I like to tell people why biodiesel and linux are very much based on the same principles. Biodiesel is an Open Source fuel supply. Quite literally, anyone can make it, just by going to the supermarket and buying the ingredients off the shelf. Because of this, the knowledge to make biodiesel can't be stopped by the fossil fuel interests.
Think about it.... Fossil Fuel companies == Microsoft Biodiesel == Open Source and Linux
The parallels are just so numerous, it's astounding. There are many many stories of some kind of fuel efficient engine or other technology that has been bought by FF or Auto companies, and quietly disbanded so the technology was never applied. MS has done the same thing countless times, but look how far it got them with Linux.:) Biodiesel is the same damn thing.
Another parallel is how fast people are jumping on the biodiesel bandwagon. Fossil fuels are causing a world of catastrophic problems, and the obvious solutions are lacking. But biodiesel is an VERY obvious solution, that just about anyone can gravitate toward. It gives farmers jobs, and reduces pollution from any diesel vehicle, it increases energy security, it doesn't cause global warming... etc.
The Algae aspect is really the first nail in the coffin for the fossil fuel Age. Think about it... a year's worth of fuel for the USA, from just 11,000 square miles of desert. And those figures use 1996 technology for algae production... given a little bit more R&D, it will get better.
There's a lot more parallels for biodiesel and Open Source... for example the distributed nature of fuel production and the distributed nature of code production. You can think of more and reply to this post.
About me... I have used B100 in my VW Jetta Wagon for two years straight, without a single problem. My car runs cleaner, quieter, and smells like french fries from the exhaust. I am one of the founding members of the GoBiodiesel Cooperative in Portland Oregon (www.gobiodiesel.org).
As a very dedicated audiophile, I can't imagine that inflatable speakers could sound good at all. Can you say uncontrolled cabinet resonance? The biggest problem with wooden box speakers is the resonance from the wood creating unwanted coloration in the sound. I don't think it is possible to brace an inflatable speaker enough to reduce resonance to any significant degree.
As far as building tetrahedral speakers out of wood, check out these from Acoustic Reality. I happen to own a pair, and resonance control is outstanding. They also sound great and are very cheap by audiophile standards.
Yeah, the Nature article is cool. There's also a Nature Science Update that explians the article in plain(er) english. The key thing is that the net is an example of a scale-free complex system, which means that there is no way to put an average number on the number of connections each node has. Being scale-free, it is vulnerable to a coordinated attack, if that attack gets one of the major nodes.
The scary thing is that the environment and ecosystems operate on the same principle (scale-free). And we are just plucking away, destroying bits and pieces without much logic or foresight. That's good because we are not likely to kill the critical nodes right away. But eventually we will, and various ecological systems will start to collapse. This is already happening in Borneo, where the rainforest is rapidly collapsing and dying off due to the combination of human and natural stress.
The really really scary thing is that we will never know what the critical nodes are in the various ecosystems until it is too late. Yet we keep on destroying and polluting. We are doomed unless we wake up soon.
climate catastrophe will make this all relevant
on
Natural Capitalism
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· Score: 1
With any new totally different idea, there is a lot of inertial resistance to the new concepts. You this already in the majority of the comments to the review. But right now people are happy and comfortable in a booming economy, so why worry about something radically new that requires thought?
Well, most of those same people adamantly opposed fouling their nest with excrement, and it will take some kind of global catastrophe to makes them realize that they are doing exactly that to the nest that is their planet earth.
My personaly favorite catastrophe is the cessation of the thermo-haline circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. Another name for the this is the Gulfstream, and this is what keeps Northern Europe warm despite having the latitude of Alaska. It is proven that the gulfstream has stopped in the past, and if it did so again, then Europe would plunge into an ice age literally overnight. The best estimates are that temps would drop 6 degrees Celsius - a huge number!
Global warming will stop the Gulfstream folks, because it is driven by a haline density pump at the north end between Iceland and Greenland. As the Greenland ice sheet melts and as the Arctic Ice Cap breaks up (40% of mass gone already), a large amount of freshwater can stop the sinking of water that is an essential part of the thermo-haline circulation.
The relief effort required to save Europe from an ice age *might* be enough for people to realize the error of our fossil fuel burning ways. That we would be collectively responsible for the problem would be impossible to refute. And it might be enough to start what some people are calling a new kind of Apollo program. A mission to use our incredible technical innovation to make our society and economy revolutionarily more eco-friendly. Then we might all be a lot more receptive to the principles of Natural Capitalism.
The whole point of the book is that there we need to place a higher value on healthy intact ecosystems. This is fundamental to human survival... at least for humans who like to eat, drink, and breathe.
Once this is established, then the challenge for the capitalistic market is to remain profitable while increasing eco-friendliness via the radical resource productivity, biomimicry, and the like. There are companies, like Interface that are already doing exactly this with beautifully innovative solutions to the problem of office carpeting. As a consumer and an environmentalist, you have to power to reward those companies. And to make them even more profitable and desirable.
Capitalism and environmentalism can have healthy happy marriage if capitalism places a higher value on the natural environment being healthy and free of pollutants. We can do this through a combination of market forces, consumer demand, and government incentives. First though, we need to believe that the systems works (i.e. not spout FUD). In 1998, how much of the free market believed that Linux would never be able to compete with MS?
Slashdot Mirror
I like to tell people why biodiesel and linux are very much based on the same principles. Biodiesel is an Open Source fuel supply. Quite literally, anyone can make it, just by going to the supermarket and buying the ingredients off the shelf. Because of this, the knowledge to make biodiesel can't be stopped by the fossil fuel interests.
:) Biodiesel is the same damn thing.
Think about it....
Fossil Fuel companies == Microsoft
Biodiesel == Open Source and Linux
The parallels are just so numerous, it's astounding. There are many many stories of some kind of fuel efficient engine or other technology that has been bought by FF or Auto companies, and quietly disbanded so the technology was never applied. MS has done the same thing countless times, but look how far it got them with Linux.
Another parallel is how fast people are jumping on the biodiesel bandwagon. Fossil fuels are causing a world of catastrophic problems, and the obvious solutions are lacking. But biodiesel is an VERY obvious solution, that just about anyone can gravitate toward. It gives farmers jobs, and reduces pollution from any diesel vehicle, it increases energy security, it doesn't cause global warming... etc.
The Algae aspect is really the first nail in the coffin for the fossil fuel Age. Think about it... a year's worth of fuel for the USA, from just 11,000 square miles of desert. And those figures use 1996 technology for algae production... given a little bit more R&D, it will get better.
There's a lot more parallels for biodiesel and Open Source... for example the distributed nature of fuel production and the distributed nature of code production. You can think of more and reply to this post.
About me...
I have used B100 in my VW Jetta Wagon for two years straight, without a single problem. My car runs cleaner, quieter, and smells like french fries from the exhaust. I am one of the founding members of the GoBiodiesel Cooperative in Portland Oregon (www.gobiodiesel.org).
As a very dedicated audiophile, I can't imagine that inflatable speakers could sound good at all. Can you say uncontrolled cabinet resonance? The biggest problem with wooden box speakers is the resonance from the wood creating unwanted coloration in the sound. I don't think it is possible to brace an inflatable speaker enough to reduce resonance to any significant degree.
As far as building tetrahedral speakers out of wood, check out these from Acoustic Reality. I happen to own a pair, and resonance control is outstanding. They also sound great and are very cheap by audiophile standards.
btw, I am audiophile lunatic... ugh.
KW
The scary thing is that the environment and ecosystems operate on the same principle (scale-free). And we are just plucking away, destroying bits and pieces without much logic or foresight. That's good because we are not likely to kill the critical nodes right away. But eventually we will, and various ecological systems will start to collapse. This is already happening in Borneo, where the rainforest is rapidly collapsing and dying off due to the combination of human and natural stress.
The really really scary thing is that we will never know what the critical nodes are in the various ecosystems until it is too late. Yet we keep on destroying and polluting. We are doomed unless we wake up soon.
With any new totally different idea, there is a lot of inertial resistance to the new concepts. You this already in the majority of the comments to the review. But right now people are happy and comfortable in a booming economy, so why worry about something radically new that requires thought?
Well, most of those same people adamantly opposed fouling their nest with excrement, and it will take some kind of global catastrophe to makes them realize that they are doing exactly that to the nest that is their planet earth.
My personaly favorite catastrophe is the cessation of the thermo-haline circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. Another name for the this is the Gulfstream, and this is what keeps Northern Europe warm despite having the latitude of Alaska. It is proven that the gulfstream has stopped in the past, and if it did so again, then Europe would plunge into an ice age literally overnight. The best estimates are that temps would drop 6 degrees Celsius - a huge number!
Global warming will stop the Gulfstream folks, because it is driven by a haline density pump at the north end between Iceland and Greenland. As the Greenland ice sheet melts and as the Arctic Ice Cap breaks up (40% of mass gone already), a large amount of freshwater can stop the sinking of water that is an essential part of the thermo-haline circulation.
The relief effort required to save Europe from an ice age *might* be enough for people to realize the error of our fossil fuel burning ways. That we would be collectively responsible for the problem would be impossible to refute. And it might be enough to start what some people are calling a new kind of Apollo program. A mission to use our incredible technical innovation to make our society and economy revolutionarily more eco-friendly. Then we might all be a lot more receptive to the principles of Natural Capitalism.
The whole point of the book is that there we need to place a higher value on healthy intact ecosystems. This is fundamental to human survival... at least for humans who like to eat, drink, and breathe.
Once this is established, then the challenge for the capitalistic market is to remain profitable while increasing eco-friendliness via the radical resource productivity, biomimicry, and the like. There are companies, like Interface that are already doing exactly this with beautifully innovative solutions to the problem of office carpeting. As a consumer and an environmentalist, you have to power to reward those companies. And to make them even more profitable and desirable.
Capitalism and environmentalism can have healthy happy marriage if capitalism places a higher value on the natural environment being healthy and free of pollutants. We can do this through a combination of market forces, consumer demand, and government incentives. First though, we need to believe that the systems works (i.e. not spout FUD). In 1998, how much of the free market believed that Linux would never be able to compete with MS?