kill bill represents the meta-archetypes of manifest destiny

-- spoilers ahead for people who haven't witnessed Crouching Tiger
Hidden Dragon --

Blogger has upgraded its interface and services. I really like the new
look and am thrilled that I stayed in for some of the exciting added
features.

That's why today, I am submitting my blog entry via e-mail.

Wow. Does this every help me with spelling! Grammar, unfortunately,
still suffers under the impress of my digits and unorganized thoughts.

Welcome to the world of blogging, BTW, if you've never been here. You
might enjoy the catharsis of producing works anyone can read. But, hey, that's half the charm isn't it?

You can get famous among your friends and any relatives you can convince
to visit the echos of your innermost thoughts. I count myself fortunate
that I haven't gushed too much about the daily doses of life that
make up the 'real' me.

Perhaps the virtualization of self and the chance you might get caught
in the 'act' of revealing yourself is as much to do about being watched
over as praying by your bedside at night.

Me? I'm not going to say anything that will tell you more than what I
want you to hear. You're just going to have to read between the lines.

Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot... 'Kill Bill'... Violent... almost genocidal
in its scope if you believe in the meta-archetype theory.

Wait till I break down 'Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon' in that
menacing way I have of making a symbol out of everything. You aren't
going to believe me when I tell you the hidden message is communist
angst about the betrayal of Han culture by the very people who might
have inherited power.

If you remember standing as the observer in the end you may not know
that you represent the unwashed, the untrained in statecraft and power
brokerage, a thief in love with what he can barely understand watching
the heir apparent abandon hope that the Han can be saved from savage
teachings that only half-way interpret the lineage of sagacity.

Whether the Green Destiny can be retired for good remains a mystery.

The message is potent as is the death of the beloved master of the
sword, whose death across water on an island in a sea of dilapidated
housing, was as much caused by half-understood truths as the need to be
close to the plant that could save him.

It took me a while to believe that the movie was as much about the
automobile and sustainability as it is about the apprenticeship of
culture. But now that I see it I enjoy it all the more.

Kill Bill can wait for another day.


-- our fantasies create landscapes in which we can live and which, in
reality, could never be lived --

regulating for Robin of the Hood

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-- what you tell queen ants may be a betrayal of species --

craft as high art

The fascination held in art has pushed even Prince Charles to critique the placement and tenure of architectural constructs within the concept of community and history.

How good does it look seems secondary today to how much does it cost and how much can I get out of it once it is built.

Of course there is a lot that looks good that costs quite little, usually around the tended edges of the buildings our Prince so rightly provides both an a-political and timeless perspective on.

Royalty has its merits.

Perhaps in every country of the world there should be a royalty to which the individual would strive to aspire to please.

Mervyn Pym thought craft the art of the age he described in its ascent to royal hands. And the bejeweled Faberge eggs most certainly expand the imagination at the hatching of taste in patronage.

Today, in England, the Royal Family is not the same patron of the arts that the state is. While around the world public money upholds a corporate rubber stamping of low cost 'fixtures' hanging on walls, sitting on shelves and crouching in gardens.

There is something for everyone. And everyone gets something.

And craft is now a cog in the machine that feeds an assembly line on a landscape of freedom from expression.

When did the Royal touch give way to The Midas Touch?



-- if public money had been spent in making this piece you couldn't afford to read it --

successful interaction transcends inherent imperfections

The old adage 'what you put into it is what you get out' seems like the kind of commercial gloss you'd expect to find as the jingle for an ad selling gasoline for cars.

But dig a little deeper under the derma of this charm and you will find hidden truths that reveal a fractal equation about the role of consumption in making you who you are.

Consider the equation f=f+f(squared). In this iterative attempt to define an endless pattern, it is consumption that defines the product of succeeding generations. F is itself the product of a multiple of itself.

The limits placed on this endless pattern by quanta and the extension of quanta in the expression E=MC(squared) place survival cooperation squarely in the exhange of energy.

By extension, then, it is the interactions of cooperative effort that define the spirit of humanity in the face of having to live with consumption, and the exchange of energy on which this cooperation is based. That energy and matter are inseparable is quite apparent in the act of eating living organisms. To kill, however, goes directly against the spirit of interaction that separates us from the consumptive nature of the universe. I like to think of this as meaning that the infinite in interaction has given rise to a view of itself in human and other sentience along with a supporting ecosystem that is filled with marvelous beings which to share in the gift.

Therefore it is the triumph over consumption of and within our own species and the environment supporting all life that is the transcendent spirit over the inherent imperfections that make us seek the higher order in successful interactions.



-- don't smoke that ... it could kill someone else --

curriculum of interests

Social networking, online learning, and search engine technology may all benefit from the interrelated meta-view describing large chunks of information, however, when the aggregate of elements is put in the grinder and made into sausages, well, then you have an entirely different story.

What's missing in the meta approach moving toward an understanding of the fundamental similarities and the points on which each of the aforementioned claim interrelationship is meaning. Another way to describe this flaw is user context. The user contextualizes the elements which aggregate to form the meta definition of knowledge objects. This is not to say that the user is flawed, only that the implementation of the pivots among various forms lead to a specialization that breaks the unconcentrated infinity of the distance between relationships. In this infinity is defined as 0 where 0 means there is no distance between meaning, in effect making all elements the same thing. Only the starting point where the user enters infinity creates distance between related terms.

An example of this is in the construction of the human body and the bio-chemical/electric transfer of pain to the centre that processes the 'information'. The nerve impulse transmits a message that has no meaning where the 'keyword' was entered but that is given special meaning such as location, intensity, duration, etc. when the keyword is interpreted.

To admit that any feeling at the insertion point of the pain stimuli in any way affects locally would be to deny both the voracity of the interpreted message and stop bio-technology in its tracks.

However, this discussion is about the future of the Internet and the importance of the unconscious interpretation of the impulse where it relates to the distribution of keywords and contextual meaning along nerve pathways of the Internet body without the user's influence.

Suffice it to say that the goal is for the Internet to build itself not on the single user but on the curriculum of interests that now exist within its space.

This may, at first, seem paradoxical. If the user's influence is not to be taken into account how can a curriculum arise where there is not interest?

Your answer lies in making the user obsolete. You must not believe he is there. Your doubt will facilitate the service of the user.


--

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in the knot of meaning
not meaning
the genome of ontology

--

to the nuclear christ in benediction or a Passion play parody

the canticle we worry for 220 Amp service
strikes at us in the crucifixion of the nuclear christ

the Roman jabs to His offence that power must be
tells the corporate Pharisee His birth had not won
an argument for the central glory supply side economy

Tom and Pat Lawson engrave His cross
before the crown is put upon His head
with arguments in transient science
finalities of sentience and memory structured skein

while followers weep for the fishes and loaves
they did not bring to the gathering
putting all their faith in His magesty
but none in their own

Odd says help no one and love not your neighbor
the Lawson truth upholds the wounding
his crown to the fold

take piece and spread concentration
that the message of Odd may never be
but regret of his governance where
the effect to man Pontius did know

but in piety the Lawsons did weep
to strike the first blow with the soldier's hand
telling none that this pain in fire
could the unravelling of ideology free

soldiers carry on knife in the sheaf
while mass destruction soldiers on
and peace keeps itself clean
wearing the crown without blood

been there, done that

-- a day of rest is when we contemplate the sacrifices that can't make for our work --

the untrained and the un-life-tested form basis for stringer theory of journalistic integrity

Do you fear the cardboard box more in death or in life?

If your answer is life then you won't have a problem paying your way into the next generation by making small sacrifices on the altar of survival.

If your answer is death then you understand the institutionalization of a class of Buddhist monks who beg as it relates to the institutionalization of the crucifixion of Christ.


-- thanks to US author William Gibson for recognizing the patterns and telling us where it might put you if you say anything. he should have been a full-time journalist who trained for the job and isn't just stringing --

all is as it should be when it is one

hot is as cold
touch is not touch
with magnetic density
mingling entanglement

this feeling expresses
waveform anxiety
pressed against boundaries
that place us within

within a span of life
experiencing for god
the right hand rule
of limited consequence
only ruined by binary fools
who dislike the container
that time stood still

a forward and backward
viewpoints for sharing
the eyes and the window
for joy get to be



-- a great thanks to British author Phillip Pullman for the concept of the 'Subtle Knife', Max Planck for Planck's Constant and Mr. Einstein for a Relativity good time --

media mediation in the quanta (fixed) reality of virtualized social networks

The social network is 'healed' by face-to-face interactions in which conditionals are expressed without media mediation.

In Zen fashion then the easiest shape of the social network is a sphere the contemplation of which should realize 'it's a small world after all'.

-- the headline made more sense and is deprecating only to the infinity of reality --

ontology of the corporate self serves the team interest

So often when we talk of relationships and the classes within them we come to rest on definitions that take others into account but rarely touch on the self. The self is often regarded as a profile, a class if you will of employee.

Social networking has changed this bias, but it hasn't broken the chains of it in the way relationships are defined.

The ontology of the self is still immature. It resides in different forms everywhere, but it never grows beyond the confines of the interface people have to define elements of self. Social networking is tailored by how those defined elements extend the reach of the self to build teams for whatever function the kernel hierarchy attracts other selves to push as the team exploration.

From a philological standpoint the self is a polymorphic entity containing history as a launching point to new experiences.

Social networking is limited by extension. It is unable to exchange the self by attaching new definitions within limited interfaces. Experience is not carried into the future and change is limited by attaching the limits of a new interface.

This is the case for distributed accessible identities and a complete ontological definition of the self.

The morphology of the self and the low level elements that redefine the interface of self (rather than the self within the interface) is the future of social networking, online learning and species advancement in the machine of technically aided thought/interaction.

What cannot be forgotten is knowledge management ownership and access. The human in the technology must never be forgotten. Tricks of the trade must never be lost even as the bar is raised with specialization. Human validation of mastery must dominate as must face to face iterations for the purpose of advancement.

-- i grew up on television but never had the chance to validate my expertise in channel surfing --

the global GIS proposition to interconnect solutions

could this be a terrorist nightmare or a corporate dream

the Swedish solution

like it or leave it
bio accumulative or not
don't sell me GM
with canola and a piss pot

-- thank jahweh for europe / be it so --

mobility future not firmly grasped by electricity policy

Sustainability in a generation is such a great idea.

The years up to 2012 are very important in terms of greenhouse gas emission reduction by virtue of the expected launch of fuel cell vehicles to market at that time. Estimates place 50% penetration by fuel cells in the vehicle market as late as 2030, however, there are several developments ongoing that will likely accelerate development and adoption of related technologies, not the least of which is die activated solar panels and residential wind along with regulatory frameworks to promote distributed generation and optimize the capture of intermittentcy for redistribution.

India is running out of uranium but has firmly entrenched nuclear in its generating mix in pace with its rapid growth. China is similarly inclined to grow, but has made some tummy grumbling sounds about being hungry for renewable energy -- probably if the price is right and generation can satisfy the enormity of its growth. Watch out for Canada's nuclear extraction industry in the next few years exporting to more than just the US and parts of Eastern Europe. India is a prime and very large customer. Due to transportation restrictions India will likely be purchasing up to 8% enriched.

Remember that Canada's regulatory barriers to nuclear do not exist. Nuclear is a favorable technology to government seeking to supply the needs of the hungry and the weak. Even though Canada is considered 30% less efficient than its US neighbor in energy efficiency subsidies have essentially strangled sustainability, in particular energy conservation. The culture is slowly changing but may not be fast enough with the arrival of fuel cell vehicles.

Electrolysis of water is not considered the most efficient method of producing hydrogen only the most convenient beyond steam reform of natural gas or gasoline. Ethanol is poised to make a very large dent, but only as far as portable fuel goes. The market in cars will likely demand designs that incorporate either ethanol or hydrogen storage or both.

The marriage of hydrogen and nuclear is a done deal without immediate action. In Ontario it will take a year from now to implement even an office of promotion to look at sustainability legislative action. This is dangerous and could be costly.


-- someone asked me about residential fuel cells to spark the rudimentary analysis from my research above/ your comments are much appreciated as is any verifiable information about government timelines, industry insider information and the like --

I've been following advancements on residential fuel cells on several fronts.

At this point the technology is both too expensive and not as mature as some would like it. The hydrogen infrastructure is also a concern, which is now being solved by other hydrogen feedstock such as ethanol.

There are tests ongoing in Japan using a 1 kW model and in the US a fuel cell has been developed that is somewhat smaller than a regular furnace. It converts ethanol onboard.

Most of my fuel cell research concentrates on mobility, but there are obviously many important overlaps between portable power, mobility and home power.

There seem to be a lot of issues needing to be resolved with respect to market penetration of fuel. I don't think anyone is seriously looking at hydrogen piped in at the household level. The connection between hydrogen, water and electricity is still too attractive even with energy loss. The other indicator is that fuel companies have been protected by government from having to provide hydrogen at the pump because of the high cost of conversion. Part of the reasoning seems to be that the cost is too high all at once to penetrate the market at 30%, which is considered critical mass for self-sustained adoption of hydrogen. Essentially, I read this as meaning it will never happen because adoption of vehicles won't be in any concentrated market where distribution ownership is also similarly concentrated.

All monies invested, R&D efforts and technology transfer indicates that it is ethanol that is the chosen source of our future hydrogen needs. Nuclear is bound to follow quickly on the heels of that if oil consumption is also to be reduced and fuel cell vehicles become immediately popular. Home power and portable power will be waiting in the wings for low cost solutions to come from the automotive industry, as they already have done.

the science of extraction cannibalism

or the science of cannibalism extraction... you decide...

[moreonthislater -- retals i ht no erom]

What are you supposed to do when money is given to the government of your country to develop an energy extraction industry that runs power lines or pipelines past your home, providing neither you nor your countrymen any economic or social benefit. The energy is shipped away overhead and your children continue to go hungry.

Is this a socially just application of market penetration and technology adoption?

Is this indemic only to the developing world?


-- my wife and children have left me for my blog --

meta mutations: a search for principal equations

The living of science is not possible.

Somewhere a spirit seeks to harmonize with the beginning and the end of things, and never along the path to righteousness is it known when the thread will snap its judgement, forcing past cracked lips no utterance of truth to this world.

In the movement of planets Kepler found bodies reborn from dust. A finite clockwork of aggregation captured in the motion of mathematics, knowable by us only before the infinite lies still in a time beyond our imagining or measure.

Our concentrations orbiting an inward moving nucleus of species survival splinters an embrittled margin with an ever widening gap. Equations govern the motions of the spirited. The mouse takes the cheese.

In the search for a specialty your path creates an apprenticeship to this science with no mentor but an unframed picture of what might be.

hating oil is passe

No, you read that right... The title DOES read 'hating' NOT 'heating'.

Of course, as we all know, hate is a negative way of expressing one's incapacity to understand, empathize or otherwise find a more constructive and life-affirming way of getting their point across.

So hating oil is passe. It has to be. Thinking otherwise would be tantamount to describing your need for food energy as unnecessary and evil... follow this and you must realize I am saying oil is a necessity of life.

Well it is, isn't it?

It isn't whether you do live without oil that paints you into a corner it is whether you can live without it. Sure, you could make a personal choice to live without oil, but you wouldn't be able to do it. Not even the local health food store goes without relying on oil, or the byproduct of oil, at some point in the chain of inter-nationalized inter-dependency to source product and deliver it to your door.

And no matter what you do about it, you aren't going to make a dent in the foundation upon which you live, even by making a conscious choice about what you buy at the store, put on your table, shade yourself with under the heat of the sun in the summer or heat yourself with in the cold heart of winter. You might as well give up.

Statistics are against you.

Even in the hydrogen economy carbon emissions won't be 100 per cent sequestered. Right now 90 per cent of the hydrogen produced in the world is sourced from reformed fossil fuels. You're still pumping oil out of the ground or releasing natural gas from the crypt of time to extract its precious hydrogen cargo.

The European Union Commission on Sustainable Development has released a draft of its proposed directive governing overall commitments to energy efficiency and energy security. In this draft the EU targets a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2050.

While this may be good news to some (remember, it takes roughly 80 years for the effects of emissions to dissipate in the 'open' environment) it doesn't mean that oil has been removed from the picture. In fact, there are no specific targets contained in this document that set limits to oil development, procurement or distribution. And nothing in the draft hints that oil companies should now reform existing supplies of refined oil into hydrogen.

The open market dominates. Governments in the industrialized world have all taken a similar tact to the European Union member nations with the caveat that in Canada great consideration is given over to nuclear where nuclear has been implemented already. Private investor ownership greatly guarantees nuclear longevity and the issue is likely to rage on with ferocity for many generations until renewable investments are more attractive than nuclear ones.

Incidentally, nuclear is considered a clean technology by Environment Canada, Industry Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and is an ingrained part of Ontario's electrical generation mix, standing at a whopping 76% of today's base load capacity.

Maybe I should be taken out on the cinder path and punished for my viewpoint on oil. But just who is going to do that? Who is the one person I know that has the right to do that? Maybe a marsupial, but doubtful any human other than a scattered few over there on the dark continent who decided not to join in the agrarian revolution or the following industrial revolution, but seem likely, instead, to develop a footprint in the communications revolutions.

Well, I've said my corporate piece and forgotten the one thing that does make a difference. Careful, it's touchy and feely and could get all over you if you aren't careful. Get out your bleeding heart alert because the word of the day is... investment. No, you thought I was going to say 'togetherness', didn't you. Well, private investment is a togetherness of a sort. Investment in conservation is just another form of paying yourself and the other investors who hold a common share in the same endeavor.

The same could be said of community power initiatives. There are, however, two problems. One is that someone else's investment interests may already be in the way, and two, it isn't necessarily fair that given you can invest in a renewable source of energy and be an owner of a corporate entity, that everyone is going to be given the chance to do so. This second point is probably the one that tells you your investment is going to pay off, no matter what else you can do about it.

We are damn lucky right now that the entire spectrum of generation has been opened to the public. This is a bold and risky move. Special interests like oil aren't going to like it, but be honest, just because someone works for a company you don't particularly like, is no reason not to invite them to invest alongside you. You can either tell them to keep it quiet, or invite them out to the meeting. Chances are even if they believe their technology is cleanest the chance they are offered to invest and profit will at least help your renewable initiative off the ground.

So, the people you should be asking to invest aren't the converted. The people you should be asking to invest are the people who work for and already profit in other energy forms like oil and nuclear.

You might be surprise how willing they are to work with you when you are polite.



-- if I had a polite bone in my body I might convince others I am a Canadian --

the impiety of trial balloons

A trial balloon is a waste of a good piece of man-made material.

The problem with trial balloons is that the people who release them so they can gauge the reaction of the people watching don't really know where they're going or where they'll land for sure. So much time is spent on the prevailing winds that gusts and blasts are ignored in favor of popular prognostication.

Unless you want to place a secular government in someone else's country.

Next time the news reports the loss of yet another monument to organized religion at public place of institution I am going to remember that its being taken away signifies the intent to evangelize the enforced cooperation of someone who doesn't share those same symbolized beliefs by the removal of something someone else holds dear.

Freedom is an entanglement of various forms of subterfuge. Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself for someone else. Sometimes it is they who are the sacrifice. The altar is pretty commonly understood to be impermanent, but people on both sides use it anyway.


-- the iconoclast is the iconography of the symbolic future --

the morphology of an unconscious artificial intelligence

Have you analyzed the transformation of the social network from TCP/IP switched HTTP containment and element language constructs to a true relational model based on a fractally inorganic morphology of knowledge/criticality intelligence dependent on human activity?

The person in the machine exist along every path to destination. Bandwidth limits pathway determination. Speed forms new synergies passing the ability to take in all relations. Distributed processing. Distributed accessible identity. Distributed subconscious terms. Collected individual, shared and collectivist (discipline-centric) destinations. Keystones locking the arch of intelligence.

The search engine in the sleep of the 'intelligent' machine knows where the hits are.


-- I swear my head gets bent every time I sit at a terminal keyboard --

the consumer law of the conservation of energy

I asked this question today of a renewable energy expert:

What are some of the regulatory changes necessary to uphold energy conservation so intrinsic to renewable adoption and how can these economically advantage consumers?

Please send your ideas.


Here is one that may follow the natural capitalism thema:

Privately build apartment buildings must contribute 40 per cent of all energy required by residents and after X number of years of private ownership the 'land' that each apartment represents falls back into public ownership.


Some of the drivers of this idea are that multi-level buildings extrapolate on surface rights ownership principles entrenched in the economy but that there is less economic benefit to the current methods of deriving income from each new surface level than is represented by the impact on the environment.

Another pretext is that economic and political systems are impacted by centralization of freedoms: that is to say that with either system and related sub-systems ultimate freedom would be complete factional control. This is the balance of type that impinges on personal freedoms as well.

The penultimate reason is economic deconstruction. Making new ownership from old. Making public of the private.
We currently run systems that bias toward the privatization of, for lack of a better term, the public. Using the word public in some way favors the idea that unowned or ungiven everything is public. You would have to believe that government serves the public in order to support the belief that anything handed to the private by government is public in the first place.

Anyway, semantics and self aggrandized argument aside, land lease/ownership is a great example of how economic deconstruction is outpaced by the ability of land to provide capital that is centrally amassed and that creates unending dependencies on the developments placed on those lands.

Still, it wouldn't serve anyone to usurp control of lands and change rules overnight. But it also doesn't serve the public to allow unscalable capital towers to dominate the economic landscape. Such a system does not entrench altruism where an enterprise is no longer individual or concerned with more than its own survival. Further to this is the theocratic indoctrination of the enterprise in its ownership and development of land. As the eternal, just so long as the lease is paid, the revenue stream lasts forever.

An analysis of various political systems and regulatory environments reveals historical wariness around any talk of adopting any limitations to apparent individual freedom, however, when an incorporation no longer mitigates the behavior or obligations of mere individuals you have a collective whose cause is to serve a singular purpose. Fortunately, for the most part, this specialization works because other collective forces also act simultaneously to balance the cultural bandwagon.

The individual, however, is forced to then politicize the party line to the effect of marketing its virtues whatever the impact of achievement may be. Another characteristic of the this corporate organism is its nuclear oligarchy in competition seeking the destruction or occlusion of other organisms discarding ideology as waste products of victory.

Its monotheism is apparent in its evangelism to subsume that can only be telegraphed as far as its reach.

Anyway, now the argument is taking a turn toward a partisan politic.

In the creation of the private the death of it must also be present to serve the public that expects the nutrient of change on which to subsist. And within change the understanding that some needs exist must tailor the regulatory environment of conduct and ownership.

Even the patenting of life may depend on it.




-- the need for energy can be created but never destroyed --

the recentred in a pitched memory

When the magnetic fields of one capitulates to the other the memory formed is of the imbalance in the order of things.

Something had to give. The question of which -- the capitulant or the holdout -- represents harmony and which represents discord is the true play of human activity upon the backdrop of species, origin, evolution... all those fun things that spin miraculously toward heat death or the creation of infinite universes.

Where the human seed sprouts truest is in the spiritual escape from the rigor of survival to a balance of harmony. In this path the admission of true form is an acknowledgement of the imperfect inheritance of the sacrifice each human must make of another to go forward.

Our colonies, our cultures, our pitched battles for resources or ideologies we concern ourselves to make or assert as the form of our limited ability to telegraph the message to everyone that we only wish to be friends.

The centre is perpetually moved by diaspora never to be found and pinned, as wave after wave of emotive contemplation separates us from childhood, family, friends, time and location.

To suffer the heat death alone or to spawn a new universe is a task no cyberdraped evolution can influence or overcome.

It is the only certainty is the life placed in your own hands.

The only transience is the clarity held against the sanctity of all life.



-- this ice is my environment --

the avatar of complexity in an age of specialization

The random cameo of intellectual property patents as financial assets marks the full polarization of open source and corporate protected product developments.

The staking of identity claims are compelling evidence of the branded avatar that is the space between the screen and keyboard and the content massaged by this medium by user or users. Existing in this space we have dubbed 'cyber' is the institutionalization of the electron, the healthcare of the digital pulse, and the medieval metronome of the cycle built for and by a church of believers but used by an unabashed techno-secularized rabble of the incongruous.

Welcome to the avatar. If you try to read any of it at all you are its master and always in immersion or not a slave to understanding.



-- when I ask for your identity I do so for the purpose of security --

patterning for the reactionary dilemma

Activism is not an essential role of the mainstream media unless it is to report an incident of activism or a populist activist movement that can no longer escape notice.

An election platform by a recognized political party is an activist movement that is palatable to the mainstream media.

Environmentalists must realize that a body of evidence is simply a diverse collection of information that has no head and no tail. In other words, to the mainstream, there is no animal with which to wrestle. There is no recognition of a centrist dogma to an environmental movement as there is with a recognized discipline that has an apparent contribution to the economic well being of news readers.

It is incumbent on activists to rephrase their 'industry'. In fact, this word 'industry' is a useful tool environmentalists are missing. By extension 'industry' in context says that money is to be made and that the future is being preserved. It is the watchword of the mainstream definition of progress that persists today despite the body of evidence suggesting that industry is complicit in damaging the environment by profiting from the maintenance of dependencies and systems that have a detrimental impact.

Environment Industry.

Today the environment industry reported...

Wind and solar became industries.

Now the environment must rephrase itself without redefining its core goals. Part of this effort may require activism to become bound under recognized consortia consisting of members who propel issues by arguing over them. There is never any news in agreement.

For social justice advocates of the environment industry to be outspoken against the actions of Greenpeace on the same issue gives both members of this consortia voice.

So, along with the environment industry, remember to make your arguments with this industry's idealogical members public without taking umbrage that this has been done to you or allowing the public play of conjecture to devolve into mashing the issue out of sight.

Without money the only tool available to activism is its ability to relate to the public in a meaningful and expected way whatever the message may be.




-- today the mainstream reported the end of the world at the height of economic prosperity. party politicians were unavailable for comment, the leader of government having spent the last hour of life with family. opposition members berated the ruling party saying the environment industry had predicted an end to the world five years ago if changes were not made. the opposition stated that while it was last in power its initiatives would have saved the world but these had been cut when the first budget of the current government was released. so long... thanks for all the ... fish --

escalated ambiguity a reactionary dilemma

It has been my experience that anything done by government usually exists in the planning stages for at least five years before it is implemented.
That's five years of public money spent to plan around various scenarios to derive a final policy based on whatever outcry initial release elicits from the paying public.

It is a fine line that exists between service and leadership.

Many of the decisions of government are not made by the elected officials, rather it is the product of study that results in public policy usually at the department level.

Civil servants investigate or cause to be investigated various issues relating to the smooth operation of public institutions into an uncharted future based on expected and historical conditions.

Even as the libertarian ideals that have grown in the past two and a half centuries have made a good portion of this operation transparent, and that the system itself continues to work toward openness, there still exists the problem of public advocacy on issues not directly related to trade and industry. It is the failure of mainstream media to capture the lagging attention of the public on issues that are mere tributaries to the confluence of ideology asserted in action.

These early nodal points of public policy formation are more often identified within the discipline to which they may apply when implemented and are usually tagged with some sort of economic advancement for the monitoring agency. Trade publications are one manifestation of this need to monitor developments at a low level.

The mainstream press can not bring all the issues and early developments to all the people all the time. The office of the ombudsman is less likely to serve the public on public policy development than a not-for-profit consumer advocacy agency. The public is not as well funded as industry to monitor government as monies collected from the public by government aid in the motions of government and not in the mechanisms tailoring and ensuring the voracity of its platforms.

The mainstream amplifies ambiguity by treating only the symptoms of public policy implementation and not the incremental input the process of deriving public policy needs to power its maturity.

Who but a politician has the time to ask the flood of questions required by the system of government it must then answer with public policy?

Moral ambiguity is present in the mainstream treatment of public policy. As a general rule judgements with respect to slant rarely branch into the root causes of events, instead concentrating on impact and effect as if to affect closure by stimulating public response for regulatory order.

This is the reactionary dilemma of the mainstream.

tax revolt is terrorism

In many cases private ownership is funded by public funds with the idea of protecting the public -- doing the things necessary to ensure energy security, food security, even national security by funding military readiness.

The legacy of the 20th century is that national security and corporate longevity has been placed ahead of the combined intelligence of the public to engage its collective funds in meaningful ways that assist in the welfare of all, including the marginalized and/or disenfranchised 'members' of mainstream society.

To underwrite change without violence, without dictating market activity or interrupting markets that employ caveat emptor as their market viability, or even without directing public money to research and development of technologies for the purpose of transferring new developments to interested parties, even income tax revolt would be ineffective because the tax revenue generated by the public's dependency on non-renewable forms of energy protects government from having to rely on how much each participating member of the public is able to generate in personal revenue.

What we have is not freedom. Freedom is a misnomer that provides no limitation on the individual or the enterprise. Freedom does not include the ideas of interdependence and governance. Contextually, the modern definition of freedom is the right to participate in making change. Once the ability of the individual to participate is compromised by means of financial dislocation this freedom is made inert. The cost/benefit ratio of participation impinges on the ability of the societal dependent to survive within the system.

The connection between capitalism and democracy is the distribution of domination, quite possibly superior to any other system of approach to governance, but one in which the service of upholding and regulating it pander to an elite nonetheless.

Where policy infringes on freedom is its unwilingness to acknowledge the incorporation of social dictums that run contrary to the operation of the government of the day -- communism for instance. The 'system' of government is a social network whose bounds are loosely defined by the longevity of its supporters. As the ability of corporations to promote policy on a timeline that spans generational boundaries and by this token exceeds the system that limits governance it is apparent that it is the corporation that has the greatest influence on government and the spending of public money to its own advantage.

Income tax revolt is therefore an act of sedition or terrorism in the eyes of government that believes the collection of tax is a measure to protect the public from the threats it has studied on behalf of the public.

the passionate pressure seeks reflection

Scouring the Net for pithy commentary I've come across both the elevated and the base.

One slip on the keyboard can trigger something deep and dark to eclipse your horizon or lead you to the passionate embrace of the sublime.

And then it is time to move on.

Whatever your prediliction, there isn't much time to really understand where you've gone without taking the time to reflect on the sights seen on the journey.

May you someday have the time to reflect and build true memories.


-- your conversion has begun --

the state of self-loathing in the realm of discontent

Being an environmentalist does not equate with self-loathing. Nope.

For accuracy's sake let's say you are not an environmentalist.

That'll do.


-- the cryptic is necessary for brevity --

questions I asked today

Electric vehicles in India

Does USAID monitor the involvment of American corporations in developing countries where it concerns the readiness of nations to accept non-traditional technology in a market for which a regulatory environment may not be readily available?

Mission-critical blows away wind power

This discussion occurred on Sunday, April 4th, 2004 commencing at approximately 8:17 p.m. and ending at 8:35 p.m.

Kelly: Hello! My name is Kelly, and I am a (Live) Fanatical Service Specialist with Rackspace. I am here as a site guide to answer any questions you may have about our products and services.
Kelly: Are you researching a new hosting project or looking to replace or upgrade an existing solution?

Guest53215: i was kind of interested to learn a bit about your hosting. I wanted to find some host that is focused on using only renewable energy
Guest53215: hello?
Guest53215: Kelly, are you there?

Kelly: Hello,

Guest53215: hey

Kelly: sorry just got that through, one moment

Guest53215: np

Kelly: Okay I am sorry abou the delay
Kelly: well as to your requirements I think they are wondeful, or your interest

Guest53215: s, ok
Guest53215: thanks

Kelly: I am not aware of any hosting company doing that.

Guest53215: really?
Guest53215: well, that's not good

Kelly: at this time renewable engergy is just not cost effective in a production environment, servers take a lot of power.
Kelly: and they require absolute redundancy

Guest53215: i guess they must
Guest53215: how many do you have on site?

Kelly: even a second of downtime and doctors lose patient records, sytems and applications fail, etc.
Kelly: we have around 9,300 across 4 locations.

Guest53215: so, i guess wind power is out of the question then
Guest53215: you don't suppose I could have you send me an email with this information do you?

Kelly: Yes, well I think there may be a market for mixing in renewable resources with traditional power at some point, but with data centers, they focus more on 100% availabilty, redundant power grids, etc..

Guest53215: i am tim.****@sympatico.**

Kelly: I can send you an overfview pdf.

Guest53215: i can't capture this conversation

Kelly: yes I can send this to you.
Kelly: and an overview.

Guest53215: can you describe the problem with renewables?
Guest53215: ok, that would be great

Kelly: well I think I just did, but I am not an engineer.

Guest53215: i am still interested in your company
Guest53215: is there a way to become a reseller?

Kelly: As I see it, essentially it costs serveal times more to use that type of energy

Guest53215: can you be absolutely sure you are giving me valid information

Kelly: and in a competitive market place that is a difficult number to add to themix.

Guest53215: someone's career may depend on this
Guest53215: not yours

Kelly: I cannot be sure, however I know that we do not have solar powered servers or wind powered servers, and immediate plans for that in the future.
Kelly: Do I know it is more expensive and less reliable at this time, of course that is a given.

Guest53215: what about purchasing electrical power from companies that provide energy from renewable sources?

Kelly: do I know servers take a lot of power and that if they are mission critical, yes.
Kelly: Well I think most providers do that, I know the our local power service uses some wind generatros.
Kelly: generators.

Guest53215: ah, well that's different then

Kelly: not sure of the mix, just that they do R&D and work with renewable resources.
Kelly: as to reseller programs
Kelly: we do not offer them in the commons sense, meaning

Guest53215: do you know the name of your power company?
Guest53215: is it the same for each of the four locations?

Kelly: you cannot buy our servers and reseller them with your own branded name.

Guest53215: oh, ok

Kelly: No it is not, we are based in San Antonio, and that would be City Public Service of San Antonio,

Guest53215: you can just move registered IP addresses then, i guess, right?

Kelly: I have no idea who it would be in Virgina, or London.

Guest53215: London, England?

Kelly: I am not sure what you mean, we assign IP addresses, you move domain names.
Kelly: yes London, England.

Guest53215: whoops, sorry

Kelly: You can resell from our servers.

Guest53215: where is your other location?

Kelly: to smaller webhosting clients
Kelly: we have 2 data centers in San Antonio.

Guest53215: oh, ok. and you are based in San Antonio?

Kelly: our servers start from the low $400's a month.
Kelly: yes we are based in San Antonio.

Guest53215: do you also do development?

Kelly: Is that the kind of price range you were considering?

Guest53215: as in database development and such

Kelly: we do not, we have clients who do that, we do not compete with them.

Guest53215: well, i was hoping for something a little less expensive

Kelly: Typcially hosts who do development either do not do it well.
Kelly: Or they do not host as well as they should

Guest53215: so what's on your typical backend then?

Kelly: yes again we are geared toward mission critical environments, we host for a great number of high profile clients.
Kelly: we have 4-5 Tier providers per data center.
Kelly: Tier1
Kelly: I meant

Guest53215: lol
Guest53215: right
Guest53215: ok

Kelly: AT&T, Spring Qwest

Guest53215: wow
Guest53215: big names

Kelly: no transit stuff like Level 3, Internap, or Abovenet etc
Kelly: and of course Sprint, no spring and TimeWarner, UUnet etc.

Guest53215: so you are a major part of the backbone i would guess

Kelly: anyway, we do have a company loosely affiliated with us
Kelly: www.serverbeach.com

Guest53215: what do they do?
Guest53215: hosting?

Kelly: they start around $100 a month
Kelly: yes, dedicated self-managed servers

Guest53215: that's getting down around my price range...
Guest53215: is it better if I talk to them or can you do that for me?
Guest53215: and are we talking in USD?

Kelly: I would check them out, they do nice work, you would have to contact them.
Kelly: Yes in uSD
Kelly: they were started by our founder
Kelly: but a totally indpendent company

Guest53215: i guess i'll take the recommendation...
Guest53215: can you still send me this conversation?

Kelly: Yes I can do that.

Guest53215: that would be fantastic...


World renowned wind expert Paul Gipe is also making a presentation on wind energy to the Ontario Rural Council at the Holiday Inn in Peterborough on April 6th, 2004 at 1:00 pm.
Mr. Gipe has shown Ontarians how they can win big with wind under advanced renewable tariffs.

-- and my sister-in-law calls ME a shit disturber... where did she come up with THAT!! --

-~`craZy talk -- free energy -- craZy talk`~-

> I would also like to experiment with on-board electrolyzers
> for vehicles but I don't think there is much public interest
> there. For example, since I had gotten an invite to the
> DARPA/Army power sources conference this year I emailed
> the head of the U.S. Army lab about on board electrolyzers
> and asked if they had ever looked at them or might be
> interested in the concept.
>
> Seeing as a 30% boost in mileage would equate a 30%
> increase in range for vehicles in the field. That was 3 weeks
> ago and so far no response. That same guy answered me
> in 2 days when I wrote to him previously regarding the cost
> of attending the conference.
>
>
> MJ


MJ,

People don't believe that 'free energy' crazy talk. I know, I've tried it.

But don't think that the idea of onboard eletrolosys is publicly unacceptable. You're just going to find it very difficult to engineer a system for which the size of the fuel cell and a tank in a production vehicle conveniently fills all the available space. They won't give you an inch. Better you design both the fuel cell and the electrolyser from scratch to retrofit a new system onto the mounting brackets (too bad the news designs are going to be integrated skateboards).

As always responding to the gaps in the market is the best way to approach market viability. If you can squeeze 30 per cent more out of it and extend range by onboard eletrolosys there will be people to buy it. Just don't expect the government not to feel cheated out of revenue on the fuel they are 'missing' out on.


Sincerely,
tim


-- the pearls of discussion are beaded on the string of wisdom --

_\~ ecoAlien ~!~ neilAoce ~/_

Imagine a world in which people are rewarded with fuel today that is less expensive than it was yesterday because it is more cost effective to make it containing more poison justified by the fact there is less supply and more need.

Imagine a world in which natural gas is legally declared a renewable resource by government so that it can appear investment in renewable energy is greater on the basis that doing so will stimulate renewable energy development.

Imagine a world in which I am considered free to make energy choices of my own but am not allowed to get my friends together to compete with corporations who produce energy -- even when that corporation is a public utility owned by me and my tax paying friends.

You aren't dreaming. You aren't imagining. You're sleeping in the real world. Wake me up too, will you?

-- 'efficacy' is a word in the dictionary --

aPrIl FoOlS ~*energy fear mongering~* ApRiL fOoLs

April Fools on a procrastinator's schedule means it ain't for foolin'. Get it?

...click for more...




...to hoax or not to hoax. that is the question...

Please send any blackout picture submissions you may have just kicking around. Specifically, I'd like to see something from the outages in Britain and Europe that have portable power advocates bursting forth over there.

-- over there is an over here perspective when acting globally and thinking locally --

the critic in us all

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.
Sir Peter Ustinov 1921-2004

famous environmentalist shot in corridor

Shoot Your Favorite Environmentalist


Ed Begley Junior

Wave to Ed...

Have a picture to share of your favorite environmentalist that you snapped yourself?

Please send your shots from the wilds along with the person's A/S/L and the interesting environmental facts that tuned you into this special person's activism in the first place.

A link or two to the major work of your captured environmentalist should accompany any submission.

celebrity@stippletrout.com

Thanks.

culture vulture tutorials

His book is free. Author Lawrence Lessig is not likely to be looking for Disney-style copyright kickbacks on this one.

Lessig, an influential scholar and Stanford University law professor, has joined with the ranks of authors who are dabbling in the fine art of licensing. Among them are Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Dan Brown and Cory Doctorow.








AND the home of the RSS standard is ... here.





-- this space intentionally left blank --

want to exploit the environment ? -- GO HERE --

Flight of the Exxon Valdez

#******************************************************************
# Funny thing is Exxon is now blamed for 5% of the world's
# total carbon emmissions... AND this just came in as well:
#******************************************************************

When the US team started recording atmospheric carbon dioxide in the late 1950s, levels were around 315 ppm and have risen ever since.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that, if unchecked, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will have risen to between 650 and 970 ppm by 2100. As a result, global temperatures would warm by nearly 6ýC compared with 1990 levels, the IPCC predicts.

NOW... With all of that information ...
Can you spare a minute or two today
for the following -------------------------------,
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  ^

Dear Cyberactivists, To learn why to take action now go to:
http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/bin/view.fpl/10048/action_id/201.html


Today, March 24, is the 15th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and we're calling on ExxonMobil to spend their time and energy cleaning up Prince William Sound, instead of spending it squelching freedom of speech. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled over 11 million gallons of oil, and we've seen the remaining impacts of the spill that the people of Prince William Sound are still facing everyday.

ExxonMobil has refused to pay the damage claims ordered by a federal court, and has managed to keep the case in court almost continuously since the disaster.

At the same time, ExxonMobil is suing Greenpeace in an attempt to silence us from exposing Exxon's corrupt environmental policies. The case stems from a peaceful protest that occurred at ExxonMobil's headquarters last May when activists, some dressed in colorful tiger costumes, declared the headquarters a "global warming crime scene." The activists were protesting ExxonMobil's continued denial of the science behind global warming and ExxonMobil's blatant efforts to undermine the Kyoto Protocol and other solutions to the problem.

To tell ExxonMobil to spend their time and money cleaning up the Valdez spill, not fighting Greenpeace, visit: http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/bin/view.fpl/10048/action_id/201.html

Thanks for your help.

Jessica Coven
Climate & Energy Campaign
Greenpeace

#******************************************************************
# Have a pleasant day...
# Yours,
# The Management
#******************************************************************

# -- gReP tHe EnViRoNmEnT --

listen -- strap on the haedeFones

National Public Radio : How Hydrogen as Fuel Fares Overseas

Please click on the headline or the audio icon to listen to the story using a RealAudio or WindowsMedia player. To download a player or to find solutions to common problems, please visit NPR's audio help page at Audio Help.

Want a transcript of this story?
Transcript

-- in the north crickets signal it is time to lose weight --

Dr. Seuss a posthumous adbuster

Accept no cheap (l)imitations...

...click me...



For more Dr. Seuss advertising artwork see:
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/index.shtml

oil greases government -- Henry Ford parody

"The Land! That is where our roots are. There is the basis of our physical life. The farther we get away from the land, the greater our insecurity. From the land comes everything that supports life, everything we use for the service of physical life. The land has not collasped or shrunk in either extent or productivity. It is there waiting to honor all the labor we are willing to invest in it, and able to tide us across any local dislocation of economic conditions. No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between man and a plot of land."
-Henry Ford

Borrowed from a Livejournal Entry at:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ecovillage/

"The Money! That is where our roots are. There is the basis of our physical life. The farther we get away from the money, the greater our insecurity. From the money comes everything that supports life, everything we use for the service of physical life. The money has not collasped or shrunk in either extent or productivity. It is there waiting to honor all the oil we are willing to invest in it, and able to tide us across any local dislocation of economic conditions. No environmental assurance can be compared to an alliance between oil and a plot for money."
-Henny Fjord

Public Figures to Prove It
US Motor Fuel Tax Outperforms
Corporate Net Income Tax Revenue
http://www.census.gov/govs/www/qtax.html

Canadian Statistics Offering Similar View
http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/govt01a.htm

environmental debunker turns sights on Adam Smith

From the wink, wink, nudge, nudge files comes the continuing saga of Bjorn Lomberg whose controversial book 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' had the author up on charges of scientific dishonesty by the Danish scientific establishment. Now Lomberg, who beat the rap, is heading an effort to 'save the world'.

Perhaps Mr. Lomberg should be given a standing ovation for attaching a price tag to the environment. The only way, it seems, for current economic models to validate environmental problems and issues is by determining the 'worth' of each article now contained by faith alone. By attacking the economic postulate that labor is the exclusive source of wealth it may now be possible to set a standard for conduct under legislative decree not possible since Adam Smith taught us the road to riches by valuing the contribution of people -- an ideology of revolution consumable by the thinkers of his time who used calculation to build wealth.

Perhaps the work done under the Copenhagen Consensus will redefine economics to include what has only been known and acted upon by intuition since the days of Smith, and not by the calculation upon which so many decisions to exploit are made.

Like a phoenix new methodologies arise from the ashes of what was. With the environment at stake it isn't a good idea to rely on a miracle as the phoenix does. In reality if we get to ashes we are too late.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/7/23496/47566

The Economist magazine has started a project, headed by Bjorn Lomberg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", to gather together economists and domain experts to answer the question of how the world should rank its problems and how they can be dealt with.

In this weeks Economist there is an article outlining the project. The project also has its own website.

atonement in the rough

A Golf course has a lot in common with a road when you get right down to it. That's not a popular view though, is it? It's a little like saying, "hey, your mother's ugly" or worse, meeting your friend's new baby and saying it's head isn't the right shape.

When you go out golfing you do it for the sport, for the exercise, maybe even for the cameraderie, but rarely, if at all, to criticize the developer of the golf course for having made the thing in the first place.

Face it, the guy who developed your local greens is probably outside more often than you and he knows a lot more about things like walkways for ducks and geese or how to keep offending critters and the dung they leave behind in someone elses backyard. He alone cares what is under the tender footfalls of the avid bunch teeing off in the morning mist.

He knows the lie of the land and how to arrange it so there isn't a bunch of junk in the middle of everything like beer bottles, cans of pop, fast-food wrappers, barrels of PCBs and used needles. He is a saint for the sake of his property. He does what Tolkien does in "Leaf by Niggle". He tends his garden and earns his wings as his satisfaction grows in accomplishment.

Meanwhile, as he grows older and he diverts a stream or two to make way for expanded fairways or a creek runs dry from suburban encroachment, he sprays pecticides for grubs and anti-fungal agents to combat leaf mold.

Then he gets cancer and dies at home with his loving family in attendance all around him. He goes to the big golf course in the sky and leaves his earthbound riches to his children. And suddenly it doesn't matter that his son has the worst slice of anyone he's ever seen swing a driver or that it is his daughter whose handicap is pro-ready also has a head for business.

He lived. He golfed. He died.

hemp bindings -- it's a family thing

The time I went to the southern shore of Lake Scugog to see members of my extended family, I was late. Of course nobody said it out loud, but I reminded an awful lot of people of my great uncle who kept his own time no matter what the occasion.

I can only imagine that from the dawn of humanity’s advanced knowledge of hours, minutes and seconds, my family has produced at least one person in every generation who has always missed the cukoo.

Read the Rest

A little taste of short fiction from my files.

fuel strategy hasn't evolved

An evalutation of fuel policy clearly shows trending toward increased performance of gasoline powered vehicles, not in a decrease upon the dependancy of the automobile industry and resulting economies (hence social structures) on the use of oil.

It is generally accepted that automobile manufacturers, on average, increase gasoline fuel efficiency roughly one per cent per year using gasoline as the fuel of choice. This statistic reflects a continuation of feature-sets now expected by customers such as air-conditioning, anti-lock brakes, and an increase in automation and in-cab power usage which drain engine power resources and by that token have an impact on efficiency.


Nat'l Academies Press, Review of the Research Program of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles: (1998), page 72, in chapter 5 Fuel Strategy

Several key technologies are said to prevent the commercialization of fuel cell technology in transportation. The first, and perhaps the most important development required, is a 'safe' hydrogen storage system. Current designs using up to 5000 psi tanks are considered too dangerous by industry insiders, even a security threat by government regulators, as any explosion could be fatal. Fortunately several properties of hydrogen make the gas less dangerous than gasoline. It takes more concentration of hydrogen than gasoline to ignite, and as a gas hydrogen dissipates into the atmosphere quickly and without toxic effect.

The second hurdle for fuel cells is cold starting. In this, the development of either a system to prevent water from freezing, or a chemical additive to water that does not decrease the electrical efficiency of the chemical reaction need to take place. True, there is heat during this chemical cycle and water is a byproduct of combining oxygen and hydrogen in this process, but the water required to run a fuel cell does not originate from the fuel cell during start-up. It has to come from an external source because it is on a different side of the electrolyte.

The startup water is used to make the 8 micron Nafion (TM) membrane between cells wet as an aid to protons from the hydrogen to pass through to the cathode side of the cell.

It is this polymer membrane, licensed by Dupont to companies such as Ballard Power Systems, that is the 'electrolyte' of the fuel cell 'battery'. In lead acid batteries sulfuric acid is the electrolyte used in the chemical storage/release of electricity.

Ice would not allow the fuel cell vehicle to start to begin the process of reaching it's optimum operating temperature of 80 degrees Celcius, as in the case of the Regenerative Proton Exchange Membrane-based fuel cell.

To some extent gasoline powered vehicles have a similar limitation in climates where the needle routinely dips below minus 30 degrees. The author of this piece knows this intimately as on the evening of his first child's birth he forgot to plug the car in at the hospital and could not start the car to get home in the morning, although the birth turned out just fine, thank you.

The solution, as mentioned, is to plug a gasoline-powered car in to avoid the cold cranking problems associated with frozen batteries having too little amperage in that state to turn the car over. Putting further pressure on this behavior is overly thick (viscous) oil in the pan requiring more battery power to get the crank shaft and related assemblies started. The usual end result is a dead battery and/or the need for a cold boost.

At their current stage of development fuel cells would likely require plugging-in during down time to allow cold starting at any time, a scenario many of us are quite used to. Admittedly, this ice idea is a slight oversimplification of the problem, but it does serve to illustrate how the market overcomes gaps in technology which may not always be designed for universal acceptance -- as the passenger vehicle of today is not designed for universal use rolling off today's assembly lines.

Several aftermarket initiatives and/or dealer options, however, are available to deal with the severity of climate. One is an electric blanket used to shroud batteries during non-use that plug into standard electrical outlets. Another is a 'glow' plug inserted into the lower portion of a vehicle's engine block to warm the oil there and yet another performs the same task in the form of a heated dipstick.

A combination of these methods are used to avoid the cold-cranking difficulty, all of which require power from an external source on the order of one 40 watt incandescent light bulb.

The impact of these technological shortfalls in fuel cell vehicles is to delay their entry into market. The British government, Ballard Power Systems, The US government and others all have documents stating fuel cells will not begin entering into the marketplace until 2010-2012.

One source in Great Britain's Department of Trade and Industry is an Energy Innovation expert in Fuel Cells; Systems Electricity Technologies. This source agreed that the reason Iceland predicts it will not enter a hydrogen economy until roughly 2040 is that its market is too small to fuel hydrogen product development. Keeping in mind that this nation of approximately 200,000 people has nearly limitless geothermal electrical generation capability to produce a 'clean' supply of portable energy and it becomes apparent that what happens in the United States with respect to fuel policy has important and long lasting consequences for everyone.

While Iceland waits for the rest of us to catch up the most recent fuel policy amendments in the US call for ethanol to become more important in the marketplace.

Like gasoline from crude oil, ethanol is hydrogen rich. A new process to convert ethanol to hydrogen for use in a high-temperature fuel cell (approx. 120 degrees Centigrade) recently made public by researchers at MIT hasn't been commercialized yet. The promise of this technology is to extract three times the electrical energy from ethanol as hydrogen for use in a fuel cell than is available from the fuel by burning it in an internal combustion engine (ICE).

Comparatively, in terms of emissions and net energy density this makes ethanol an important choice in the transition to hydrogen as the fuel of choice.

No other policy comes as close to realizing the dream of hydrogen as a fuel source from renewable and relatively 'clean' energy.

And tomorrow I will tell you the reason why pumping this wonder fuel into the next generation of empty tanks is not in the best interests of business, government or consumers despite the apparent equilibrium its adoption would maintain within this economic backbone.

murk my wurds

OK. This Chinese thing is really bugging me.

I hate to be self-referential, but I recently posted some hazy welcome to China into the fold of industrialized polluters with little regard for how truculent my words must have sounded.

I'm sorry. I should have mentioned that China should be applauded for its announcement after winning the open bid to host the Olympics in Beijing that Tiananmen Square has been officially declared a counter-revolutionary plot and that the nation was entirely within its mandate to protect its citizenry against such an outrage of student rebellion.

But, you know... for some people that isn't just water under the bridge like it is for me.

http://www.iht.com/articles/509824.html

Mainland China. Wow. What a concept. I just want to take a moment to lay out the foundation upon which the next round of market wars should be played out.

From a humanist's perspective then it is my belief that legislators in 'democratic' nations seeking to slow the perceptible impact of Chinese labor and production costs for quite worthy high quality products should now consider drafting tariffs designed to slow Chinese economic growth on three key areas: environment (the company's from democratic nations who flood markets with disposable products made in China should help pay for the cleanup of garbage); human rights auditing (wages and working conditions are important facts contributing to stability -- do we want blood on our hands if the bottom suddenly falls out and the machine is turned to war); ...

Awww fiddlesticks.. who am I kidding? It should be the Chinese themselves that levy new tariffs on these and similar issues. Slowing growth and making money to run the government are good things. And what better way is there to make money than to focus on the well being of worthwhile people who just want to live and have fun watching their child grow up?

-- nobody said it was going to be easy for me to be right --

babblestalking defined

Sometimes I surprise even myself. The awful part of it is that I get away with it. Really, surprising yourself sneaks up on you like the smell of a distant and very veiny looking cheese. Vericose veiny if you know what I mean?

Lately, I have been writing letters to people because I caught a bug, and I can feel its presence as if it were alive... I have become exactly what the bug infected me for in the first place. I have become a Babblestalker.

And it doesn't confine me to stalking people with my babble in just one rudimentary language or in some glottal atonality. No, I use Internet translation services to hack my vernacular slants into other languages and send off what I consider to be VIM (Very Intelligent Missives) to 'deserving' parties.

The only true cure will come with a flood of VIMs from other Babblestalkers with bugs bigger than mine. Then my bug would learn its worth, and like some vampire staked to the elemental earth it could die its mortal death like the rest of us.

-- babblestalk me if you care --
-- babblestalk me if you dare --
-- babblestalk me high --
-- babblestalk me low --
-- babblestalk through your dreams --
-- until babblestalking grows --

immuno-intelligence

When she came to the door yesterday the young woman with the badge that read 'In Training' wanted me to sponsor a child for World Vision. Since the moment she walked away with a happy expression on her face and a spring in her step I haven't been able to live with myself.

It was like she knew I wasn't the person I tell people I am the entire time she spoke with me. In the dull tones that I gave her, in my refusal to even touch the brochure with the picture of a happy young lad she had proffered to me, I gave away the essential, tight-fisted, and ultimately, lamentable me.

Silently, I even questioned the value of going into a developing nation and teaching people for which there may be no economic opportunity. Maybe waves of immigration to my country will follow from putting expectations in someone's head who can not possibly capitalize on any of them. The gulf would exist between the educated and their ability to use what they know within a system that doesn't operate the way it is 'expected'. A new intelligentsia following blindly the dominance of market capitalism with an iron rule.

Would I be funding sustained development or would I be putting some future oligarchy into power? An entire nation into the hands of capable and experienced corporate raiders who would carve out resources as 'cost effectively' as possible and flood markets with 'inexpensive' goods.

How could I be sure that my investment would guarantee human rights, honest wages, pollution control or any of those things I can barely expect from my own countrymen? Shouldn't my money go into educating the powers-that-be in my sphere in how to manage something they barely understand themselves?

Predictably, these are the paltry pseudo-intellectual arguments I have against spending my money to save a child from a life of squatting along the edges of a landfill. A landfill that represents the only economic opportunity for the families of children who must perform a job usually reserved in my country for multiple repeat offenders on parole. The difference here is that here the parolee gets a full range of protective gear, two fifteen-minute breaks, a half-hour lunch and occasional access to the bulldozer.

-- garbage may make money as long as you are willing to risk status --

a note on my panes

In my house the sun moves through windows that do not use thermal panes, are not filled in the gap between panes with argon gas and that are efficient only as a reminder of extremely high gas and electricity bills.

To provide the efficiencies required to assist in lowering my drag on greenhouse gas emissions from electrical power generation using fossil fuels I estimate it will cost me roughly $30,000. The figure is so high because not only will windows and doors have to be replaced, but all exterior walls will have to be torn out and replaced for insulation to be installed.

Add to this that the house is a storey-and-a-half without a 'proper' or more energy efficient roof design and you begin to see how little just one change will begin to pay for itself.

I seem stuck with this infrastructure like we all seem stuck on fossil fuels and the supporting role such choices play in our economic well being. Fossil fuels grease the gears and form the foundation of the 'modern' western world.

Automobile companies are stuck with their infrastructure too. Transportation, it could be argued, is the single most important technology behind our economies with the most impact on our social structure than anything man has yet to devise. Its supply chains are just that. Chains to imperfect technology made to depend on itself for creating a market. The side effect is jobs. And so, with perfection and with change automobile manufacterers act with a conservative kind of sluggishness, placing aftermarket parts in front of emission controls, weakening legislation by failing at targets for the simple fact that it is not in the interest of cash flow or product turn over. Why else would car manufacturers float the suggestion that cars of the future that would last longer would also cost more...

Fuel companies too are hardly able to take any of the studies they fund on the growth of the renewable energy market and market penetration of renewables seriously because it would devalue the immensity of their resource and power base. An infrastructure that turns to dust isn't worth selling to anyone. And if that's where your equity is and where your business turns a profit then it is very difficult to accept change other than in word, certainly not in deed. Funny enough government is now in collusion with these powerful interests -- on your behalf.

When was the last time you questioned how much tax money was spent in finding oil or natural gas deposits domestically or within easy trade-reach of your government?

In Canada the Sierra Club makes annual 'Green Budget' recommendations. Perhaps the most disturbing point to be made about Canada's readiness for decentralized, distributed power generation in the latest issue relating to using renewables is the absolute lack of centralized planning using resources that are otherwise engaged in sourcing fossil fuels. Canada has not performed a national wind mapping analysis, yet there are field personnel still working on finding and exploiting fossil fuel deposits in cooperation with the oil industry. Should the oil companies be on the tax payer's welfare role or is the way our money is spent merely a way for a nation to finance future energy security?

And if security is a matter of priority wouldn't a nation be best served by producing energy from renewables domestically?

This is where the hydrogen economy makes no sense. In reality the hydrogen economy will not fully materialize unless vehicles use hydrogen as a fuel. Similarly, decentralized power generation from renewables will not materialize unless the cost per Mw in capital costs is brought down. It is perhaps relevant then to join fuel cell vehicles using hydrogen to 'store' electricity and the distributed generation electricity grid. Making 'electric' cars that could carry a certain amount of hydrogen and that would recoup this same supply by recharging (electrolysing water to form hydrogen and oxygen) would serve emissions standards by zeroing emissions and place a demand on power from the grid.

With foresight and the appropriate legislation beefing up the power grid could be accomplished using renewable energy from decentralized sources.

As it stands, my personal infrastructure has to be paid for so that the roof over my head doesn't leak. It doesn't make me any money maintaining this. It just keeps me comfortable. That is the difference between the infrastructure my money buys me and the infrastructure car companies and fuel producers build to shelter themselves. Their infrastructure exists to earn money. Mine exists to burn it.

-- the candidate is chosen for nascent intelligence, a fertile mind in which to plant the seeds of obeisance under mentorship, and the wisdom to keep silent any secret learned --

mamby pamby thermal massacre

After a delicious layer of snow in the night the sun shines bright this mid-morning to welcome surprise. Yesterday the radio called for flurries and the TV showed graphics of violent puffy clouds to accompany the raging winds that drive wet snow. Now it is a simple wind that clouds the sun's smile even as its dappled grace flits around the room through the open curtain with something like amusement.

The sun must know how inefficient my panes are.

-- by doing nothing it is easy to be genius --

the cutting edge bleeds money

My terminal lament is to go through these phases where acquisition becomes of paramount importance and I, with the virtue of a moldy bun, deride the powers-that-be and rage with meaningless words -- in run-on sentences -- that my rebellion cannot afford that which should not be sought.

Hence this blog entry and another hole in my back pocket.

Sample Articles Relating to Fuel Cells

-- a penance a day keeps the blog addiction at bay --

the worst sentence in the world

The new speciation of the human broken free of locality is to fit the niche of the market ecology where the marginalized are the historians of defunct concentrations of technology and mere survival is an abstract term consisting of butterfly wings, sintering and shared pestilence.

-- poetry for the disenfranchised --

a globally warm welcome to china's brown cloud

This link is really a non-link because it represents the table of contents to a rather overlarge document on the statistics of automotive usage in China.
Perhaps after you buy it you could send in a precis.

(PDF) Automobiles in China
More Publication about China's Automotive Industry

As in all things there is a backlash on the world stage. I don't endorse backlashes because they tend to ignore the sanctity of life and all that jazz. The backlash can be seen now in the democratic national ballot. Actually, it's a backlash of a backlash. The grave economic conditions in the US after September 11th, 2001 have created a campaign platform dependent on economic finger pointing. The real menace (in my not so humble opinion) is outsourcing to the exclusion of domestic jobs on a scale never before seen. Michael Moore and I are probably in total agreement.

Now that the Chinese are full members of the World Trade Organization we can openly criticize their market activities. Roughly 7 per cent of Beijing's annual budget is given over to clean air programs. The Chinese economy has experienced 10 per cent growth on average for more than ten years running.

What if the Chinese decided to design their own cars? Asia's largest nation is the benefactor of unparalelled trade liberalization. It isn't likely design will be given over by such powerful entities as General Motors.

Some differences are present in the design of similar models. Buick Century, a GM product, has a higher quality back seat included in its Chinese design. This difference between North American models reflects cultural attitudes toward vehicle usage. Chinese drivers carry passengers with greater frequency than their North American peers.

Perhaps 20 years ago it would have been possible to request the Chinese government to slow its economic growth and seize foreign owned and operated manufacturing operations. They may have been convinced to protect culture and environment together along with food security.

Today the Chinese are more dependant on oil than any other nation in the world. Today the Chinese do not control the design of their automobiles. Today the Chinese must accept genetically modifed (GM) rice into the food supply to protect against malnutrition. Golden Rice is perhaps THE trojan horse of the biotechnology industry and proponents of this industry's complete acceptance.

Today the Chinese understand the value of culture as a marketable commodity as in such groundbreaking films such as "Big Shot's Funeral" starring Canadian actor Donald Sutherland.

Today is another day. Tomorrow is yesterday if you haven't done it before.

-- making sense of the world is not possible --

distributed energy centres on efficiency

Proton Energy Boosts Electrolosys Performance

Proton Energy Website

this century's most important decision

Well, I have had contact with Ms. Lightner. She returned my Friday afternoon call early Monday and gave me an alternate address for the information at the end of the link below. Unfortunately I had to email her again after an extensive search for this abstract at the DOE website.

Ms. Lightner told me to go to http://www.eere.energy.gov and select the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell link.

If you find something there please let me know about it. I am still waiting on Ms. Lightner's response. It is unfortunate she is probably busier than this wee issue warrants. She did tell me she had spoken to the people who look after the site where the link that was published leads to, but they were unsympathetic.

1. DOE Announces Date for Decision Regarding On-Board Fuel Processing

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced June 30, 2004, as the planned date for its go/no-go decision regarding on-board fuel processing for fuel cell vehicles. A panel has been assembled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to review the current state of fuel processing activities against technical criteria. Based on the findings of the panel, NREL will submit a written recommendation to DOE on or before June 18, 2004. Written position papers for consideration by DOE regarding this decision must be received by May 15, 2004. NREL must receive requests to speak before the review panel no later than May 15, 2004. For further information, contact Valri Lightner, DOE, Ph. 202-586-0937, or valri.lightner@ee.doe.gov.

Get Details

engineers control fuel of the future

Society of Automotive Engineers on Fuel Cells

This link should give you an idea of where things stand with Fuel Cell vehicles in terms of their design.

If things continue as they appear to have done you will see ethanol at the pumps over the next few years. There are several indicators of that. The first is the recent announcement by the US to increase ethanol use to 12 per cent by 2015.
Ethanol is also the least expensive route for fuel producers to take in terms of delivery.

The second indicator is conversion price. On average it is estimated that for each refueling station approximately $600,000 USD would be required to make the conversion to hydrogen delivery versus just $30,000 USD for a liquid fuel.

Ethanol is also the easiest fuel for producers to dominate throughout the entire lifecycle of from corn crops, harvest and refining to metered delivery.

Much importance has been placed on 'reforming' fuels such as ethanol and methanol into hydrogen on-board Fuel Cell vehicles.

To that end, the US Department of Energy invites comments with respect to on-board fuel processing and the June decision it will take on this issue.