environment

Ringed Shaped UFO — Interesting

This is one of the best “UFO in action” videos on Youtube right now. Whether it is legit or not is a whole nuther’ ball of wax. It is fair to note that the guy who shot this didn’t stabilize or focus correctly. Hell — if we had seen something like this, would we?

Check it out.

This is a very well done video.

Amazing video about Abu Dhabi’s urban planning decisions

This is a thought provoking article about our food and how it is made. It discusses the dairy industry..

It does not require a Harper’s magazine subscription to read. Enjoy. Dex and I have had a very busy few weeks but we plan to feature more original art, news and ideas soon. This blog is just for fun anyways.

Cameron

In this video – Israeli entrepreneur and venture capitalist – Yossi Vardi – gives a humorous 6 minute presentation at T.E.D about the phenomenon of local warming. He is an interesting person who focuses on the human side of investment, and clearly has a conscience. He can certainly afford to, his company, ICQ – was sold for 400 million.

“Happiness is relative,” Mr Vardi warns. “The more successful the high-tech sector, the more frustrated and unhappy the rest of society could become.”

Launch Video via Videoegg Player

You can read an excellent profile of Yossi Vardi in this Economist article

I was talking to a friend the other day and he happened to mention a man he knows who has recently returned to Denver from the Los Angeles area. Apparently the guy really hated Century City in particular and California in general and I — being a California man — couldn’t resist hearing exactly why he felt the way he did. The answer was pretty shocking to me:

“There are too many fake people there.

“Now — I don’t want to slam a guy I don’t even know, and — dog knows he is entitled to his own opinion, but I’d be lying if I neglected to mention that I completely agree with him on principal: California actually does harbor a lot of fake people. The difference is this… I like them better that way. In fact everyone I grew up with was pretty fake and they still are. Donnie wanted to be the next “Steve Harris“; legendary bass guitar player from the seminal English NWOHM band “Iron Maiden”. My best friend David thought he was Asian, in spite of his snow white tan and long blonde hair. I knew a guy named Kenny who could draw complete comic book pages in fine point permanent black ink without penciling, and his stuff looked better than most professional comic book artists at the time. He could do a full page, including story and art — in about 5 minutes — and he could do it on demand. Adrianne was an actress, and had been playing leading roles since she was a small child. What most people didn’t know was that she had a talent for writing and was working on her 1st screenplay at the tender age of 19.

Skot was a painter, and a record collector who just happened to be one of the best rock and punk guitarist in the OC scene. Nobody ever heard of Rich kid “Tyler” until he scored a gig with Alanis Morissette as her touring drummer. Later — I met Robert who was a working class guy from a family of hard workers, and nurtured a secret painting ‘jones’ that blew my mind, and still does. Tim was a real gangster and not to be messed with. He is also a family man and father and one of the kindest souls I have ever known.

But this guy had recently returned from the “Golden State” and had nothing good to say about it. He had been a lighting tech trying to break into the film business, and was dismayed that every other person he met was an actor, and the rest were busy polishing their latest screenplay. Even the gas station clerks had an angle; some played in bands, and others had pretensions of owning their own chain of ultra convenience stores. To hear the story told in this way it almost sounds crazy. Just who the hell do these FN people think they are?

And that is precisely my point.

Not content to walk around for the rest of their lives in the skin they were born with, they reach and strive beyond their “natural abilities” and get their GED at 24 so they can return to school and study Film Making. They surf every morning while the rest of us sleep and parlay their love for the sport into a fairly lucrative merchandising contract and later open their own restaurant to great success off Pacific Coast Highway, overlooking the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean.

To be sure, there is nothing inherently noble about entrepreneurship or “breaking into show business.” But it sure is nice to know real people who never give up no matter what and are never content to stop growing, learning, living and making big mistakes along the way — because they know that doing so is the only reliable way to get where they really want to go.

If you are out there Mr. “back from California” I hope you will understand that while I wish you well and I hope your return to a slightly saner world works out for you — I’ll take a big dream and a grand adventure any day of the week over a comfortable life in front of the TV watching other people live their dreams for me.

Full of shit or food for thought?

A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened a few weeks ago. The seed vault is buried deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

This facility will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks around the world. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters.

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony 130 metres underground (around 400 feet). “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”

Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike, said Kent Bradford, director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at U.C. Davis.

Many more details in this good Science Daily article

Government of Norway Press Release

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened February 26 on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.

The building of the vault itself has attracted much outside interest due to its location and its unusual engineering, security, and aesthetic features. Its engineering allows it to stay cool with only a single 10-kilowatt compressor, which is powered by locally generated electricity.

The vault consists of three highly secure rooms sitting at the end of a 125-metre tunnel blasted out of a mountain on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. The seeds will be stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and sealed in specially-designed four-ply foil packages. The packages are sealed inside boxes and stored on shelves inside the vault.

Each vault is surrounded by frozen arctic permafrost, ensuring the continued viability of the seeds should the electricity supply fail. The low temperature and moisture level inside the vaults will ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable. If properly stored and maintained at minus 20 degrees Celsius (about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), some seeds in the vault will be viable for a millennium or more. For example, barley can last 2000 years, wheat 1700 years, and sorghum almost 20,000 years.

Anyone seeking access to the seeds themselves will have to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 115 metres down the tunnel and finally the two keyed air-locked doors. Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. Not all keys will unlock all doors. Motion detectors are set up around the site. Boxes of seeds inside the rooms are scanned before entering the seed vault.

A work of art also will make the vault visible for miles around. Artist Dyveke Sanne and KORO, the Norwegian agency overseeing art in public spaces, have worked together to fill the roof and vault entrance with highly reflective steel, mirrors, and prisms. The installation acts as a beacon, reflecting polar light in the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fibre-optic cables will give the piece a muted greenish-turquoise and white light.

“Purchasing an original Case Study steel and glass home is the opportunity of a fortunate few” I am probably going to use either this one or Rocio romero’s in New Mexico one day. Pierre Koenig was an early proponent of a modern steel home. One organization, Modernist Modular Homes provides a variety of models for California and the desert / south west. After all, there are only a handful of old ones, so building one is the way to do it.

Pierre Koenig (October 17, 1925 – April 4, 2004) was an American architect.

Born in San Francisco, received his B.Arch. in 1952 from the University of Southern California, apprenticed under Raphael Soriano among others, and in private practice beginning in 1952, Koenig practiced mainly on the west coast and was most notable for the design of the Case Study Houses No. 21 and 22 in 1960 and other steel houses. Both 21 (the Bailey House) and 22 (the Stahl House) were constructed on dramatic, otherwise-unbuildable sites.

Pierre Koenig – Opens New Window

Steel Home Builder Site – Opens New Window

An amazing astronomy blog had some profound news in the last few days from NASA’s WMAP project.

WMAP Results

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

4) The Universe is flat.

5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

There are other important things that have come from the WMAP data, and if you’re interested, you can read all about them on the WMAP site and in the professional journal papers.

But if you only want to peruse the results I’ve highlighted here, that’s fine too. But remember this, and remember it well: you are living in a unique time. For the first time in all of human history, we can look up at the sky, and when it looks back down on us it reveals its secrets. We are the very first humans to be able to do this… and we have the entire future of the Universe ahead of us.

Professional Journal Papers:

For a while now I have been entranced with modern homes. I prefer a blend of hand made and wooden furniture that contrasts with the often stark austerity of the structures. I like the clean minimalism of modern structures. I like the way these structures can harmoniously blend into the landscape while offering large expansive views. They often can blend the boundary between outside and inside.

Anyways, about 5 years ago I was in New York City on business, and while I was walking through the city I happened to notice a gallery in SoHo that was showing some modern home displays. I went inside and learned about an architect, Rocio Romero, who is based in Missouri. I then began visiting her web site over and over.

When you order a home like this, you get a kit that comes on a truck. You need to prepare a site, have permits in place with a foundation or footings setup. She sells homes that can withstand 150 mile per hour winds, and that have minimal upkeep. I also like a home that is between 1000 and 2000 square feet. Huge homes are bad for the environment. I can see if someone lives with a large or extended family, but for me – the larger the home the more cleaning required. Her kits start at 45,000 or so. You can join them together for larger homes and she has some options as well. Its a really neat way to build a home. I do love a rustic post and beam home, stone or log home as well. I am not some fanatical modern absolutist.

Rocio Romero LLC is a multidisciplinary firm. We design, manufacture, build, ship, and sell our kit homes. By marrying all these disciplines we are able to better deliver quality design easily and affordably. It is through prefab efficiencies that we are able to control the cost and quality of our homes.

Rocio Romero is the owner and principal of Rocio Romero, LLC. Rocio received her Masters of Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture and her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Environmental Design with a major in Architecture from UC Berkeley.

Having been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, CBS Sunday Morning News, and the Wall Street Journal, the LV home was acknowledged by Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker as “an exceptionally beautiful house… Romero’s designs stand out for their clarity, simplicity, and grace”.

For more information on Rocio Romero, download her PDF biography

Rocio Romero LLC Web Site

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“edun LIVE is a an ethical tee-shirt company created by Ali Hewson and Bono” is how their main blurb reads and that is exactly what caught my attention when I first saw it. “What the hell does Bono have to do with tee-shirts?” I speculated. “And just who the hell is Ali Hewson?”

A little digging helped put it all in perspective of course. With apologies to Bono; – I mostly love your music of course, but had not previously paid any attention to your marital status. I found out that edun LIVE is an tee-shirt company who specialized in organic tee shirts which are made of 100% combed African cotton, so you know — these tee-shirts are “extra soft and delightfully smooth”.

If this is starting to sound like a commercial, then give yourself a cookie because — it is. We are proud to be affiliated with edun LIVE because we like their mission. Keep the capitalization of African cotton where it is needed most: In Sub Saharan Africa. According to their FAQ:

edun LIVE is not a charity, it is a for-profit business. Via a successful economic business model driven by high-volume sales, it is edun LIVE’s mission to provide long-term sustainable employment in developing countries to help foster economic growth rather than provide charity.

and

edun LIVE has a triple bottom line, which means edun LIVE’s decision to do business with a factory is not based only on price and margin – it is also based on the resulting social and environmental impact. edun LIVE is focused on providing a deeper commitment by working with the factories to grow their capabilities so they are a viable resource, not only for edun LIVE, but also for other brands.

Now, Bono doesn’t need my endorsement, or our affiliation. But I wanted to draw some attention indirectly to a relatively new concept in business. I like to call it “For Profit — with a Mission”. This is a concept that involves making money for yourself or your shareholders without being a miserable fucking prick to the environment around you, or the people who work for — and make their living supporting — your corporation.

This is an important but difficult concept for some, but only because they are indoctrinated into a paradigm of uselessly irrational expectations by the popular culture which encourages consumerism by marginalizing anything lower then yourself on the food chain. Let me give it to you without the buzzwords for a moment: Profit is good, and having a society worth living in is also good, and it is up to each of us to make it “come into being” daily.

I don’t know if business like edun LIVE is the harbinger of something good, or not. But I do know that there is a tremendous business value in considering more then just the bottom line, while not losing sight of it.

With apologies to Ali Hewson.

Dex out

These blank t-shirts help create jobs in Africa.