A new video by @joesimpson and I: Electric Vehicle Nirvana explained over at Brits On Green.

Really quite good, and we’re fans of the format. Next one will be shorter of course, in a Pascalian sense

Snacks are people without strong personal competence or will.

Trolls are people with strong personal competence, but without social status. Many computer programmers and engineers are trolls. They live in caves.

Bastards are people with strong personal competence and high social status. Bastards who speak the truth about unpleasant things lose their social status and become trolls.

What this means is two things: if you want to know the truth, ask a troll. If you want people to do something, convince a bastard it’s the right thing to do.

Within this framework one can see all politics…

Feed the World
We live in an age of scientific and technological advancement that was almost unimaginable only a few generations ago. From mobile telephones to the Large Hadron Collider, human know-how and ingenuity is deeper, more widespread and disseminates faster than at any time in history. However, despite our vast knowledge almost 900 million people in the world today are undernourished. Hunger and malnutrition is the number one risk to health worldwide – greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

The challenge for science is clear. How can we use the world’s huge intellectual resources to solve one of humanity’s most basic problems? What approaches should science pursue? Is genetic modification the answer, or would greater use of organic farming help? Are more and better pesticides needed? Is it advantageous for food to be grown locally to where it is consumed? Is a high-tech approach needed or is it time to rethink what science can do and what it is for?

Join the debate at this café scientifique as we discuss the issues for agricultural science of how best to feed the world’s growing population.

This event will be held in the Ri’s cafe and the focus will be on an informal discussion between Sygenta’s Andrew Coker, biologist and writer Colin Tudge and the audience, facilitated by Alok Jha, science and environment correspondent at the Guardian.

Admission is free and there is no need to book

(from the RI web site)

What transpired was shilling from a genuinely dislikable man from a GE company with patents on things like “golden rice” (GE vit A enriched rice) who said things along the lines of “some people in the developing world only want to eat rice, not vegetables, they have a rice based diet so we made a rice for them, we’re just giving them what they want.”

Now, this may be a “there’s this tribe” story. There may be such a situation, somewhere, with exactly these properties. But, in general, the arguments about GE foodstuffs in the developing world are not about the fact people don’t “want” vegetables, but that they cannot afford them. A patented rice is at best a questionable intervention, but to justify it’s existence with a bullshit story about dietary preferences – rather than absolute poverty – is excremental bad and an insult to every person in the room (or who died from lack of vitamin A.)

I could poke a few more holes, but they’d involve words like “genetic chernobyl” and involve a lot of swearing. It went beyond lame and deeply into sleazy and unpleasant. Would not buy again.

Colin Tudge I was too hard on. He’s obviously very expert in organic farming, particularly in the UK, but his grasp of the developing world situation left a lot to be desired. I was still too angry at the entire event’s desire to ignore actual food security issues and its presentation to apologize properly, but I certainly owe him one. He knows his stuff on the UK situation inside and out. But he’s not a poverty guy, or a one acer farming guy, or a development guy, and the applications of organic agriculture to starvation-level farmers is a totally different thing to why we can’t transform the UK food supply. Organic is a luxury in the UK, but effective farming is a life-or-death matter in the developing world.

Alok Jha did an excrementally bad job of framing the issues or encouraging debate. The fatuously shallow game he seemed to want to play was “GE or Organic” without any discussion of – hello – why are people starving?

No mention of micronutrient deficiency.

No mention of farm subsidies.

No mention of any of the realistic plans in play to do something about food security issues globally.

I am extremely disappointed that the Royal Institution ran such a deeply amateurish show about such an important topic, and I’m none too pleased that the moderator chose to block all discussion of the actual science which shows paths to solving these problems.

It was billed as a discussion. It was not. Alok Jha had a fixed agenda: GE vs. organic, and absolutely no apprent knowledge of or interest in starvation, despite framing the food issue as being one of the world’s most important problems because of its humanitarian impact and associated death toll.

I forcefully brought up Ivette Perfecto‘s work demonstrating that organic agriculture can feed the world, including increasing food availability in the developing world by 80%. I also mentioned that small lot farming is vastly more effective than large lot farming, and would have mentioned Paul Polak‘s work had there been any opportunity.

I emailed copies of Perfecto’s paper to about a dozen people who asked for one. But I really think the RI needs to tighten up these shows, because this was embarrassingly bad. To frame something as one of the world’s most important problems and then have people who are not expert in the field presented as experts who are capable of leading discussion? To frame the problem itself in a way which is entirely irrelevant to the real issues in the field?

Fundamentally, if feeding the world one of the world’s most important problems, get people who actually know their way around the problem to discuss it. This is London, the city is packed with universities and institutes, and food security is not hard to present in a comprehensive way.

The real issues here matter enough to get them right. Science for Humanity is the RI’s attempt to make itself relevant to the ongoing humanitarian problems of the world, but it’s no good at all if the RI’s lecture series undercuts SfH’s credibility in the field.

I just love this post. This is exactly the kind of magic that I hoped that Global Swadeshi would produce. Now let’s build it!

I’ll note that the same logic applies to the dry coastlines of Africa too. And I bet there are ways, at scale, of cutting corners we can’t even imagine now.

Really great video on systems thinking from Paul Krafel.

Via Evonne – great link, thank you so much!

People are astonishingly successful endurance runners, “and I don’t think it’s just a fluke,” Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. “We’re loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don’t have any role in walking,” Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.

Although Bramble has studied locomotion in animals ranging from tortoises to jackrabbits for 40 years, he was first tipped off to the hypothesis that humans were born to run by one of his students, David Carrier. In the 1970s, Carrier was assisting with Bramble’s studies of how dogs, horses, and people regulate breathing while running. A marathoner himself, Carrier began to wonder about the role of endurance running in human evolution. People, he noted, can shed heat quickly—not by panting, like most animals, but by perspiring through millions of sweat glands. A lack of fur also helps dissipate heat more quickly.

Still, Bramble eventually came to realize that people turn in remarkable performances. He once filmed a horse cantering, with Carrier running alongside at the same pace. The movie showed that Carrier’s legs were churning more slowly than the horse’s, which meant that the student’s strides had to be spanning more distance per step than the horse’s.

Although Carrier moved on to other research, Bramble grew convinced that his student had discovered something. During a visit to Harvard in 1991, Bramble encountered Daniel Lieberman, then an anthropology Ph.D. student, making a pig trot on a treadmill. To glean insights into how bones grow—and thus to better interpret fossilized human jaws and skulls—the student wanted to see whether the repeated impact of running would spur a thickening of the pig’s skull. “You know,” Bramble said, “that pig’s not holding its head still.” He went on to explain that adept runners like horses, dogs, and rabbits keep their noggins remarkably steady as they lope, thanks to an obscure bit of anatomy called the nuchal ligament. It’s a tendonlike band that links the head to the spine. People, he said, have a version of this band.

Rummaging through a collection of replicas of fossilized primate bones in a nearby lab, Bramble pointed out that the nuchal ligament leaves a trace—a delicate ridge—where it attaches at the base of the human skull. Then the scientists noticed the ridge in a pitted, yellowed skull of our 2-million-year-old relative Homo erectus—but not in older hominids known as australopithecines, who walked the earth as far back as 4.4 million years ago. “Holy moley!” Lieberman thought. “There’s something going on here, and what’s more, we might be able to study it in the fossil record.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us

Looks GREAT. Several devices, well-explored design synergies and so on. Cutting edge work from the Tamera Ecovillage in Portugal.

Amazing stuff, well done folks.

They’re so big, there are likely to be problems on any given drive (56%) which is (the author notes) a big issue for RAID.

Seems like exactly the sort of thing ZFS was designed to combat.

A direct drive 5 KWh electric motor carbon fiber lightweight 45 inch propeller gets the little airplane climbing at 500-600 feet per minute. The ElectraFlyer-C has a cruisng speed of 70 mph (112 kmph), a top speed of 144 kmph, and your flight time would be 1.5 to 2 hours. That is with the top end battery pack, of course. With others, your flight time would be a lesser. yes, you can carry that 110 W charger when flying cross-country. The ElectraFlyer weighs around 250 pounds.

http://www.dancewithshadows.com/aviation/electraflyer-c-electric-mini-plane-makes-flying-cheaper-than-driving/

Damn clever.