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- Canadian Oil Sands Flyover
An aerial/telephoto exploration of the Canadian Oil Sands operations. Two trillion barrels of oil in the ground. Pyramids of sulfur and coke. Lakes of oil stretching to the horizon. At $200k/yr, it's easy to understand how one might get roped in, gold rush style. - Clean energy will unfortunately be political
Conservative thinktanks step up attacks against Obama's clean energy strategy, as revealed by ALEC bills and other PR documents. This morning at the World Renewable Energy Forum, in response to a (long winded) question about how we might re-frame the energy discussion in light of the unfortunate hay which was made from Solyndra's failure, US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu re-iterated that clean energy should not be a political issue -- that it's just common sense. That may be true, but it doesn't mean it will remain apolitical. As Pericles once said... "Just because you do not take an interest in - The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry
A look at the increasingly outsourced world of underground pharma. Domestic black-market chemists handle R&D and distribution, and the actual manufacturing is done in China. Seems that way with everything. - Google Street View for building energy efficiency
Essess is doing drive-by thermal imaging in high density urban areas across the US, hoping to target possible building energy efficiency opportunities. Another company is using urban satellite imagery to choose the best rooftops for solar energy siting. Big Brother may be watching you... but at least occasionally he's got the right idea. - The Neapolitan Mob’s Most Dangerous Family
A character sketch of Paolo di Lauro, one of the Neapolitan Camorra's former leaders. Southern Italy it seems, like some parts of Mexico, operates with more than one quasi-state organization governing in parallel. A tacit negotiation between the official and unofficial systems, which sometimes erupts into violence -- ironically, at those times when the so-called "criminal" organizations have become weak.
- Canadian Oil Sands Flyover
Twitterfeed
- Incredible photo essay on the Athabasca Tar Sands operations: businessinsider.com/canadian-oil-s… 5 days ago
- At a great talk about individual cities as the right scale for renewable energy systems innovation at #wref2012 1 week ago
- Heard rural Wyoming folk talking local Chinese coal/gas investments, hacking of their SCADA water system. I live in a @GreatDismal future. 1 week ago
- The tar sands have to stay in the ground. Stop the pipeline… again. And again. And again, if necessary. act.350.org/sign/kxl/ 3 months ago
- Roughly 2/3 of all the humans who have ever reached the age of 65 are alive today. 4 months ago
Incoming Memes
Tag Archives: science
Sequencing Risks
A reporter from Bloomberg joins the PGP, only to discover that he carries a rare and potentially pathogenic acquired mutation, found in people with blood disorders. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, and neither do the doctors, really. … Continue reading
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Tagged genetics, genome, george church, personal, pgp, project, research, science, sequencing
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Open Climate Science Course
The University of Chicago has created an Open Courseware style Climate Science 101, with videos of the lectures and self-assessment materials online. It’s aimed at non-science undergraduates. If you, or someone you know, want to get a little more in … Continue reading
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Tagged climate, education, learning, online, open access, school, science, technology
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PLoS ONE: The Network of Global Corporate Control
The Network of Global Corporate Control, as revealed by a research group at ETH Zurich (kind of the Swiss MIT). Their core finding: a densely connected “super entity” of 147 corporations, about 75% of which are financial intermediaries, has an … Continue reading
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Tagged banksters, collapse, corporations, corruption, crisis, finance, financial, graph, illuminati, network, non-linear, plos, research, science, zurich ETH
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The capitalist network that runs the world
A team at the Swiss equivalent of MIT has revealed a dense knot of power and ownership interconnections within a particular subset of the world’s transnational corporations. It will come as no surprise that these companies are overwhelming financial firms… … Continue reading
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Tagged bailout, bank, banksters, capitalism, corporations, economics, networks, non-linear, research, science
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Solving protein structures with social computation
In just 16 days gamers solved a protein structure that had eluded computational methods for a decade. Distributed social computing? What other computationally difficult problems are susceptible to this kind of approach?
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Tagged biology, computation, distributed, folding, foldit, game, protein, research, science, virus
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Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling
Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling, a good look at how the processes of science get misconstrued to the public at large, and why it’s not really a good idea for science journalism to focus on … Continue reading
Scientific Civil Disobedience
Tens of thousands of academic papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are being shared via BitTorrent thanks to the work of someone going by the name Greg Maxwell. All of the papers are out of copyright — they … Continue reading
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Tagged directaction, information, open access, p2p, peer2peer, publishing, science, technology
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A Space Aged Hiatus
Like a lot of scientifically inclined technophillic folks, the space shuttle’s last flight makes me feel a little melancholy. I believe there are very good reasons to send people off world. If we are both lucky and conscientious then in … Continue reading
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Tagged apollo, earth, exploration, nasa, politics, science, shuttle, space, technology
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Discounted cashflow analysis of scientific programming
Software Carpentry does a little math describing the value of teaching scientists how to build good software. Even with very pessimistic assumptions, it’s clearly worthwhile. With realistic assumptions, it’s a frigging research bonanza. WTF? Why don’t advisers and administrators make … Continue reading
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Tagged programming, research, science, software, technology, tools
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Cornell refuses to sign journal pricing NDAs
Many academic journals require their library subscribers to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep their pricing structures secret. This is obviously anti-competitive, and precludes any kind of free market from forming. Cornell has decided it’s had enough of this, and will … Continue reading
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Tagged economics, journal, library, open access, publishing, science
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