Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Zane Selvans on Think Again: Drugs
- Bryan Keith on Think Again: Drugs
- Coal Finance for Climate Activists | Amateur Earthling on Boulder’s Energy Future Is Bright
- Hanna on Straight Talk on Climate Progress in California
- Coal Exports a Bigger Threat Than Tar Sands | Amateur Earthling on Obama Delays Keystone XL Pipeline
Linkstream
- PACE Lives!
The Federal Housing Finance Administration is taking public comments on Property Assessed Clean Energy financing programs, at the insistence of California's 9th Circuit court of appeals. Here's what I told them: Property Assessed Clean Energy financing programs, as have been initiated by many states and local governments, are a potentially transformative financing mechanism, enabling property owners to make good long term investments in energy efficiency and behind-the-meter renewable energy production. They address a market failure, in that buyers often do not appropriately integrate a property's energy costs into their price assessment. So long as the state and local PACE programs are - Climate Denial Instruction In Schools
Corporate interests are pushing a model bill in many states that would require schools to teach climate change denial. It sounds creepily reminiscent of the creationism/evolution mess from a few years ago. Except with the fossil fuel industry instead of the religious right behind it. Gah. - Vision Prize
Vision Prize is an expert poll on the nature of the climate risks we face, meant to demonstrate the degree of consensus (or the lack thereof) amongst those able to judge the evidence. It's put together by Carnegie Mellon University. Will be interesting to see what the results look like... - 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 depth knowledge about climate science on their own time, it's a great resource. - Think Again: Drugs
A great roundup of the myths surrounding the Drug War, and the cogent arguments against continuing our ridiculous, harmful, and expensive policy of ideological prohibition.
- PACE Lives!
Twitterfeed
- Roughly 2/3 of all the humans who have ever reached the age of 65 are alive today. 2 weeks ago
- What I learned about coal industry finances this week: http://t.co/UN1lXxRm 3 weeks ago
- In a room full of suits at NYU law. Everyone here wants to end the Reign of Old King Coal. Strangulation by purse strings. 4 weeks ago
- More thoughts on the dangers of giving in to a defeatist climate apocalypse narrative: http://t.co/Bwq276vQ from @AlexSteffen 1 month ago
- Authorizing US military to indefinitely detain citizens w/o trial would be unconstitutional, right? http://t.co/cRKXkpfb #tellmeimdreaming 2 months ago
Incoming Memes
Tag Archives: technology
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
Posted in linkstream
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
Posted in journal
Tagged apollo, earth, exploration, nasa, politics, science, shuttle, space, technology
6 Comments
George Church’s Evolution Machine
George Church wants to automate evolution, in the same way that we’ve now automated genome sequencing. Any trait that can be easily and automatically screened for should be susceptible to the technique. You give the machine a rough draft, and … Continue reading
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Tagged biology, biotech, genetic engineering, george church, synthetic, 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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High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit
High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit. Virtually all the damage resulting from “sexting” is done by the law, not the digital nudity. Eighth graders get naked. With each other. Theyve been doing this for a long time actually. And unlike getting pregnant … Continue reading
Big Brother Loves Your Phone
A great visualization of one person’s location, as tracked for 6 months by their cell phone carrier. The person is Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician in Germany. He fought a legal battle with Deutsche Telekom to obtain their records … Continue reading
Leveraging digital design in synthetic biology
Automatic Design of Digital Synthetic Gene Circuits from PLoS Computational Biology. They seem to be saying look, real biology isn’t generally digital, and all that continuum behavior means we need a bunch of new and complex tools to do anything … Continue reading
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Tagged bioinformatics, biology, computational, design, genetic engineering, plos, science, technology
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The Missing Wikipedians
An interesting analysis of the cultural biases of the Wikipedia. As participation by the developing world increases, we need to come up with a better way of assessing “notability”. Especially with English, shared language is not shared culture or context. … Continue reading
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Tagged culture, developing, globalization, internet, technology, tools, wikipedia
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Education will not be fixed, it will evolve
It seems like there have been calls to “fix” our education system in the US for decades. The Apollo program’s Saturn V engines were largely built by young engineers and scientists. Their educations were influenced by the Sputnik-inspired National Defense … Continue reading
Posted in journal
Tagged anki, education, engineering, fablab, hackspace, khanacademy, kids, learning, online, policy, school, science, technology
3 Comments
Anki: intelligent digital flashcards
Aaron recently pointed me at Anki, an open-source flashcard system. I’m using it to refresh my Spanish language skills, but it’s a very generalized system that one can use to remember just about anything. You create linked “facts” (n-sided flash … Continue reading
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Tagged education, language, memory, spanish, SRS, study, technology, tools, vocabulary
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