There’s a crack in Everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
This nice saying found @ Tomorrow Polly comes who got it from Leonard Cohen. I like it. A lot.
This is soo cool – this is a way to make a radio, similar to what the GI’s in WWII did. It requires no batteries, and you just need some wire, a razorblade, some pencil lead and a few safety pins.
What amazes me the most is this : IT DOES NOT NEED BATTERIES ! It’s exclusively powered by the radio waves.
Here are some other links :
Bizarre labs : The history of foxhole radios
Bizarre labs : how to build them (with schematics)
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The Dustbowl
I stumbled on a mention of something called a dustbowl via a picture on shorpy (see the comments for more pictures) – I didn’t really understand what they were talking about, and some research led me to these articles :
- dustbowl and the great depression (Wikipedia)
- NY Times Review of a book that also mentions the dustbowl
It seems this was a huge man-made ecological disaster in the 1930’s that was caused by (over)plowing the wrong way and not taking care of the soil, leading to soil erosion. All this soil became enormous dust storms that had many people fleeing to the cities.
Fascinating reading about a major ecological disaster.
First a reminder to self for later : to calculate the doubling time of a steady growth percentage increase, divide 70 by the percentage to get the doubling time; the doubling time is the time which it takes to double in size using that steady growth percentage.
I got this from this very interesting (and depressing) lecture : Dr. Albert A. Bartlett’s presentation on “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy.”
It’s in eight parts, you can find each piece in youtube on the right-hand side.
I wonder what world my kids will live in, and wether I shouldn’t invest *now* in solar energy…
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Summer project : build a housie
Last summer I foolishly embarked on a quest to build a small play house for the children, using leftovers from constructing our attic floor.
I had constructed a basic floor with solid beams (as seen in the picture below) as I wanted this to survive any assault from my twist boys. The sides and floor frame were filled in with osb plates and painted white. Just before the winter last year I put a roof on it.
This year I finished most of the outside by buying some den with pre-made grooves which I attached to the outside. It’s looking a lot nicer now.
Still need a few more sunny days though, to finish it. I would really like to fit some plexiglass in there or other protection for the winter times. That way it can double as a storage shed for the kids stuff.
Categories
A group is it own worst enemy
A very interesting article. Published in 2003, but very very relevant and worth reading if you are at all interested in group interaction, how this reflects on the internet, and what the results may be in the future.
An extract :
we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern. It’s really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you’re not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said “I am frustrated. I’m sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another. I want to have a group conversation, too. I’ll start a conference call.
“But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I’m going to bring up a chat window at the same time.” And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said “Well, I’ve also opened up a wiki, and here’s the URL.” And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.
So, suddenly you’ve got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated. So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone’s like “Oh, can I — no, but –“, everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.
It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.
Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.” Or “You should look at this URL…you should look at that ISBN number.” In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out — “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash…” In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”
This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing. It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It’s different from: Let’s take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.
Found via vowe.net
It seems that a new revolution is under way, and in less than 10 years we homeowners should have a source of renewable energy, simply by using the sun and water (and some catalysts) :
Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.
The key component in Nocera and Kanan’s new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.
Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.
The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it’s easy to set up, Nocera said. “That’s why I know this is going to work. It’s so easy to implement,” he said.
I think that it would be really cool if this made it’s way to the top. Of course, being the 40ish year old cynical wiseguy that I am, I wonder if the oil companies and the electrical power companies (both behemoth energy suppliers) will be happy, and if unhappy, what they will do about it. In the article, they claim that powerlines could soon be a thing of the past, but I disagree with that : you could still give energy back via those lines, and someone inventive enough is going to find another solution to reuse them.
My hope is that those companies show themselves to be flexible and ready to adapt to the new possibilities.
Oh, and by the way, this is my 300th post !!!
Categories
Stanza just crashed my iphone
Stanza, the free ebook reader just crashed my Iphone, forcing an immediate reboot.
My hacked applications never did that !
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Guild Wars and the upgrade NightFall
I’m still experimenting with Guild Wars, and this time I’ve stumbled by accident across a guild made up out of Dutch and Belgian people that were recruiting.
Quite nice, apparently almost all people are in a guild nowadays. Once I joined, I found my missing conversation with other people in the guild speak. There seem to be quite a few people now in guilds.
For the knowledgeable, I just finished Bloodstone Fen, with the help of a nice guild guy who helped me out with the difficult parts ! On with the next !
I just helped beta-test Crossover Games 7.1 and it’s out of beta and into production.
Well, not like I tested *all* the games, but several of the ones I advocate for. No luck so far for ‘Broken Sword : Angel of Death’ or ‘Jade Empire’ but one of my fave MMO’s is running 100% : Guild Wars is running perfectly.
In version 7.0 Guild Wars ran, but there were some graphical issues and, what was very important for me, the keyboard arrows didn’t function very well. This is now solved, so I’m actually playing GW on my iMac, with no apparent slowdown !
Cool, but I had forgotten how loooong the coop missions can take to do. And ofcourse in two and half years or so (which was the last time I really played a lot) the population has changed. Everybody seems to be in a guild, and there’s not a lot of talking. I’m stumped on how I can get people to go into mission with me, it seems that only hardcore users are still running around there ?
Gonna try for a bit more, maybe I’m in the wrong area…