:: What Was Your First CLue? ::

December 19th Lakota Sioux representatives headed by such long-time activists as Phyllis Young and Russell Means, announced in Washington DC that the Lakota withdraw from all treaties with the US and reaffirmed their 1974 “declaration of continuing independence” (which came out following the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, the occupation of the B.I.A. offices in DC in 1972, and the 1973 battle with federal agents at Wounded Knee).

It will be “interesting” to see how this plays out. Here’s the Lakota Freedom web site:
http://www.lakotafreedom.com/

I will hope and pray that the feds don’t come down as hard as they did at Wounded Knee in ‘73, or in reprisal against A.I.M. leaders like Leonard Peltier and John Trudell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Peltier
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Incident_at_Oglala_The_Leonard_Peltier_Story/625470?trkid=189530&strkid=2124119707_0_0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pirLWdYeMBg
http://www.dickshovel.com/JTT.html
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Trudell_Independent_Lens/70044868?trkid=190393

FWIW, the book covering the Wounded Knee battle in ‘73 that I read most recently was by a woman who gave birth during the siege - Mary Crow Dog’s “Lakota Woman”:
http://www.amazon.com/Lakota-Woman-Mary-Crow-Dog/dp/0060973897/ref=pd_sim_b_img_2 (the book covers much more than the siege)

CNN and MSNBC have been silent about the Lakota treaty withdrawals. Fox at least carried this article:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317548,00.html

This could get messy. It certainly did 34 years ago. I am hoping that cell phone cameras and the internet will help keep the dogs of war at bay. It seems important to me that as many people as possible are aware of this to keep our government acting as honorably as possible.

Peace;

Michael

For a measly $15,000 pre week ($30,000 per couple) you will be able to rent a view like the simulated one below starting next year (construction is currently underway). Poseiden Resort’s claim to fame is to be the first 1-atmo undersea lodging on the planet. In other words - your ears won’t pop going in or out:

On the other hand - if you want a dry undersea experience today you can sleep above and eat below water at the Hilton Maldives:

Of course it will cost you $1,000-$1,500 for two adults, two nights, to sleep on stilts over the water.

Also in the Maldives is the Maldives Luxury Resort/Huvafen Fushi, complete with underwater spa. Same sort of deal as the Hilton: sleep above, play below.

Or on the more affordable end - there’s the Jules’ Undersea Lodge goes for $375/person/night (2 people max - two tiny bedrooms with a sliding door - hey baby, your twin or mine?)… but seriously - any scuba divers out there? Go to Florida - it looks like a blast!

Way out on the “there’s a venture capital angel born every minute” edge - there’s Crescent Hydropolis Resorts. Currently scheduled for 2009. Has construction started? I’ve seen a “satellite photo” that shows the project under construction - but in Google Earth? Not a trace - fly to: 25.087 55.128 for yourself. Anyway - if it ever gets built they plan to charge $5,500/night.

Craig Venter - of human genome sequencing and round-the-world ocean slooping fame

is set to announce the creation of synthetic life - according to this Guardian article.

…or at least a synthetically created genome implanted in (to take over) cells of a natural bacteria. Which in genetics is called a Chimera:

So we are on the brink of creating synthetic life forms! Bwaaa-ha-ha!

Probably through his spin-off operation Synthetic Genomics.

Just to repeat myself (and The Bard):

MIRANDA
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

A couple of weeks ago I heard a note on NPR/Morning Edition that caught my interest - so here’s what I found: Nevada Solar One - the solar electrical generating facility in Nevada that came on-line this Summer - is the third largest solar power plant on the planet.

C|Net did a good article on it back in March. From a patch of desert about 25 miles SE of Las Vegas they are harvesting enough energy from sunlight to power 15,000 homes!

This looks like a very straight forward design to a layman like me:
* heat oil to 750 degrees F in a closed loop
* boil water with the oil
* use the steam to drive a turbine
* use the turbine to generate electricity

No nuclear waste to bury for a million years. No CO2. No particulates being sprayed into the atmosphere. The modular design looks like it can be just plopped down side-by-side as many times as you like (with an occasional set of turbines to harvest the heat).

I got curious about whether you could see it in Google Earth…











The Google satellite photo was taken while Nevada Solar One was under construction…

Back off a little and you see it as a spot in the desert…

Back of far enough and you can see what a tiny spot of desert they are using! (it’s in the center of the picture - just south-west of the Hwy-95 marker)

And here’s another interesting site: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

In Inuit families near Thule AFB in Greenland - only girls are being born. Across much of the Arctic Circle twice as many girls as boys are being born. The scientists studying the phenomenon link the sex-ratio shift to concentrations of PCBs and other pollutants in the local food supply.

Pollutants from industrialized countries are carried north by winds and ocean currents and become concentrated in the traditional food sources.

Here’s the Times of London’s article.

Decades ago I’d read about sex-ratio problems in frogs and amphibians living in polluted waterways. I guess the newts have come home to roost.

One of the more ominous trends on the planet (after war, pestilence, and natural disaster) is the tightening control of water.

First, it seems bizarre to me (psychotic?) that people spend hard earned cash buying bottles of filtered tap water at the grocery store. Buy a water filter and get over it! It seems bizarre but not ominous.

For ominous you’ve got to start talking about big water corporations like Veolia, Suez, and Thames Water - or countries that control water that flows into neighboring nations such as China(Tibet)’s control of river sources for most of populated Asia - or Turkey’s control of rivers that supply Syria and Iraq - to name only two.

Israel has been trying to do an “arms for water” deal with Turkey for the last decade. Originally it was going to get water in giant tankers - but more recently they have been talking Turkey about a multi-use pipeline shipping oil, gas, and water - or does that also include electricity (that does NOT sound safe).

Radio Free Europe notes: Turkey, located upstream of the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, began the Southeast Anatolia (GAP) Project in 1990, which will give it extensive control over the flow of Euphrates water and is expected to double Turkey’s irrigated farmland. The project is expected to be completed by 2010. In an article, “The New Water Politics Of The Middle East” (”Strategic Review,” Summer 1999), the authors explain that: “Despite the signing of a protocol ensuring Syrian access to Euphrates water in 1987, Turkish development efforts have increasingly threatened to marginalize and even eliminate Syrian access to water.”

“In the future,” the article continues, “Turkish-Syrian disputes over water could escalate into regional conflict…. Once fully operational, the GAP Project may reduce Euphrates water to Syria by 40 percent and Iraq by up to 80 percent. Such activity, critical for Syria, will also be significant enough to substantially affect Iraq.”

Then, of course, you’ve got climate variability and global warming and population and agriculture growth playing merry hob with rainfall and aquifer levels.

Seeing as around 2 million people die every year from not having access to clean drinking water (90% of them under 5 years old), this gets to be an issue over which nations can be expected to go to war.

All of which promise to ensure that we will continue to live in interesting times.

On the brighter side you have low-key, low-tech innovations like this one:

PlayPumps: take that boundless energy of kids at play and get clean drinking water for the village out of it! The initial cost of setup is covered by donations. The ongoing maintenance cost comes from renting billboards around the water tank (OK that’s tacky, so think up a better way!).

Geoffrey Miller has an unusual take on what pushed the human brain to expand to its present complexity. Sex. Seriously. And in this worldview conspicuous consumption and public charity are basically the same: showy plumage to attract a mate.

Just as the Birds of Paradise use up their physical resources in creating showy plumage to lure a mate, Miller proposes that the human brain expanded for the same purpose.

The theory is that humans, because the male takes part in child rearing (or at least the female would like him to), the female wants to gauge how much of a provider he can be. The male, because he anticipates a long association with the female, wants to gauge how helpful to others the woman will be (and by implication - supportive of him).

Theory is all well and good - but does it pan out in the real world: that’s what you call the Scientific Method (come up with a good theory, see what the theory predicts will happen, test to see if the predictions pan out).

The studies are in: when male test subjects were primed for romance they wanted to display wealth - cars, clothes, bling… and when female subjects were primed for romance they wanted to display self-sacrifice - work at public charities, volunteer at public events, etc. The control group (not primed for romance) was pretty bland and cautious.

So: Darwin (who proposed sexual selection) meets time-honored wisdom that in a long term relationship women want money, and men want to be served. Gosh. I wonder how much money they blew on that set of studies???

But seriously folks, it’s nice to test theory against reality.

And then of course there are always physical courtship rituals, well suited for a one night stand, but might also be helpful in picking that long-term mate.

They had a little problem recently in Basel Switzerland… they had a manmade earthquake (or two). A geothermal well being tested for use in commercial power generation injected water into a fault under the village and things got a little shook up.

But if you have the wide-open spaces of - say - Australia then you’ve got plenty of room for geothermal. In fact Australian licenses have skyrocketed:









Petratherm is one of the bigger players down under.

Geothermal is clean power, taps a ridiculously small amount of the Earth’s internal heat (I bet the Sun will go nova before geothermal could have any effect on the biosphere), and has been in use in the United States since “The Geysers” project fired up in 1921 in the hills near San Francisco. The “big moat” around getting geothermal up and going is the initial cost of drilling the wells.

Here in Oregon, the Newberry Crater pilot project is scheduled to come online in 2009/2010. Read all about it. Not bad. Not bad at all!

Just a random update: SRI International and a spinoff are deploying a wave energy generation test off the Florida coast - in this test, the mechanical energy of the waves is turned into electricity via the stretching and compressing of artificial muscles. See the SRI press release - - - or check out the Artificial Muscle web site - they have a number of curious applications for the stuff!

Anyway - wave energy seems like a good idea to me… energy without adding to greenhouse gasses - here’s the CO2 chart from the observatory at Mauna Loa: