The next thing I want to see done, and alas this is going to take a government’s backing, is global survival mapping. Here’s what that looks like. For each square mile of the earth’s surface, I want to know seven things. * what’s the 50 year trend in death by violence and are there immanent [...]
Read more →eep in the northernmost reaches of the Amazon jungle, a land conflict between rice farmers and a handful of Indian tribes has turned so violent that the country’s Supreme Court warns it could escalate into civil war. The court is expected to decide in August if the government can keep evicting rice farmers from a [...]
Read more →Gupta Option is where the policy work lives. Check out: * Winning the Long Peace on appropriate technology as foreign policy. * State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture on failed states and making biometrics safe for general use, particularly in bringing banking services to the very poorest. * Severe Pandemic Flu Strategies on [...]
Read more →Can’t tell you why yet, but it’s on now.
Read more →Basically, it’s this insanely great and very historic (134 years!) festival on the Westman Islands in Iceland. Here’s a nighttime shot. And here’s a daytime one. Note all the white tents. They serve a very similar function to theme camps, but each one holds about a dozen people, so it’s lots of small microclimates with [...]
Read more →Working on infrastructure. Seriously putting some dents in my head, looking at the systems around me right now keeping me cosy, wondering how on earth it all works. Fundamental realization – most infrastructure was designed by and for cold countries. With tons of consistent solar energy you can do a whole new class of things [...]
Read more →Energy in Nature and Society is a systematic and exhaustive analysis of all the major energy sources, storages, flows, and conversions that have shaped the evolution of the biosphere and civilization. Vaclav Smil uses fundamental unifying metrics (most notably for power density and energy intensity) to provide an integrated framework for analyzing all segments of [...]
Read more →Energy is about to become absurdly cheap at least during daylight hours in sunny areas of the planet. http://nanosolar.com is retailing panels (maybe a gigawatt a year) for $1 per watt. Their production cost is 30 cents per watt of panel capacity. Konarka claims 10 cents per watt production costs (confirmed here) and are expecting [...]
Read more →http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html?em&ex=1216958400&en=7df5348a50e688b3&ei=5087%0A Guy comes round to your house, grows your vegetables, and gives them to you. There’s a name for this, and I’m trying to remember it…
Read more →There’s just no way around it – patent is broken. I’m writing up a set of docs right now, and it’s clear that trying to tease apart what might have been patented before by other people, what’s common knowledge, and what’s potentially material for a patent pool is just impossible. It’s a question that, in [...]
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