Open source knowledge…what a novel concept

Thirty years ago, give or take, I read Lucifer's Hammer (by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) for the first time. Published in 1977, it has a few dated elements, but apart from those, it holds its own in my mind. The novel describes a near future after a comet hits the Earth. I enjoyed it, but one very small reference stcuk in my head. One of the characters has a library (that he preserves from the anarchy) and the one book he takes as currency to the outpost central to the novel is "Volume Two of The Way Things Work." Google "The Way Things Work" now, and you'll likely find mostly hits on David Macaulay's illustrated book. Nice...and informative, but not the one Niven and Pournelle were talking about. I searched for years, pre-internet, before finding my copy. It's an eighth edition of the one originally published in 1963 by Simon and Schuster; subtitled "An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology." It's a single volume, not two, and although also dated (vacuum tubes), it is still an enormous, condensed wealth of knowledge. I'm not an end-of-the-world type person, but I have several survival books of this nature (Back to Basics, The American Boys' Handybook, etc.) for my children and descendants...just in case. Not in case of the end of the world, but in case they get stranded or what have you. Driving around to look in on various construction projects today, I listened to a few TED videos and one, very short by TED 18 minute standards, conveyed in four minutes one of the more amazing ideas I've seen at TED, host of hundreds of amazing ideas. Marcin Jakubowski, a Polish American with a PhD in fusion physics, founded Open Source Ecology, "home of the Global Village Construction Set, developing community-based solutions for re-inventing local production" after starting a farm. I'll let him describe what he's done: I'm adding this to my various "Way Things Work" works. It's free, brilliant, full of maker ideals, and can deliver affordable technology to the world. Maybe I'll even be able to contribute.

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Sheep mowing

Grass needs to be cut, and sheep need to eat. Hmmmm.

Sheep are taking over some of Carlisle Area School District groundskeeping chores. They are saving the district up to $15,000 a year and cutting local air pollution . . . .Instead of workers spending six hours a week mowing and trimming near solar panels, sheep have moved in for the summer.

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Happiness strategy: Don’t think about global warming

It's easier for most of us to think of our extreme droughts, floods and tornadoes as isolated unusual events, and to deny any connection to global warming. That denial makes good sense. It allows us the freedom to not consider that our daily actions are destroying people's property and lives. Hence, this denial is the tactic of the mainstream media, which sees its job as keeping its audience in a good mood so that it can sell products for its advertisers. Bill McKibben says we really do need to start connecting the dots, however. It's not that we can say that any particular drought, flood or tornado is necessarily a result of human-caused carbon dioxide, but McKibben insists that it is time to invoke the phrase "climate change" to describe the current level of occurrences of extreme weather. And it's time to force the Obama Administration to take this issue much more seriously at a time when many members of Congress refuse to consider the issue at all. At Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviews McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org. According to McKibben, who outlines numerous recent cataclysmic weather-related disasters worldwide, there's a lot of room for improvement for the Obama Administration:

Now, to President Obama, look, the guy has done a better job on climate change than George Bush. That’s not an enormous claim to make, but, you know, happily, he’s doing something. He’s also doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging. He has opened this vast swath of the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming to coal mining. The early estimate is there’s enough coal there to be at the equivalent of having 3,000 coal-fired power plants running for a year. His administration is currently considering allowing a permit for a huge pipeline across the center of the country that will run from Canada from the tar sands in Alberta down to refineries in Texas. That’s the equivalent of lighting a fuse on the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.
What is the meaning of "350" in 350.org?
Three-fifty is the most important number in the world. The NASA scientists told us three years ago that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. That is strong language. It’s stronger still when you know that everywhere, outside your studios, up on top of Mount Everest, in the Antarctic, right now we’re at about 390 parts per million CO2 and gaining fast. That’s why this is not some future problem. It is the most pressing present crisis that we have.

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We consume

At Truthout, Ellen Dannen points out that we live almost entirely in the present, as consumers:

As consumers, we live today in a perpetual now, ingesting and eliminating. But our ancestors understood the importance of being conservative, of conserving. They saw the value of building infrastructure of lasting value - not thinking only of themselves - but building also for their children and progeny yet to be. They understood, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the taxes they paid were the price of admission to life in a civilized society. They understood that to live in a civil society required providing real nourishment, including the best education possible, for everyone. That society at least gave lip service to the principle that, "What you have done to the least of these you have done to me." The things they produced and created still contribute to our security and progress. Among other things, they created a high-quality, heavily subsidized system of education that eliminated cost as a bar and made our country a leader in so many areas. We would be better off today had we properly valued their investment in us, rather than having consumed and destroyed so much of that inheritance.
I consider this issue often. If one were really to implement "family values," would we be trashing the planet and failing to plan for the future? Wouldn't we be obsessed with making sure that our children will have access to a well-cared-for planet on which they can live out their lives, one they can hand to their children? But as a government, we really do seem to be living in the present, dealing with the disasters as they arise rather than taking steps to avoid them. We excel at kicking the can down the road just a bit, putting off for another day.

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United States attacks Canada to seize tar sands region

Let’s see. What oil rich region should the United States next invade? Hmmm. Politicians and oil companies are increasingly telling us that our future oil lies in the tar sands of Canada.   Only one thing lies between the United States and that oil: Canada might not simply give us their tar sands.  Problems like these, however, are ready-made for the United States military solutions. Hence, today I imagined that we might soon see the following news story.

I don't really believe that the United States has any plans to invade Canada, but I am trying to make a few serious points with this image. We all know how to pull this sort of land grab, because Americans are well-practiced in simply taking land from other people (ask Mexico and native Americans, and check out the size of the American Embassy in Iraq).  We are experts at inventing the need to go to war.  Here's a simplified version of the plan:  We claim that there are weapons of mass destruction in Canada.  We claim that there are French terrorists threatening America; we are good at inventing stories that serve as excuses to go to war.  Our mass-media goes along with the ploy because they are amoral conflict-mongers.  Eventually, the United States simply takes over the tar sands region of Canada.   Or at least that's how it goes in my imagination. It’s increasingly clear we have entered peak world-wide oil production, but American politicians don’t not dare to urge American citizens to cut down on their use of energy. Conservation is widely seen as un-American because it is usually framed as an approach that deprives Americans of their life-style, even though conservation and renewable energy makes far too much sense on many levels. And all of this crazy framing of the debate takes place while reputable scientists are offering solid evidence that with current technology and reasonable conservation measures we could now begin replace much of American fossil fuel usage with renewables. If I had to place a bet, though, I would put my chips on a future where Americans continue, as long as they are financially and militarily able, to engage in profligate oil usage (we use more than 9,000 gallons per second, enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool every minute of every day).  They will do this despite the fact that tar sands oil is an environmental disaster in the making .

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