Blame The Right Things.

A week ago I listened to Lance Armstrong and what stuck with me wasn't anything to do with bicycle racing, it wasn't his philosophy, it wasn't even really his work with Livestrong.  No, it was the flat blaming of the cancer itself.

Everyone does this. "It was the cancer that got her, lung cancer"  or "Colon cancer.  Colon cancer killed him."

No. No! NO! The cancer was caused by something!  Foods with additives, cigarettes that addict, fumes that cling to towns and cities and sicken the people.  Cancers are the executioner, but the other things are what kills people.

And if you say that cancer was around forever and we just never knew what it was, I say crap.  Almost all causes of death from a few hundred years ago to millenia ago are known, and cancers weren't in anywhere near as much proliferation as we now have.  Cancer is very much a 20th and 21st Century phenomenon.

And my research for The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook emphasised the close relationship between additives and cancers and inflammatory diseases.  Additives = illness.


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Throwing Out The Baby

I do so admire the clean tech sites like Gizmodo's Treehugger site.  Set up to promote awareness of clean and sustainable technologies, the site is the hippie's answer to existence.  Or is it?  In these two separate articles, Treehugger is expressing very negative sentiment about some of our cleanest technology, solar PV cells.

It's the kind of bullshit wibbling behaviour they've started to become famous to me for.

Every TreeHugger worth their roots loves solar power. After the (not always low) upfront costs are paid back you get free power from the sun, without emitting greenhouse gases or supporting continued extraction of fossil fuels. What’s not to like, right? 

And it's right, in a limited way.  Yes you get "free power from the sun" but THAT'S NOT THE POINT OF DOING IT YOU KNOB ENDS! It's the second bit, the bit about no more fossil fuels and no more greenhouse gas emissions that we do it for!

Unfortunately, both those articles go on to lambaste the solar PV cell industry "stronger supervision needed" and "toxic byproducts: up the wazoo - FFS get over yourself!  Over the 25 year life of those solar panels, they will take away the need for burning fossil fuel or "clean coal" that will more than balance out what it took to make the PV cells in the first place.  Once solar factories cotton that they can eat their own dogfood and use solar electricity to power the manufacturing process, you'll have one less thing to whinge about.  And when, in 25 years' time, they figure out how to extend the life of the arrays or recycle them into better PV cells, another bastion of your whinge will have fallen.

It's like nuclear power - every whiny little greenie is up in arms dead set against nuclear power plant - but the fact remains that even if 10% of them melt down over their lifetimes, they would still provide clean low impact power with less damage to the ecosystem than "clean coal" and fossil fuels and all the manufacturing steps inherent in those would cause in the same time.

Non-Treehugger question - why is the USA wanting to keep GMO's out of their food chain? Considering that the first time two primitive amoeba played mummies and daddies they were already indulging in genetic modification something akin to REussian Roulette?  Don't forget all those cheap DNA labs in people's homes, with people now hacking DNA.  Nothing will remain sacrosanct any more.  And your "policies" won't be able to do a damn thing to stop any of them anyway.  These GMOs, by the way, are designed mostly to have less impact on the environment, provide better yields or better quality, and are going to be the only way to save the States (and soon, other countries) from famines.

But no, in both cases the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, and it's usually done in an effort to make sure baby stays clean.  Hate to say it but being ecologically sound also means being good to ourselves, and it means that we need to pick the best of a not very perfect set of options.

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Spinning A Carbon Web

Some schemes calling themselves "green" are a bit umm...   dubious perhaps.  There's a site where you go and get to watch videos; and that is supposed to generate "carbon points" and donations to your favourite charity and cash for you.

I initially logged in there and poked around, but there seems to be very little to their site that looks like it could generate the kind of revenue that means that they can offer the readers money, (or offer to pay money to charities on behalf of the reader,) and put money into the carbon offset projects they claim to be supporting.  The carbon offset projects themselves are dubious, as with most carbon offset projects, and I noticed that most seem to be pretty unknown to the world in general. These things make me wonder about what the real point of the site is.

There's another reason I find this place to be a bit dubious.  Considering how much it costs each time you do a Google search, perhaps this isn't the way to achieve greenness.  If you're not making a lot of money to begin with (likely scenario) and out of that you're paying staff wages, server hosting costs, electricity costs; and you then take what's left of the money and apply that to some dubious carbon offsetting scheme; and assuming that the amount of offsetting that can take place for your fiscal input is going to be quite small; then you have to ask yourself "did that just cover even the carbon cost of running our servers, and the accommodations of our staff, and our office?" and most likely you'll find that you've just put your wage in your pocket, and cost the earth a bit more greenhouse gas emissions than you saved.

But what really clinches it is this superyoubeaut email I got, exhorting me to get back in there and generate my share of carbon emissions, suck down my share of "it's not advertising it's serious videos", and I could be the next person to create my bit of instant wealth.  All that was missing was a Netherlands address to send my details to, honestly...

Hi Ted,

We wanted to inform you that we have a new winner in Save the Planet and Win!

He participated in a Movic Records promotion that consisted of watching music videos to offset his carbon, and won the grand cash prize offered.

Click Green and Win is green entertainment that rewards the planet!

Every time you view an ad or video from a Click Green and Win promotion, sponsors will thank you by:

- Neutralizing a portion of your personal carbon footprint with accredited carbon offsets.

- Supporting your favorite social causes with sponsor money.

- You also earn real-live cash every time, or trade points for more carbon offsets.

- You are entered for a chance to win Grand Cash Prizes instantly.

For a list of other lucky winners, please access www.savetheplanetandwin.com and go to our "Winners" section inside the "Community" label.

Remember that with Save the Planet and Win the earth is always the big winner... but you can run a close second!

Thanks for being part of the Solution!

The Save the Planet and Win team. 

Want me to take you seriously?  Seriously?  Then if you're sending one of these "we have a WWIINNAAHHHHHHH!" emails, either mention the name of the wwiinnaahhhh (it's kind of de rigeur for these kinds of announcements,) or else leave all gender references out and make the point that the winner wished to remain anonymous, so that I can at least half believe this crap.

Oh - and saying to go to the site and see the "other lucky winners" is just a blatant ploy to get hits on the homepage, so you can point out to your customers (the ones making the videos and wanting exposure for them) how many people are seeing their product.

Go there if you want to feed their hit counter, and decide for yourself if it's spam, scam, or something real.


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Browner Shades Of Green

Examples of when "greenwashing" just isn't enough:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/ces-2009-green-is-here-but-its-made-to-stand-in-the-corner.php
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/ces-2009-horizons-renewable-energy-science-kits.php
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/ces-2009-the-6-in-1-solar-toy-kit.php
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/ces-2009-powermat.php

... need I say more?

And sorry for the "random links yanked from a site" format but I want to make the point that so many companies aren't taking the message seriously, from minimising green at their CES booths to not using recycled materials in toys meant to raise awareness of ecologically important issues, to making claims but not demonstrating them.

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Does One EV Look A Lot Like Any Other?

Maybe that's because it is.  Mitsubishi is licensing their "i MiEV" to European car manufacturers.  If you check out the main players in the EV field, you'll see that many either have a similar looking product, or else it's deliberately "out there" and concept car looking.

No idea why the styling has to be so stand-out, but it's perhaps one of the reasons why small utilitarian EVs aren't quite as accepted yet - what the Toyota Prius achieved with distinctive styling and building a green reputation around it, perhaps these are efforts to cash in on that, maybe if cars are shaped weird, people will realise that with such weird shapes, these just have to be green cars, right?

The bigger marques seem to have gone more with their traditional styling, while all the start-ups seem to have either low-slung sports styling, or else they look like the old car the Jetsons would have in their archaic garage.

I'm still in favour of making mod kits for existing cars, as I've repeatedly said here on the blog, because this would mean the least manufacturing footprint with the most benefit.  You still have your petrol-engined car, and can drive on it as per normal.  It still looks like the car you're used to.  Braking gets better because you use regenerative braking to help your normal brakes, brakes wear less.  And a few stops and starts after the battery has run out of charge, regen braking will ensure that the battery assist will have enough juice in it to assist you on the next hill, saving you fuel.

There's now an external kit which supposedly clips over the rear wheels of existing cars and provides some battery/electric assist, but A) it's ugly and B) it's very clumsy.  And, C) from the look of it I wouldn't trust it at anything other than very slow bumper to bumper speeds.  It doesn't look like it's particularly robust.  And I've misplaced the URL to it, it's from about three months back and has apparently generated no more news so perhaps it's resting...

If you're interested in owning an EV and doing your bit to keep our cities unpolluted, and you're wondering why we don't seem to have that many EVs in Australia, go here and do your bit.


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Making Your Burgers Cheaper (To Make.)

It's always good to see how a garage inventor can come up with the goods, in the face of all the big corporations - just by recognising a need.  Big corporations don't see the need to help other big corporations trim costs, it takes someone who's actually in touch with the problems faced by those franchise operators to see a need and fill it.

(Are large corporations really that out of touch?  I say hell yeah - once you get to that kind of altitude in the business ecosystem, you just can't have the kind of vision that's needed.)

Anyway - back to the invention, the Vegawatt.  Just brilliant.  Toss in the cooking oil you were using to pump out fries and heart-attack-burgers, and it saves you up to 10% of your energy costs by providing electricity and hot water.  (I bet though that they won't take 10% off the price of that burger though!)  Of course, this also saves load on the local power grid, which is a good thing.

It neatly takes care of all the drums of waste oil sitting around out the back waiting to be collected, which cuts down on smell and mess.  And for those who say "what about the biofuellers?" I have to say I always thought that having to go collect and process all that oil was pretty much a drain on the resources, most people can use that time far more efectively.

Sorry to say, but if you're a biofueller mainly because it's cheaper, then think again.  Reducing greenhouse waste emissions isn't about economy, it's about survival of the world.

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Electric Cars - Why Don't We Have Them Yet?

Mahindra, who made one of the first affordable small 4WDs I'd ever seen back in the 80's, are now planning to release a 4 seater electric vehicle by (here comes that effing arbitrary date fished out of some sales exec's ass again!) 2010.

At four seats, it handily beats the REVA, which is sold in the UK under some other geewhiz name, ah yeah that's it, the G-Wiz.  The new Li ion battery REVA may just pip the Mahindra in the range stakes though, and seems to have managed to lay down a bit of a track record by now.

ZAP has a whole slew of little electric buzzabouts, but in all it's been a very quiet 2008 for ZAP, it seems.

I notice, reading all those articles, that these little cars are approved in the UK because they are classed as a low speed, low power 4 wheel cycle, meant for low speed traffic conditions.  I also noticed that the REVA has been full front crash tested at 25mph and apparently passed that test, but I guess the question is - who feels safe in a little tiny peapod when they're sharing the road with buses and SUVs the size of a small tank?

I'm not sure what the state of play is in Australia, but I think we classify the EVs as cars, and therefore they all don't pass the roadworthiness tests, and in fact as far as I know, none have been tested yet.  I might lobby for a change of laws, because if it wasn't for them, I could have been driving a ZAP or REVA four years ago, and saving thousands on petrol, as well as producing considerably less pollution.

Look at car sales figures - surely that's saying something?  It's not just that people want to wait for a "more stable market" or a "more opportune time" to buy a new car.  It's that they aren't sure where the price of petrol is going, having been bent over and loved one too many times by petrol multinationals, and I think most would rather just avoid all that happening again.  If ever there was a clear sign that we need to change the roadworthiness laws and the classification of small EVs to allow us to own them, don't our politicians think this might be it?

I've ridden a scooter in between the semi-trailer road trains around Fremantle Port, and I think an electric car would be brilliant in that kind of situation.  And probably safer than a 50cc scooter.  So I'm going to ask you to email your member of parliament, ask them why we still can't import a cheap electric vehicle that makes so much sense in today's stressed ecosystem?  And make the point that you personally would like the choice to buy a small EV rather than feed global warming.

Maybe an email such as this would work: (change the name to your MP or whoever you send it to)
Mr Rudd - Can you please explain why the REVA and ZAP electric vehicles and many others are considered roadworthy in the UK, and are saving UK citizens hundreds of dollars a year, saving the UK hundreds of tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year - and yet I as an Australian citizen don't have this choice?  In a land blessed with more sunshine than almost anywhere else in the world, where a solar charger on my carport roof and an electric vehicle in that carport could save me and my family thousands of dollars, why are we still not changing the laws to allow me to do so?



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Bring On The Uber-Cute hedgehogs!

Treehugger, I can't believe you said that... 

It's NEVER okay to bring in an outside species for any reason whatsoever.  In Australia alone, our two biggest "integration" stories are cane toads (now spread to almost half the places we human Aussies frequent and killing or supplanting hundreds if not thousands of native species) which were meant to control the cactoblastis moth.  It turned up it's bufus nose at the moth grubs and ate everything else in sight, and since it's poisonous, it also killed off most of its predators...

And rabbits...  (For which we ended up having to put up one of the longest continuous fences, the Rabbitproof Fence...)  Rabbits brought in partly for food, and partly for sport among the rapidly-increasing members of the well-to-do set.

We're still fighting a rabbit plague to this day, and losing the battle.  We're losing the battle to keep cane toads from spreading and destroying.  Can you see a common thread here?  The words "losing the battle."  You just can't import a species and expect that everyone will keep theirs locked up safely.  How's your battle with the sewer alligators going?  Squirrels?  And the hundreds of other out of place invasive imported species?

With our rabbits, also imported were foxes, which damage stocks of an animal we did also import for utility, the chicken.  Which, as any good imported species should be, is totally useless at surviving in the wild and supplanting native fauna. Yet our good friend and import, Brer Fox, is totally brilliant at eating chooks and native animals alike, and finds rabbits (which it was among other things imported to control) too much hard work.

And I won't speak about the damage abandoned pet cats and dogs do to the native fauna shall I?  Nor the spiders which arrive on loads of fruit at our seaports and have interbred creating several hundred new species of totally uncatalogued, totally unknown, and generally totally venomous spiders that are now spreading out all over the country and wreaking God knows what damage among native insects.  (The large majority of which we haven't even discovered yet and which will probably all be extinct before we get the chance to...)

So I'm sorry - as cute as hedgies may be, as cute as an 11-year old kid taking on the City Fathers and winning may be, as much as you paint that as a feel-good story, I just can't see a shred of ecological responsibility in the way you've chosen to report that.

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Get Your Vitamin D Dose With - Mushrooms?

We (should!) all know that Vitamin D deficiency causes all sorts of complaints including brittle bones and rickets.  And we should all know that ten minutes of exposure to the sun every day or two, allows us to manufacture our own Vitamin D (well, one of the forms of Vitamin D, luckily for us one of the two that are important, D2 and D3) and thus avoid rickety bones.  Vitamin D2 is more often the one present in foods, while D3 seems to be the one we synthesize most.  However, it appears that they do broadly the same job, so our bodies can use them interchangeably.

You should also know that oily fish, prawns, beef liver, and a range of other foods contain enough to meet our requirements on average, if we have a varied diet.  But mushrooms, once listed as only a minor contributing source of Vitamin D, can actually be enough to fill our average daily requirement.

In The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, I mentioned mushrooms as a source of natural selenium, which - despite current research that fails to find benefit for prostate cancer sufferers (flawed research, as I've since discovered) - was only one of the benefits of mushrooms I mentioned, the second benefit being vitamin D.  (Because I'd got hold of brand new research which had been the precursor to the articles I quoted above, you see.  I was very thorough in my research.) 

Modern mushrooms are low in Vitamin D because they are grown in the dark, away from sunlight.  It's another example of how we unknowingly adulterate our food.  Mushrooms grow in dim sunlight in nature, and absorb significant amounts of UV-B that way.  It *was* part of the natural balance of things - we couldn't stay in the sunlight enough but mushrooms sat on the forest floor, faithfully absorbing and storing our sunlight for us, waiting until we collected them, put them into baskets and carried them home.

The significant take-home you should have gleaned from reading the articles is that you can make *any* mushrooms richer sources of vitamin D by exposing them to UV-B - especially *after* they have been harvested.  

If your question is "how can I find enough UV-B to activate my mushrooms, and will it work with any mushrooms?" then I have a solution and an answer for you:  The mushrooms tested - although it's not specifically mentioned in the articles - are those that are grown artificially in the dark bunkers, i.e. they are the mushrooms that show up on your supermarket shelves, portobello, swiss brown, button, and so-called "field" mushrooms.  The technique should work with all of them.

And the technique is equally simple - spread fairly freshly-harvested mushrooms heads-up on a suitable flat surface (maybe inside a shallow flat cardboard box you used to bring your groceries home in) and leave them out in the sun for 20 to 60 minutes depending on how good your sunlight is.

One more note: The way our skin synthesizes vitamin D is that it combines certain cholesterol type compounds and alters them, that produces (in about ten minutes of exposure) our average requirement.  After that requirement is met, the skin continues to produce vitamin D but it is destroyed as fast as it's produced, so we don't get vitamin D poisoning or something.  I would suggest that a similar process occurs in mushrooms (after all, nature re-uses successful techniques) and after a certain amount of time, all that is happening is that the mushroom is converting its essential compounds into vitamin D and then destroying it.  In other words, past a certain point, the mushroom will actually start losing nutritional value.  Since we have no way of measuring the amounts of nutritional value, I've given a rather broad range of exposure times, but I tend to stay at the lower end of that time for bright sunlight, and have more mushrooms...

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NOTE: If you're interested in why I believe research into selenium benefits is deeply flawed, I'll post an article on this shortly.  For now, get a copy of my book, read it, and then you'll probably see it for yourself.  There is a HUGE difference in the way the diet uses the nutrients and the way the researchers applied them.  This is because researchers are specialists and they rarely look outside the parameters they know, and that's in fact how even the specialist dietitians missed the simple home truths I discovered while being a broad generalist...

The Cookbook Scores Another Hit.

Here's some more positive evidence supporting The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook.  It's one of the components of the diet and I can't stress enough the importance of using grapeseed oil and extra virgin olive oil together in cooking for the simple reason that the oily vitamin E helps your body absorb the beneficial antioxidants much more readily - and now there's another reason.

Of course, again it has to be stressed that direct application of the extract of grapeseed onto leukemic cells isn't exactly the same as ingesting the extract, but the links between grapeseed oil and reduction in tumors and dysplasic cells seems to be established enough to warrant its inclusion in the diet.

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Autopublishing Rocks

I just pre-wrote a post on here and left it to autopublish on its due date.  Kind of a weird feeling - I could be run over by a bus in the interim and that article and others will still publish....

What a great dead-man switch!  "You can't - if you kill me that post will publish and reveal your part in the scheme to hijack that shipment of nuclear weapons!  You need me to delete it before that happens!"

And a good way to creep out your relatives after you die...  Arrange your posts to autopublish at key dates, and hope that someone keeps your blog in their feed reader... %)

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Toyota Goes "Me Too!" with their planned EV.

*sigh*.  Yet another electric vehicle.  It seems a bit airheaded of me, I know.  I'm sposed to be shouting all things green from the rooftops, after all this is the green side blog... But... This is Toyota, I like Toyota...  And all they've come up with so far is the decidedly non-green Prius and now this little EV which looks like the minimum amount of design work and effort to get from gas to green.  Gone from "Toyota" to Toyawnta" in one easy step...

Two things that really really REALLY shit me are all the car manufacturers seeming to have agreed on a standard formula already and all building broadly the same EV with a different badge; And all of them, when asked about it, fishing a date out of the same hat: "Oh, when?  Errr, 2010.  Yeah, that sounds good.  Say we said 2010 when you write us up, okay?"

As I said in another article, with any kind of luck this is the tipping point over a slippery slope for the Big Iron auto manufacturers, and while I deplore a waste of billions of dollars as much as the next person, the bailout might just be a cheap price to pay for getting rid of that particular "car"tel...  Because, you do understand that despite the huge suck at the public tit, they will inevitably go "bus"t due to public reaction, as the green message sinks in.

The idea is that just as in evolution, organisms grow until they exceed the capacity of their niche to support them.  That's when you step in and star supplemental feeding, which is what the bailout is.  And then economics takes over and you realise the species is better off extinct...

Meanwhile, small manufacturers will fill the niche, and one hopes they'll do a better job at innovating and coming up with new technology.  And before 2010, thank you very much!  I'm still sure that any number of companies out there could come up with a series of hub motors/batteries/solar conversion kits to turn front-wheel drive petrol engined small cars into fuel/electric dual drives, which could spin out their useable lives by another five years and reduce their petrol consumption by half.

And don't forget all those crazed inventors spruiking and promoting their water to hydroxy gas to water mileage boosters.  Because, these technologies aren't new - my father knew people who converted their cars to use hydroxy gas, steam injection, and even charcoal fired wood-gas to run on.  No kidding - I've seen old faded b&w pix of a car with basically a sealed, wood-heated, wood-containing boiler, and the gas that it boiled out of the wood was used to run the engine...

See, we're overly used to convenience.  That particular guy back in the early 1900's had to plan his trips carefully - fill the chamber with wood, start the fire going, watch the pressure gauge and when the time was ripe, belt off to the nearest village, where (with luck) he had time to cool the chamber, remove the charred remnants, add new wood, and re-stoke for the return trip.  You don't just go impulse shopping when you have a setup like that...

But I digress.  The point was to say that this technology works.  Despite being "invented" every year by someone new, it's the same ideas going around.  The reason they fail is that it's far more convenient to just turn a key and drive away.  No-one except the dedicated person wants to have to fiddle with an electrolyser or fill a steam water vessel before each trip.  The reason the car manufacturers aren't all baying and snapping to develop these ideas isn't because they don't work but because what they already have works and is all market-ready, no additional development costs.

Look at the light bulb - for almost 200 years, we wasted 80% of the electricity that was used in lighting.  almost 100 years ago we had fluorescent tubes, 30 to 40 years ago we had the technology to make CFL bulbs.  But the light bulb manufacturers were using factory plant that had been used for decades (many many deacdes!) and didn't want to go to the bother of upgrading their plant.  Why should they?  It's only been in the last few years that any of them grudgingly made a CFL among their stock lines, and it took force majeure in the form of government regulations before they all started making them.

And in the interim, smaller specialty manufacturers made a fortune selling CFLs and now the major light bulb manufacturers have competition. That's exactly the situation the car industry is heading into now.  Good luck to them all...

There will be other ways to differentiate your EV from others.  A mass commodity market approach would work so much better than the big bucks car showrooms.  After all, people are buying these to be green yes - but the real reason is that they want a cheap form of transport, not some chrome behemoth sold from an expensive car showroom where the cost of that premises and the sales staff must be re"coupe"d.

Also - sharing taxis could be another small thing that adds up - Laurent is apparently working on a few new wrinkles for his cab sharing site, so go there, try it out, and support his effort.

So - the standard formula is Lithium ion style batteries, crap electric drives, and a cont"roller" made in China sold with a different badge on it, and I reckon by 2010, all the big manufacturers will have one at least on the market.  If Toyota want to do something for their image, they would be better off finding a new niche rather than jumping up and down yelling "me too!  me too!"

PS: I realised afterwards that I had all these inadvertent puns so I put quotes round them and slightly changed the font colour.  No reason, it just amused me when I proofed the article and I love stupid puns...

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Baby Green Steps

Are you prepared?  Do I sound like one of those survivalists who rose to attention last century, who had stashes of food, weapons, ammunition, clean water, and fallout shelters?  Because, that kind of attitude has always been around, and always it's treated with a mixture of amusement and respect.  Farming and animal husbandry started out of a survivalist attitude - only then they didn't call it "survivalist," they just called it "surviving..."

Similarly, the people most like survivalists today are the sensible treehuggers - not the ones that chain themselves to trees or want to flood the world with pet food animals - rather, the ones who, like us, are quietly going about their day and making each day a little less impacting, a little more self-sufficient.  I don't mind what type of action you take, as long as you're aware of the problems and pitfalls and are doing something positive.  That's what being "Zen" means, on this website and on the zencookbook.com website.

I notice that JH Kunstler predicted a recession, for a variety of reasons, and also that he has suggestions for the following decades.  Now, since his predictions are all proving to be quite uncannily accurate, I will tend to believe a lot of what James says.  Now compare that to this article about what President Obama should do.

There's quite a gulf between the two...  Yet each has valid points as well as weak links.  With the instability in oil prices, I would not be surprised if fossil fuel vehicles see a very sharp decline.  Despite handing auto manufacturer CEO's gloriously bountiful golden handshakes (which is what the bail-outs amount to) those will see a slippery slope from which there will be no coming back.  Similarly, any work invested into that most oxymoronic of oxymorons, "clean coal," will see nothing but billions sunk into a technology which will amount to almost zero benefit to the world.

And as far as keeping things local, I can think of a few things I'd prefer not to localise - health and medicine, for one.  I just can't see how dying in Town A, when the right medications and treatments are available in Town Z a thousand kilometers away, well I can't see how that would be of benefit...

Also - these are big-ticket items, which I can't deal with all by myself.  I'm happy to provide the support for voicing these plans, and spreading what information I have - but I realise that this is something "WE" all will do together.  I'm confident that en masse we will all speak up, and the changes will happen.

Meanwhile, I'm doing the personal, "survivalist" things that I know make a difference at "MY" level - I have a worm farm and hoping to make that a much larger setup so that I can collect scraps and distribute worms and worm fertiliser around my neighbours, in return for maybe some of their produce.  I'm making kitchen planters/seedling raisers and sharing how to make them on this blog, and I use the solar power of the bus to try and offset energy use here - I run the refrigerator out there for keeping longer-term foods, am using the 12V freezer as my deep freezer, and will shortly run out 12V CCFL lights so that I can reduce my energy footprint even more. I tend to run my laptop from a 12V powerpack off the solar batteries, again to reduce the energy footprint.

And I'm experimenting with compact high yield gardens without fertiliser runoff, and as I develop these I'll be posting them to this blog. For example, my in-ground herb patch is already watered by recycled grey water from the washing machine.  My washing machine itself is a recycled item which I saved from becoming landfill, and also a quite efficient little machine.

Because I can see how fragile our hold on "civilisation" really is becoming, and to me that means that there need to be islands of civilisation of a more environmental kind.  Since you're reading this, I presume you must feel very much the same way.  Oh - don't get me wrong, either - I believe technology will definitely pay off for us in environmentally friendly ways if we just keep funding it - also advances on medical technology which will allow us to better survive, and better adapt, and generally live better lives.

I just believe that since I can't develop a safe fusion reactor given my faculties and resources, I can at least take steps to make sure that while I'm waiting for the next big breakthrough, I'll ruin as little of the Eart as possible, to give them more time to think...

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Planters Sprout Crop

Update to the kitchen planter article from last week - the soil stayed damp through one of the hottest days, and then the rest of the week, and the seeds have sprouted.

sorry for the blurries, I'm a lousy cam op

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Share Taxis In Your City! Save Money!

Here's a service that the concept works for me, and which I'll have to try. http://www.cabeasy.com/ lets you enter a planned cab journey, and someone else can chip in along the way.  Given so many web enabled phones, all it needs is an SMS reminder as well as the email alert, and you could have Twitter-like social sharing of cabs and cab fares.

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The UPC Never Lies.

Handy to know in these times of very troublingly contaminated Chinese goods and foods, are the barcodes, the UPC codes, on packaging.

The resellers and retailers who would rather see you buy the cheaper Chinese products will obviously try and obfuscate the country of origin as much as possible, given all the recent bad (and deservedly so) publicity Chinese product has been getting.  But the UPC codes (those barcodes generally printed as part of the packaging) have to be true and correct.

So by knowing which barcodes to avoid, you can save yourself and your family from lead or melamine or other contaminant poisoning.  And it's not as difficult as you'd think.  Look at the first three digits of the UPC barcode, this is the three digit country number.  The ones to watch out for: 690 to 695 are all  made in China.  471 is made in Taiwan.

A UPC Code

Here are a few more - you can safely forget these again, as long as you remember 690 - 695 and 471.

00  ~ 13 USA & CANADA
30  ~ 37 FRANCE
40  ~ 44 GERMANY
49  ~ JAPAN
50  ~ UK
57  ~ Denmark
64  ~ Finland
76  ~ Switzerland and Liechtenstein
741 ~ Taiwan
628  ~ Saudi-Arabia
629  ~ United Arab Emirates
690 - 695 ~ China
740  ~ 745 - Central America
All  480 Codes are made in the  Philippines.


Here's an article on barcodes, and here's a bigger list of countries if you like that kind of thing/

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Kitchen Herb Planter For Peanuts

Want to make a few planters for herbs in the kitchen but the garden or hardware store is just too far away? More importantly, do you want to re-use and re-purpose old stuff you'd only be sending to the tip or to the recycle center anyway?

I used some 2.2litre soft drink bottles I had and was feeling guilty about.  I cut it just under the halfway mark and again just above, because these bottles have a stiffener ridge cast into them which gets in the way.

I make a small puncture in the bottle base bit, about 1 - 2 cm down from the cut edge, just to prevent air locks when filling.  Generally a "crease" forms when you jam the two parts into one another and lets air in, but the puncture is just in case that doesn't happen.  (You don't want the bottom airtight because the reservoir won't fill up properly if the seal is too good.)

So then you stuff some kind of porous wadding (I used a fibre wool I salvaged from some old air conditioning ducting but old teeshirt or towel or dishcloth would probably do) through the neck of the top part of the bottle and press in some potting mix fairly tight.  As you can see from the last pic above, that crease did form when jamming the two bottle halves inside one another.

And that's it, really.  Add enough water (about three or four standard cups) to drain through and fill the reservoir, plant your seeds or seedlings, and keep the watering up.  Some liquid fertiliser applied every week or two will help - but not much as it will collect in the reservoir.  And keep it where it will get light, by a window, and don't let it dry out.


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Save A Fortune On Solar Panels!

If it's true that there's a glut of solar panels on the market, then perhaps put off your plans to become energy self-sufficient until late next year?  While the advantages of solar electric and hot water can't be overstated, and the effect of tens of thousands of households switching to nett surplus of energy will undoubtedly alleviate the need for more power stations, the effect on the economy of your pocket of waiting for the cheaper cells may just be worth it.

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Enough To Make You Sick? Hell Yeah!

I don't think I've harped on enough yet, about additives and how they DO NOT belong in our food.  Here - I've picked a colouring agent and three preserving/processing agents out of the list which is in the appendix of The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook:

"-Known to provoke asthma attacks (though the US FDA** do not recognise this) and urticaria (nettle rash) in children (the US FDA** estimates 1:10 000); also linked to thyroid tumours, chromosomal damage, urticaria (hives) and hyperactivity; ... used to colour drinks, sweets, jams, cereals, snack foods, canned fish, packaged soups; banned in Norway and Austria


-derived from coal tar; all sulphur drugs are toxic and restricted in use (in USA, FDA** prohibits their use on raw fruits and vegetables), produced by combustion of sulphur or gypsum; known to provoke asthma attacks and difficult to metabolise for those with impaired kidney function, also destroys vitamin B1; typical products are beer, soft drinks, dried fruit, juices, cordials, wine, vinegar, potato products


-used to prevent rancidity in oily substances; derived from nutgalls; may cause gastric or skin irritation, gallates are not permitted in foods for infants and small children because of their known tendency to cause the blood disorder, methaemoglobinemia; used in oils, margarine, lard and salad dressings, sometimes used in packaging


-petroleum based; the HACSG* recommends to avoid it. May cause nausea, vomiting, delirium. A dose of 5g is considered fatal. Typical products are fats, oils, margarine"

With such lovely descriptions, (I've highlighted the most worrisome in red,) you're probably thinking I was very selective and looked hard to find those four.  Truth is, I was very selective, but didn't have to look far - I'd estimate that between one third and one half of all the additives used in our food are known to be toxic, are banned, and cause serious ill effects in people.  And no-one has ANY idea what they do in combination...  

So I suggest that you buy my book, or find a table of additives and known issues, load it on your mobile phone or PDA, and take it shopping next time you feel like getting a rude shock...

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Superstore Shells, Post Recession Uses For

Just an idea, of course.  But the question of what the USA calls the "big boxes " (being the shells of huge buildings that the megamarts and others leave behind) is beginning to plague us here too, with large shed-like shells left over when the businesses close or go belly-up being re-used willy-nilly or left empty.

So why shouldn't such buildings be re-purposed green?  By that I mean - they all have decent loading ramp facilities, since they would have had high stock turnover when they were economical.  That means you have one bonus already.

A further bonus is, as pointed out, the parking facilities.  I know it's not green to drive your car everywhere, but for some things you do need transport over and beyond what a bicycle or public bus can offer...

So here are my top uses for old big box buildings:

---
A recycling center.  You have places for people to drop off whitegoods and electronics, and you accept more incoming from local neighbourhood collection vehicles.  Run these yourself, small electric scooters and vehicles with trailers for larger whitegoods, and just bring local recyclables to your facility.  Once there are a few centres, put a call centre in one and divide up the area into localities, assigned by software.  That way when someone phones in and asks to have their old 51" TV removed, the software informs the relevant recycle centre which can then send out a scooter with a trailer to pick up the TV.

It's an ideal use for these big boxes, provides local employment, and if done right poses no health risks whatsoever.  For some items, a particular centre might hold a specialist section, and recycle those for all centres.  And for anything that will produce noxious byproducts, the centres act as a short term store-and-forward facility for larger facilities located away from the population centres.

---
Remember when I said we need to change how we sell electric cars?  Well, here's an ideal thing.  Put aside a few square meters for a showroom, or use a whole big box to sell EVs.  Once again, it's a re-use that makes environmentally better use of the places than just knocking them down and rebuilding would.  Selling electric vehicles as a commodity would be the way to go.

Yes, this will lose large car showrooms and sales organisations their status as the suppliers of cars - but let's face it this is a Good Thing, it's time that particular enclave was busted wide open.  Agile companies will convert their car lots into EV lots, or sell them and buy a big box building or two and stop selling fossil fuel cars.

---
Local nursery outlets.  Loads and loads of green-friendly plants.  Plants that thrive under local conditions and provide one of the essentials such as cover, foods, herbs, shade, and are reasonably decorative.  If these kinds of places are ubiquitous and sell cheap enough, think of the difference it will make to a city to reduce it's water use for gardens and at the same time increase the number of plants improving the air and converting much local waste locally.

---
Solar and renewable green energy stores.  Stock and supply everything a person needs to reduce their energy needs, generate their own energy, save their greywater, recycle their scraps as compost for plants.

---
Clothing and household item swap/trade/sell markets would benefit from such large venues, too. These could be a spot set aside for this, no matter what else the store holds, and would serve to make these places a community landmark and center.

---
When there's no possible use such as above, the places could still be converted by internally partitioning them, into small apartments.  I've seen several big boxes converted in this way, because the shell is already in place, the individual apartments inside were able to be built cheaply and quickly, and generally a two-storey layout is possible.  Stock such apartments with items from the swap/trade/sell markets and they can become crisis housing, add as many recycling and re-use options and they can also serve as examples of what can be done with green living.



I can think of dozens of things such places could be re-used for, and as with all the ideas above, there needs to be a bonus in the form of rates relief from local government, perhaps an incentive from federal government to assist in converting such stores, and for green items, a government rebate to enable such things to be sold cheaper than non-green alternatives.

It's the start of a new paradigm in what shops and facilities are needed, and makes ecologically friendly use of those big box stores, and it will become VERY relevant as time goes by.

And then as the push to be green loses relevance in a decade or so and is replaced by all green, it will be time to bring those big boxes down and recycle them into something else, perhaps apartments as above, or public facilities, or just tear them up, recycle the materials and plant the ground with a community parkland.



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Green Car Is Green... And White.

Fiat is out with a concept EV, which means some car manufacturers are getting the message.

It's a good trend to see.  The Phylla EV seems to be settled right into the standard groove of Lithium batteries and individual electric motors, small and fairly nippy for getting around the city.  Top marks for topping up the batteries with solar power, now let's see if we can't get them into Australia, where one of our top resources, ahead of iron ore and LNG is, in my opinion, the many long sunny days we have, making sunlight our number one renewable energy resource.

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I've Solved The Recession.

Well, this falls somewhere on the environment scale, because it's going to carry through to everything we have and do... Aside from the rather biased article title, it's got some sense to it.  And some nonsense.

"Are people reassured by a cheque with a large "DON'T PANIC!" sign attached?" is roughly one of the take-homes out of the article.  Want an answer?  From me, being one of the pensioners the article refers to and the bonus applies to, the answer is a resounding "shit no, I'm gonna panic!"

Some of us lived through tough times as kids.  Our family was never affluent, we had enough, we never went hungry or poorly clothed, but we sure didn't exactly wallow in it.  We remember either living through, or hearing about our parents living through, depression.  And now we're being told we can spend our way out of a recession.  Hell yeah.

The article says it's thought that most of the handout will be saved rather than spent.  Again, speaking from the point of view of a pensioner, I can answer that too:  "hell yeah I will put some of this aside!"

You know why? Because after living on the starvation borderline shit scrap of income they call a pension, it feels good to have some spare cash around for the bills that used to cripple me financially.  It's good to know that there's a safety net.  Even if it will only last a short while, at least it is there...

And here's another reason I won't spend it immediately - it's because the people who will be "bailed out" by me spending my bonus won't be myself, or the kid working down at Woolies pulling down an even more shit income than I am.   No - it'll be companies like Woolies who reap the benefit.  Giving us this bonus ends up much the same as if K-Rudd had just given my $1400 to some rich arsewipe on the board of Coles or Telstra or any other of the dishonest bastards that run the money machines.

Australia will slip-slide its way to a recession not because we lack confidence that our leaders can rein in the economy, but because we've had proven to us time after time by the previous government that they will stick money - preferably our money - up the arses of every large corporation they can find, and there is no justice for working Australians, and certainly there was no justice nor pity for pensioners.

For K-Rudd to reel in this one, a better approach, much as I find myself loath to agree with it, is to provide tax cuts for wage earners, and enforce some economic leashes on large corporations such as banks, which cry poor year after year, nibble away our income one one hundredth of a percentage point at at time - and then come up with a several billion dollar profit at the end of each year...  Those billions had to come from somewhere Mr Rudd, and I respectfully suggest that I paid hundreds of thousands towards those billions in my working lifetime, and I'm even now still being ripped off for part of my meager pension by those same banks.

I say, Mr Rudd, that if you reined in the "magicians" of the stock market who make money trading money they don't have and instead use my money as collateral, that would be better for the economy than shoving more of my tax dollars into their ventures as a "bailout."

I contend that if you show the balls that John Howard lacked throughout his slimy career, and told the petrol companies they can either accede to a Government-directed pricing structure or else take their business elsewhere, that a lot more Australians than just pensioners would benefit.

If you, Mr Rudd, told the farmers "doing it tough" all over Australia to either adapt or else move on, perhaps we'd be exporting crops that are more suited to our environment as it currently is, and shoveling less money into a dead horse dying of thirst.

I say that if we put more effort and funds towards clean energy and research into clean energy and renewable/sustainable living and technology, we would have something to export, something that will do the real job of saving the economy and the world.  Stick "clean coal" where it belongs, i.e. someplace deep and dark where the sun don't shine, and let's give our Australian inventors and researchers and entrepreneurs some incentive to stay here and make money for our country instead of draining off overseas.

We still throw out millions of tons of recycleable rubbish every year, or send it offshore for processing.  How about an industry in cleanly recovering and recycling some of that?  We have the brilliant minds working on recovery processes, we have the sunlight to provide the energy, and we have all those farmers out of jobs that would be better off working at something that earns money such as recovering material from recyclables.

There may be less of those stuffed shirts working at being CEOs and other assorted freeloaders, but they can get a job selling our new technology overseas, pitching for research grants, and doing whatever it is that these tossers did before, only now for a good cause instead of an evil one...

Those farmers that want to remain in primary production might want to consider farming kangaroos.  The old excuse that it's too expensive just doesn't wash anymore - nothing can be more expensive than $23/kg lamb in a land that prided itself on the fact that it got to the top on the sheep's back.  Or maybe they can find a more natural crop plant - we do have some food plants that it might be worth checking out - the Aborigines didn't live on sunshine and geckos before we came here, after all.

Stop thinking along traditional lines!  Times are anything BUT traditional, move with them!

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Nup. Nothing New And Exciting Here, Either.

Seeming to become a stagnation node in our development, this last few months.  I've seen a few discussions of shit - well, composting toilets in fact - and some solar energy devices that were not that much of an advance on existing technology.  And one bright light - and Israeli system using silica gel (that stuff you see included in electronics packaging in the little pouch labeled "dessicant silica gel - do not eat") and recycling as much as possible of the energy, to extract water out of air.

But as I said over on the TEdADYNE Systems blog, something's got to come up in the next few weeks, and I'll be there to ferret it out.  Stay tuned...

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Target Energy 2020

South Australia is on target to generate 20% of its energy needs from renewable energy with this wind farm.  Call me a hardliner but I don't think 20% as required by K-Rudd is enough.  SA should now try going for 25%, and then 40%, 50% - I think the terms of the requirement are not the way I'd phrase them.  I'd have said that I wanted 50% of energy to come from clean or renewable energy sources, and then grudgingly accept 30% or 35% (knowing all along that this is all I could have hoped for - so in actual fact, Ive reached my target...)

Also, while we're at it.  Let's make distributed systems a much bigger feature.  This makes sense from a lot of points of view.  You want to use a lot of wind power?  Fine.  Spread it around, if the turbines in the hills aren't producing due to low wind, the turbines along the southern coast will probably be spinning.  All out of wind?  And clouds have occluded the solar collectors?  Luckily you've got localised nuclear energy plant to keep each location going.

"Whoa!" you're saying.  "WFT is that?  You want to save the Earth and yet you're recommending nuclear energy?"  Well as a matter of fact, yes I am.  And there you go again, having read the article, you say "But - TWENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS...  Ummm... ?"

Actually, that's about $30mAUD, but don't forget that this is among the first attempts to make local nuclear power plant.  There will be more, the price wil come down.  Then also, don't forget that you're generating (by this stage) at least 30% of your energy from renewables, so one Hyperion will suffice for 20,000 houses, bringing the price per household to $1500.  They are cleaner than traditional nuclear power plant, and have a pretty respectable useful life.  Spread that cost out per household over 20 years, and you can see that the cost is under $20 per household per month.  You'll surely get at least that much in metered useage.  These (and other non fossil fuel based power plant) will pay for themselves quite early.

Also keep in mind that appliances and equipment is slowly coming around to realising that energy efficiency sells.  And that energy consumption will most likely become the subject of legislation, so energy use per household will drop significantly.  Population will increase, yes; but useage per person will reduce as more and more of our gadgets go for legitimate green standards.

In the budgets of most States, there has got to be room over the next ten years for several hundred of these, leading to several tens of gigawatts of energy at around $3bnAUD.  That is easy to absorb into the costs, especially when you figure in the cost benefit of shutting down fossil fuelled plant, not having to build any new ones, and the thus reduced cost of fixing the environment.  (That latter is not counted in many cost/benefit analyses - the cost doesn't stop at cleaning coal plant, for example - there's still an environmental cost, and any government that's looking at this realistically will see that the cost of repairing environmental damage over the next twenty years or more will add up to many times more than the original plant or any savings made by installing it.)

Distributing our energy generation is also sensible from a defensive point of view.  After all, that's the reason bunkers have their own power sources that don't depend on grid power.  In a similar way, if an enemy is good enough to take out a few power stations, that's going to inconvenience the grid, but if they have to carpet-bomb the equivalent of three Asian countries to bring our grid to a standstill, the cost/benefit of attacking power infrastructure goes way pear-shaped.

Also, distributing things like nuclear local generating plant means much the same thing.  One nuclear power plant is easy to disable.  A hundred, many in unknown location, well that begins to be a much more difficult proposition...

Lastly, the waste.  As the (admittedly press release optimistic) article says, there's not a lot of waste, and it's "environmentally friendly" whatever they mean by that.  But don't forget that in 20 - 30 years' time, if we do things right, right now, we'll have time to focus research on how to dispose of those Hyperions and similar units, at minimum impact to the environment.  Or the human race will have become extinct despite our best efforts, in which case it won't be a problem to us.

But the time to set realistic - and stringent - requirements on clean/renewable energy and energy-efficient appliances is definitely here, and now is the time to set those standards, not "next year" or "nearer to the end of our term in office" or whatever else.  And this is NOT the time to say things like "but China isn't doing it, and poor us we'll be sooo disadvantaged by it, economic ruin, oh woe!"  To the companies (and the people who work at those companies) I suggest considering that they're gonna have to deal with it, so deal.  I'd rather take a cut in pay and increase my productivity for the next ten years than die in a heatwave in eleven years' time...

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Why E-Waste Needs To Be Managed

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If It Smells Like A Load Of It...

He started on a similar note, had a long run in office based on it, and finally, he's ending his time in office on it.

Bush, George Walker: (Nov 2000 - Nov 2008) - consistently, he was full of it...

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In Support Of Duncan Riley's Open Letter To K-Rudd

This sucks.  A lot of people think so, for various reasons.  Why is the car industry getting so much money?  I recall not too far back when an embarrassed Toyota exec was basically arm-twisted into accepting millions of dollars.  The exec was all "But we are making a lovely profit already thank you and have already got plans well in hand to build hybrids.  I SAID, we are alright thank you! Hey! Quite trying to shove this into my g-string!  Securityyyy!"  And that is only a few months ago...

Are you or are you not, Mr Rudd, for some change on global warming?  If you are, why are you propping up all car manufacturers, when all they will do is build the same cars?  Only slightly worse, because they'll have lost interest in manufacturing amidst the party they'll have with the money?  Why?  Well, because you're just shoving this money at them willy-nilly with no requirements other than "have fun guys!"

You know Kevin, as a pensioner, I should feel like you're a bit of a mongrel.  And while I'd been a Labor supporter for all my life, I now do think you're a mongrel.  Since when were cars more important than your Australian people?  What have you been thinking?  Don't reckon you might lose it all in this recession?  And then you might be relying on a freaking poverty pittance to live on like you're condemning the rest of us to?  I hope you get bitten by this, K-Rudd, and bigtime.

Meanwhile, unless there are some tangible positive results for me and others in my situation, you've not only lost my vote and those of my friends, you've attracted a vocal and determined campaigner - against you.  In less than a year you've completely erased my lifetime of Labor voting.  Nice going!

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Clear As Mud Cleansing

So the greenest of green ways to wash is brown, clay brown.  Why am I not impressed?  Why does this sound like the hygienic equivalent of anorexic veganism?  And why, particularly, does it strike me as not all that green, either?

We're human, and for millenia we didn't bathe.  We also died of a lot of hygiene-related illnesses, of course. Personal hygiene was one of the things that we discovered would reduce our mortality rates, and is thus a Good Thing.  But the fact that you need to keep in mind is that we should wash to keep clean, not to fulfill some kind of personalised ideal of - well, I actually have no idea what would drive this kind of behaviour.

For a start, it's "pick-axed out of the earth" in someplace in Morocco.  Sorry, but generally when I hear pick-axes and far-away places, it's generally a sign of exploitation.  It also tells me that it's a finite resource, and once it's gone, it's gone.  And you're taking it from one country to another.  Haven't we learned a lesson here yet?  Taking a finite resource from one place and spreading it around a lot of other places - something like uranium and fossil fuels, isn't it?

Let me break that down to tonnages - a person will use about 1.5Kg of this clay per year.  That's one and a half tonnes for every 1,000 people who use clay.  There are almost 400,000,000 people in the USA, 22,000,000 in Australia.  How many years before that clay is silting up water tables and sewage systems all over the world, and is all gone from Morocco?  See, it's an elitist, one-time thing, this.  Pure wank factor.  You could surely find clay closer to home, if you wanted to be environmentally friendly?

Never mind.  At least you've got your golden clay now, and can mix it up, a week's supply at a time, for use on your body.  Where, I might add, it will NOT do any great job of killing germs, and not even so good a job of cleaning.  Little word in your ear, Rassoul Clay Hawkers:  Clay is what I use soap for, to wash it from my skin after a hard day pick-axing it out of the ground in a secret location in Morocco...

It doesn't stop there though.  This is the personal hygiene gift that keeps on giving!  Because, it contains silicates.  Every soil on Earth does.  And 90% of bathrooms now have plastic bathtubs and shower recess floors.  And plastic gets scratched by silicates, after which it holds a thin film of clay, and grows nasty bugs.  Even enameled tubs and tile floors get scratched up and porous.  So you'll want to be pouring some disinfectant in there regularly.  Or vinegar.  Either way, something that had to be manufactured in greater quantity so you could make up for a shortcoming of clay as a cleanser.

Having messed up your surfaces, it also messes up your skin, because as the Treehugger reporter said, you end up with brown towels.  How do you think that brown got to the towels, ectoplasmic transfer?  Or maybe on your (not so clean) skin?  So you're still dirty, your bathtub or shower floor is dirty, and your towels are dirty.  Thank God that an extra half a cup of laundry detergent and an extra long wash cycle will get most of the clay out of your towels before it fatigues the threads and the towel wears out twice, three times as fast...

See - this is one of those "green" things that's just crap.  Soap - real soap - is made from a fat and a caustic substance.  Both break down in the environment just fine.  Where it gets messy is when you use detergents and surfactants and foaming agents...  I can find, with very little trouble, soaps made from olive oil and some alkali, and if hard water is a problem and they won't foam properly, I have lemons.  (The juice softens the water on my skin and that in turn allows the soap to foam better.)

Also, I have any quantity of glycerine left over from biodiesel, if I'm making it myself, or I can generally get it from a neighbour who's into biodiesel.  That too makes a reasonable liquid soap that also breaks down nicely in the environment.  And both can be made with local and renewable ingredients instead of raping Moroccan deserts.

Sometimes, just using a bit of commonsense will save you a lot.  And maybe save you from smearing yourself with mud just to feel greenwashed.

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Trick Your Body Into Burning Fat With Drugs.

Unfortunately for you, you junkie you, they don't mean party drugs... hehehehe..  Trick your body into burning fat - if that's not the most abuseable thing I don't know what is.  For a starter, there are always people who "are more special than the standard dose" and who will deliberately overmedicate. They say the drug is closely related to resveratrol, which is a component of red wine.

Have you ever heard the term "wino?"  There's a reason for it.  They are generally very thin, probably because of a very similar effect that resveratrol has, and are malnourished.  Not because they don't eat - they generally do - but because of that effect.  I know, I lived with a person like that for over a decade.

So - there's bound to be a toll on your body for over-using SRT1720.

Now to an interesting question.  This is just me, always finding potential bad uses for things.  Because people will.

Suppose I was secretly overdosing you on SRT1720, in your coffee, your meals, your sweets, your snacks?  You'd be eating normally but losing weight and condition rapidly.  Murder by weight loss drug.  And don't say it will never happen, there have been cases of people dying under very similar circumstances from ethyl glycol poisoning (brake fluid) administered by their spouses, never suspecting a thing.

... and  now you have help to clean up afterwards ...  Oh and don't try drinking brake fluid - it's definitely bad for you and you may not be able to stop...

UPDATE:
All jokes aside - more information has come to hand, and it seems SRT1720 is actually considered safe - for mice. Insofar as the researchers say that there is no further effect of a dose exceeding 500mg - again, this is in mice.  There's hope that the drug will aid Type 2 diabetes sufferers, and the ageing, as well.  So perhaps we'll see this on shelves soon.

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Lumped Solar Articles And A Mark Pesce Post

ROUNDUP - do these things together ring any bells?

http://gizmodo.com/5076530/solar-panel-quantum-leap-near+perfect-light-absorption-possible

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/11/solarwash-automated-solar-array-cleaning-system.php

http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=76 make sure you watch the third video...

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What We Need Is Kei-oot Kars

Just an observation.  I've been looking at the small economy and hybrid and electric car market staggering off the ground, albeit at a fraction of the speed it needs in order to thrash its larger gas guzzling siblings.  And then I see - this - and I realise something.  Japan's once again whupping our asses and handing them to us.  At the thing that will sell these cars faster than burger meals with a happy toy.  I'm talking cuteness.

Cars have to be solid colours? I remember my father bemoaning when cars strated coming out in "kitchen colours" as he called pastels and mixed colours.  It was a step to integrating cars into our lives - and it worked, in aces and spades and straights.

My friends were all disgusted when soccer mum cars started sporting racing stripes, and horrified when vehicles started sporting "designer mud splashes" painted right on them.  Those cars may have looked like 20th century Barbiemobiles but they sold in huge quantity.

Now look at the kei car in the picture.  It's a very cute shape, the lighting has been set up to give it a soft pink glow, and it has a logo on the door.  All it needs is a Hello Kitty face and flower on the doors, and  I don't care if it has a range of 80km, a top speed of 80kph, and runs on pickled bee farts - I'd fall for the cute toy factor, and a toy price to match.

So come on car manufacturers - you want to penetrate the market with environment-friendly small cars, take a leaf out of the book of the Masters Of Cute and start inking deals with Sanrio and Mattel, The Wiggles, Nickelodeon, and all the other sources of cute and appealing, get their design input, and their icons on the panels.

The problem with marketing EVs and ZEVs and PZEVs (Electric Vehicles and Zero Emission Vehicles and Practically Zero Emission Vehicles) is that you can't compete with the evil large vehicles on the basis of being "impressive performers" or "power and speed to match the imposing looks" - that's like cartoons advertising themselves, like encyclopedias, as "a source of knowledge and learning your family will treasure for generations."

Advertise the cars with cute ads - the Honda Jazz series is a good start - a light-hearted touch, make sure their cute factor outweighs the fact that they will only cost a few cents to recharge, and emphasise the fun factor.  These aren't terrain-conquering, fire-breathing, slide-drifting, competition impressing vehicles, these are a simple and cheap and fun way to get to work, to get the shopping , and to drop the kids to school and appointments.

Also - no showrooms.  You're making these cars as a cheap and plentiful source of transport - right?  Warehouse them, put a dozen models in different paint jobs in supermarket plazas with sign-up booths and home delivery the same day, build on-street dispensers for pick-up right there and then or for delivery to your door same day.  The key is that you get the cars looking like a true commodity that way.

The two biggest reasons the 'smart' car hasn't flooded the market?  They sell them at Mercedes dealerships (where I certainly don't even think to look for a cheap fun small car) and they've priced them wayy too high.  And it still takes as long as a normal vehicle to register and get on-road.  That's wayyyyyy too much to go through for a vehicle that's supposed to be trouble and hassle free.

And - governments wanting to score HUGE environmental points?  Register small (P)(Z)EVs as scooters, i.e. at a very very low price.  Make pre-registered license plates available to the manufacturers, to be attached to pre-sale vehicles and to become activated instantly on sale of the vehicle.  It's included in the price of the vehicle, and if the end user wants a personalised plate they can still do so at a later stage - the important thing is that they have a vehicle right there and then, it was cheap, and it was fun to buy it.


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WMML: Circular Competiton In Cycle Design

Let's say the design of the bicycle is outmoded, outdated, hopelessly retro, and hasn't seen a serious visual design makeover in several centuries.  Which is true, the bicycle is about as stagnant as the filament light bulb was a few short years ago.

Now let's assume that you're holding a competition to get people's ideas for the best redesign of the good ole bike as a commuter vehicle.  (Found at Treehugger)  What would you offer as the grand prize?

Why oh why?  By entering the competition I'm basically admitting that I think contemporary bikes are crap, I'm showing that I have an interest in a new design in commuter bikes.  So why would I want an old regulation design bike?  Oh come on!

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WTF is it with GMO?

What's with that?  You say "organic" and everyone kisses your feet and throws dollar bill confetti at you.  You say "natural" and people are learning that the word doesn't mean what they think, but they still smile at you and generally buy your beans.

But just say GMO and watch everyone light the torches and get the pitchforks.  Even nice sensible folks like those at Treehugger, who should be a bit more responsible with what they %promote.  They even say it in their article - it's the extraction process that causes all the toxicity.  Please please please people, there's a difference between a Frankensoyabean and a GMO soyabean designed to produce more using less resources.  There's less difference between a "natural" soyabean and a GMO soyabean, because the "natural" soyabean has had its genes selectively bred out to the point where it grows more beans from less soil, whereas the GMO bean has had essentially the same thing done to it but with a pipette and microscope.

The "Frankenbean" on the other hand is the kind of thing Treehugger and alert individuals should be on the lookout for - anything that's being bred to be no longer a soyabean, and is instead a combination of soaybean and fish protein and red grape resveratrol, for example.  (No - I'm not saying such a thing exists - but there have been such hybrid chimerae.)

The other thing to watch out for - as always, and as belabored to the point of dead equine in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook - is the processing.  Processing is the stage where the chemicals are added and subtracted, where good wholesome whole food becomes the toxic stuff that's causing illnesses and deaths.

I could keep going about where to draw a line between "organic" and "GMO" and "artificial" but there are entire ethics committees out there trying to work those boundaries out.  As usual, it's not up to them, it's up to you, yourself.  Are you prepared to eat lecithin from a soyabean that, instead of having been bred for decades to a particular form, has had those changes made overnight? Are you still prepared to eat that lecithin after the lecithin has been extracted with an alcohol?  What about hexane?

Short extract from Wikipedia:
"common constituents of gasoline and glues used for shoes, leather products, and roofing. Additionally, it is used in solvents to extract oils for cooking and as a cleansing agent for shoe, furniture and textile manufacturing. "

and also this
"The neuropathic toxicity of n-hexane in humans is well known; cases of polyneuropathy have typically occurred in humans chronically exposed to levels of n-hexane ranging from 400 to 600 ppm, with occasional exposures up to 2,500 ppm. The unusual toxicity of n-hexane (compared with other alkanes) has resulted in the chemical industry switching away from n-hexane in favour of n-heptane where possible."

Now - after reading the Treehugger article, I felt scared for my life.  But after reading the above, I'm more equipped to deal with that fear and make a rational decision.  My decision is that I care less about which beans produce the lecithin and more about how it's extracted and what it gets added to it during the process.

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