Geocentric Universe

R.I.P. Mary Daly

2010-01-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

A Facebook link led me to the NY Times obituary of the feminist theologian who, ensconced in Boston College, excoriated Christianity. She was a late igniter of the Enlightenment powerfully advocating women's dignity. Her books are great fun to read, and saved my serious suburban friend from depression by pointing out that the condition is an invention of the patriarchal psychiatric power structure; now she is ready to take up flirting. Daly, in literary heaven, weaves a corrected Summa with her favorite cats and bunnies.

Notes on Rosa Montero's Historia del Rey Transparente

2010-01-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

The Wikipedia article informs us that this novel won a national prize when it appeared in 2005. Lamentably, an English translation hasn't appeared.

The setting is Provence, c. 1200, with the violent but decentralized feudal order gradually giving way to the dominion of a national church and French state. The heroine is a plucky peasant who becomes a knight-errant, traveling with a healer who holds dear the legends of Camelot as a more innocent and marvelous age. Gradually she accumulates an entourage, a freakish family of choice (as advocated by us [neo-]hippies and Daniel Quinn), and throws her lot with the persecuted Cathars.

Montero explains in the afterword that this period has long fascinated her, and that the narrative juxtaposes events, like the Children's Crusade and Richard the Lion-Hearted's reign, that were some decades apart. I didn't notice these deviations from history; only an unfortunate mention of Ottoman lore was gratingly anachronistic. The Necronomicon was also spotted locked in a monastery library together with a book with our title, but I can imagine an implied wink at the reader. The tale of the see-through king plays a tragicomic role inspired by the pre-Lovecraft lethal play, the Yellow King.

Green computing

2007-08-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

Via extremegh, still undergoing painful fits of enlightenment, I learned of Zonbu. This sounds like an ungainly savanna herbivore but is in fact a startup that's selling Linux-based personal computers that they will back up and maintain remotely, through an internet connection. A key selling point is low environmental impact: because it has no hard drive (only flash memory) and presumably an underclocked CPU, the device uses only around 15 watts, and Zonbu promises to pay for offsetting carbon credits. A portable solar panel is one of the accessories. It's $99 with a prepaid two-year subsciption (~$13/month), which altogether amounts to hardly more than just paying for the privilege of burial in the coffin of the hulking lawyer-infested zombie that is Windows Vista.

My officemate plans to get his parents two for Christmas.

Revisiting the origins of 'Islām

2007-06-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State, Prometheus Books, 2003, viii+462 pp.

For a religion's adherents, its origin-story, like that of a love-match for spouses, is much less a matter of fact than the fondly-retold, emotion-laden prologue to its sacred story, which defines its highest ideals and encapsulates its bounds of permissible practice. Historians of religion seeking to understand reasonably objectively the rise of Judaism and Christianity have over the last few centuries made little headway. The religious scriptures' own historical accounts were hopelessly vague, self-contradictory, and full of believer-pleasing miracles. Accounts by people of opposing sects were sketchy and biased by ill-will. The multitude of biblical-archaeology finds did not resolve ambiguities, though inspiring some novel theories like Norman Gottwald's proto-Marxist peasant revolution for Jewish origins.

The case of 'Islām is similar. Like most historians of the Levant in the period before literary Biblical criticism, most contemporary histories of the Islamic world pick and choose among the mass of Muslim historiography dating from the 9th (Christian) century onward to construct a coherent story of the origin of Islām and Arab conquest of the Peninsula, the Levant, Persia, and North Africa in the 7th century, subtracting miracle-stories, reconciling disparate genealogies and battle-accounts, and weighing the reliability of various chains of transmission. Even though we're closer to the present than in the cases of Jewish and Christian origins, there are not many contemporary writings on 7th-century events, and archaeological finds are difficult to date precisely. Revisionist historians of the period, notably the Anglos John Wansborough and Patricia Crone, have made a good case that the Islamic sources should not be trusted to provide an accurate account of 7th-century happenings, just as in the Jewish and Christian cases. However, a definite alternative account remains elusive. Relying heavily on period coins, dated rock inscriptions, and the Syriac writings of Christian chroniclers, Nevo and Koren attempt a coherent interpretation of the 7th century that treats the Islamic sources with great skepticism.

Nevo and Koren make key observations. The sparse contemporary accounts do not mention battles associated with the Arab conquest of chunks of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires. There is no clear mention of Muḥammad as the name of a prophet or 'Islām as the name of a religion until about 690, close to the time of the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Inscriptions from then onward feature mottos that are similar to Quranic verses, but mention of a written Islamic sculpture begins only around the time of the `Abbasid takeover in 750. Building on these arguments for silence, they reconstruct developments as follows. The Arab takeover was the culmination of centuries of Byzantine military redeployment away from the Levant, and did not require formidable military strength or the impetus of a new religion. Arab rule was solidly consolidated by Mu`awiya around 660, after fighting between various chiefs, who then had coins minted and public works built in his name. At that time, many Arabs were monotheists, taking Abraham as their model and revering Moses and Jesus as prophets, although pagan practices were very widespread as well. The expansion of the Arab empire created the political need for establishing a specifically Arab variant of monotheism, which was met by exalting Muḥammad as an Arab prophet who gave the Arab conquests divine approval. The `Abbasid rulers moved beyond the ethnocentric conception of 'Islām to one where 'Islām, embodied in its own scripture and legal norms, was to be embraced equally by all people. The Qur'ān was therefore compiled in the early `Abbasid period, based on miscellaneous preexisting collections of religious sayings. (See here for more detailed attempts, in a similar spirit, to understand the composition of some Quranic materials.)

Nevo and Koren's story of the rise of Islam is not completely convincing. Their contention that Byzantium intentionally left the Levant and Persia ready for takeover needs to be substantiated with detailed study of Byzantine records as well as other writings of the 4th-7th centuries. Dismissing the Peninsula as poor and culturally unimportant in the first half of the 7th century is supported by archaeological and documentary evidence, as masterfully summarized earlier by Patricia Crone in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), but leaves unexplained exactly how the Ḥijāz came to be accepted as the spiritual home of Muslims and a site of pilgrimage. And the vexed questions of where "jāhilī" poetry was composed and how literary Arabic (which, unlike 'Islām, is attested starting very soon after the Arab conquests) arose remain unresolved. While Nevo and Koren's story is more plausible than the standard accounts based on Muslim sources, it remains to be seen whether critical endeavors that build on their contributions will lead to a fully satisfying historical understanding of the origin of 'Islām, or whether, as in the cases of Judaism and Christianity, this will remain an episode shrouded in ambiguity and controversy. Regardless, it's a fascinating detective story to follow.

Red scarf (an exercise in points of view)

2007-06-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

Had I been present when your scarf fell low,
I would have picked it up and put it on.
-Cyrano de Bergerac

1.
I wouldn't miss my buddy Marc's possibly-goodbye party, if only for the cookies that came out in warm batches all evening. As the porch dimmed, before gin started to fortify the iced tea, everyone (except Amanda, who said she was still shaken up from her favorite wicker chair overturning) climbed the back stairs, past the sumptuous laundry room, to watch the sun set. Cloud waves lapped over the Marin ridges just under the gold sun. As I admired the solar water heater and started explaining my new metal-sculpture concept, Naomi ceremonially unwound the red scarf from Julius' neck. The scarf weaved cinnamon-twist patterns as it spiraled toward dark bushes hidden by overhangs and trees. That evening, I paid more attention to the jigsaw puzzles in Marc and Mariëtte's give-away pile, and to flirting with Andrew, who'd just moved from Atlanta and was doing a summer Akkadian intensive; that scarf toss, though, was to inspire my next piece, Contortions.

2.
You never had time, always singing and playing the stock market. She's too scared to send you to no-return-land, the velvet spaces between the stars, the clay that ocean sits on. But I'll be going to heaven myself – Mammoth, anyway – and you'll have to sort out on your own your stereo speakers and plasma screens. Unwrapping the silk felt good, I had a flash like a neon bulb lighting up, like a gift angry at the dimness. Ciao.

3.
An end to villany, undoing ropes. The ecstasy of heart-thumping days went to auction; hope's fairy tale must move to the Otherrealm. What was taken can't be returned, but newness can sprout freshly confident. The message drifts in the wind; let whoever dares seize it.

Haunting, or a small exercise in story outlining

2007-06-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

On the road between Las Cruces and El Paso, Shif, an itinerant doula, found an accordion.

Investigating further, she discovered an ice-cream stand cleverly concealed behind a casino billboard.

Three refreshing peppermint scoops later, luxuriating in the afternoon sun, Shif conversed with a gathering crowd, who told of ghastly, tuneless polkas heard in the small hours of the night.

She was pointed toward a desolate butte, and told not to stop until she found a house.

The accordion owner turned out to be an old women who lived on a large, decrepit zebra ranch.

The resemblance of the clump of agaves behind the zebra shed to the skeleton of Shif's childhood babysitter, who vanished in the midst of a ceilidh, was nauseating.

Tequila didn't appeal to Shif anymore, and often she would warn newborns of the desert's haunting, gravelly melodies.

Sun power

2006-12-07T16:55:00.000-08:00

The Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative, an association of mostly MBA students, organized a gathering last night that featured some local solar workers talking about the photovoltaic industry. They emphasized that while the supply of semiconductor-grade silicon now cannot meet the surging solar demand, resulting in higher prices for solar cells, new silicon plants are being built, and prices should drop by early 2008. Innovative financial and marketing tools are needed, including standard bank loan arrangements and rooftop rental ideas as well as hassle-free standardized installation. On the policy side, favorable national grid connection and net metering standards were identified as the most important single change needed to encourage the solar industry - as one presenter emphasized, "the rules make the market". Interestingly, the air force is a leading buyer of green power, and Wal-Mart is seriously considering putting solar panels on all their store roofs.

Flow

2006-11-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

A crash program to restore electrified mass transit to cities is a necessary component of reducing the country's dependence on oil and in moving toward a conservative, and sustainable, energy future. Alan Drake in The Oil Drum lists by metropolitan area planned projects that could start immediately, given sensible reallocation of, for example, Iraq war spending. Paul and Percival Goodman's 1961 essay "Banning Cars from Manhattan" touches on some of the likely social benefits.

Post-election scribbles

2006-11-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

After years of failure and increasing frustration, enough people joined the effort to succeed in shifting vote fractions decisively through most of the country. The Democrats gained six of fifteen Republican Senate seats while losing none, an unprecedented feat. (The Republicans in 1994 picked up a slightly smaller fraction: 8/22.) Victory has many parents; with some partiality, I credit the Net and its bloggers, alternative-media sites, MoveOn, and so forth, a virtual world created since about 2000 that gave the disaffected urban middle class a forum and mirror for their opinions not afforded by the mainstream media and provided an avenue for hardworking and unaffiliated people to contribute time and money to campaigns - one that paralleled and came to rival the Republican Party's church and corporate networks for effectiveness. Howard Dean, as presidential candidate and more recently as Democratic National Committee chair, has excelled in connecting the rage felt by the educated middle class with on-the-ground promotion of Democratic candidates, with far-reaching results.

The curiously conciliatory response of Republican leaders to defeat suggests to me that they are subconsciously happy to give up the reins; they have run out of aspirations and out of hope. The party's ideology has devolved into a mere blend of fear and hate - of blacks, of queers, of secularists, of violent Muslims and foreigners generally - with not a positive message in sight. Freedom has become, as in Orwell, a freedom from undesirable elements, not a freedom to do anything worth doing. The idea of smaller government, an at least potentially hopeful negative idea (insofar as less government can suggest more liberty), has under Republican auspices been replaced by continually increasing spending and greater government hubris intrusiveness. The Democratic message this year has also been negative, with the important difference that the threat it pointed to was at least a concrete, believable and manageable one - the insane obsessions of Republican hegemony.

While the leftward momentum that has been created is powerful in itself (especially since media attention and corporate money flow to the ruling party), the two-party system tends to small, regular oscillations that change the pubic agenda only slowly. To lead the nation in the right direction beyond 2008, progressives will have to restore hope, and act on positive steps to build community at home and lead constructively abroad.

Initially, the most difficult challenge for congressional Democrats will be to insist on prompt (meaning as-fast-as-logistically-feasible) withdrawal from Iraq. In almost every respect, Iraqi people today are much worse off than they were before the US invasion. The Bush administration's current argument for continuing is that Americans owe Iraqis help with restoring a stable government; in fact, this objective, however morally justified, is beyond American capabilities and resources, and US forces are simply making the current civil war longer and more bloody. Few Democrats have forthrightly called for withdrawal, but that is exactly what, for lack of an alternative party, they were voted in for; and if they do not withdraw our troops before many more die, voters may not give Democrats the chance to pursue much else of their agenda.

Electioneering, Berkeley-style

2006-10-31T18:33:00.000-08:00

Next week's election is a busy one. Whole forests have been cut down for glossy direct mail, and the televisions of those unlucky enough to be watching drone with actor monologues and candidate clips that tragically fail to sound convincing. Here are my choices for what will be on my ballot in Berkeley, and largely relying on VoteSmart and Berkeley's Institute for Governmental Studies for information. (I've left out uncontested races.) If you know more, leave a comment.

California state offices

Statewide: Democratic slate - Angelides, Garmendi, Bowen, Chiang, Lockyer, Brown, Bustamante. While Schwartzenegger's green veneer has some appeal in a Hollywood glamor-boy sort of way, he's been busy imprisioning more people and providing public schooling to fewer (for example, between 2003-2004 and 2006-2007, yearly State spending increased 23%, from $154 billion to $189 billion; State funding for the University of California rose only 6%, from $9.4 billion to $9.9 billion, forcing large tuition increases; and funding for the Department of Corrections jumped an astonishing 80%, from $4.8 billion to $8.7 billion). Environment-wise, Schwarzenegger vetoed the imposition of renewable-energy targets on electrical utilities, and his favored avenues for decarbonization, hydrogen-powered Hummers and more Persian Gulf imports via new liquified-natural-gas terminals, evince either incredible naïveté or great contempt for the intelligence of the average Californian. Schwarzenegger's vision of a militarized and walled Mexican border is out-and-out scary. Although several of the Democrats in question have their own histories of corruption, changing the Schwarzenegger & co. Bushite regime is a necessary first step toward more constructive use of State resources.
State Board of Equalization (oversees state taxes), 1st District: This is an overwhelmingly Democratic district, so I feel comfortable voting for a third party - I'm leaning toward the Libertarian candidate, Kennita Watson, who's both articulate and a Sam Delaney fan.
Supreme and Appellate court judges: routinely confirm.
US Senate: Feinstein has an overwhelming campaign machine but has been a Democrat-in-name-only, hewing to the PATRIOT Act, supporting war in Iraq, and opposing same-sex marriage. I'll vote for Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party, a pleasantly radical neighbor.

State propositions

Prop. 1A, reserve collected state gas tax for transportation improvements - no (this restriction sounds needless)
Prop. 1B, authorize borrowing $20 billion for transportation-related projects - no (mostly a pork-barrel of money for specific, questionably necessary, roads to expand; does nothing to reduce vehicle-miles traveled [California Bike Coalition])
Prop. 1C, authorize borrowing $3 billion for affordable-housing projects - yes
Prop. 1D, authorize borrowing $10 billion for building and repairing schools - yes
Prop. 1E, authorize borrowing $4 billion for flood control projects - yes
Prop. 83, yet another crowd-pleasing ritual condemnation of already-demonized, admittedly bad, bogeymen - no (Mandatory GPS tagging of legislators, permitting the public to keep better track of their nefarious activities, would be an infinitely more helpful variant.)
Prop. 84, authorize borrowing $5 billion for projects loosely connected with water quality - yes
Prop. 85, require teens to tell a parent before having an abortion - no (abusive parents don't need more legal power)
Prop. 86, tax tobacco heavily to pay for $2 billion a year in various health program - no (Even though I don't like smoking, there's no reason for smokers to pay more than their fair share of taxes, and this high a tax will promote smuggling and organized crime besides.)
Prop. 87, tax California oil extraction at something like $2 per barrel, genrating around $300 million a year which is to be spent to promote alternative fuels and other renewable-energy technologies - yes (with reservations - while taxing fossil fuels is good, the usefulness of alternative fuels is very overhyped)
Prop. 88, impose a statewide tax on land parcels to raise $500 million per year for spending school - no (the money could come from cutting back on destructive state spending)
Prop. 89, public funding of candidates who agree to spending limits, and restrict spending by all candidates - yes (imagine how many trees would be spared the fate of being turned into junk mail!)
Prop. 90, require governments to compensate landowners if a government action can be imagined to reduce their property's value - no (a more limited rule is needed to restrict eminent-domain confiscation)

Regional races

US House (CA-9): Lee (D)
California Assembly (14): Hancock (D) (Mayor Bates' wife, incidentally)
Alameda County Superior court judge, #21: Doubtfully, Hayashi, on the strength of the League of Conservation Voters' endorsement.
AC Transit director (Alameda and Contra Costa county bus lines): Kaplan (the incumbent), a progressive-enough lawyer.
East Bay Regional Park District (1): Skinner, on the strength of the Sierra Club's endorsement

Berkeley stuff

Mayor: Zelda Bronstein. The incumbent, Tom Bates, talks visionary but has been shadily supporting more or less unsightly commercial developments (as exemplified by his support of Measure I and opposition to Measure J in this election) and doing far too little to actually make Berkeley a model of mixed-use prosperity. Bronstein's focus on promoting public participation in planning new projects and reducing the University's burden on city finances looks promising.
School directors: Harrison, a de-schooling advocate; Baggins, a political science professor who seems to be the only one to acknowledge that very many berkeley student are refugees from the Oakland district; Hemphill, an advocate of community partnership.
Measure A, renew $20 million / year in extra property taxes for Berkeley schools - yes
Measure E, stop requiring a special election to fill rent stabilization-board-commissioner vacancies - yes
Measure F, approve changes to the waterfront plan for building some new sports fields in the flats near the Albany border - yes
Measure G, advise the city to adopt plans for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions - yes
Measure H, advise the US Congress, who always seem to be the last to realize the obvious, that Bush and Cheney should be impeached - yes
Measure I, authorize the sale of more rental houses as "condominiums" and kicking their tenants out - no
Measure J, strengthen the city's landmark-preservation process. with the goal of stopping the demolition of pretty old houses in order to build big ugly new ones - yes

Bioneers!

2006-10-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

The conference was inspiring, a weekend-long pep talk on discovering your better self and saving the world to boot. The site's a conference center just north of San Rafael, adjoining an artificial lake that jumped with Canada goslings in the middle of a shallow basin framed by low hills that were green with valley oak and bay laurel. Paul Stamets talked about mycelial networks as the first internet, and everything from cellulosic ethanol to quick 'n' easy termite control through fungi, and there were good presentation on everything from saving Canadian forest to bringing fresh food to poor cities to the curative power of psychedelic plants. The multicultural dance performances made me resolve to get back to contra sessions.

Heat

2006-10-19T18:14:00.000-07:00

I noticed that, in his column in the SF Chronicle, Mark Morford decries the takeover of organic food by large companies, such as (horrors!) Wal-Mart This is overdone; the organic label merely denotes that artificial chemicals were not used, and has never necessarily meant that everything about the labeled food is wholesome. The increasing popularity of organic in the mass market is very good in that it provides a constituency to block the spread of genetically modified crops and reduces, however slightly, biocide spraying and the global health risk posed by dosing animals with hormones and antibiotics. Organic food typically remains fossil-fuel intensive, if likely somewhat less so than the average supermarket offering, but there are plenty of farmers' markets in the Bay area where suppliers can be found to meet one's favorite sustainability criteria, not to mention community gardens for the conscientious columnist to work in.

There was also an article about magnetic-induction based food heating, inexplicably not on their website - neat!

Gates

2006-09-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a recent book about the end of the western Roman empire by a British historian (Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization). He argues that the turn among historians away from viewing the German invasions as bringing on the dark Ages and toward seeing them as just one facet of a newly named Late Antiquity goes too far, because the breakup of the western Roman empire in fact brought about sharp declines in trade, an end to workshops that made good pottery, stunted cows, and probably a fall in food production. He correlates changing attitudes toward the Germanic tribes with feelings toward Germany, and suggests that the recent friendly attitude is connected with the desire to establish a European identity that unites Germans with Latin speakers. Since nobody at the time seems to have been collecting much evidence on people's well-being, it's hard to decide who's right: whether the western Roman empire's end was a catastrophe or just the replacement of one exploitative upper class with another. The point is made that there is a large measure of luck in whether a complex government will survive the various threats to control of its economic base that constantly arise - an interesting perspective on the question of societal collapse.

Closer to now, the NY Times published a useful explanation of how the spinach food-poisoning outbreak can be blamed on the cattle industry. See also here.

And happy new month and Jewish new year to all.

Anticipating first night

2006-09-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

I have seen the moon

reflected in a well,
a firefly skimming the pulsate water-face.

I have seen the moon

magnified in bonfires
set on far hilltops.

I have seen the moon

broadcast over loudspeakers,
toasted with dessert wine,
whitening a dead man's brow.

I have seen the moon

bubble desert hot springs,
pound taut snare drums,
sizzle our little tent.

I have seen the moon sink in the ocean.
I have seen the folding of the sea.
I have seen the jewels scattered.
I have seen the sky puddle with tears.

Elevation

2006-09-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

Read The Way of the White Clouds, a book, originally written in 1964, by Lama Anagarika Govinda, the honorific of a German who studied and taught Buddhism for many years in the Indian subcontinent. The book comprises a pretty travelogue of the author's several trips in the 1930s and 1940s to Tibetian monasteries and ruins to learn about Tibet's distinctive brand of Buddhism, and it vividly conveys the grand desolation of the high, dry plateau. A recurrent theme is that the supernatural is pervasive in Tibetian religion, whether it is the reincarnation of the author's guru, a generally revered master, as a child a couple valleys over, or having visions that people will show up just before they do, or the uncanny accuracy of the god-possessed oracles at certain temples, and the argument is that this side of reality is unjustifiably denied by scientifically minded skeptics.

Most religions have miracle stories and many, me not included, have witnessed events that seem supernatural - are these only examples of believers and some ill-informed outsiders deluding themselves, or do some of these reports point to gaps in the scientific/rational worldview? Postulating a power of people to communicate via thought (telepathy, to use the Greek coined by "parapsychologists" who sought to study such things scientifically) and/or to move things through thought (telekinesis) would explain many of the stories, but hasn't been shown to happen in a predictable or reproducible way. However, these are not exactly hot areas for scientific research, and the effect would surely depend on state of mind, which isn't easily induced or measured. Though even skeptics will admit that we understand little of how mind works, the Dalai Lama's call for research will not, I fear, be quickly answered. For now, I'm going to keep an open mind.

Politics

2006-06-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Tom Friedman advocates for a third party to push his oil-independence energy plan - unaccountably not mentioning the existing Green Party, which has been agitating for renewable energy for only several decades now. Meanwhile, the NY Times writes about Europe's vigorous coal industry, a clear sign that the price of carbon emissions is too low.

Orientation

2006-06-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

Google is experimenting with a "green overlay" on their city maps. The Los Angeles demo is still sparse, though you can see what parts of the metropolis are within a few meters of sea level (most extensive around the San Gabriel and LA River mouths), and you can map out hike trailheads, which could be inspirational for the weekend.

Vehicles

2006-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Mark Goodstein, a .com venturer newly on board the X Prize Foundation of space tourism fame, talked today about planning for a new prize for manufacturers of very energy-efficient cars. The American Solar Energy Association has a new editorial on how a more modest transition to smaller cars is a necessary first step to reducing US oil demand, with a reasonable if still slightly optimistic discussion of biofuels. The last issue of Solar Today had a article on whether photovoltaic strips make sense for car roofs.

Thorns

2006-05-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

A fine trip to Joshua Tree, emerging only slightly scraped and with a sore ankle from diving off a large boulder. Will need to find a good large-scale geologic map to sort out all the dikes. For now I've been browsing for good graphs to use in my presentation - some good ones on WikiPedia.

Pedaling

2006-05-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Dissertation madness - but the first draft is in! So I had time to notice Steve Lopez roping together a bevy of retired public official to advocate for a cycle-friendly LA. Yaaay!

Conference

2005-11-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

BBC has good coverage of the UN meeting being held in wintry Montréal to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol for limiting national greenhouse gas emissions. It notes that Spain has, for some reason, been increasing its greenhouse gas emissions at a remarkable rate since 1990.

Groceries

2005-11-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

The Boston Globe reports:

A sharp run-up in plastic costs is starting to have an impact on supermarket shelves, pushing up the price of products packaged in plastic and forcing some beverage companies to consider shifting to cardboard.

Citing the aftereffects of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, many milk producers have started passing along surcharges for raw materials and fuel costs. One food industry official, who asked not to be identified, said most milk producers added a surcharge of 9 cents a gallon last month and tacked on another 5-cent increase this month. The price increases by and large are being passed along to consumers.

Replacing plastic with cardboard will probably be a net health benefit, assuming that fewer chemicals leach out of cardboard than of plastic - if I remember, I'll check on this further sometime.

As the critical documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices opens, the New York Newsday has an inconvlusive article that summarizes studies on the short-term economic impact of Wal-Mart stores.

Bright ideas

2005-11-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

Amid much fanfare, the MIT Media Lab officially announced their $100, garishly lime-green, laptop design, intended for distribution to children in poor countries (I imagine it would be popular in rich countries too - sounds like companies hate the idea of cutting into their profit margins though), at a UN conference. Extracts from the BBC story:

The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning.
...
The laptops will be encased in rubber to make them durable and their AC adaptors will act as carrying straps.
They have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory instead of a hard drive which has more delicate moving parts, and four USB ports. They link up and share a net connection through "mesh networking".
...
One computer with a wi-fi or 3G net modem, for example, would share the connection with others in a classroom.
[MIT person] explained that the display did not have a backlight or colour filters that more pricey LCD laptop displays used, so saved power. Instead, bright LEDs are used which reduced power consumption by a factor of 10.
The screens are dual-mode displays so that the laptop can still be used in varying light conditions.
Although children will be able to interact with each other through the machines, education was still the priority for the laptops.
But by using mesh networking, the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale.
Collaboration will also be encouraged by using open-source software, which the children could develop themselves and use in local communities

For those of us with plans to benefit society in this country, the Service Employees International Union is sponsoring a "best idea since sliced bread" competition for really good economic ideas. The first prize is $100,000, and the deadline is December 5th.

Renewable investment

2005-11-14T07:56:00.000-08:00

Newsweek profiles "ten eco-friendly companies", including several small solar-related firms, and of course Vestas and its wind turbines. It mentions silicon valley startup Miasolé's developing photovoltaic arrays that use metal (copper indium-gallium selenium alloy) instead of silicon, which may be in demand while the current shortage of crystalline silicon lasts.

More on biofuels

2005-11-11T16:49:00.000-08:00

I went to a lecture by Lonnie Ingram, director of the University of Florida's Center for Renewable Chemicals and Fuels, a distinguished-looking fellow with a strong southern drawl. He discussed his group's efforts to genetically engineer bacteria - primarily the microbiologist's usual workhorse, Escherichia coli - to make grain alcohol (ethanol), acetate and pyruvate out of the sugars that compose wood and other plant fibers, providing a replacement for petroleum as a source of fuel, plastic, and so forth. He saw his mission as working to end the dependence on foreign oil, a cause of much war and pollution, and pointed to a recent report by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy that argues that it would be feasible to replace most of the USA's oil imports with plant derivatives, and that plant debris that's now landfilled could by itself provide a substantial fraction (maybe a quarter) of the requirement. Growing dedicated energy crops under today's fuel-intensive agriculture has, as I've noted, definite drawbacks, but refining fibers that are thrown away sounds benign.

Also on the topic, the NY Times, in an article entitled "Mountains of Corn and a Sea of Farm Subsidies" discussed the ineconomy of the bumper corn harvest, the fruit of billions of dollars in government subsidies, while the closure of New Orleans makes it difficult to export, and cautioned:

While farmers and grain merchants like Mr. Fray expect even more corn to be planted next year, some traders believe that higher natural gas prices will cause farmers to grow less corn - natural gas is used to make fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides. "With higher energy costs you will see more wheat acres and soybean acres," Mr. Bruce said."

Something similar is happening in Germany. Reuters quotes the deputy Minister of Agriculture Alexander Mueller:

Asked if biofuel production could provide a new market for European Union farmers as the World Trade Organization reduces export subsidies used to remove Europe's huge overproduction of farm products, he said:

"We are standing before the next round of world trade talks in Hong Kong, market access for food will be one of the central points."

"Production of biofuels and renewable raw materials can become a second pillar for the agricultural economy along with production of food."

"We need a strategic decision for the next decade and the political side must provide the framework for expansion."

Deal

2005-11-08T08:27:00.000-08:00

Jamais Cascio at WorldChanging blogs about the Serious Games Summit, held in DC last week. Basically these are simulations that are used as educational and training tools in various professions, not least the solidery - war games go back a long way, after all. Cascio takes the progress reported at the conference as a challenge for people to develop comparably sophisticated games that have environmental issues as themes. Compared with writing (not to mention testing) an atmospheric general circulation model, writing a good environmental interaction module for Civilization IV should be easy enough.

New England carbon trading

2005-11-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

Nine northeastern states are finally getting ready to agree an accord that will establish mandatory caps on CO₂ emissions from power plants and a market to trade emissions permits, which BBC sees as a rebuke to Bush's devil-may-care attitude to global warming. At the conference I went to there was criticism of this accord because it supposedly doesn't restrict electricity imports from Pennsylvania, which is not a party - does anybody know if this is true?

In a development related to our name, Copernicus' bones have supposedly been found in a cathedral graveyard now part of northeast Germany.

Alternatives

2005-11-01T09:15:00.000-08:00

On the topic of the last post, some people from the Rocky Mountain Institute heatedly defend biofuel production as "far more cost-effective and less energy-intensive than gasoline", at least with technologies that, while not commonly used anywhere, are "on the horizon". For the opposite view, see a paper by Berkeley petroleum engineer Tad Patzek, who argues that burning crop fractions is unsustainable almost by definition because it depletes topsoil, adds extensive thermodynamic discussion, and concludes "About 13% of the U.S. corn production is now diverted to produce ethanol. Hence ... the U.S. corn production should be reduced by at least 13% with significant benefits for taxpayers and the planet."

For an indubitably nifty renewable energy application, look at the German company SkySails, whose idea is to propel ships, at least partly, with giant kites a couple hundred meters above the ship (where the wind is stronger than at the surface). Sailing ships have a huge advantage now over the caravels of the age of exploration in the form of good weather forecasts that enable them to plot the route with the most favorable winds. (New Scientist article; via Peak Energy)

Gas

2005-10-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

Biofuel is cool. Britain is planning on blending 5% biodiesel with their gasoline and diesel fuel (which is a small enough amount that ordinary engines won't require modification) by 2010, a strategy also endorsed by the American truckers, and various Midwest governors are touting their alternative-fuel vehicles.

Unhappily, conventional agriculture uses lots of petroleum in its own right, so it's not clear how much less fossil fuel we're actually burning; earlier this year, a study by David Pimentel and colleagues, focusing on corn alcohol, was the latest to find no savings at all for the cases they examined.

Pickings

2005-10-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

The newest Utne Reader arrived yesterday. I can't understand why magazines feel compelled to revise their perfectly adequate typography every few years - in this case it was to a ghastly razor-thin font with almost double spacing, and fancy but distracting graphical motifs that left the impression that the whole magazine was one of the advertising inserts that the tourism ministries of small tropical countries like to commission. Still, they summarized a few good articles: National Street Playing Day is slowing down cars in the Netherlands, and a Vancouver couple found that subsisting on food from within a 100-mile radius was an effective weight-loss method in some seasons.

Bright idea

2005-10-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

WorldChanging mentions a new, simpler approach to making white-light (as opposed to single-wavelength) LEDs using very small (smaller than the wavelength of light!) cadmium selenide crystals. Similar crystals could also be used to absorb sunlight in photovoltaic systems. According to Vanderbilt's press release: The white-light quantum dots, by contrast, produce a smoother distribution of wavelengths in the visible spectrum with a slightly warmer, slightly more yellow tint, reports Michael Bowers, the graduate student who made the quantum dots and discovered their unusual property. As a result, the light produced by the quantum dots looks more nearly like the “full spectrum” reading lights now on the market which produce a light spectrum closer to that of sunlight than normal fluorescent tubes or light bulbs.

Map madness

2005-10-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

Check out PlaceOpedia, a site which aims to annotate Google Maps with links to correponding Wikipedia articles. It should be helpful for finding local sights like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which would be a good place for replicating Lemuria. It would help to also have map links from the Wikipedia articles.

Storm

2005-10-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

I couldn't believe this morning's news headline that the hurricane in the Caribbean is now the most intense Atlantic storm ever measured - but it turns out to be true. In fact, this year saw three of the five most intense Atlantic hurricanes ever, all in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. If this level of storminess continues over the next few years, the entire Gulf coast is likely to become depopulated, and the remaining houses will be built on stilts, like in pictures of certain Neolithic villages. For now, south Floridians should be watching out.

Also, Greenpeace is protesting European plywood imports from China, which gets timber from rainforests in Papua and elsewhere. The London Independent puts the story in the perspective of China's increasing dominance of world manufacturing.

China banned logging in large areas of its own natural forest in 1998 after catastrophic floods, themselves a direct result of deforestation, killed thousands of people. "This ban, coupled with massive growth in Chinese timber processing capacity and a liberalisation of trade barriers, led China to look overseas in its hunger for timber," says the Greenpeace report.

Keeping warm

2005-10-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

As our rainy season starts, the NY Times covers New Yorkers' reactions to sharp increases in natural gas and heating oil costs in an article entitled "Reaching for Blanket, Not Thermostat, as Days Cool and Oil Costs Rise". It advises: "At these oil prices, cashmere was starting to look affordable."

For the coffee drinkers out there, green LA girl is doing an extended series on fair-trade coffee (or lack thereof) at California Starbucks shops.

Consumerism

2005-10-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

Heard a talk today about the multitude of nasty chemicals that leach out of plastic, and I'm running off to upgrade my water bottles to glass.

At Grist, arch- research associate Umbra patiently explains why eating meat requires more water, land and energy than eating soy. And GoTo Reviews covers a sleek-looking if not completely necessary pasta cooker.

Play to win

2005-10-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

WorldChanging has a review of some recent multiplayer climate-policy games. The European Climate Forum is quoted as explaining:

Climate games may make the difference when communicating highly complex issues of climate change because they introduce a rather simple but very important element into communication: having fun. As known from the science of learning, having fun catalyses learning processes remarkably and makes people interested in subjects they would not make inquiries into otherwise.

WorldChanging also looked at the green chemistry angle of this year's Nobel. And while we're at that time of year, the LA Times has an amusing article titled The Nobel Prize for Creativity about the efforts of universities to link themselves, however tenuously, to as many Nobel laureates as possible. David Baltimore, Caltech's president, opines: "It is sort of a game, and you might as well play it by whatever rules you want, like solitaire".

Save plastic

2005-10-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has discovered the joys of de-diapering:

Ingrid Bauer, author of "Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene" (Natural Wisdom Press, 2001), believes it is easiest to begin toilet training in the first six months. To start, parents are taught to hold the baby by the thighs in a seated position against their stomachs and to make an encouraging hiss or grunt. With practice, parents learn their child's rhythms...

For families who practice the technique, the advantages are many: savings in the cost of diapers, which can reach $3,000 a child; less guilt about contributing to the 22 billion disposable diapers that end up in landfills every year; no diaper rash, and a nursery that doesn't reek of diaper pail. They also note that age 2, a common age for toilet training, is a time of notorious willfulness and a terrible age to start teaching any child anything.

World's largest seawater desalination plant opens in Israel

2005-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

According to a Dow press release, the reverse osomosis plant on the Mediterranean coast "will provide approximately 15% of the total household water consumption in Israel". It's good to hear that Israel is diversifying its water supply. Santa Barbara, on the tail end of the canals from the Colorado River and the Sierras, has built a smallish desalination plant years ago, which is hardly use, but southern California is a veritable rice paddy compared with the Mideast, and with a few fewer English ornamental plants new water supplies shouldn't be necessary.

Hat tip: HG.

Economy

2005-10-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

It's encouraging that even in America, gasoline demand has some price elasticity. Bicycle sales are rising, car sales are down, and gas consumption is a couple percent lower than last year. The screaming headline in today's LA Daily News is "Downsizing vehicles", and the story has even made it to Israel (with commenters noting that telecommuting likely to gain acceptance as another good way to save gas). Our ever-adaptable American car companies are innovating in their usual perceptive way: according to Newsweek, "GM is counting on a new crop of full-bodied SUVs arriving next year to drive its comeback. And though the models are still big, GM designers burnished the edges to make them look smaller."

Gathering

2005-10-02T00:38:00.000-07:00

I went to the International Carbon Dioxide Conference, held at a plush hotel between a strip mall and a vast expanse of golf course outside Denver, to present some of my work. The conference was dedicated to the memeory of Dave Keeling, who had started the first regular measurements of rising carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa in Hawai'i almost fifty years ago and who died last summer. The oceanographer Ken Caldeira, now at the Carnegie Institute, gave an opening overview, focusing on the changing chemical state of the oceans (carbon dioxide makes them more acid) and also arguing quite reasonably that unchecked fossil-fuel burning will radically change Earth's climate and probably lead to all the ice sheets melting within a few thousand years. People were pessimistic that much will be done soon to reduce energy requirements and switch to other fuels, though some scientists suggested starting or becoming involved in local groups such as the Boulder Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Working Group.

Alarmism

2005-09-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

The London Financial Times notes a series of recent studies that suggest reason for concern on the effect of global warming on plant growth and on agriculture. I'll probably write more about that another time.

A report commissioned by the European insulation manufacturers association Eurima suggests that better building insulation could greatly reduce energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions in eastern Europe (via PeakOil). This would be a wise step considering the disruption that an active hurricane season is dealing oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. Austin City Limits is also in danger. Finally, one can always worry about the H5N1 strain avian flu, which is spreading, at least in birds, over most of Asia.

Climate drama

2005-09-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote a well-regarded trilogy on human colonization of Mars in the 90s, is coming out with the second book, Fifty Degrees Below in a new trilogy set in a warming earth of the near future. I'll plan on reading it. Apparently in this volume he has Europe and northeastern America freeze because the Gulf Stream shuts down, but I'm convinced by the arguments of the oceanographer Carl Wunsch that the strength of the Gulf Stream is unlikely to change much, since that it's mostly due to the Earth's rotation. In the simulations I've seen, any cooling due to ocean circulation changes would only offset greenhouse warming over most of the North Atlantic. RealClimate had a discussion that presents different perspectives on this.

Grist has an interview with the Weather Channel's resident climate change reporter, a PhD climatologist: "In general, it's still somewhat of a luxury to talk about global warming -- it often gets bumped to the back page. Keep in mind that in a regular newsroom, the question is always, What do you need to know immediately? Usually that doesn't include background on the big-picture state of the atmosphere.". She's learning to put in more pop-culture references to get through to viewers better.

Information that wants to be free

2005-09-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

E Magazine covers the environmental challanges faced by big cities in the Third World, using Mexico City and Lagos as examples: "It’s worth looking at some of these emerging mega-cities in detail, because daily life there is likely to be the pattern for a majority of the world’s population."

WorldChanging notes the debut of an online database of biomimickry projects, meant to eventually serve as a sort of encyclopedia of design ideas adopted from life forms.

When planning the tool, we went through the process of trying to design something biomimetic, and discovered it wasn't just a bucket of ideas we needed--we needed a way of finding the right people, something that was a "matchmaking" tool as well as a knowledge source. We wanted to make something with the best aspects of Wikipedia, a relational database, and ThinkCycle. We may or may not have succeeded, but we've at least created a new kind of tool.

This should be fun to contribute to...

On an older-fashioned note, Megan Prelinger writes in Bad Subjects about starting her own public library in San Francisco. It's a charming story, and the subjects include "landscape, land use history, the built environment, natural history, ornithology, media, philosophy, history, political science, radical studies, and American cultural history".

Fuel

2005-09-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

UNplanner is concerned that a resurgence in wood heating due to heating oil shortages will result in harmful deforestation. A lot of houses in LA have fireplaces even though we don't have any forests to speak of nearby, but most of them burn gas logs anyway.

Hilarious as always, Dave Barry sounds off on gasoline prices in an old column reprinted by the Miami Herald.

Sparklets

2005-09-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

AP has also picked up on solar companies' stocks. Meanwhile, truckers in Spain are planning to strike next week to protest gas prices, and motorists in Britain are becoming concerned about a similar strike.

Energy Sunday

2005-09-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has learned about the recent run-up in share prices of small companies that specialize in solar energy devices. These companies' prices are volatile and I would guess already too expensive, but finally attracting the attention of mainstream investors should be beneficial for the sector.

Also, with gas prices rising after the havoc on the Gulf coast, there is renewed interest in ethanol-gasoline blands, though this can only be cheaper than gasoline because of government subsidies. More exotically, scientists are looking at genetically engineering algae to release burnable molecular hydrogen when they split water molecules during photosynthesis (via PeakOil).

Intelligent design

2005-09-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

The LA Times has a reasonable editorial on some of the measures that need to be taken to live with hurricanes in the Mississippi delta.

Grist looks at how to encourage organic farming and at the factors that control the price of organic food.

Transgression

2005-09-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

Last week we lost the country's 31st most populous city (in the 2000 census) and leading port. Rebuilding will be very expensive and also ill-advised, since the Mississipi delta keeps eroding and equally violent storms are likely to strike every few years. The destruction of busy port cities has been a literary theme for thousands of years - think Tyre, Troy, Atlantis - and perhaps this one will also be remembered for generations, its watery ruins sought by adventurers.

As New Orleans flooded, I was reading a birthday present, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which for many pages touts the wonders of globalized business. It's a worthwhile book despite the unfortunate metaphor in the title (compounded by the introduction's ridiculous assertion that Columbus showed scientifically that the world was round), and Friedman does include reservations about the environmental degradation caused by industrialization and reiterate his laudable call for a crash program (similar to the Apollo initiative) to end our dependence on fossil fuels. But the flooding in the Gulf coast, in India, and in central Europe, and the varying levels of chaos that followed make it starkly clear that sustained global trade can't take place at all without reality-based societies that can take care of themselves to be the trade partners. Corporate boosterism and high-tech consulting turn helpless before even entirely predictable bad weather. Prudence can't be outsourced.

Bugs

2005-08-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

I returned from the salubrious and low-news northern lands, where only the steady $2.75/gallon at the gas station assured that few major regime changes were being reported. The Milky Way was still above, and I read about Cairene gang wars, Maldive coral construction, and other highlights of the 14th century. The summer had been warm and dry, and the mosquitos were sparse and slow and generally not in top form, but wandering swarms of stable flies could be noxious. The big local issue was an invasive insect, the emerald ash borer, which is hitching north on firewood.

Yahoo has an interesting story on possible indoor lighting applications of LEDs, which are becoming cheaper and, as purely electronic devices, can be programmed to turn on and off precisely. Their low power consumption also makes them a natural choice in a renewable energy society.

Brokering

2005-08-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

Another article on carbon trading, this time from the London Times, covers the run-up in European carbon emissions allowance prices this year, in part due to power generators wanting to switch to burning coal because natural gas is too expensive.

Dying

2005-08-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Detroit's abandoned real estate is the subject of musings, including plans to convert some of it back to farmland, as some groups are already doing on a small scale. The neat thing about having a declining population is that there's lots of space. (via PeakOil)

Elsewhere, environmentally friendly cemeteries are slowly growing. They'll put you in a wood casket, dispense with the stone monuments, and let you rot, just like in the old days. "They are vying for the millions of baby boomers who are expected to die by 2040."

Old, new and trashy

2005-08-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

A reanalysis of satellite measurements of the microwave radiation that the earth emits corrects some claibration problems and finds more warming over the last quarter-century, making these measurements more consistent with surface observations of warming. (See also RealClimate.)

Increasing demands for water in the suburbs, even in Wisconsin, are putting more pressure on the Great Lakes. Happily, their defenders are staunch.

There's also an interesting article on how big grabage management companies are stuffing garbage into landfills ever more efficiently, delaying the need for new landfills and reducing cities' garbage disposal costs.

Climbing

2005-08-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has an interesting article on the progress of a demonstration vegetated roof for a Long Island movie studio. Apparently, such roofs are much more common in downtown Chicago, where the city government has been encouraging them.

In arboreal news, German groups have identified two new lemur species, bringing the total to 49.

Roundup

2005-08-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Happily, the Discovery landed safely after a delay attributed to weather. The NY Times also reports on a study that finds that most of the increase in US melanoma diagnoses in the last couple decades can be attributed to more intensive screening, which makes sense given that there's little sign that most people are spending more time in the sun.

Maariv is taking gleeful notice of a group of California girls that's bringing sex appeal to promoting a vegan diet.

Forest power

2005-08-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports on a German town named Schönau whose residents, motivated by anti-nuclear sentiment, brought out the local utility and are converting their electric grid to rely on solar, biogas and hydro generation. According to the story, they've formed a nonprofit that aims to expand to other parts of Germany.

Waiting room enlightenment

2005-08-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

US News has an article on the Chicago Climate Exchange, a trading board for greenhouse gases founded by an economist from Northwestern. While some US companies and cities have been participating in it voluntarily, CCX is also moving into Europe, where because the Kyoto protocol is in force carbon trading is a much larger market.

The NY Times says that the supply of solar cells isn't keeping up with demand, especially in anticipation of California's Million Solar Roofs program. A big bottleneck is the supply of silicon crystals, which suggests substantial opportunities for people using alternate materials as well as thin silicon cells, such as those made by Heliovolt and Evergreen respectively.

Ozone

2005-08-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

Interesting feature in the NY Times on air pollution here in southern Califronia, its health effects (unfortunately without enough detail on the evidence) and regulatory efforts to reduce it over the last 50 years. They focus on pollution from ships and trucks in the Long Beach - San Pedro port complex, which they note is downright hazardous to locals.

Age

2005-08-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

The science section of the New York Times (free subscription required) covers a novel application of radiocarbon dating -- a Swedish group has measured in people's tissues leftover radioactive isotopes from the big 1960s nuclear tests to figure out how fast cells are rebuilt.

The sorry saga of the shuttle continues. It makes you yearn for the good old days of the Mir, when duct tape sufficed to keep the craft in working order. I hope that the astronauts return safely, and that we have enough sense to let the junkyard claim these flying deathtraps.

To illuminate musty corners

2005-07-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

According to Slashdot, a startup in Tennessee has developed a way to pipe sunlight into buildings in fiber-optic cables. Imagine how many yawns would be prevented if something like that was installed in every conference room.

Canyonland rush

2005-07-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

RedNova is reporting about a resurgence in uranium mining in the plateau country of southeastern Utah, after years where little uranium was mined in the US. Hopefully, it will cause fewer problems than the 1950s frenzy, whose prominent mounds of slag are now targets of costly and laborious cleanup attempts to keep the Colorado River from being polluted. Uranium is now largely mined in Canada and Australia, but the present production rate is less than the amount used by nuclear reactors - apparently there are large stockpiles from earlier decades. (Via PeakOil.)

Climate court

2005-07-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

Grist has a story on how an Inuit representative body intends to complain to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the US has been ruining their livelihood through its contributions to greenhouse warming. Legal attempts by Tuvalu and several states to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions haven't come to much.

Oil and beer

2005-07-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

Some Danes have brewed the world's first open-source beer, with the recipe and logo released under the Creative Commons License. As some skeptics observe in the guestbook, lots of people already give away beer recipes. Since I have other uses for my bathtub, I'll have to wait for some enterprising local to bring Vores Øl to a local pub for a fair judgement of the value of this contribution to the public domain. (Via Slashdot.)

Meanwhile, Chevron seems to be intensifying its peak-oil-esque promotion, Will You Join Us. According to Edgar in Crisis Energética, they're advertising on Mexican CNN, definitely several steps above the pastoral SUV ads we see more often here.

Carmaker Survivor

2005-07-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

Daniel Akst, in the NY Times (free registration required), tells Ford and GM that promoting fuel-efficient, low-emissions vehicles is one of their few options for becoming profitable anytime soon, given low-cost competition from China. When Bill Ford became CEO a few years ago, there was some hope that Ford would move in that direction, but Ford has instead brought out ever more bulky ATV pretenders, and even the prospect of bankrupcy may not be enough to make them change their ways.

Congress gets serious about saving energy!

2005-07-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

Setting the clock forward will magically convince people to turn off lights. A representative from Massachusetts munificently announces "this is a huge victory for sunshine lovers", especially ones that don't like to get up before lunchtime. Airline lobbyists are complaining that it would be complicated to keep flights at the same clock time.

Pedal-powered internet

2005-07-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Ephraim Schwatrz writes in InfoWorld about a nonprofit that's combining regional wireless with solar and bicycle-generated electricity to provide internet service to off-grid African villages. I wonder what it's mostly used for. (Via Maariv.)

Tours disputations and biodiesel tours

2005-07-20T21:18:00.000-07:00

The Manila Times reports on a big conference on population held in France where the effects of population growth on carbon dioxide emissions seem to have been a hot topic. Doesn't sound very new.

In more encouraging news, DaimlerChrysler India says it's testing cars fueled by pure biodiesel in faraway Ladakh. As might be expected, German engineers are involved.

Moving away to our satellite, Google is commemorating the old (36, to be exact) first Moon landing with an extension to their Maps.

Intro

2005-07-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

No, I don't particularly believe in the geocentric model. In my vague notion of the universe's shape, it has no center. But earth is far the most interesting planet I know about, and for most purposes, it's very much in the middle of things. I also do earth science for my dissertation research. I said it would be good for there to be a blog devoted to

intriguing state-of-planet links I (and my minions) discover,
local and global environmental issues,
developments in earth science,
neat environmentally friendly technology, and
informed (or at least thought-provoking) commentary.

For general comments or if you'd like to post here, e-mail me.

Welcome, and happy surfing.