(via Changethethought)
MonthJune 2008
(above: part of the Mechabolic)
At WorldChanging Jeremy Faludi speculates on the combined use of gasification and terra preta for the creation of carbon-negative fuel:
I can’t promise that using gasification for energy and using the resulting char as terra preta fertilizer will be a carbon negative fuel, because I haven’t seen a credible lifecycle analysis of it. (If anyone has, please post it to the comments.) But it’s quite plausible. Consider that it takes a certain amount of CO2 to grow a crop, such as corn. You harvest the crop and sell the food part, which leaves you with all the agricultural waste. Instead of burning it in the open air, or landfilling it (which is what’s done today — basically topsoil mining), you gasify it. You then burn the fuel gas you get from gasification, putting some fraction of that CO2 into the air; the agri-char (terra preta) that you’re left with contains the rest of the embodied CO2 which the crops sucked up while growing. There’s more carbon here than there was in the fuel gas. You spread the terra preta on the fields as fertilizer to grow more crops, and repeat the cycle — and with each repeat, you pull more carbon back into the soil than you burn, resulting in a carbon negative fuel as well as crops fertilized with fewer petrochemicals. It’s a double win.
A group of Burners have created a project using these principles called the “Mechabolic”:
Our intention with the Mechabolic is recast combustion machines and their related petroleum fuels –the foundations of our industrial energy economy– as somewhat of a veiled project of artificial life. Where usually a dry technical problem is seen, we want to suggest that what is really at issue here is the the “third leg” of the grand human engineering project of replicating ourselves.
Here are the facts as I’ve been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski’s son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.
Cyberspace is weird and obscure to many people. So let’s translate all this a bit: Imagine the Kozinski’s have a den in their house. In the den is a bunch of stuff deposited by anyone in the family — pictures, books, videos, whatever. And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family’s stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won’t like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: “Hey look,” he says, “look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house.”
I take it anyone would agree that it would outrageous for someone to publish the stuff this disgruntled sort produced. Obviously, within limits: if there were illegal material (child porn, for example), we’d likely ignore the trespass and focus on the crime. But if it is not illegal material, we’d all, I take it, say that the outrage is the trespass, and the idea that anyone would be burdened to defend whatever someone found in one’s house.
I agree. Although I do think public figures, like judges, should be subject to more public scrutiny, waving some privacy as part of public life, this is absurd. Kozinski has done nothing illegal, nothing hypocritical, and there is no conflict of interest. Should obscenity trials only be tried by prudes who have never looked at porn before?
Also: 10 Zen Monkeys takes a look at the pictures in question
I have seen hell, and it is indisputably on Rinca Island in Indonesia. This Komodo dragon-infested spot is where three British divers who got caught in a rip tide washed up last week. Far from being “misunderstood” reptiles who only “occasionally” attack humans, as my G2 colleague Jon Henley described them afterwards, the Rinca dragons engage in what must be the vilest animal practices ever witnessed by man.
I met three particularly nasty ones last year. We had walked past a few harmless-looking dragons sunning themselves in the bush or lurking under the stilts of houses, and were not beyond thinking we could be friends when we reached a water hole. A large buffalo was lying on its side, clearly having been brought down by two 6ft dragons and one that was even larger. The three reptiles were crawling over it, and during the next 24 hours they proceeded to eat it alive.
The first dragon had grabbed it by its testicles and was starting to chew its way into the body from below. The second dragon was slowly forcing the buffalo’s head open and was going down its throat. The third was, as they say, going in the back door. To make an already grisly scene far worse, the whole slow-motion kill was being conducted in deep mud.
After a few hours all was black – apart from the blood that occasionally bubbled up from the muddy depths, the white saliva that sometimes oozed from the buffalo’s mouth and the bright, flickering forked tongues of the three dragons, which were forever darting around. Slippery things slithered slowly over other slippery things until it was hard to tell whose tail was whose, where one body started and another stopped and who was doing what to whom. The smell was fetid, the heat intense.
Every so often the buffalo shuddered and tried to rise. Was it really still alive? We watched from a few feet away, our guide armed only with a stick, transfixed and disgusted like us. Our stomachs heaved. The buffalo continued to twitch.
We left and returned several times; each time the horror was more complete. The next day, two Americans told us that the three dragons had got deep inside the buffalo, which was still twitching.
(via OVO)
Ford and GM are asking for subsidies to accomplish a fraction of what Fayez Annan has already done… under siege conditions. Never mind Think, Phoenix, Aptera and all the rest. Let’s look at Ford and GM vs. a man living under siege conditions to see who can produce a better EV.
Story 1: DOE Awards $30 Million for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Car Research
Story 2: In Besieged City, Man Builds Electric Vehicle with 110 Mile Range
With a span of less than 15 centimetres, his aircraft qualifies as a micro air vehicle (MAV), but it has an unconventional design to say the least. It is a saucer shape covered with electrodes that ionise air to create a plasma. This plasma is then accelerated by an electric field to push air around and generate lift.
Roy says the machine can be filled with helium to reduce its weight, and is efficient enough to be powered by onboard batteries. Its ability to hover and generate lift electronically means that it is particularly robust against gusts of wind that send other MAVs off course, says Roy.
All he needs to do now is build one and get it flying. Like other MAVs, the primary application would probably be surveillance, but a plasma flying saucer would make a great toy too.
(via dysnomia.us)
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