the only country in the world that has no land, it is 100% border
admittedly, it was a narrow survey, and only of articles i liked. this one’s just fun on th’inside and presents the book for your consideration.
the earth would be incinerated. explain.
i… can’t.
ps. ok actually i think i know why — but — that assumes they were living gerbils — which brings us back to this strange human concept of individual wholeness.
pps. a perfectly sensible and “instinctual” error. —that’s killing us.
ppps. now, next question. what would be the energy output of an object, with the mass of our sun, but made of gerbils, burrowing material, things to play with, things to gnaw on, and enough food and water to sustain them and their children’s children’s children’s distant kin for 10 billion years?
If the gerbilarium is left in direct sunlight, gerbils can suffer heat exhaustion. They should recover if—
wait, stop. what “sun” are you talking about? do you mean gerbil centauri?
pppps. shit. we’d need a whole biosphere to clean the cage or they’d toxic croak. waste conversion — implies renewable supplies of food and furniture — that saves some storage space and that really big question of keeping the pellets fresh — and water purification — maybe need some pretty big treatment areas — we’d end up with marine gerbils — after, what, a few hundred generations — actually that could be a growth medium for the food — that and the dead gerbils — but we’d still need a sun to keep the cycle moving and the water liquid — and oxygen — so what we’ll do is — get an oil drum, tip it on its side, pour in a bunch of carefully-enriched water and some kelp — let that grow for a few months — then throw in maybe a few dozen? gerbils — seal the tank, add oxygen — come back in a year
— and it’s a good one — covers the bases:
i’ve said this before but for those who are new to the weirdness of the san francisco bay metropolitan area, “the city” is actually now the third, maybe fourth second largest city in the region, after san jose and oakland, and is one of i-forget-how-many five or six densely-populated counties (of nine) in the almost-megalopolis. (we have more transit agencies per person than anywhere else in the world, i’m sure.) where i live should be read as “the san francisco bay” “area” — not with emphasis on the city of under a million by the bay.
anyhow the real point of writing this was to step up a couple orders of magnitude and wonder — if SUV owners have lost all the value of their investments — imagine owning a perfectly-good fossil-burning power plant.
i haven’t seen a lot of thinking out there about what happens to the investors’ money, or the balance of loans, but it sounds like private operators of dirty generators are seeing sunset and seeking purchase contracts nobody can really keep.
ps. nine counties. “the city and county of san francisco” is the fourth largest county by population and second largest city. do you have any idea why i thought oakland was, like, three times larger than it is? probly just mixing up the ranks and fixing it by inflation.
pps. and the reason people aren’t thinking about it too hard is they’re looking at 2050 like it’s still 42 years away when this is actually the shortest century ever recorded.
i’m a little late with this. say my alarm clock didn’t go off. i said this would be the bare minimum i did to change the future of mideast meddling by ours truly. truth is i’ve been out in another desert, going blind, mentally parched, driving myself to extinction — what can you do? frames of reference are heavy.
you heard of the second coming, right? the rediscovery of the pentagon’s embedded subcontractors as tv news analysts, hawking their wars? the ensuing deafeningly absent self-examination by the soldiers of the fightin’ 4th estate?
or the gaspworthy revelation that bush lied. and lied. and lied.
in doctor who’s universe, sometimes they talk about “interstitial time” — the gaps between moments — ok, maybe in just one episode, but anyhow it’s said to be how his ship travels from one story to another in the blink of an eye. much like deny-then-dismiss travels between mysterious invisible gaps in the news cycle, tearing great holes in the fabric of VIP accountability.
the marx brothers joked about this.
PRESIDENT: And now, members of the cabinet…
[pounds gavel]
…we’ll take up old business.
CABINET MEMBER: I wish to discuss the tariff.
PRESIDENT: Sit down, that’s new business. No old business? Very well…
[pounds gavel]
…we’ll take up new business.
CABINET MEMBER: Now, about that tariff—
PRESIDENT: Too late, that’s old business already. Sit down.
people died laughing.
ps. modern audiences might find parts of duck soup a little slow; particularly the war; but iraqi audiences wouldn’t necessarily walk out until the grand ayatollah sistani said so.
The
Sino-Japan
Friendship
Centre
for
Environmental
Protection
has
been
around
for
more
than
a
decade.
ps. that looks like a seismograph reading, right? not a tornado?
pps. see, the social quake is highlighted, followed by gentle green aftermath.
are the U.S. flagship programme in international educational exchange and are used to help promote a better understanding of U.S. values abroad.
so, yes, the people trapped in gaza, imprisoned in gaza, they have so much need for a better understanding of US values abroad. they are deprived of this information and they are dying of this lack.
At a news conference on a visit to Iceland, Rice suggested she disapproved of the move cancelling the Fulbright scholarships to seven Palestinian students hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall [because Israel had not granted permission for the students to leave Gaza].…
But Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups say the withdrawal of the Fulbrights is emblematic of a much wider problem in which hundreds of Palestinian students have been prevented from leaving the Gaza strip to study abroad.
Palestinian groups said some 670 Palestinian students, including the seven who qualified for Fulbright grants, missed deadlines to attend programs at universities abroad because of Israel’s refusal to let them leave the Hamas-ruled territory.
someone should teach them a lesson.
ps. …by playing less golf. that’d tell them what they need to know.
fresh water, cheap plant fuel, habitat, soil, fish, waste space, you name it, about the only things we have in high supply are buried methane and greed which make quite the tag team.
forget our natural resource inventory. how much luck do we have left?
Renewable energy would pay back investments four times faster competing with gasoline than competing with other grid power.
when CDs came out, and people needed new equipment and the little shiny discs promised future profits for the music industry, even though people needed to buy new equipment to play them, it was ok. even though there was much love and knowledge and quality built into the analog auditory infrastructure, whole huge business ecologies hanging off, the switch to digital was an industry-approved effort.
it sold a lot of new stuff; it was “good for the economy.”
what’s different about going brown to green?
imagine if, instead of CDs, the music business went from LPs straight to napster.
*shudder*
the old economy has great powers of veto.
you can help by expanding it.
ps. guess which i wanted! hint: it had to do with monsters.
pps. oh, here’s another good one.
ppps. oh, here’s another good one.
pppps. and a rarity — the doctor who theme that was too funky for the UK.
ppppps. take this statement literally: i am not a fan of electronic music. when i bump into it i like it and we chat and then of course i have other things to do. this was not the situation in the BBC offices in 1972.
In 1972, there was an attempt by Brian Hodgson and Paddy Kingsland, with Delia Derbyshire acting as producer, to modernise the theme tune using the Radiophonic Workshop’s modular “Delaware” synthesiser (named after the Workshop’s location at Delaware Road). The “Delaware” arrangement, which had a distinct Jew’s harp sound, was not well received by BBC executives and was abandoned. The master tapes were given to a fan at the 1983 Longleat celebrations by Hodgson and were never returned. The episodes that used it were redubbed with the old Derbyshire arrangement, but lacking the repeated notes at the beginning of the music. However, the Delaware version was accidentally left on some episodes which were sold to Australia, and survives today in this form.
i’ve always liked the original best — spare and hand-built.
The original 1963 arrangement of the Doctor Who theme tune is widely regarded as a significant and innovative piece of electronic music. Recorded before the widespread introduction of synthesisers, Delia Derbyshire used musique concrète techniques. Each and every note was painstakingly handcrafted using pre-recorded individually struck piano strings as well as electronic equipment such as wave signal generators, noise generators, filters and square- and sine-wave oscillators (which were themselves rare at the time), with the results pitch-shifted if necessary. Each individual note in the Doctor Who theme was individually created using these instruments, and recorded onto magnetic tape. The swooping sounds were created by manually adjusting the pitch of the oscillator to a carefully-timed pattern. The rhythmic hissing sounds, “bubbles” and “clouds” were created by filtering white noise to “colour” it. Examination of the original makeup tapes suggests that one of the two bass lines alone is a “concrete” sound, a plucked string sample.
oooooh! the cleaned-up remix is on youtube!
this video’s actually a little special because it also includes all of the original time-warp effect sequence from the first episode, an unearthly child, on which the famous title visuals have always been based. anyway, back to our wikistory.
Once each sound had been created, it was modified. Some sounds were created at all the required pitches direct from the oscillators, others had to be repitched later by adjusting the tape playback speed and re-recording the sound onto another tape player. This process continued until every sound was available at all the required pitches. To create dynamics, the notes were re-recorded at slightly different levels.
Each individual note was then trimmed to length by cutting the tape, and stuck together in the right order. This was done for each “line” in the music — the main plucked bass, the bass slides (an organ-like tone emphasising the grace notes), the hisses, the swoops, the melody, a second melody line (a high organ-like tone used for emphasis), and the bubbles and clouds. Most of these individual bits of tape making up lines of music, complete with edits every inch, still survive.
This done, the music had to be “mixed”. There were no multitrack tape machines, so rudimentary multitrack techniques were invented: each length of tape was placed on a separate tape machine and all the machines were started simultaneously and the outputs mixed together. If the machines didn’t stay in sync, they started again, maybe cutting tapes slightly here and there to help. In fact, a number of “submixes” were made to ease the process — a combined bass track, combined melody track, bubble track, and hisses. Eventually, the piece was finished.
[Composer Ron] Grainer was amazed at the resulting piece of music and when he heard it, famously asked, “Did I write that?”. Derbyshire modestly replied “Most of it”.
i should’ve realized it but somewhere around here i also have another of derbyshire’s famous efforts, an electric storm, as part of the band white noise.
pppppps. as of right now, most of doctor who and the carnival of monsters — you gotta see it — most of it can be seen here.
after my roller coaster ride — or theirs, i guess — riding home with everyone, not on rails, at high speed, i browsed the internet with the aphone. i was laughing about it but nobody else was amused because i wasn’t in the conversation. i was, in fact, totally absorbed, and there’s that difference — if i’d been sitting there staring out the window people think they wouldn’t have felt nearly as insulted — though i can tell you — from past trips — that’s not true.
however i did pass on the better parts of what i found. one of them was called “ugly reggy” and it was the fruit of the state’s considerable research labors. the air resources board found, and try to restrain your shock here,
that carbon trading is only going to produce about 40% of the reductions the state needs. The other 60% will be produced by old-fashioned sector-specific regulations.
two days later this bay area’s air managers enacted a (tiny) carbon tax.
i would like now to tell you that everyone traveling with me cared about this but they didn’t. they wanted me to be looking out the window.
anyway, i dedicate this next number to them. it’s a ditty popularized by david roberts at gristmill just a few hours ago and it’s already been watched by a couple people. i hope you’ll join them and all of us here and sing along with “ahead of the curve: states lead on climate change.”
wait before you do that, there’s a higher resolution version at the documakers’ site and here’s the google vid link if you want to embed, and and and, and they did an earlier, funnier, fuzzier (in terms of targets) piece about corporate acclimatizing along with many other fine short films, such as this:
also ignore most of the %-reduction goal numbers; they’re not long for this world. i mean in the one about the states.
thanks for coming! enjoy!
ps. for the record—
As California seeks additional renewable energy resources, considers new water quality regulations for coastal power plants, and limits greenhouse-gas emissions, important issues must be addressed. It can be done, as the closure of the Hunters Point power plant in 2006 illustrates, but not without hard decisions that recognize the physical characteristics of the transmission grid that serves California.
—the private utilities—
But my question was if they would still need to rely on natural gas or any other “conventional” power sources as they transition, or to meet peak needs and state-mandated reliability standards.
—never stop being annoying.
good comments on the second one. tell you a lot.
pps. hee hee. aren’t we having fun.
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