I try not to define myself as liberal or conservative – but some of the fear-mongering and end-of-the-world fatalism being used in this election cycle is inappropriate and ultimately destructive, rather than constructive and adding value to the debate.
David Frum has a good opinion article on CNN about it –
Inhabit posted a story about a net-zero energy small house (1,051 sq ft) built recently in Fort Worth:
Zero Energy Casita in Texas Opens to the Public | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World.
Lisa and I recently went on the Austin Cool House Tour co-sponsored by the Texas Solar Energy Society and Austin Energy Green Building.
We realized the efficiency retrofits to our home were pretty similar to what we saw on the tour, so for fun I thought I’d write up the green feature list of our house in the same format as used by the tour book.
Built as a traditional non-green building, this Austin home has been retrofitted for energy efficiency and simple but high-tech living.
Owners: Lisa and Jason Spangler
Solar PV: Texas Solar Power Company
Any other ideas for increasing energy efficiency or going more green? Leave the in the comments!
Update: Here is an aerial photo of the metal roof and solar panels from Google Maps:
Bob and Mickey Burleson are two of my prairie heroes. Decades ago, when few people talked about tallgrass prairie conservation and restoration, they went and did it: they purchased worn our crop land and an overgrazed prairie remnant in Bell County and spent many years restoring over two hundred and fifty acres of highly diverse, native tallgrass Blackland Prairie through collection and planting of local ecotype native seed from area hay meadow prairie remnants, invasive plant removal, prescribed burning, haying, and other management practices.
The Burlesons collected local ecotype seed from native prairie hay meadows in the area, many of which no longer exist due to being destroyed by plowing or development. Their prairie is an invaluable source of locally adapted native plant genetics and seed, and they have provided prairie seed and seed hay for use in other restorations.
[Update: A Texas Legacy Project interview with Mickey and a joint interview with Bob and Mickey (requires RealPlayer)] (more…)Funny! Laugh out loud you will.
Did DNS partially break under Fedora 12 32-bit or x64 on your machine recently?
It was the strangest thing… DNS problems started for me last week, even though I had not done any software updates since the beginning of April. Machines using my caching nameserver would be fine, but some programs running locally would fail all name resolves (while others would succeed).
After much pulling of hair, gnashing of teeth, and searching of Google, I eventually ran across a bug entry and comment that helped with the following instructions:
And name resolution is back! 🙂
“Because today it’s so hard to get anything past the ethics boards, compared to the good old days, when you could just electrocute people and call it science. You can hardly do anything these days!” – University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman, author of 59 Seconds.
He was joking around… I think. 😉
via The Self-Help Psychologist Is In – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.
Buggy software played a part in radiation overdoses given to some cancer patients, leading to deaths.
The Radiation Boom – Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm – Series – NYTimes.com.
The NYTimes has some really neat graphs on how people spend their day, divided by hours and activities, on average.
via How Different Groups Spend Their Day – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com.
I’ll be speaking at two game development conferences during September: CEDEC 2009 in Japan and GDC Austin in Texas. Details and links follow.
CEDEC 2009 – CESA Developers Conference 9/1 – 9/3 in Yokohama, Japan
GDC Austin (Game Developers Conference) – 9/15 – 9/18 in Austin, TX
Look me up and say hi if you are there!
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