall inside and asked if I could give him my report to show to the General.

After a few minutes he came up to me and asked, “The General is pretty busy. Could you rewrite this onto half a page?!” And that’s how I learned to write a business plan.

What was the DEW line?

A continuous radar line above the arctic circle, from far western Alaska to eastern Canada and Greenland.

There are many people today that have never heard of the DEW line and a few more that have heard of it but still don’t know what it is, or was.

The DEW line — Distant Early Warning line — was a series of radar stations built above the Arctic Circle during the early years of the Cold War.

The DEW line was a deterrent.
After WW II was over the United States, and what in those days was the USSR, were becoming belligerent with each other. Over succeeding years, this became the Cold War. The Cold War, in essence, was both sides intimating “You use the atom bomb on us, we’ll use the atom bomb on you,” keeping everyone continually on their toes. Either or both sides could have done just that, calling it a peace policy of ‘mutual assured destruction’.

Blind from the North
In that era the blind side of the United States was from the North. If an enemy came at us from that direction we might not be able to detect them soon enough to defend ourselves. The polar north in those days was very desolate with no lookout stations covering this vast territory.

An early warning plan swung into action February 15, 1954, when President Eisenhower signed the bill approving the construction of the radar domes, a low altitude radar mast and huge radio cones to send warning alerts toward the mainland.

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) line was born

• 25,000 people had a direct hand in building the DEW Line.
• Everything in and out of the Ice Cap was flown in the C130.
• Reportedly, it was the most expensive single military project up to that time.

Links:
http://www.dewline.org/
http://www.lswilson.ca/dewline.htm

In the USA,
3 million men,
6 million women,
three times or more each week,
exhibit the most common eating disorder.

Binge Eating,
uncontrolled eating,
well past the point of being full.

National Census of Eating Disorders

Ethanol attracts water and other chemicals,
so it can’t be sent through the long-established pipelines.

It must be shipped in tanks. Truck or rail. Ethanol is straining railroads already taxed by shipments of coal, containers and grain. [subscriber story at the Wall Street Journal]

Ethanol demand brings big profit but,

• all freight costs will increase
• railroads are spending billions
• 425000 rail carloads of ethanol per year
• add over 100 million tons of rail capacity
• double the railhead capacity that exists today
• cost to move by rail averages 4 to 5 cents per gallon
• may outstrip capacity to build rail cars, barges and storage
• costs twice as much per gallon of ethanol to ship corn by rail
• Horrendously congested, one-third of the country’s rail cargo passes through Chicago, the hub for the corn states. Freight may be delayed two days or more.

Who’s singing the “intermodal multinodal yodel” !?!

More capacity struggles to come:

water for corn, 1,200,000 gpd,
water capacity, 300,000 gpd,
water peak demand, unknown

My thought:
We will not convert our nation to ethanol. The task is too great. But blending ethanol reduces the demand for crude oil and increases gasoline supply for a given refining capacity. We will likely divert crude oil demand, and do the best we can.

Exxon just announced the biggest profit in American corporate history.

At any price on the tanker, Exxon delivers $25 of net profit per barrel, while Shell generates $20.

Gasoline and fossil fuels are a serious wound to our air, earth’s species, our stability, and our pocket.

Yet Exxon’s $39.5 billion is a small pinch of the cost of war. The War in Iraq has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $400 billion since the March 2003 invasion, and the president’s new budget seeks another quarter of a trillion dollars over the next two years.

Neither bears nor bulls can offer clues about what we must decide will be our better future.

We will divide resources across new tasks and direct our duty into new horizons.

We will have a different world soon. We all sense it’s needed.

We will shake another yolk of silly dominance and engage each other in better ways.

It’s in the hand we offer and the resolve we give each other.

Rising uric acid probably makes our minds slow down as we age.

Johns Hopkins and Yale university medical schools have found that a simple blood test to measure uric acid, a measure of kidney function, might reveal a risk factor for cognitive problems in old age. The findings appear in the January issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

This Kidney Watch Alert found at FuturePundit

Which biofuels are truly environmentally sound?

Politicians in many countries are rethinking the billions of dollars in subsidies that have indiscriminately supported the spread of all of these supposedly “eco- friendly” fuels for use in power vehicles and factories.

The 2003 European Union Biofuels Directive which demands that all member states aim to have 5.75 percent of transportation fueled by biofuel in 2010 is now under review.

“If you make biofuels properly, you will reduce greenhouse emissions… You can end up with a 90 percent reduction compared to fossil fuels — or a 20 percent increase.”

On the surface, the environmental equation that supports biofuels is simple:

Since they are derived from plants,
biofuels absorb carbon while they are grown
and release it when they are burned.

In theory that neutralizes their emissions.

But rainforests that are stripped to plant biofuel crops cause an increase in carbon emissions.

The industry [is being] promoted long before there [is] adequate research….

Biofuels should not automatically be classed as ‘renewable energy’.

Story at International Herald Tribune

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Pushing bushels. Corn prices rising!

tortilla protest

Tens of thousands of people have marched through Mexico City in a protest against the rising price of tortillas.

The price of the flat corn bread, the main source of calories for many poor Mexicans, recently rose by over 400%.

Seeking to comprehend the changing structure of power and authority:

We are in the midst of a revolution. Some will call this revolution globalisation. Others will call it the knowledge revolution. Whatever we call it, we are witnessing everywhere a changing power equation.

Power is moving from the centre to the periphery. Vertical command and control structures are eroding, and being replaced by horizontal networks of social communities and collaborative platforms.

Unprecedented integration and interconnectedness have created a true global neighbourhood. But there is an underlying paradox. Power is becoming more and more widespread, but it is also becoming harder and harder to harness.

We have a de facto global world, but our institutions and systems of global governance are disintegrating.

Klaus Schwab,
founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum,
Business Report fom the annual meeting in Davos.

A related analysis:
Davos 07: how power has shifted

The unipolar moment of US supremacy has passed.
Power is now diffused between multiple states and groups.

via lunchoverip

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Update
Most of us get really excited about such terms as “globalization,” mainly because we associate it with learning how to appreciate a good Thai green curry and being able to buy cheap T-shirts made in Bangladesh.

Tsk. What we really need to worry about is a global uprising among the growing ranks of the poor against the rich. Uneasy statistics.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

via workhappy

Sometimes the scale of change is difficult to see:

China in the next 10 years will build 400 new airports. Foster is working on the new one in Beijing, which will be huge, but he wants it to be “green and compact despite its size”: “it will be about the human experience of travel”. Foster ends with this line: “Who is going to crack our dependence on fossil fuels? Inspiration is more likely to come from China, India and other emerging countries” than from the US and Europe.

via lunchoverip

Using only soybean and corn to meet biofuel demand would require the world to use virtually all of its arable land. A process known as ligno-cellulosis would enable non-food crops and plant waste to be used to produce biofuels.

Algae, also known as pond scum, can produce up to 10,000 gallons of oil per acre and can be grown virtually anywhere.

Utah State University Biofuels Program – with $6 million for five years through the Utah Science and Technology Research Initiative – is researching algae and plans to produce an algae-biodiesel that is cost-competitive by 2009.

Biodiesel is a clean and carbon-dioxide-neutral fuel that is becoming more popular, but most of the current product comes from soybean and corn oil.

As supply and demand grows, so does the price of soybeans and corn. People and animals rely on soybean and corn as a food commodity, eventually causing competition between commodities and growing enough product.

GreenFuel Technologies Corporation is a pioneer in the development of algae bioreactor technology to convert the CO2 in your smokestack gases into clean, renewable biofuels.

A bird’s egg, biomineralization and growing new materials.

A bird’s eggshell is about a half-millimeter of layered calcium carbonate crystals, stabilized by a protein matrix.

The shell forms during just about 12 hours of travel time through the bird’s oviduct, an amazing natural feat.

It starts as a collagen membrane and goes through a series of different fluids with different species in them, and in the end, you have this hard mineral….

It might be possible to grow new bone, teeth or cartilage by using collagen and calcium phosphate, said NSLS physicist Elaine DiMasi, one of the authors of the biomineralization study that was published in the October 3, 2006 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here is a quick overview of the cotton trade in this thoughtful post on cotton, colonialism and globalization.

It starts 6,000 years ago with a snippet describing cotton as ‘tree wool’, carries us along the traditions of growing cotton in India and Africa, swings us through British colonialism and industrialization and through America’s slavery driven success with cotton, offers an ascerbic quote while Ghandi is lifting India toward independence, provides a short picture of the world’s current cotton trade, and concludes with serious questions about the tactics of dominant players that remain powerful in a free market that may not be free nor fair.

Different economists have argued that if “free trade” were truly free a lot of developing countries would have better savings, credit institutions, and profitability.

Isn’t it funny how the empires founded on the tight embrace of free trade are so protectionist when it’s something that the third world does better?

And it was in light of government’s protectionist policies that benefitted wealthy elites that Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, which is frequently mis-cited/applied as the “laissez faire” solution to capitalism, when in fact he was talking about reforming mercantilism, government cronyism, and wealth disparities.

As Om Malik discovered, SepiaMutiny has a great post on the role cotton.

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Update from previous post:
It appears that many people are still living in the world of the old debate between “the free market” and “socialism”.

but …all societies have always had market economies.

The question is: What SORT of market economy?

The modern market economy with which we are familiar, and for which many argue so hysterically, did not come into existence because of the magical thing called “the free market”.

Rather, the kind of free market with which we are familiar, and which we admire so much, arose in Reformation countries in order to confront and change traditional markets that had simply reinforced entirely unjust hierarchy and elite society.

The production of cement, the primary component of concrete, accounts for 5 to 10 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions; the process is an important contributor to global warming.

Cement is manufactured at the rate of 2.35 billion tons per year, enough to produce 1 cubic meter of concrete for every person in the world.

If engineers can reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the world’s cement manufacturing by even 10 percent, that would accomplish one-fifth of the Kyoto Protocol goal of a 5.2 percent reduction in total carbon dioxide emissions. [Science blog]

Take a football field, pile it with sand to a height of about 18 feet, mix in one single grain of colored sand, and search for it. You’ll be searching for 1 part per trillion.

The US government has suggested that “modifying solar radiance” by the use of giant mirrors to reflect the sun’s rays could help to reduce global warming.

Thousands of scientists are involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are finalizing their report on climate change. The main message to the world’s politicians will be the increased confidence attached to the statement that the warmer temperatures of the past 50 years are mainly attributable to man’s activities. [story]

I’m often wondering why so few business people tell the “inside story”. There are 1,000s of rip-offs, betrayals and dirty deals every day, but often in the shame of it, folks keep quiet.

This link features a good honest rant.

And it points out a libertine mood in the book publishing sector that may haunt America.

Many people seem to think this is just another bankruptcy story. But it is, in its own way, possibly bigger than Enron or World Com.

Thomson bought Delmar and then Aspen. Harcourt bought Academic Press and Mosby, joining them up with previous acquisition Saunders. Then Thomson and Reed-Elsevier divvied up Harcourt.

Between 1999 and 2003, ten different [companies] became two. That consolidation created an “oligopoly.” Unlike a monopoly, which is capitalism taken to its logical (and disastrous) extreme on the supply side, an oligopoly is capitalism taken to its extreme by a limited number…

When the History channel picked the most important people of the past 1000 years at the turn of the millennium, number one was Johann Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Because without him, the narrator said, there would never have been a way for the great scientists, scholars, and promoters of democracy to get their ideas to the world. And we can’t afford to let what Gutenberg invented by rubbed out by corporate greed five centuries later.

What Can One Author Do?

Don’t Let ANYONE Tell You That You CAN’T Do Something.

Optimism runs through the blood of almost every entrepreneur I know. You must believe that if you can see it, you can do it. It’s that simple. With that, I highly recommend staying away from individuals or energy that take anything away from that knowledge and belief. You are capable of everything you need to do to be successful. Dream your dream, crystalize your vision, will it to happen, then make it happen. Always know it is up to you.

Taking the Plunge: A Perspective On Entrepreneurship

Few Americans are aware of the steady build-up of innovative community wealth building strategies throughout the United States.

The goal of Community-Wealth.org is to provide the web’s most comprehensive and up-to-date information resource on state-of-the-art strategies for democratic, community-based economic development.

Capitalism 3.0 is out. It’s about how to upgrade our economic operating system so that it protects the planet, shares income more equitably, and makes us happier, while preserving the strengths of capitalism as we know it. The key to the proposed upgrade is to rebuild the commons, that dwindling set of natural and social assets that benefit everyone.

In the spirit of enlivening the cultural commons, the book’s publisher, Berrett-Koehler, has agreed to an experiment. They are selling the book in the usual places — in bookstores and on-line — but they’re also allowing readers to download the book from this web site for free. Find the .pdf here

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• “People will acknowledge as just or fair only a social order that they themselves help to define.” Polsky, ’83 Democracy (winter)

• “Local initiatives should have substantial content and communities should plan investments and administer services . Services in which would reassert the importance of places so people could rise with their communities not in spite of them.” Lockout, ’83 Democracy (winter)

Quotes I used in my policy presentations at a 1980’s ‘conference on the future’ at the College of Marin, California. I was a founding director of a 501(c)3 called Community Renewal Inc. operating a short time under a charter to assist California community leaders including infrastructure and development trends that encouraged local initiative and local sovereignty.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three Rs:

Respect for self
Respect for others and
Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realise you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

[link]