A bunch of rules
- One pair of glasses at a time.
- T-shirts should not be tucked in. Shirt-shirts should
- Wear functional clothing for the function
- Sandals should be leather, unless you actually are standing in a river
- Baseball caps are for baseball (and driving a tractor)
- Your sports car should be (your age — 17) years old. Any older and you look like you're having a midlife crisis. Even if you are having one, there's no point is showing it.
- No socks with shorts. No exceptions.
How to die
From the Good Drug Guide:
There is perhaps a single predictable time of life when taking crack-cocaine is sensible, harmless and both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. Indeed, for such an occasion it may be commended. Certain estimable English doctors were once in the habit of administering to terminally-ill cancer patients an elixir known as the "Brompton cocktail". This was a judiciously-blended mixture ofcocaine, heroin and alcohol. The results were gratifying not just to the recipient. Relatives of the stricken patient were pleased, too, at the new-found look of spiritual peace and happiness suffusing the features of a loved one as (s)he prepared to meet his or her Maker.
Drawing life to a close with a transcendentally orgasmic bang, and not a pathetic and god-forsaken whimper, can turn dying into the culmination of one's existence rather than its present messy and protracted anti-climax.
There is another good reason to finish life on a high note. In a predominantly secular society, adopting a hedonistic death-style is much more responsible from an ethical utilitarian perspective. For it promises to spare friends and relations the miseries of vicarious suffering and distress they are liable to undergo at present as they witness one's decline.
- 3% are underexploited
- 20% are moderately exploited
- 52% are fully exploited
- 17% are overexploited
- 7% are depleted
- 1% are recovering from depletion
We’ve made the world’s largest amateur space rocket. – The Something Awful Forums
Tycho Brahe micro-spacecraft.
They're building a spaceship. They've already built a submarine.
I'm such a loser.
via We've made the world's largest amateur space rocket. - The Something Awful Forums.
Red Menace: Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation | Magazine
I've been long interested in how we price little things like genetic codes. One day, a little-known wild grape is worthless. The next it's saving the world's vineyards. One day, a hardy little grain of wheat is in forgotten the back 40 of a campasino; the next, it's saving us all from famine.
In the US, stem rust was the bane of the Great Plains, which endured frequent epidemics throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the most disastrous episodes occurred in the middle of World War I, when P. graminis obliterated 200 million bushels of wheat — one-third of the nation’s annual consumption. Countless Midwestern families scrambled to survive on nutrient-poor corn mush. “There is and has been for the last six months very wide and extended suffering upon the part of the poor people of this country for want of food,” an Idaho senator declared in the spring of 1917, as the crisis reached its peak. Soon after, the spooked federal government ordered the eradication of barberry, the plant upon which P. graminis rests and reproduces when wheat is scarce. The epidemics abated, but they didn’t stop: A two-year outbreak in the mid-1950s, for example, caused $3 billion worth of damage to the Great Plains’ crops.
In the early 1940s, after the onset of World War II made it impossible to conduct philanthropic works in either Europe or China, the Rockefeller Foundation turned its attention to Mexico, where destitute campesinos suffered from chronic malnutrition. The foundation dispatched 30-year-old agronomist Norman Borlaug to Mexico in 1944 to lead a project aimed at ending the nation’s hunger. When Borlaug first arrived south of the border, Mexico was reeling from a three-year bout with stem rust, which had cut wheat production in half. Borlaug resolved to breed a variety of wheat that P. graminis could not kill. Thus began the Green Revolution, the lifesaving agricultural movement that would earn him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
There was no high tech trick to Borlaug’s work, just countless hours of experimentation that he would later describe as “mind-warpingly tedious.” The Iowa native collected cereals from around the world, bred them with one another, and then took copious notes on the physical characteristics of the resulting crosses that fared well in Mexico’s fields. After many years of selecting and refining the top performers, he identified several genes capable of frustrating P. graminis. The most impressive was dubbed Stem Rust 31, or Sr31, a gene that several of Borlaug’s colleagues had bred into wheat from a rye chromosome.
Not only did Sr31 successfully fend off the pathogen, it also vastly improved grain yields. Farmers clambered to plant wheat that bore Sr31, which quickly became the world’s predominant rust-prevention gene. Developing nations in particular adopted the seeds, which they obtained from Borlaug’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, or Cimmyt (pronounced “SIM-it”).
The creation of rust-resistant wheat was one of the cornerstone achievements of Borlaug’s Green Revolution, which produced multiple disease-proof, high-yielding crops capable of feeding once-hungry populations. By 1970, stem rust was no longer a threat to nations that relied on wheat as a dietary mainstay. It is impossible to calculate how many lives Sr31 and other disease-resistance genes saved, but hundreds of millions would be a fair guess. Finally able to feed their burgeoning populations, developing countries like India were able to grow and prosper beyond all expectations. Two generations of farmers and agronomists came of age never having witnessed a stem-rust infection in the wild, and P. graminis largely ceased to be of interest to anyone except Cold Warriors: The US and Soviet militaries spent years trying to weaponize the pathogen. (America developed a cluster bomb containing turkey feathers smeared with spores; the stockpile was eventually destroyed after President Nixon renounced the use of offensive bioweapons.)
via Red Menace: Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation | Magazine.
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Bill Gates: the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year
GatesEquation.jpg
CO2 = P x S x E x C
Meaning this: the climate emissions of human civilization are the result of four driving forces:
* Population: the total number of people on the planet (which is still increasing because we are not yet at peak population).
* Services: the things that provide prosperity (and because billions of people are still rising out of poverty and because no global system will work unless it's fair, we can expect a massively increased demand for the services that provide prosperity).
* Energy: the amount of energy it takes to produce and provide the goods and services that our peaking population uses as it grows more prosperous (what some might call the energy intensity of goods and services). Gates believes it's likely cutting two-thirds of our energy waste is about as good as we can do.
* Carbon: the amount of climate emissions generated in order to produce the energy it takes to fuel prosperity.
via Worldchanging: Bright Green: Bill Gates: the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year.
Hexayurt: An uninspired but cheap place to sleep, kind of
Welcome to the home of the Hexayurt Project.
What is it?
* The Hexayurt is a refugee shelter system based on work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. It uses an approach based on "autonomous building" to provide not just a shelter, but a comprehensive family support unit which includes drinking water purification, composting toilets, fuel-efficient stoves and solar electric lighting. Other systems can be added in a modular fashion. Here is a one page summary (pdf).
Is this for real?
* Yes. Both the American Red Cross and the US Department of Defense have examined the Hexayurt system in detail and found that it has considerable merit and utility. I hope that we will see it in use by international agencies within two years.
* The best place to get started is to read the slides from the presentation Vinay Gupta gave at the Pentagon in December 2006: Pentagon Presentation (pdf) - 20 pages, not much text, and the best summary of the system we currently have online.
Projected Costs
* Shelter: $200 - $500 per single family unit depending on size, climate and use duration
* Infrastructure Package: around $100 per unit
Materials
* Permanent use: Thermax HD (Dow)
* Temporary use: laminated hexacomb cardboard (Pregis)
* On site fabrication: Tuff R (Dow, widely used)
Units
There are three shelter sizes, of which the middle size is shown.
* Stretch Around $100 per unit, 6' high, 72 sq ft
* 8 foot Around $200 per unit, 8' high, 166 sq ft.
* 12 foot Around $300 per unit, 12' high, 166 sq ft. Resembles a space age cabin, full standing height throughout.
Assembly
Units take a team of three people around an hour to assemble. They are assembled using a 6" wide, 600 lb bidirectional filament tape, and anchored to the ground like tents. No heavy lifting, ladders or scaffolding are required.
Manufacture
Any wood shop or packaging factory can be taught to manufacture units in an afternoon. In emergencies, basic units can be manufactured on site with hand tools in half an hour each (only six cuts are required for each unit.)
Infrastructure Package
* 1 Wood Gasification Stove (burns wood for cooking, 3x more efficient than clay stoves)
* 2 Cold Cathode / LED Flashlights (energy efficient area lighting)
* 1 Composting Toilet (model depends on location and we are still researching options)
* 1 Water Purifier (type depends on location)
* Rechargeable AA batteries (for stove, lights, radios etc), for use in solar charging stations.
Availability
Template:Public domain All intellectual property associated with this project is public domain.
via Category:Hexayurt project - Appropedia: The sustainability wiki.