We've all heard the expression "haste makes waste," but how about waste making energy? At the fourth annual Maker Faire Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, a quartet of teenage girls ages 14 through 15 have created a urine-powered generator. This eco-friendly energy source cranks out six hours of electricity for every liter of human bodily fluid by separating the excretion's hydrogen with an electrolytic cell. While this method of human waste disposal seems promising, the device has the potential to be a pee-powered biobomb and will need more than its limited safety measures before you're able to pick one up at your local hardware store. However, if this can help us save a few bucks on our energy bill, then we need to introduce these girls to these guys posthaste.
An old man suffers a heart attack and falls into the street in front of a bus.
From a risk management perspective, the first thing you do is pull him out of the traffic.
The second thing you do is treat the heart attack. On the sidewalk, not in the street.
This pretty much describes the re-election of Barack Obama.
Yes, it is a good thing that a bloodthirsty, misogynistic, homophobic, war-mongering, intellectually primitive oligarchy of the world’s most dangerous religious extremists has been kept out of the white house. Yay. Go team. I guess the drone strikes, bank bailouts and illegal monitoring of innocent civilians can continue unhindered. Break out the parade balloons.
America has just undergone a monumental exercise in democracy. But no one can now tell whether the result means that the country will decline into “singularity” or soar to a new supremacy. Nor can anyone say whether America has “turned left”, merely by sticking with Barack Obama and rejecting Mitt Romney. All that happened was that the Democrats persuaded more minorities to come out and vote, while an awesome debt remains.
Don’t be fooled by the deceptive simplicity of that last sentence, however. These “minorities” (everyone except angry, white hetero men) are now collectively the majority. This has huge policy implications. Of course, the price is eternal vigilance but hegemony can no longer re-appropriate women’s bodies or the rights of same sex couples with impunity. Because they will eventually get their asses handed to them.
A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.
And while neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power.
Revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority, the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.
We are all still stranded in a great ocean of fuck, but the events of the last few days have me thinking of priorities and attitudes. Say what you will about the efficacy of voting in a federal republic for reliably selecting a leader, an election is still a potent gauge of sentiment.
And… whisper it… but is it possible our apocalypse is turning us into better people? Has all this trauma made us “grow” like the protagonist in your first novel? It has me thinking about Penelope’s most recent (excellent) book:
It used to be we had a midlife crisis. Then we had a quarterlife crisis. Now we have a constant crisis. Adults feel overwhelmed by the idea of of trying to construct a life that works. And the core of this problem is that the goal of happiness is feeling vacuous. It’s just hard to say that. It’s hard to say you are not trying to get what you were raised to get. It’s hard to say you are not playing the game you were taught in school – for twenty years – to play.
I struggle with this. From a personality perspective, I’m actually extremely competitive. Living in London means you accidentally party with royalty. It means your social group inevitably includes globally successful lawyers and entrepreneurs. My challenge is I just don’t want to work twenty hours a day in the desperate hope that I’ll get a mysterious phone call from the head of the vampire squid. I don’t want the medal at the end of the race. It’s stupid. The arbitrary accrual and dispensation of unequal wealth is stupid. Even a capuchin monkey can work that out:
We are all scared, we are all insecure, but sometimes we are also winners. The recent grand demographic protest showed that. Back to Penelope:
The key to getting the life you want is to be able to see that the old paths don’t work. Instead of feeling like it’s high-risk to buck the system, recognize that the paths that baby boomers took are simply not available. You are walking off a cliff when you choose one of those paths. You are walking off a ladder with no rungs. In the New American Dream, the safest thing to do for your career is to choose a path that is engaging to you. No more paying dues. No more choosing graduate school because you think it’s safe. No more doing work that’s not well suited to you. These are no longer paths to the American Dream.
Destiny is opportunity
The traditional routes to wealth -whatever that word means- have been permanently disrupted. But I don’t think they were ever there in the first place. Take property ownership. We were sold this idea as wealth creation because it suited banking interests. Here’s a quote from an excellent article you should read in its entirety:
The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner hit the front bookcase displays at Barnes and Noble in March 2006, at the very top of the real estate market and just a few months before the whole thing crashed and burned. Its main message was simple: If you take out a mortgage to buy a home, you will always make money. There is no way you can lose—no matter when you buy, how much you pay or what type of loan you get. And the kicker is: both the book and finance expert who wrote it were bankrolled by Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
The past 10 years have been about discovering new ways to work together and offer services on the web. The next 10 years will, I believe, be about applying those lessons to the real world. It means that the future doesn’t just belong to internet businesses founded on virtual principles. but to ones that are firmly rooted in the physical world.
The nascent Maker movement offers a path to reboot manufacturing – not by returning to the giant factories of old, with their armies of employees, but by creating a new kind of manufacturing economy, one shaped more like the web itself: bottom-up, broadly distributed, and highly entrepreneurial. The image of a few smart people changing the world with little more than an internet connection and an idea increasingly describes manufacturing of the future, too.
And here is the ever-amazing Seth talking about it in a video I found via Lonnie.
For me, this comes down to three key areas:
1. Priorities
The trouble with appearing in a musical that doesn’t have a script is you have to make up your own lines. Working out what is important to you in a disrupted world is really fucking hard. Steve Palina suggests you should write until you cry:
“What is my true purpose in life?” Write down your first answer. Then, write another answer. Keep writing until you cry. “This is your purpose.”
An extra tip -directed largely at myself: you will start crying before you write the words “my purpose is to be a famous millionaire lawyer working until 11pm in the office every night.” That is to say… when you are working out your priorities don’t measure the wrong things.
2. Create space and scope
It took me years to get my head around two of what are probably the most important career steps you can take.
When it comes to networking… help four people a month. Seriously… calendarise it. I do. Networking exists so that you can help others, not so that someone important will be so impressed by you at an industry event that they give you a corner office and become your mentor. This isn’t a Disney film.
So that’s scope.
By space I mean the thing you give yourself. If you have a job that requires you to use your brain then it counts as work if you’re thinking. I go for ‘work walks’ now. That’s seriously what I call them when my boss asks why I wasn’t at my desk.
3. Authenticity
Authenticity is a macrotrend. It extends beyond the world of work into everything you choose to do with your life. It’s what culture is doing to eradicate the hipster AIDS it caught in Brooklyn that weekend a few years ago.
To me it looks like the Makers’ Revolution. It looks like the music of Sam Lee. (Pagans among you will adore him.) It looks like anything you are doing where you are not comparing yourself to others.
Authenticity is scary. Going after what you want is risky. Penelope again:
Gear up for big risks. Screaming at my investors. And crying. And getting thrown out of the attorney’s office where we were. Those were big risks. I could have lost my company, but I didn’t. I didn’t lose my salary, either. But I took big risks. You never know what risks you’ll have to take to get what you want, but it’s safe to say that if you are aiming for flexibility in corporate America, you will need to risk your job, or your salary, to get what you want. Just remember it’s worth it.
It is indeed worth it. The last couple of weeks have seen huge changes in my work life that I can’t talk about or even link to because there is an army of PR drones scouring the internet for commentary. But it is basically huge, exciting, scary, risky news. The news of my career. It is opportunity as destiny. So there has been a lot of soul-searching and prioritising and assessing authenticity around here.
There has also been no small amount of terror. And so we pray:
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant that I may not be a coward, feeling Your mercy in my success alone;
But let me find the the grasp of Your hand in my failure.
At the GOP convention in August, Mitt Romney’s cavalier dismissal of global warming got the intended laughs. Today, it seems less funny and the Democrats are capitalizing on the turn of events:
Here’s the transcript:
President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the
oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.
In two short sentences, Romney gives us the broader context for the denial of global warming: the denial of society itself. He echoes Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum
There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
This doesn’t mean that there are no groups beyond the family. But those larger groups are valid only because individuals, consciously and voluntarily, chose to create them. This way of thinking about the relation between individuals and groups has long been an underlying principle of American thought. Claude Fischer, in Made in America calls it “voluntarism” – the idea that the only legitimate groups are the ones that people voluntarily form or join.* The individual has a strong obligation to those groups and their members, but he has little or no obligation towards groups and people he did not choose.
That is a moral position. It tells us what is morally O.K., and what is not. If I did not choose to join a group, I make no claims on others, and it is wrong for others – whether as individuals or as an organized group, even a government – to make any claim upon me.
That moral position also shapes the conservative view of reality, particularly about our connectedness to other people and to the environment. Ideas about what is right determine ideas about what is true. The conservative rejects non-voluntary connections as illegitimate, but he also denies that they exist. If what I do affects someone else, that person has some claim upon me; but unless I voluntarily enter into that relationship, that claim is morally wrong. So in order to remain free of that claim, I must believe that what I do does not affect others, at least not in any harmful way.
It’s easy to maintain that belief when the thing being affected is not an individual or family but a large and vague entity like “society” or “the environment.” If I willingly join with many other people, then I will see how our small individual acts – one vote, one small donation, one act of charity, etc. – add up to a large effect. That effect is what we intended. But if we separately, individually, drive a lot in our SUVs, use mega-amounts of electricity, and so on, we deny that these acts can add up to any unintended effect on the planet.
As Fischer says, voluntarism is characteristically American. So is the denial of global warming. The incident at a recent Romney rally illustrates both (a video is here).
When a protester yells out the question, “What about climate?” Romney stands there, grinning but silent, and the crowd starts chanting, “USA, USA.” The message is clear: we don’t talk about climate change; we’re Americans.
Last year, faulty 1TB Seagate drives living in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs purchased between May and July of 2011 were at the heart of Apple's HDD replacement program. Now, Cupertino has extended the initiative to encompass rigs sold between October 2009 and July 2011. Customers with an affected iMac are eligible to receive a free drive until April 12, 2013 or for three years after their desktop's original purchase date. Curious if your machine contains an afflicted hard drive? Simply visit the source link below and plug in your computer's serial number to find out. If you do need a replacement, an Apple Store or authorized service center will be happy to help -- just remember to back up your drive before parting with it.
The fact that ISPs are working with the RIAA in a bid to squash piracy is far from new. A leaked document claiming to be AT&T training materials, however, suggests that the operator is about to stop talking, and start doing. According to TorrentFreak notifications will be sent out to customers on November 28th about the change in policy, with those suspected of illicit downloads receiving an email alerting them of the possible copyright infringement. We'd previously heard of a six-stage notification system, and this, too, is mentioned here with repeat offenders facing access to "many of the most frequently visited websites" restricted. Even stranger, is the talk of having to complete an online tutorial about copyright to get the restrictions lifted. As AT&T is part of the MPAA and RIAA-backed Center for Copyright Information, it's likely that the other members (Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision), will be prepping similar plans. We've asked AT&T for confirmation directly, but for now keep an eye on the mail.
I'm absolutely in on this one on day one. Mark is an acquaintance and a scary-smart person and this is going to be way bigger than it looks.
It's just a Lamp (with a LAMP) until it's cycling with your baby/partner's heartbeat, until it synch with the playlist of your long-distance partner, letting you know when they're playing sad or angry songs, until it syncs in with a household system, until it acts as a gateway to control the rest of your lighting, until it...
Yes, we'll admit that we borrowed that pun in the title. MooresCloud founder Mark Pesce's Xzibit reference is still a very apt description of the Light, his company's Linux-based LED lamp. The Australian team's box-shaped illumination runs the open OS (including a LAMP web server stack) on an integrated mini PC with an accelerometer and WiFi. The relative power and networking provide obvious advantages for home automation that we've seen elsewhere, but it's the sheer flexibility of a generalized, web-oriented platform that makes the difference: the Light can change colors based on photos or movement, sync light pulses to music and exploit a myriad of other tricks that should result from a future, web-based app store. When and how the Light launches will depend on a Kickstarter campaign to raise $700,000 AUD ($717,621 US) starting on October 16th, although the $99 AUD ($101 US) cost is just low enough that we could see ourselves open-sourcing a little more of the living room. At least, as long as we don't have to recompile our lamp kernel before some evening reading.
Imagine a licensing agreement for buying seeds that allows them to be used only once a season. They cannot be resold for planting, and cannot be used for research, crop breeding or seed production.
Those indeed are the terms of seed giant Monsanto’s licensing agreement for its “Roundup Ready” soybeans, regardless of how unnatural the conditions may seem when it comes to farming. This is farming in the age of patented, genetically modified organisms, which in this case concerns soybean crops that withstand herbicide.
The Supreme Court is weighing in on the soybean patents, agreeing to hear an appeal by a Knox County, Indiana soybean farmer who was ordered to pay $84,456 in damages and costs to Monsanto in 2009 for infringing those patents.
Farmer Vernon Bowman’s dirty deed? The 74-year-old bought soybean seed from a local grain elevator that was contaminated with the patented seed, which he used to produce beans on his 299 acres.
The case addresses the question of how far down the stream of commerce — in this instance the farming cycle — can a company control its patents, especially for products like soybeans that easily self-replicate. A lower court, an appeals court and even the Obama administration maintain the stream is virtually endless.
The administration told the Supreme Court in a filing that the justices should not concern themselves with the possibility that such rigid patent protectionism could undermine traditional farming techniques, where parts of one harvest are often used to produce the next. The administration said Congress “is better equipped than this court” (.pdf) to consider those concerns.
If the farmer’s view were adopted, the government argued, “the first authorized sale of a single Roundup Ready soybean would extinguish all of [Monsanto's] patent rights to that soybean and to its progeny.”
“Without reasonable license restrictions prohibiting the replanting of second- and later-generation soybeans, Monsanto’s ability to protect its patented technology would effectively be lost as soon as the first generation of the product was introduced into the market,” the agriculture giant told the high court in a filing.
Farmer Bowman began purchasing Monsanto’s patented seeds in 1999 and, because of the licensing agreement, did not save any of the seed for future planting. But he also bought so-called “commodity” seed from a local grain elevator, which acts as a clearinghouse for farmers to buy and sell seed.
But given that more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted in the area were Roundup Ready crops, the elevator’s seed was contaminated with Monsanto’s patented seed.
Farmer Bowman planted that commodity seed, which was substantially cheaper to purchase, to produce a second, late-season crop, which is generally more risky and lower yielding. He then used seeds generated in one late-season harvest to help produce subsequent late-season crops.
Monsanto sued him for patent infringement, and he lost.
“Even if Monsanto’s patent rights in the commodity seeds are exhausted, such a conclusion would be of no consequence because once a grower, like Bowman, plants the commodity seeds containing Monsanto’s Roundup Ready technology and the next generation of seed develops, the grower has created a newly infringing article,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last year.
The court noted that, once Monsanto’s patent genie is out of the bottle, Monsanto controls the soybean landscape.
“While farmers, like Bowman, may have the right to use commodity seeds as feed, or for any other conceivable use, they cannot ‘replicate’ Monsanto’s patented technology by planting it in the ground to create newly infringing genetic material, seeds, and plants,” the appeals court added.
Monsanto’s licensing terms allowed farmers to sell the seed produced by one Roundup Ready crop to grain elevators. But the terms also forbid unauthorized planting of those seeds.
“Practically, this issue affects every farmer in the country and the method of planting that farmers such as Mr. Bowman have used for generations,” Bowman’s attorneys wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court.
The court, which decided Monday to review the case, did not indicate when it would hold oral arguments.
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