be the change you want to see in the world

When we burn fossil fuels, we burn solar energy that has been converted and stored in plant matter, which in turn, over time, has coverted into oil and natural gas. The Sun delivers 10,000 times more energy than we require. Why then are we digging up old energy, burning it at a central location, and then trying to efficiently distribute it over long distances? We don’t have to do this, but we continue to do so because power monopolies need to continue to sell power in the centralised manner they do now. This can change.

How do we do this? I think we can do it using that same decentralized power concept I’ve written about before. Instead of constantly plugging everything in to a central power grid, why aren’t we generating our own power from available sources? The Sun is everywhere. Wind is everywhere. Tides operate near most human populations. Geothermal sources are right below our feet, and never run out. Read more

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. The Matsushita Electric Company (Panasonic) is working on a technology that wil leverage existing electrical wiring for Internet. This isn’t new in conceptual terms - the power companies have been doing it for decades - but Matsushita now has a chip it can embed in its consumer devices to enable the process for anything plugged in to the wall socket. Read more

This is a question that many people have asked with increasing frequency of late. I am not an expert on fascism, but this website seems to have made up its mind on the subject. Its title, Project for the OLD American Century is a play on the NeoCon Imperialist blueprint published in advance of the 2000 election by Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and others.

The OLD Century site provides a guide to the characteristics of fascism and supplies links and materials in support of the thesis that America fits the profile. Make up your own mind, but I’ll leave you with this quote: Read more

Why go to space? Well, that’s a question we’ll leave aside for now, but it may be that getting there will be a lot easier in our lifetimes. There is a contest coming online shortly much like the X Prize, which saw private inventors vying to be the first to get to space. The new contest is for a working prototype of a space elevator. A space elevator is a stationary orbital platform or satellite with a long cable dangling from it at least part way back to Earth. Doing this seemed impossible because of the likelihood of the cable breaking under its own weight, or the weight of objects that tried to climb it. Read more

One thing that really drives me nuts is stickers on a new consumer product. We don’t have a lot of money. We’re trying to make a nice nest for our little fledgling, who will arrive in a few weeks. We bought this rocker stand for our bassinette. It is likely made by slaves in China. I’m sorry. It’s what we could afford.

In any case, somebody in Canada where the thing is packaged up and labelled decided it was a good idea to put a sticker on one of the rockers telling us a bunch of completely irrelevant stuff. Not a fun sticker. A completely banal and ugly sticker. A far too sticky sticker that shredded itself as I pulled. The sticker took me a full twenty minutes of my now considerable shorter life to remove.

Why, oh, why do they put such sticky stickers on new items? That really bugs me.