Smart Energy

A feel-good elevator short, this film brings together local Washington state and national leaders in green building, climate change, manufacturing, and work-force development to make the case for green buildings capacity to create jobs and boost the economy while not further imposing on our environment. The transcript is available here. For more info about the film and the economic outlook expressed therein, contact Rachael Jamison, Green Building Coordinator (Washington Dept. of Ecology), at (360) 407-6352 or email rjam461@ecy.wa.gov.

Map of Central Cascades from National Geographic

The National Geographic Society today unveiled its latest Geotourism MapGuide, which highlights the sustainable places and attractions in the Central Cascades region of the Pacific Northwest. Based on recommendations of local residents and business owners, the MapGuide showcases authentic and sustainable ways to experience the dynamic landscape, pioneering culture and recreational treasures of the Central Cascades areas of Washington and Oregon.

The Central Cascades MapGuide will be available in the West Coast edition of the May/June issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine, as well as through a new Web site, www.TheCentralCascades.com.

“We are thrilled that Oregon and Washington have seen this challenging, multi-year project through to its successful completion,” remarked John Francis, National Geographic’s vice president for Research, Conservation and Exploration. “In defining this region by what its residents most treasure, you have made great strides toward ensuring its geographical character for future generations.”

The MapGuide features more than 200 geotourism sites selected by the National Geographic Society and regional committees, based on more than 1,200 nominations from local residents. Points of interest include cultural, recreational, agricultural, natural and geological attractions and activities that promote sustainable travel throughout the Central Cascades. The MapGuide also features full-color photography from Northwest photographers and famed National Geographic cartography. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy smokes, never seen a geetar fingered like this before. Go, Ronnie, go!

Sez Cory Doctorow:

Italy’s Berlusconi regime, already known around the world as an enemy of free speech and popular access to the tools of communication, has now floated a proposal to require Italians to get an “uploader’s license” in order to put any “moving pictures” on the Internet. The government claims that this is required as part of the EU’s product placement disclosure rules, which is about as ridiculous assertion as I’ve heard this month.

via Italy proposes mandatory licenses for people who upload video Boing Boing.

Astronauts are apparently scoring dope while in orbit, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times:

A shuttle worker employed by United Space Alliance found a plastic bag with a white powder residue — later confirmed to be cocaine — in a shuttle processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center last week.

This raises an important question: from whom are the astronauts scoring? And, is the drug war being extended into near-Earth orbit? More, is the cocaine being scored in space and brought back to Earth in any way connected to the U.S.’s secret moon base so recently exposed? Additionally, why are the U.S. and Russia spatting over an “asteroid hit“? Just what is meant by the term “hit” in this content? Could the asteroid, in parallel with the moon being made of green cheese, be made of pure cocaine?

When we were in SoCal over the holidays, my sister and I made this wee movie.

I just found a couple more reviews of On Joanna Russ, to which I contributed an essay. This review is by Paul Kincaid, and was featured on The SF Site; snip:

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

A newly created signature research center at Oregon State University (OSU) could position the region as an international leader in solar cell innovation and manufacturing.

The Oregon Process Innovation Center for Sustainable Solar Cell Manufacturing has been set up at OSU with almost $2.7M in new funding. Participating researchers believe that technologies the center generates could lead to dramatic changes in the global solar energy industry.

“We’re reaching the limits of what can be done through incremental improvements in traditional, silicon-based solar cell technology,” said Greg Herman, associate professor of chemical engineering at OSU and associate director of the center. “We’re aiming for a revolution in solar cell processing and manufacturing that might drop costs by as much as 90% while being more environmentally sensitive.”

via Oregon State University Launches Solar Research Center – 2010-01-09 03:07:00 | PV Society.

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) announced two major biofuels research grants from the U.S. Department of Energy that will bring in more than $16.8 million to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Washington State University, the University of Washington, and several cutting-edge biofuels companies based in Washington state. One research effort will focus on developing the technologies needed to develop diesel and jet fuel from algae. The other initiative involves a public-private effort to find ways to use non-food biomass in our nation’s existing transportation infrastructure.

“Our goal is to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, stimulate local industry and job-creation, and achieve a cleaner environment,” Cantwell said. “These grants will put Washington state on a track to all three goals. The grants will help researchers and cutting-edge businesses in Washington get ahead in the race for fossil fuel alternatives. Within just a few years, these initiatives should lead to new techniques for turning biomass into fuels that we can use in our existing refineries, pipelines and cars.”

PNNL and a Colorado-based national laboratory will share funding to develop cleaner-burning biofuels capable of replacing typical uses of petroleum in trucks, planes, and other transportation vehicles. Called the National Advanced Biofuels Consortium (NABC), the project is co-led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and PNNL, with work primarily done at PNNL’s Bioproducts, Sciences, and Engineering Laboratory (BSEL) in Richland. NABC involves research to develop a sustainable, cost-effective production process for biofuels and a plan to measure environmental benefits. PNNL will receive approximately $7 million over three years for this effort, with significant additional funding going to Washington State University and companies including Catchlight Energy and Tesoro, which have significant presence in Washington state.

“The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a national leader in energy innovation and finding ways to reduce fossil fuel use,” Cantwell said. “This new funding opens the way for further break-throughs in advancing America’s clean energy economy.”

A second research grant will fund PNNL work in both Richland and Sequim, WA, on the commercialization of algae-based biofuels such as green aviation fuels, diesel and gasoline. The grant is being awarded to the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB), led by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. PNNL will receive about $7.2 million over three years, with additional funding going to Washington State University, the University of Washington, and Washington-state companies such as AXI, Genifuel, Inventure, and Targeted Growth, Inc.

via County & State :: Lake Stevens Journal.

The universe, why does she purr and growl and spit and coo the way she does? “Like the eye,” Leonard Susskind writes in The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, “the special properties of the physical universe are so surprisingly fine-tuned that they demand explanation.”

The eye, of course, was supposed to be the trump card of the cadre of crypto-creationists known as the intelligent design underground. The plan, as outlined in the infamous Wedge document, was to stealthily sow doubt and infiltrate key positions in order to get creationism taught in schools, along with morning prayers and the Ten Commandments mowed into the lawns of every courtroom in the U.S. Alas, the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania (a case fondly, if very unofficially, remembered as A Couple Dumb Cluck School Board Members and Their Discovery Institute Allies vs. Common Sense), put the kybosh on intelligent design.

Which might mean that Susskind’s 2006 book is passé and no longer useful. The influential and admired theoretical physicist wrote it, he says in his introduction, because he thinks the universe – quirky, special, and weirdly tuned as she is – can be explained without recourse to “supernatural agents.”

In fact, though, and except in the introduction, Susskind has way too much fun ogling the universe’s sexy features to really spend much time bashing creationists. He’s got “branes” on the brain while luxuriating in “a bubble bath universe,” washing off the mud (or whatever that stuff is) being slung in “the black hole wars.” Creationism be damned, let’s do math!

Or, since there aren’t any actual equations in The Cosmic Landscape, let’s do the diagram rumba and follow the squiggly lines that compose a Feynman diagram – but watch out! The dance floor is folding according to the weird rules of its own private geometry. And: energy is mass with no clothes on so, parents, shield your children from the wonders of the universe.

But that, ultimately, is Susskind’s point: you don’t need to bring in supernatural intelligence to explain the weird goings on in the universe; you don’t need “intelligent design” or, as brainy physicists with a metaphysical bent like to call it, the “anthropic principle.” The anthropic principle is the idea that the universe is designed just so, so that – guess who – humans can thrive in it. Things are neither too hot nor too cold; neither too inflationary nor too contractionary. It is kind of spooky. Better, though, Susskind says, to take a look at what he called “the physicist’s Darwinism.”

Survival of the fittest, that is, only as it applies to the laws of physics. Just as with biology, where you get highly adapted and complex things like eyes and duck-billed platypuses, the universe has strings, and branes and black holes. The laws that work, continue to work. The ones that don’t, stop being laws, either dying out or changing. There is, Susskind claims, a “landscape of possibilities” Out There – and The Cosmic Landscape is his delightful tour of it.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010