Material, Energy & Information

Yesterday’s New York Times article, “One Moos and One Hums…”,
describes a recently proposed plan to power data farms with biogas produced from the manure from dairy farms. Clever, but flawed. This proposal is combining the worst practices of the current “green” movement with the worst practices of modern industry.

In order to meet power quotas, farmers will need to confine their cattle to the “barn” to ensure the collection of deposits of fresh fuel. This will create a double-commodification of the animals in which their livelihoods will be even more tightly controlled in order to maximize profitability. The evils of industrial agriculture have been discussed at length elsewhere. Here’s a list of concerns surrounding factory farming for those of you not in the know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming#Key_issues

Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Capitalizing on biogas is brilliant. Our proposal: decentralized, small scale, organic/free range/grass fed data/dairy farms. In this model, the power generated is determined by the manure produced. The data center in no way interferes with the day-to-day affairs of healthy livestock. Perhaps this wouldn’t produce much energy. But imagine if every dairy farm in the United States was powering a server.

The recent NPR story,The Aging Brain Is Less Quick, But More Shrewd, discusses the ways in which the human brain changes over a life time and how to embrace this change. The news is good for the generation of young people growing up with our current technologies, who are often accused of having a lack of focus due to digital distractions and multi-tasking. I propose a different perspective: the use of digital technology is a more accurate reflection of the manner in which the young mind operates and learns. As this becomes a part of our everyday routine, we will be better equipped for the day our brains slow and focus.

Or, for another perspective: the study measured middle-aged individuals who grew up without digital technology and were most likely educated in the traditional, structured pedagogical model. Perhaps the manner in which the young mind “learned how to learn” affected the manner in which it would develop later in life. If so, then the young mind of today will develop into something much different.

According to this article in Treehugger.com electro-magnetic waves, or EMF, are responsible for the growth patterns of certain maple trees.

Might this effect be slowly transforming humans as well?

Will a lifetime of wearing a Bluetooth headset cause the rest of one’s head to grow away from the device?

Will several generations of microwave ovens, cell phone signals, WiFi, ubiquitous computing, and a plethora of on-person electronic devices contribute to a genetic drift in our species?

Only time will tell.

The economic crisis is doing cities everywhere a huge favor: limiting funding for city planning. Rather than imposing a structure “from above” on actors, (as is the case in centralized planning), actors in all of their urban, suburban, exurban, and rural forms are building the built environment in the manner it is always constructed regardless of planning, “from the ground up”. This is not to say that government agencies shouldn’t participate in the processes constitutive of urban life. Rather, their interventions need to establish the means by which various forces may negotiate the development of space according to the terms established by said forces.

The city of the future will be built one brick at a time.

More… Don’t Plan On It

Slow Consumption: Heirloom Design

Technology for the Poor

The Wired post, No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You, details a recent study into whether or not individuals accurately portray themselves on social networking sites.

The key flaw in this study is this:

Back’s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects — who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Both descriptions, the actual and the idealized are derived from the same source. Both are variations on a theme. One may counter that a better study would incorporate the connections of the subjects. Yet, it may not even be possible to accurately gauge an individuals personality by interviewing his/her friends. The network that constitutes a subject may be too vast, but most important, and most complicating, is the fact that this network is perpetually changing.

Following Jaron Lanier’s recent critiques of the social networking behemoth, Facebook’s project is now complete, having provided the categorization, quantification, and homogenization of personality traits necessary for an academic study. It began in the ivory tower and now makes its return.

Our proposal: a social networking site in which your friends determine the content of your profile and in which you determine the content of your friends’ profiles.

We are officially announcing We Eat Good.
Please visit our site at http://www.weeatgood.org where you’ll find seasonally inspired recipes, information on vegetables, and gardening tips.
This is our first venture. We’re beginning with the fundamentals: soil & food.
We’re exploring a means to address the problems of hunger, industrial agriculture, and unemployment as well as a reconfiguration of the urban environment. We’ll document the results of our efforts and research here.

Here is our description of the project as explained on our fliers and website:

We like to eat good. We want everyone in the world to eat good, too. Our long-term goal is to establish a sustainable urban agricultural infrastructure in the city of Los Angeles.
Our short term goal is to put a garden in your yard.

We install and maintain organic vegetable gardens. Your garden will invariably produce more food than you and your family can eat. If you wish, we will deliver the excess produce to food banks and shelters in Los Angeles, as a charitable donation on your behalf.

Our garden installation includes:
* soil test
* box construction
* tilling and digging
* application of soil amendments and compost
* drip irrigation installation
* compost bin installation
* planting of seasonal crops of your choice!

Our weekly maintenance includes:
* weeding
*harvesting
*composting
* seeding/transplanting
* maintenance of beds and irrigation systems

We do our best to minimize our carbon footprint. We will only use fossil fuels to deliver supplies. All labor is done by hand, all site visits are done by bicycle.

Please visit our website, weeatgood.org, for more information and for gardening tips, recipes, and vegetable highlights.

Feed yourself, feed the world.

The flier above was created using Inkscape.

This is our first video made using ffmpeg from the command line. An homage to Muybridge.

Stopmotion is a free application for creating stop-motion animation movies. It’s very easy to use and has an intuitive interface. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with exporting your video once you’ve pieced it together in the GUI.

There’s another way and it’s very easy.

If you’ve created a Stopmotion project, saved it, and tried to export it to no avail, navigate to the save directory and locate the project file, a tar folder ending with the extension .sto. Something like [your_project].sto. Open this and the next folder [your_project]. Here you’ll find an ‘images’ folder, ’sound’ folder, and .dat file. In the ‘images’ folder, you will see that Stopmotion will have given each of your files a name such as 000001.jpg and so on. Copy the ‘images’ folder to another location. From the command line, navigate to this new location. Then run the following command:

ffmpeg -r 27 -b 1800 -i %06d.jpeg -s 640x480 test.mp4

Where:
* -r controls frame rate; (here 27)
* -i is the input file name; here I’m saying “take all jpgs whose name is 6 digits, in sequence”
* -b is the bitrate. 1800 is pretty low quality but results in a manageable file
* -s is necessary if your photos are landscape; ffmpeg assumes they’re portrait by default

Bingo! This will create a video ‘test.mp4′ in your current directory.

This is assuming that all of your images are the same size (in the example above, 640×480). If not, you will need to resize them. You can batch resize all of the images in a directory using mogrify. This tool is included in the ImageMagick library, so you’ll have to install that.

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then navigate to the directory of files you want to resize and enter:

mogrify -resize 640 *.jpg

Of for both dimensions:

mogrify -resize 640×480! *.jpg

You can also eschew use of the Stopmotion app entirely and animate your files with only KRename and the command line.

Install KRename using apt-get or the Software Center. It will install in your accessories. Throw all of your images into a folder. Open KRename and Add your images. Select the Destination tab and ensure the “Rename input files” radio button is selected. Check the “Overwrite existing files” box if you wish to do so. Under the Filename tab, select the Advanced tab. In the Template field erase the “$” and enter “###” or “####”. In the next field, also delete the “$” and enter an extension, such as “jpg”. The click Finish.

Run the ffmpeg code above and voila!

Source links:
http://flavor8.com/index.php/2008/10/11/how-to-stop-motion-in-ubuntu/
http://www.smokinglinux.com/tutorials/howto-batch-image-resize-on-linux
http://www.smokinglinux.com/tutorials/howto-batch-image-resize-on-linux

Interview with a scammer
You know those annoying e-mails from the desperate Nigerian dude who claims all he needs is a little help, in the form of a few thousand bucks and maybe a photo ID, to get his massive inheritance out of the country and share it with you? Not everyone deletes those.