Month: October 2004

His new video “Mosh” rules. See it immediately!

See also Public Enemy’s video “Son of a Bush” which is like a 3 minute gangsta public service announcement, filled with so much information you will have to watch it several times.

I almost wonder why it’s not on MTV 24/7. Almost.

“Bush Relatives for Kerry” grew out of a series of conversations that took place between a group of people that have two things in common: they are all related to George Walker Bush, and they are all voting for John Kerry. As the election approaches, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out about why we are voting for John Kerry, and to do our small part to help America heal from the sickness it has suffered since George Bush was appointed President in 2000. We invite you to read our stories, and please, don’t vote for our cousin!

Web link of note: Bush Relatives for Kerry
(At http://www.bushrelativesforkerry.com/)

Projects:

1. Construction of a condenser in a arid zone of Marrocco
2. Construction of a condenser in a arid zone of Burkina-Faso
3. Installation of experimental dew condensers on the island of Biševo in Croatia
4. Study of the dew water as an alternative water source in the Canarian Islands
5. Construction of a atmospheric humidity condenser on Tahiti

…Dew is like our Earth,
so solid but also so fragile.
We all are responsible that this morning miracle should never be transformed into an acidic, hazardous liquid so that dew remains a symbol of purity and innocence …

From the Publications page:

Russian engineer, Friedrich Zibold. In Féodosia, in Crimea, during the summer 1900, while leveling its forest district, Zibold discovered large conical stone heaps, of volume approximately 600 m^3 volume.

In the majority of cases, remnants of clay pipes
surrounded these tumuli. Zibold concluded, as will be shown later, wrongly; but which gave rise to an astonishing construction, that these stone heaps were dew condensers. He decided that the tumuli were used to feed with of drinking water the antique Feodosia.

To verify his assumption, F. Zibold built a condenser functioning on principles that he thought identical to those of the old condensers. For this experiment, Zibold choosed a place at the top of Tepe-Oba, close to Feodosia, at 288 m elevation. He built a stone condenser, in form of a cup, 1,15 m depth and 20 m diameter. The cup was filled with sea pebbles from 10 to 40 cm in diameter, arranged in the form of truncated cone 6 m height and 8 m diameter at the top. The condenser began to be operated in 1912, and gave till 360 liters of water per day. The experiments had to cease in 1915 because of leaks in the base. Partially dismounted, it was completely abandoned. Today, there remains only one gigantic cut 20 meters in diameter.

quote from Marq De Villiers:

…”But for me, a small and largely forgotten example of technological inventiveness, and one of the most beguiling, is the work of the Russian Feodor Zibold in the early 1900s.

   Zibold was a “natural scientist,” as they were then called, a philosopher of nature, a man consumed with a childlike curiosity about how things really worked. There were people like him all over Europe a hundred years ago, men of independent means and independent minds, all imbued with the kind of sunny optimism that goes with exploring where none other had been before. Charles Darwin is the most famous exemplar of this agreeable species. Zibold came later, but he was operating on the fringes of Europe, in the last tottering days of czarist Russia, and could be forgiven his dilatoriness. And, unlike Darwin, he was often spectacularly wrong, which only adds to his charm.

   One day late in 1906, when he was taking the waters in the Crimea, he came across a local legend that the ancient Greeks, who had built an important provincial capital at Theodosia (now Feodosia, Ukraine), had mastered the morning dew: they had become so proficient at collecting and dispensing it that they had supplied the whole city with its fresh water, using neither well nor brook.

   Zibold was captivated by this notion and determined to recover the secret. Once he started to look around, the evidence was everywhere. Lying about on the ground were stony tumuli, undoubtedly remnants of ancient dew collectors, and surrounding them were clay pipes, which had clearly been used for conducting the water to storage cisterns. Filled with enthusiasm and energy, he bullied the local agricultural community into helping him build his own massive dew collector, a stone reservoir 20 meters across, in its center a pyramid of stones and pebbles 6 meters tall. Halfway through construction he ran out of money, and it wasn’t until 1912 that the marvel was finished. And, indeed, it worked: a yield of 350 liters per day was reported, not exactly city-slaking news, and not much water per ton of rock, but something.

Web link of note: International Organization For Dew Utilization
(At http://www.opur.u-bordeaux.fr/)

FogQuest is a non-profit, registered charity dedicated to planning and implementing water projects for rural communities in developing countries. We utilize innovative fog collectors as well as effective rainfall collectors to make optimum use of natural atmospheric sources of water.

Web link of note: FogQuest
(At http://www.fogquest.org)

Send a greeting card reminder to someone… like say a debtor.

What’s weird is I remember seeing a sunday school movie (at a Buddhist temple) about the trap of “Yuomi” (“you owe me”)- the tendency (in Asian cultures) to give someone a gift larger than the one you last received to assuage one’s own guilt.

It was pointed out that this is a manifestation of the ego, and is not a healthy habit.

In the film, a gremlin-like man, played by one of the actors, is named Yuomi, and keeps encouraging the other characters to “do better than that” e.g. “how can you be so stingy? Remember what she gave YOU? You should make sure you give her something better.”

It’s a weird balance.

Web link of note: U Owe Me
(At http://www.u-owe-me.com/)

Based in Minnesota, the McKnight Foundation is the sponsor of Food’s Frontier by journalist Richard Manning.

The basic premise of the book: the agricultural revolution of pesticides and fertilizers has actually set humanity up for a big fall. We have become dependent on them (I’m not sure if he covers this idea, but since most fertilizers are based on petroleum products we may be more screwed than we realize) and the only way out of a scenario where billions starve will be learning about more traditional crops and methods which are more sustainable. Sounds like a safe bet to me.

Incidentally Manning was also the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. In that book he advocated returning to our hunter-gatherer roots… Yyyyyeeeeeahhhh…

The part that interests me most:

“The Midwest is strewn with rural ghost towns whose small farmers were driven away by huge agricultural firms farming thousands of acres of a single crop. And the oversupply of grain has promoted widespread usage of high-fructose corn syrup in processed foods, contributing to the epidemic of obesity,” Manning said. The McKnight project researching an ancient Aztec polycropping system, still used by Mexican peasants, called milpa, could provide a solution for reversing monoculture in the U.S.

I love exploring new crops. Of course this ties in directly with my current interest in desert reclamation.

More related to consumer protection and sustainable agriculture:

The second green revolution is a revolution not only in biological science, but also in information distribution among scientists, farmers, and consumers. Food’s Frontier documents the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation’s Collaborative Crop Research Program, which has funded research and training in agricultural science in nine developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Each project is headed by scientists from the developing country, who identify the agricultural problem they want to tackle and put together interdisciplinary teams of scientists such as biologists, economists, and anthropologists. Each team collaborates with counterparts in U.S. universities.

“We’re realizing that economic and cultural factors are as important as biology, soil and climate in developing a secure global food supply,” Manning said. “Certainly, you have to understand the biology behind the interaction of, say, a chickpea and a pod borer if you want to reduce the damage the pest does to the plant. But you also need to figure out how to help Ugandan farmers learn about a method of planting that protects sweet potato from weevils, or how to convince Mexican wholesalers that there’s a potentially strong market in the United States for blue corn.”

Web link of note: McKnight Foundation
(At http://www.mcknight.org/)

Dan got me some issues of Aphrodite IX, because I had been asking for it for a while… it’s a comic by Top Cow/IMAGE, and all of their titles have a particular style to them.

The art in Aphrodite IX is cracking me up- Image really pioneered the “less inking, more shaped gradient coloring in Photoshop” style which we see in modern superhero comics. Aphrodite IX herself is a good example of this extreme- the only part of her nose that is inked is a nostril and the shadow under the tip: her entire nose is coloring. That is, her nose is a collection of shaded gradients, shaped to imply a nose.

I like how not only does Aphrodite IX not have an inked nose, not only does the green dot on her face keep changing sizes, but she is wearing giant leather armor on every part of her body… except for her crotch… which is covered only by a flimsy square of tissue. Perhaps someone’s forgotten handkerchief they lost at the laundry.

I’ve been getting around to things I hadn’t had time for- like playing video games.

I had started playing Metroid Prime several months ago, and it’s a great game. I got to around 55% completion at 15+ hours (not so great I know), finally beating the Omega Pirate after fighting him many many times. Now it’s time to collect the Chozo relics. I have 4 of them.

However, there is now a slight problem. I got to a point in the game where no matter what I do, within 2 minutes of continuing my game it freezes. I’m in the save room in the Phazon Mines, just before the Omega Pirate, on my way back from getting the Relic of Newborn.

The Map thingy tells me I have to return relics to the Chozo shrine
place, but if I got to the map screen on this prompt, the game freezes. It locks up and even the music hangs on one buzzing note. I tried re-saving and even just ignoring the map prompt and making a run to the Phaedrana border. Nope!

So the breakdown:

• When the game restores, it nags me to look at the map.
• if I look at the map, it freezes
• if I don’t look at the map, and keep playing, I can get as far as the room past the Phazon refinery, and then it freezes.

At least GTA: San Andreas comes out in a week!

CHIA: i never got into GTA
CHIA: metroid prime 2 comes out in a month
BRAIN: maybe that will suck less
BRAIN: maybe I should mail them my memory card
CHIA: maybe it won’t have omega pirate
CHIA: maybe copying the save to a different memory card would help
BRAIN: hmm good idea
CHIA: of course, if the actual save is corrupted, it’s game over
BRAIN: I should mail them this thing anyway
BRAIN: maybe they could mail me a working one
CHIA: maybe you can beat the game in less than 2 minutes!
BRAIN: I hear if you do that Samus does a sexy pole dance
CHIA: justinbailey
BRAIN: who
CHIA: it was the secret password in the original metroid
CHIA: when you typed it in, samus would appear in a bikini
BRAIN: aha
CHIA: apparently, bailey was a popular swimsuit maker
CHIA: “just in bailey”
BRAIN: my brother was so good at the SuperNintendo version that he actually got her to appear at the end in a bikini
BRIAN: under 2 hours
CHIA: nice

A site for people to show off how they shaved off their pubic hair to show their support for the end of the Bush Administration – that is an awkward way to put it, but that’s what it is, not so much pro-Kerry as anti-Bush.

Eh whatever. Yay nudity!

F The Vote was better executed, but this has that ghetto quality.
Web link of note: Shave It 2004
(At http://shaveit2004.org/)

Probably!

It’s only a conspiracy theory because people try to disbelieve it. It should be fairly obvious. We’re turning into a nation of OJ jurors.
Web link of note: Is Bush Wired
(At http://www.isbushwired.com/)