For a change of pace from projects, here are some interesting I-did-it-myself fixes. To add to this mix is a video profile (follow the link in the caption) of Vince Hannemann, the Junk King. The Wall Street Journal reported on his Cathedral of Junk in "A Sacred Shrine to Austin's Junk."
I don't fully believe that there are evil people, just ignorant ones who are mostly unaware of the consequences of their actions--both for themselves and others. Often evil is a label that observers (and victims) place on people and things that are counter what is defined as good, sometimes at the moment. This label could be used to define a gossip who spreads a rumor about you or a dictator who kills indiscriminately.
Many philosophers and religions have discussed evil and attempted to define it. I'm partial to the Bahá'í Faith observation:
"Nevertheless a doubt occurs to the mind—that is, scorpions and serpents are poisonous. Are they good or evil, for they are existing beings? Yes, a scorpion is evil in relation to man; a serpent is evil in relation to man; but in relation to themselves they are not evil, for their poison is their weapon, and by their sting they defend themselves. (`Abdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the religion, in Some Answered Questions)"
Thus, evil is more of an intellectual concept than a true reality. Since God is good, and upon creating creation he confirmed it by saying it is Good (Genesis 1:31) evil cannot have a true reality.
My apologies to those of you who are atheists. For you there are a variety of razors, or eponymous laws. As an example--
Hanlon's razor – A corollary of Finagle's law, and a play on Occam's razor, normally taking the form, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." As with Finagle, possibly not strictly eponymous. Alternatively, "Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence."
However, there are dragons, ones that rise up in your face when you least expect it.
To me this quote from the Worldcrunch article "At U.S.-Mexico Border, Children's Lives On The Line" tells a lot about how Mexican and Central American migrants view America and the current state of immigration.
Rina Guaimaca doesn't have time to wait for political reform. "In Honduras, the gangs were extorting us. We didn’t earn much in the first place, but we had to give half of that to them. I have a 7-year-old son, Fernando, and I didn’t want him to grow up like that. So, I decided to escape and join my mother who works in Oregon."
This article is part of a series called "Migrant Lives." To know more about the publication Worldcrunch, take a look at this review at tinypass.
You may well ask why a newly-released, discrete video card is needed for cryptomining. In December, 2013, the CoinDesk reported:
Bitcoin mining on a standard GPU is a thing of the past. Put simply: it’s no longer economically viable, given the power consumption of discrete graphics cards and their relatively high price.
Note that hashrate is directly related to profit. The difficulty reported in the graph above is due to investors/miners competing for coins. As you know, a fundamental tenet of economics is the greater the demand, the higher the price. The CoinDesk explains "How Bitcoin Mining Works." CoinWarz has a nice online mining and profit calculator.
Since I'm working on learning animation, I go looking for good information on techniques, styles, and effects from time to time. There is so much good work to see, especially on YouTube. One thing I learned yesterday is to do the animated parts in 2D and the background in 3D. Good to know.
Here Jazza of Draw with Jazza shows how he develops a character.
Below is a trailer for the CGI 2D/3D animation titled Colombiana; it's by Planet Jump Productions and published on YouTube by The CG Bros. You may recall the movie Colombiana was a 2011 French-American action film co-written and produced by Luc Besson and directed by Olivier Megaton.
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This last sample--Telescope--is a film with CGI elements. It's included because it is arresting and just plain beautiful.
While, as Steve Breen asserts in the cartoon below, many of us still value life, liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, some in America don't value these rights so much. This is especially true when the self-evident rights of others are concerned. Here are some dos and don'ts for today's America.
Environmentally compatible organic solar cells (in development), Physics.org
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Home installation of solar panels is growing fast:
A new solar-power system is now installed on an American roof every three or four minutes, often through leasing deals that require no money down and lock in lower electric bills for years. Wall Street behemoths like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are pouring cash into rooftop solar, as are giant corporations like Walmart and Google, while a range of new financing mechanisms are making solar investments even more attractive. The installer SolarCity has begun to bundle customer leases into solar-backed securities, which could be as transformative (though hopefully not as dangerous) as mortgage-backed securities. And while the panels are now amazingly cheap–down from more than $75 per watt 40 years ago to less than 75¢ per watt today–the solar industry is just starting to drive dramatic reductions in “soft costs” like permitting, marketing and installation. (The Green Revolution Is Here, Michael Grunwald, Time Magazine)
But, unless you want to use environmentally unfriendly batteries that must be replaced and require maintenance, such as the ones sold by Wholesale Solar, you have to connect to the grid. If you decide to build or purchase a battery bank, be aware that there is a risk of explosion and the bank must be scaled to your system.
The push is on to build a better battery and a promising concept is a water-based organic one being developed by a team of scientists at the University of Southern California (USC).
What with recent graduates and young families in need of financial help moving back in with parents, and many sharing apartments to help with expenses, the concept of communal is becoming attractive again. In the U.S. communes were big in the '60s and '70s, but fell out of favor. The article on communes at Wikipedia notes:
Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times wrote that, contrary to popular misconceptions, "most communes of the '90s are not free-love refuges for flower children, but well-ordered, financially solvent cooperatives where pragmatics, not psychedelics, rule the day." There are many contemporary intentional communities all over the world, a list of which can be found at the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC).
Huffington Post has a section on Communal Living. The video below was found there.
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BBC's article, "Living the communal life," gives some interesting insights into why people decide to share their living space.
The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
The comments are well worth reading, too.
Minimal or simple living isn't new. Nor is it necessarily asceticism. But it is refusing to let your possessions and desire for new possessions to take control. In a world where we are constantly barraged by advertising and calls to action, it's becoming more and more important to step back and reclaim the freedom to just be and to see what we want to become or do.
But in a world increasingly out-of-balance, economically and politically, the instances of a person or group being wounded by the 'system,' whichever system it is, mount in number. A recent attempt to speak out in the form of Occupy was summarily dismissed by local authorities, sometimes by unnecessary measures.
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Defining civil disobedience becomes a philosophical exercise. Quoting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The term ‘civil disobedience’ was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1848 essay to describe his refusal to pay the state poll tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. In his essay, Thoreau observes that only a very few people – heroes, martyrs, patriots, reformers in the best sense – serve their society with their consciences, and so necessarily resist society for the most part, and are commonly treated by it as enemies. Thoreau, for his part, spent time in jail for his protest. Many after him have proudly identified their protests as acts of civil disobedience and have been treated by their societies – sometimes temporarily, sometimes indefinitely – as its enemies.
One thing is clear: open protests simply cause a war-like reaction from those in power. Members of the 99% who recognize the threats inherent in the growing economic gap in so-called first world countries, realize that your strength is in numbers and the 1% cannot survive without your economic support.
Now this DIY project is worthy of an X Prize competition.
You may think such a project is outside possible for regular folks; but in June, 2013, the Russian magazine RIA Novosti reported that "Fifteen high school students in the world have built nuclear fusion reactors." The Russian article was describing Conrad Farnsworth's build (video below). Other teen builders are Jamie Edwards and Taylor Wilson.
The news this week may appear to be about Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, losing the Virginia primary to a Tea Party candidate, but it's really about what voters will tolerate. In the Washington Post's Opinion Section E.J. Dionne says:
We’ll never know whether Cantor would have done better if he had held steady on the subject [of immigration reform]. What we do know is that sending out campaign literature bragging about a news story that declared him “the No. 1 guy standing between the American people and immigration reform” did nothing to placate or persuade those who were out to defeat him.
Dionne's article is an excellent look at Republicans, the Tea Party, and the effectiveness of Republican attack ads, presumably backed by Big Money Republicans.
I don't know about you, but to me the Tea Party has become scary. They seemed innocent enough when they started out and their goals looked good, then they shut down the U.S. government and gloated about it.
Mankind has been building with earthen materials for ages. Think adobe, brick, turf, and rock. Earth houses take a number of forms--above ground, below ground, embedded in an embankment, and so on. Building materials range from bagged dirt to old tires, concrete to fiberglass composites.
Unconventional earth homes in Switzerland, inthralld
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If you prefer to build above ground, here's information about a Superadobe earth home. Cal-Earth(California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture) describes the building process in detail. It is reported to be low-cost. Below is the interior of a home built with Superadobe.
Terminology for underground homes includes earth-sheltered, earth-bermed, earth-covered, earth-bunded, and subterranean. Prefabricated components for an earth-sheltered house are available, such as the ones manufactured by Colfibrex.
Dragonfly Hill is a blog that chronicles building an earth-sheltered home. Below Michael G. Smith describes his craft--building above ground with earth and straw.
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Since there are no step-by-step project instructions (that I can find) available for underground homes, just notes on what you should keep in mind, I urge you to look at my earth homes playlist.
Eugene Goostman is an artificial intelligence chatterbot. First developed by a group of three programmers; the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukranian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen in Saint Petersburg in 2001, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year old Ukranian boy in an effort to make his personality and knowledge level believable to users.
Chatbot Eugene Goostman supposedly passed the legendary Turing Test on Sunday, tricking 33% of a panel of judges into believing he was a real boy during the course of a five-minute chat conversation.
The milestone conveniently occurred 60 years to the day after Alan Turing passed away; Turing bet that by the year 2000, computers would be intelligent enough to trick humans into thinking they were real 30% of the time.
You can talk with Eugene yourself by surfing to his homepage at Princeton ai (Artificial Intelligence).
Searching on 'artificial virtual assistant', you'll find a number of companies that offer their services. IKEA features one, Ask Anna, on its Customer Service Contact Center page.
