It's Inevitable

Despite the hold of big oil over congress, it's inevitable that renewables are winning the war against the energy polluters of the world.

The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's no going back. 

The shift occurred in 2013, when the world added 143 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity, compared with 141 gigawatts in new plants that burn fossil fuels, according to an analysis presented Tuesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance annual summit in New York. The shift will continue to accelerate, and by 2030 more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added. 

"The electricity system is shifting to clean,'' Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF, said in his keynote address. "Despite the change in oil and gas prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas."

Maybe it's time to put the Tar Sands and other unmentionables to bed, don't you think? :)

Channeling 1984

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”  - Orwell/1984

When never ending war is combined with a perpetual state of emergency, you have a nation falling apart, something we see when driving over roads filled with potholes, seeing bridges rusting out and watching manufacturing jobs being sent overseas, never to return. On the emergency end of things, USA Today has it covered.

A post-9/11 state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush — and renewed six times by President Obama — forms the legal basis for much of the war on terror.

Tuesday, President Obama informed Congress he was extending another Bush-era emergency for another year, saying "widespread violence and atrocities" in the Democratic Republic of Congo "pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States."

Those emergencies, declared by the president by proclamation or executive order, give the president extraordinary powers — to seize property, call up the National Guard and hire and fire military officers at will.

It gets better:

In his six years in office, President Obama has declared nine emergencies, allowed one to expire and extended 22 emergencies enacted by his predecessors.emerge.

Change we can believe in, right and we haven't even talked about the secretive TPP.

People are questioning the deal big time, both on the left as well as the right and it's about time.

 To try to block fast track and the TPP, liberal groups and labor unions are not organizing only among their own but are also reaching across the spectrum to conservatives skeptical of fast track and TPP. This left-right alliance has been duly noted in recent months. What has gone underappreciated, though, is just how much the opponents of the trade deals on the left are appealing to the right very much on the right’s own terms. After years of ridiculing the Tea Party movement’s talk of Obama as an autocrat on issues such as immigration and health care, the left is now pushing those very buttons on trade, noting that fast track would give Obama vast powers and that the TPP would create a new international arbitration panel where corporations could challenge local, state, and national laws. Some left-leaning advocates are going so far as to link the trade issue to the conservative litany of Obama outrages: the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups, Benghazi, and the “Fast and Furious” gun-running fiasco, among others.

What you don't tell your kid on Earth Day

A good friend turned me onto this amazingly funny site. Tech laughs for geeks like yours truly. :)

I think

Depicted above is Darwin's first depiction of the evolutionary tree, drawn and written shortly after The Voyage of the Beagle ended, the only time this extraordinary naturalist ever traveled outside of England during his long life. When looking at this, one sees just how intimate the creative process truly is as Darwin struggled to understand the profound implications of evolution and how it applied to life on earth. In essence, it was the underdiscovered country writ large, discovered by a charming and decent man who was a genius in every sense of the word. 

When reading The Voyage of the Beagle, a detailed and fascinating view of the world unfolds, written by an ever curious person wanting to know why things are the way they are. When reaching the Galapagos, the first inklings of the why started to issue forth, a notion coming to full fruition in 1859 when Darwin published The Origin of Species.

To yours truly, the word genius is often connected to IQ tests and specific abilities in a given discipline like math or music but this description seems too narrow as there are many people who possess these kinds of skills and more. To me, genius is the ability to make connections, to see relationships and be able to articulate how the relationships apply to the task at hand. Newton had this as did Jobs, Einstein, Miles and ... without question, Darwin.

To whit.

Darwin is a very interesting case. My interest in Darwin is part intellectual and part biographical, as is often the case. So intellectually, a little bit like Newton. He wasn’t at university; he was on a boat! He was sailing around the coast of South America with a very unstable captain. And on that boat, without funds, without qualifications, without colleagues, he formulates, essentially, in his red notebook, the theory of natural selection—based on empirical observations of an extraordinary kind. So that level of empirical synthesis, somewhat in isolation, is of great interest to me.

The other thing about Darwin that makes him an ambiguous figure, in fact, in discussions of genius relates to what attributes of mind he had, for example, in distinction to a Henri Poincaré or a great mathematician, and it’s because he combined what Howard Gardner would call, “multiple intelligences.” Darwin was both narrative and linguistic; he was visual; and he was analytical. So what makes Darwin somewhat unique in the history of science—and I think explains in part why he’s such a key figure—is that he had many attributes of intelligence—not just the analytical-mathematical or the linguistic-narrative. He had them all! And the taxonomic. 

I think kind of says it all, doesn't it? :)

in·ter·stice

ScanLAB Showreel from ScanLAB on Vimeo.

Innovative tech, pioneered by ScanLAB combining videography, 3D laser scanning and 3D imaging, is both informative  and eerie in an interesting sort of way. Sort of like Sin City on steroids if you ask me.

MATTHEW SHAW AND William Trossell document the world with lasers.

When the duo founded ScanLab Projects in 2011, they were a pair of freshly minted architecture school graduates who’d gotten their hands on an extraordinarily expensive commercial-grade laser scanner. Today, their London-based studio is at the forefront of large-scale 3-D laser scanning, specializing in striking, ghostly reproductions of castles, museums, ice floes and more, conjured from billions of millimeter-precise dots.

ScanLab’s latest undertaking is a sprawling scan of Mail Rail, a network of abandoned tunnels once used to transport mail beneath London. Like much of the group’s work, it sits at the intersection of utility and beauty, commerce and art. On one level, it’s an unprecedentedly detailed document of a historically significant site—a laudable bit of high-tech preservation. On another, it’s a work of art in an arresting new medium, a strange offspring of photography and computer-generated imagery. Depending on your perspective, it’s either the past seen through the lens of the future, or the future seen through the lens of the past.

I. F. Stone on Earth Day

Izzy Stone is a hero of mine as he was relentless in digging out the dirt in DC. His I.F. Stone's Weekly was a must read to see how Governments lie, something that's gone on since the beginning of time but, this blurb is not about the weekly per se but rather about Earth Day and Stone's prescient comments about same.

You know, there is no use talking about Earth Day unless we are prepared to make these fundamental changes. Everybody’s talking about Earth Day, and it comes out of the mouths of so many hypocrites it turns your stomach. What kind of an Earth Day can we celebrate in a country that is spending so much of its money to destroy the Earth? How can we talk of reverence for life when we’re spending so much on our enemy, our genius, our money, and our youth on building up new means of destroying life?

What’s the use of talking about the pollution of air and water when we live under a precarious balance of terror which can, in an hour’s time, make the entire Northern Hemisphere of our planet unlivable? There’s no use talking about Earth Day until we begin to think like Earthmen. Not as Americans and Russians, not as blacks and whites, not as Jews and Arabs, but as fellow travelers on a tiny planet in an infinite universe. All that we can muster of kindness, of compassion, of patience, of thoughtfulness, is necessary if this tiny planet of ours is not to go down to destruction. Until we have a leadership willing to make the enormous changes—psychological, military, and bureaucratic—to end the existing world system, a system of hatred, of anarchy, of murder, of war and pollution, there is no use talking about buying more wastebaskets or spending a couple of hundred million dollars on the Missouri River. If we do not challenge these fundamental causes of peril, we will be conned by the establishment while basic decisions are being made over which we have very little control, though they endanger everything on which our future and the world’s depend.

Think about it, I know I have.

515

Interesting and haunting video of the rise of the NYC skyline. 

From the moment the doors close until they reopen 47 seconds later on the 102nd floor, a seemingly three-dimensional time-lapse panorama will unfold on three walls of the elevator cabs, as if one were witnessing 515 years of history unfolding at the tip of Manhattan Island.

For less than four seconds (roughly proportional to the time the twin towers stood), jarringly familiar pinstripe facades will loom into view on one wall of the cab. Then, in a quick dissolve, they will evanesce.

Inherent beauty

Inherent beauty, inherently mysterious. Enjoy.

  

All About Books & Then Some :)

A good friend of mine turned me onto this NYC gem where antique books of the highest quality are available to see and, of course, buy. Enjoy.

A New York State of Mind

Spring time is the best time to check out NYC IMHO. 

Diverse, noisy and grand, NYC rocks in its own particular way. Enjoy.