Everything Else
It’s a graph. Click on it for the full explanation on The Economist.
Here’s what it says: all the downwards pointing bars are energy savings that pay for themselves. The depth of the bar shows how much you save, and the width of the bar shows how much of that saving is available. It’s like saying “you can buy a unit of savings for $40, and there are 28 available.”
Here’s the point: the very, very large savings available in the “profitable” area - the energy savings which are also financial savings - these savings are by-and-large getting much, much less attention than the items further to the right, which involve financial sacrifice for environmental benefit.
Environmental issues are simply too important to be handled in a way which is financially irresponsible. We must prioritize making the energy savings which are profitable first. Everybody insulate your houses, your water heaters, your windows, your lofts. Get the easy stuff done. Once you’ve done that, and you’re saving money and energy, figure out what the next most profitable energy saving you can make is.
Eventually you’ll run out of money-and-planet saving steps, but until that happens, keep going.
When you actually calculate the return on investment for environmental improvements in the “Smart Green” box, they are often staggering. I was part of the editorial team on Small is Profitable, the Rocky Mountain Institute book on distributed energy generation, and when you see the numbers worked out, over and over again, every day, you come to understand: saving energy is a profit center, not a loss making activity.
I Want A New Platform - at Union Square Adventures - can’t handle a new platform!
The core of this issue is that we’re in a **PARALLEL COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT**
That’s really the issue. You’re planning on using multiple CPUs to do the work, and the architecture bottlenecks at your ability to get the centralized components of the architecture to behave.
Gee… didn’t the supercomputer guys have this problem about 30 years ago?
A single system, serving hundreds or tens of thousands of concurrent users is going to have these problems. The more interactive it becomes, the more **LIKE SOFTWARE** your web site is, the worse the problem will be.
You think you have problems? Check out:
http://disastr.org
and imagine this problem in the context of sixty million people hitting your system in a three hour window to try and figure out how to save themselves from a disaster.
Can it be done? Sure. But the STORM botnet is a your model, not your current web applications framework.
Start thinking of swarms of disposable entities serving your web sites. It’s not about taking a single webserver app and scaling it no no no. It’s about writing parallel supercomputer cluster software that happens to be user-interactive rather than number crunching.
Nodes that carry data. Migration over the network to spare compute resources. Local session data that’s spooled to disk replicated on the fly rather than databases.
SQL *on the node* if you need it (think SQLite) rather than an Oracle install.
It’s not easy: people in the supercomputer world have been worrying about this since the 1980s, maybe earlier. But that’s what you’re up against here: supercomputer sized computations with irregular datasets and complex interdependencies.
If you haven’t thought about this stuff, you need to go back to the Transputer papers and the Occam programming language. Occam is really the best single source for clear thinking about parallel computation as a fundamental part of software design that I am aware of, and the Transputer is an idea who’s time is not yet come - first we need parallel programmers, *then* parallel computers.
Once you’ve got your head around that - and things like the “Crazy Postman” algorithm and why they worked in a transputer environment - then you’re ready to get down to writing code for these massive new generation applications.
Hexayurt.com is now live.
There you can see a tiny video about the project, and links to the primary project repository at Appropedia.
I’ve also posted the mass evac. sketch that I showed to the Red Cross in January. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in decentralized disaster response. They liked it. A lot.
The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official.
The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying. “I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [US-led] coalition and made him really wild,” the Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Mowaffaq Rubai’e told The Independent in an interview. It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with
(The Independent)
Hearts and minds, gentlemen, hearts and minds.
WAPO
A case in point is Ahmed Belbacha, 37, an Algerian who worked as a hotel waiter in Britain but has been locked up at Guantanamo for five years. The Pentagon has alleged that Belbacha met al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden twice and received weapons training in Afghanistan. His attorneys dispute the charges and say he was rounded up with other innocents in Pakistan in early 2002.
On Feb. 22, without explanation, the Pentagon notified Belbacha’s lawyers in London that he had been approved to leave Guantanamo. Despite entreaties from the State Department, however, the British government has refused to accept Belbacha and five other immigrants who had lived in the country, because they lack British citizenship.
Zolli, using a study from Technorati
Looking at those numbers it’s probably fair to say that there are 4 times as many potential English language bloggers as Japanese, so in light of that the Japanese are by far more active in blogging than English speakers.
So, that’s interesting… what’s going on with that? Otaku? School kids? A flat medium in a hierarchical society? Any ideas?
The website for this new book is all in Flash and has no blog, so they’re clearly retarded in terms of internet marketing, but the idea is quite clever: that Democrats have forgotten how to weave myths and dreams to tell their story and get their message across.
While (my addition) the Republicans have become masters, indeed, of the art of fantasy.
Legotown
Teachers notice kids fighting about lego distribution, institute socialism. National Review responds.
Neither side seems to have a satisfactory answer unsurprisingly.
The depth of the wrongheadedness of both sides is unnerving, but would you or I have done better in this situation I wonder?
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