Found a bunch of cool stuff by way of TOD:
Found a link from treehugger.com to the latest national solar homes tour. I went on one of these back in ‘96 or ‘97 and it was inspirational and fun. My friend Chris Schaefer at Solar and Wind FX is organizing the Finger Lakes part of the tour. A list of locations and directions is on his site.
I don’t know most of these folks, but I heard Bill LaBine give an interesting talk a few years ago on making biodiesel from waste vegetable oil. He was on to peak oil before most and just seems like a fascinating guy to talk to. He’s been doing alternative energy for a long time. I’m hoping to interview both Chris and Bill for upcoming posts, so this might be a really good chance for me to touch base with both of them.
I’m reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and I’m about two thirds of the way through. He’s just off to deal with the newly awakened dragon who is pissed because someone snagged a goblet. Beowulf has been king for 50 years after having defeated Grendel and his ma. More and more over the last several years I’ve been interested in quest stories, particularly medieval works like Parsifal and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Quest, the Hero’s Journey. In fact I’ve always been attracted to this type of work, from Star Wars to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Last Wednesday I was babysitting my two girls and two other kids. The weather looked like it was going to be crappy so I rented Eight Below. When I got home, Y cringed and said D had taken her son to see it and they were both very upset by it, that dogs died in a terrible manner and so on. So I watched it myself last weekend and despite the Frank Marshall - Disney schmaltziness moments it was pretty good. And not that different from Beowulf, actually in that it comprised two separate hero journey’s: one by the main character and one by one of the dogs.
The hero has comrades but has to leave them and wander alone for a while. Then something or someone unexpected shows up (the sword which Beowulf uses to slay Grendel’s Mother is found, the old man who tells the main character the story about his father in Eight Below) to put the hero back on the path. In the end the hero must observe correct protocol (presentation of gifts to his king in Beowulf, asking the question in Parsifal, acknowledging Coopers girlfriend in the picture in Eight Below). This last part is like a restoration of balance after the quest and critical.
Since we’re going through CMS selection vendor demo RFP scoring hell at work, I thought I’d finally install a CMS. After a little research, Joomla looked like the best choice based on the admin functionality, ease of use and support community.
My first test was to see if I could easily change the banner image. I tried to do this with the WordPress template and I only got halfway there. With Joomla, it was just replacing an image.
I was easily able to add a user and set permissions. He got an e-mail notification on cue. So far it looks pretty good, although I’m noticing that when I login as an admin, I don’t necessarily get the Administrator menu in the left nav.
Found a story on the coming global food crisis the Independent (via Raw Story) that shows some of the problems with agriculture. The story features Lester Brown, who was interviewed recently at treehugger.com. Last week the NY Times ran a story on the failed corn crop in much of the West.
The Independent article blames population increase plus growing ethanol demand, then goes on to say the solution is to help poor countries grow more of their own food. And there’s the rub. Just this morning my friend Mike was telling how his nephew just returned from Peace Corps duty in Zambia, where he was teaching the locals how to farm-raise Tilapia. “The problem,” says Mike “is that they are subsitence farmers and have no concept of cash crops.” To his credit, he caught himself and said “Actually, who knows whether that’s good or bad.”
The green revolution was based on cheap oil and exporting destructive practices that produced more in the short term but created conditions in which few people could and did farm. The US in the 1960’s is a great example, and Wendell Berry quotes then Secretary of Agriculture McGeorge Bundy as saying how great it is that only 3% of the US population produces all its food. The fact is that subsistence farming has been systematically destroyed. Ostensibly this is to make way for global agricultural products markets, but Doha and the EU Constitutional crises should show that we have a long way to go before there is anything like a level playing field in global farming.