So far, drones are being used to hunt down and shoot/bomb those evil terrorists in a foreign lands… in a war that has resulted in little more than futile death on both sides and zero additional security stateside. And recently they’re being used by some police departments – which is a mixed bag with good benefits on paper and admittedly, at least one successful real-life example, but with lotsa room for abuse too, especially if they get around to arming them. I can see their usefulness and at the same time the harm they can do to a free society. Much like the ubiquitous cameras in the Orwellian UK, there are good things… and bad things about the overall system.
However, given that Japan has non-repentantly flouted treaties that ban hunting of whales, using an alleged loophole which in their case is a blatant and government supported lie (they may as well have not participated in the treaty at all), I have to say that I am cheering a new use for drones – hunting down and locating Japanese whaling ships so the Sea Shepherd can harass them and scare off the whales that they hunt. Really – over a thousand whales killed annually for… scientific research??? Liars!!!! Either that or their scientifically stupid if they must kill that many to study them and they should leave whale science to the professionals. Go Sea Shepherd! Shut down Japanese whaling ships HARD and send them back home empty handed.
We’ve all heard and seen the testimonies of the contamination that oil and gas drilling using the fracking technique is doing to our water. It’s been in the news, online, perhaps even our neighbors – it’s hard to avoid hearing about it. Most states don’t require a disclosure of the chemicals used in the fracking process, and there is little control or regulation regarding water-table contamination. So, even tho the gas industry has responded to this PR destroying reality by airing commercials bragging about how environmentally responsible they are, the facts are before us. Fracking pollutes. And we end up suffering because of that. It poisons our water (not to mention sucks up a LOT of water, especially hurtful in areas that are already stressed by drought), renders the water flammable in some areas even – and time and time again the industry has ducked responsibility or attempted to hide the truth and just flat out blind denial. Well, the public finally has some teeth behind their contaminated water claims. Now it is time for a landslide of lawsuits and legislation to reign in this monster and return our confidence in our basic drinking water.
Our cities have planted thousands of trees, nearly all non-fruiting – solely to look pretty. And yet many of these same cities have a lot of hungry people. So rather than feeding our hungry, we are planting pretty trees that require tax funds to plant, tax funds to maintain and tax funds to replace for a return of… they look pretty. These women are bucking and challenging the trend by surreptitiously grafting fruit scions onto these trees. They fly under the radar, but they do try to be conscientious to ensure that the trees they graft are maintained by locals in the area. This is definitely something I’d like to see more of.
NASA is far from immune from the occasional catastrophe, as Challenger and Columbia could testify to. However, our safety record has been fairly exemplary. And now NASA has retired the fleet of the only domestic vehicles that can carry out astronauts in orbit far ahead of any replacement and amid budgeting issues that could put that replacement even further into the future and who do we have to turn to now? Our old nemesis, Russia, who also has apparently cut corners during their own budgeting crisis. But, they have the only fleet of manned orbital vehicles in the world now. And yet, their own safety track record isn’t quite so shiny. A few hours before Soyuz was set to dock with the ISS, carrying a US astronaut in it’s compliment, Russia suffers their fifth failure this year. In fact, it was Russian launch difficulties that kept the ISS short-staffed for months. Is this the future of the US presence in space? When is the spin-a-dial to catastrophe going to point to a manned Russian rocket?
We can all breath a sigh of relief now – a coalition of biotech researchers in France have laid down their highly esteemed opinion – GMO is as safe as non-GMO. Wow – glad that’s settled. Of course, keep in mind the source – universities and labs that appear closely tied to biotechnology such as AgroParisTech, School of Biosciences at University of Nottingham, Laboratoire Physiologie Cellulaire Végétale, INRA Biotechnology Laboratories. Suddenly I’m reminded of the tobacco industry publishing reports that tobacco causes no harm. Or of BP saying that the Gulf of Mexico is now clean.
Blender is a 3D graphics, animation, post-processing and even game development platform and much more. And it’s Open Source software – free. But Free does not mean cheap – this is some powerful software and is getting better every year. I’ve been using Blender since back when it was a custom tool developed for an animation company and released to hobbyists like myself for personal exploration. It has since evolved and become open source and has grown more and more sophisticated until it is presenting a viable and growing challenge to even Maya and 3D Max. An example of what it can do is their latest demonstration movie called Sintel. Studios around the world are using Blender commercially in movies, commercials, advertising art and more and it’s presence in the CGI environment is steadily growing.
Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth." (03/20/2010 13:00:07) http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/images.pl?photo=AS17-148-22727
One of the first impressions astronauts get with their initial view of the Earth from orbit is just how small it really is. Below them they see the entirety of civilization, the whole of our home in a single gaze. They see just how limited it all is. We live on a rock surviving within a very thin sheath of moisture and air. Take a basket-ball and dip it in some water and shake off the excess moisture and you have our oceans being represented. It’s hard for us Earth-bound folks to conceptualize it. We look out our windows and see… what? A few miles around us. Which seems vast to us. The sky look endless because there’s no reference point for size comparison. The clouds, are they just a few hundred feet up or thousands? It all seems so big to us and it is so easy to get lulled into believing that we cannot possibly have any affect on the world around us. However, a change in perspective is all that’s needed to make us realize that what we have is so very rare and so very precious and so very little compared to the cosmos around us. And most importantly, so very limited. We are effectively on a space-ship.
It’s been a long time in coming tho – this demise of the incandescent light bulb. But, it seems that it’s inevitable. So little energy is converted to light in these bulbs and so much to heat that it’s a wonder it’s still so popular. Only 2.6% of the energy put into the average 100 watt bulb is converted into light! Think you’re saving money with a 60 watt? Only 2.1%! How about a 40 watt? 1.9% of the energy put into it becomes light! It’s like putting the pedal to the floor in your car then with the throttle wide open riding the brakes to obey that school zone speed-limit. Worse even.
This is one of those “Oh it’s possible and it’s neat” type things that remained pretty much at the vaporware stage, if even that. However, recent developments indicate that it just might migrate from “What if” to, “There it is.” Harvesting energy from waves has long been discussed and dreamed of. It’s not a complicated thing. Waves and tides go up and down – all we gotta do is harness that energy. In most cases it’s a LOT of energy potential. From the article:
“Ten sites on the seabed off the north coast of Scotland have been leased out to power companies in an effort to generate wave and tidal energy.”
It seems to be slow in coming tho, in spite of the tremendous potential for less costly energy production. Let’s hope it doesn’t fall to the wayside like Picken’s Texas windfarms.
“Urban beekeepers in New York City no longer have to keep the honey of their labors a secret. The city’s health board voted Tuesday to overturn a longtime ban on beekeeping within city limits…”
This is absolutely AWESOME! The house of cards is surely going to come down. First the White House gets their own bees. And now this highly visible event, none other than the Big Apple taking honeybees off the banned list. May this provide more ammunition for the rest of the beekeepers to hopefully convince their local politics to overturn similar prohibitions. We need more beekeepers and this will help enormously.
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