- Transparency means nothing without justice – Government transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. If police violence is recorded and publicized, and nobody cares, it doesn't matter. This is in come sense emblematic of the coup in western propaganda. You don't need to control the media as the Soviets did or the Chinese do, if your population is comfortable enough not to care what's happening out there to someone else, and if their voting patterns are firmly tied to other issues (especially social issues like abortion), the idea of a democratic revolt becomes fairly abstract. I think this where a lot of the government's fear of economic recessions comes from. When people are out of work, or even hungry, suddenly they become a lot more excitable. (tagged: transparency law police politics technology internet )
- Condensing steam without water – Concentrating solar thermal power stations are ultimately designed to run a steam turbine, just like a gas-fired power plant. That means they need water (to turn into steam). Problematically, most such plants use water as a condensing coolant (70% of Caltech's water usage is as coolant for our 14MW worth of gas-fired power)… which is going to be hard to come by in the desert, where CSP will be built. Thankfully, there's a way to recondense steam without using a water coolant – but it does require a huge cooling tower. Not so great in Pasadena, but probably fine in the Mojave, next to acres and acres of mirrors. (tagged: solar energy technology sustainability green electricity water )
- Rousing a Latent Defense Mechanism to Fight HIV – It turns out there is a gene in humans that produces a protein which inhibits infection by HIV, but it has a mutation – a premature stop codon – which prevents it from being effectively synthesized. This mutation doesn't exist in most Old World monkeys (and that's apparently why they can't get HIV). Undoing the mutation allows the protein to be synthesized, and grants HIV immunity to human cells. I imagine that undoing bad mutations like this, and our inability to synthesize vitamin C, might be the first place we see human germ-line engineering outside of disease avoidance (preventing e.g. cystic fibrosis). Really, these mutations are hard to distinguish from genetic diseases – they're just diseases that we, as a species, have learned to live with. (tagged: genetic engineering hiv aids biology science research plos medicine )
- Anna in the Middle East – Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who got a Fulbright fellowship to live in the West Bank in 2005, and document the experiences of Palestinians. She's been giving presentations about it ever since. Some parts of her presentation are available via YouTube too. From the 15 minutes I watched she seemed like a level headed critic. She's speaking in Boulder and Denver in May. (tagged: israel palestine politics fulbright peace war )
- Twitter + Stimulus = Humans are Gullible – A wonderful demonstration of the power of the confirmatory bias. Twitter is the perfect platform for the injection of random falsehoods. Too short for citations. Instantaneous distribution. Make sure your followers are predisposed to agree with what you say, and you can get them to believe just about anything – within that constraint. Too bad the author seems to think this only applies to conservatives. (tagged: politics twitter statistics propaganda )
Tag: water
Shared Links for Apr 14th
- National Marijuana Forum at CU Boulder – I'm proud of my other alma mater for organizing and hosting this event. Hopefully there won't be any riot police involved on Farrand Field. 15,000 people would be quite a sight. Looks like the DEA and Drug Free America aren't so sure about whether they should participate in the discussion. (tagged: drugs marijuana cannabis colorado law )
- Photo Splicing – Ah, the wonders of Photoshop. (tagged: art photoshop urban )
- Water footprint and virtual water calculator – A water footprint calculator. To really do it right I'd have to actually measure my food intake for a week or a month… but off the cuff, I'm at around 900 cubic meters per year, which is a little more than a third the US average, and about 70% of the global per capita average. (tagged: sustainability water green )
- How Much Water Do You Use? – Good graphic showing the difference in water use between two possible days. By far the biggest waste: beef. 1500 gallons for one pound of steak. Cut that out, and you'll reduce your daily water consumption by more than half. (tagged: sustainability environment green water meat )
- tweenbots – Apparently all it takes to inspire human altruism is a smile and flag that says "help me". Encouraging. I think. (tagged: human robot culture experiment society urban )
When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce
When the Rivers Run Dry is a kind of modern, global Cadillac Desert, looking at present and future water issues around the world. I think in the end it was too ambitious, looking at too many individual situations superficially, without going into the details on how they came to be the way they are (which Cadillac Desert was able to do, since it focused only on the American West), and also without drawing enough insightful generalizations from the many different cases the author studied. It ended up feeling mostly like a dreary litany of mistakes painstakingly repeated in nation after nation, decade after decade, apparently without any learning going on. Often these projects were funded by the World Bank and other international “aid” organizations, or by powerful central governments. In both cases, the motivations often turned out to be short sighted and political or financial and had little to do with good engineering, productive agriculture, fisheries, or long term stability.
Our Drought Aware Shower
Water rates in all of the SoCal MWD are going up this summer by 15-30%. Drought has been declared. There’s talk of Lake Mead being completely dry by 2021, and our shower has decided to conserve water. It refuses to stay on for more than a few seconds at a time, strongly suggesting that you conserve water. At first this might seem annoying, but long showers have been a guilty pleasure of mine, and I actually don’t mind getting some backtalk from the plumbing. Continue reading Our Drought Aware Shower