Absolutely, it is easy for you to be more charismatic, though you will never be as appealing as I am. According to Professor Richard Wiseman (I’m not sure what he’s a professor of, but he’s British and his last name … Continue reading →
|
Algae can be used for all sorts of wonderful things from cleaning up oil to producing energy. Architects in Hamburg have built a building that uses algae to power the complex and it opens this week. The building is meant to be a demonstration of cutting-edge sustainable architecture. “Using bio-chemical processes in the façade of a building to create shade and energy is a really innovative concept.” says Arup’s research lead for Europe, Jan Wurm. “It might well become a sustainable solution for energy production in urban areas, so it is great to see it being tested in a (Read more…) scenario.” Arup led the design project, which also included work by Splitterwerks Architects from Austria and Germany’s SSC Strategic Scientific Consult. It was funded by the German government’s “Zukunft Bau” (“Future Construction”) subsidy, which looks to support innovation in the construction industry when it comes to renewable and . . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Algae-Powered Building Opens This Week Former US Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s recent resignation — his farewell letter is here — is no doubt celebrated in the fuel cell quarters as passionately (or more so) than it is mourned in the rest of cleantech. Early in his term, Chu infamously argued (infamously, at least, to fuel cell enthusiasts) that fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV’s) needed four miracles for commercial success, namely: most hydrogen comes from natural gas (so why not just use that as a fuel?) improvements in hydrogen storage were needed fuel cells needed to improve there was no distribution system in . . . → Read More: Eclectic Lip: Steven Chu’s “Time to Fix the Wiring” at four years 
 Algae, America, ARPA-E, australia, automotive fuel cell, cellulosic biomass, energy, environment, FCEV, fracking, fuel cell, fuel cell miracles, geothermal, Germany, global warming, hydrogen, intermittent, mckinsey, photovoltaics, politics, Renewables, renewables cost competitive cleantech clean energy, solar, solar cost, solar cost competitive, solar photovoltaics, solar PV, steven chu, technology, Technology Review, The Economy, time to fix the wiring, transistor, what matters, Wind, Wind energy With Obama talking the talk on climate action in his State of the Union address yesterday, now seems a good time to start compiling a planned set of blog entries about renewable energy. Many many others have done so online already (as evidenced by the fact I’m linking to them!) but I’d like to communicate my cautiously nascent optimism in my own words. I’m growingly confident that I’ll live to see renewables dominate global electricity production, as dominantly as oil dominates global transport today, with immense and commensurate environmental benefits. That moment won’t come a moment too soon, either, . . . → Read More: Eclectic Lip: Our Renewable Future part 1: clearing “myth”conceptions
Clean tech, cleantech, coal, electricity, energy, energy storage, environment, Germany, grid parity, grid storage, intermittency, intermittent, john cook, natural gas, our renewable future, peaker plant, peaking plant, photovoltaics, PV, renewable energy, renewable energy future, Renewables, skeptical science, solar, solar PV, technology, Wind energy, wind power This and that for your Thursday reading. - John Studzinski describes how a sense of social responsibility and a country-wide commitment to making jobs available have placed Germany in a better economic position than its European neighbours: Let me highlight some of the features unique to the Mittelstand model that I believe everyone should learn from – and imitate if they can. The first is what we might call the Mittelstand ethos – that business is a constructive enterprise that aims to be socially useful. Making a profit is not an end in itself: job creation, client satisfaction and product . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links Here is a remarkable photography project using garbage dumpsters as pinhole cameras. The city of Hamburg has allowed it’s trash collectors to drill small holes into these portable bins that are loaded with large sheets of light sensitive paper. And the results are often quite stunning! From their Flickr page - Hamburg´s garbagemen portrait their city in the Trashcam Project – with their garbage containers. Standard 1.100 litre containers are transformed to giant pinhole cameras. With these cameras the binmen take pictures of their favourite places to show the beauty and the changes of the city they keep clean . . . → Read More: Walking Turcot Yards: The Trashcam Project by Brian Lee Crowley | Troy Media | Macdonald Laurier Institute My mother could have told you why giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union would produce such a predictable and deserved outpouring of derision. An aspiring writer, she took a creative writing course. One of the assignments was to describe a single [...] I was surprised to discover recently that governments in Europe collect taxes for churches and other religions. In Germany, for example, taxpayers pay between 8 and 9 per cent of their income tax to the religious community to which they belong. Religions may choose to collect the tax themselves, in which case they may demand that the government reveal the tax data of their members so they can FB.Event.subscribe(‘edge.create’, function(response) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','SocialSharing','Facebook - like button',unescape(String(response).replace(/\+/g, " "))]); }); Share this: Every once in a while, the subject of circumcising male newborns and boys rears its ugly head – no pun intended – and the discussion rarely takes long to veer into ethnocentrism, if not outright intolerance. With the best of intentions, and without realizing it, many people who object to the practice end [...] In May, Germany was able to supply 50% of their national energy consumption using renewable power sources. That was remarkable in itself given the size of Germany in both industrial and population size. Now, it’s been announced that for the first half 2012 Germany produced 67.9 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy which makes up a quarter of all energy production this far into the year. Biomass, or material acquired from living organisms, accounted for 5.7 percent and solar technology for 5.3 percent. Solar energy saw the biggest increase, up 47 percent from the previous year. Germany . . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Germany’s Sustainable Energy Grid Keeps Improving With a ruling that circumcising boys constitutes grievous bodily harm, a German court has effectively outlawed the practice in that country. The case was brought against a doctor in Cologne who circumcised a four-year-old Muslim boy on his parents’ wishes. When, a few days after the operation, the boy was bleeding heavily and taken to a hospital, the doctor was charged. “The body of the child is A German Salafist Muslim Group (Salafists generally considered an extremist variant of Islam) is causing controversy with a plan to distribute some 25 million German language Korans. That something specific could even be done about this is not clear given the strength of German freedom of expression laws, but this has not stopped their politicians and media from complaining vociferously. All such issues induce one thought from me: bring it on. The battle for ideas in society ought not to be fought by stifling or complaining about those who offer ideas we disagree with or find repugnant. It is best . . . → Read More: Progressive Proselytizing: Uncompromising Freedom of Speech La Belle Epoque(1984 Wellington, metro Charlevoix)Saturday, June 30, 1PM traduction anglais-français disponible After the surge of protest that was the sixties, all around the world radicals were drawn to new forms of action and experiments in an attempt to cope with the movement’s ebb. In West Germany, the armed struggle was one important pole in this post-sixties revolt. Although only ever involving relatively small numbers of people, the armed groups constituted a reference point for tens of thousands of supporters, and repeatedly challenged State power, at times cracking through the State’s hegemony. The 2nd of June Movement was . . . → Read More: Sketchy Thoughts: Armed Confrontation in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s “The problems of Canada are not problems caused by Canada, they are the effects of the foreigner causes, the communists and the Jews.” The crowd of men encircling the speaker at the Montreal public house were fixated with the unquestionable certainty the wirey Adrien Arcand embodied. “It is not from our own hands that our country is being torn asunder, but it is the immigrants, it is the immigrants that are taking our jobs, bankrupting our economy, and diluting the Canadian culture.” Michael Horner sat at a table, with his third empty glass of beer, surrounded by three . . . → Read More: The Scott Ross: Two Men Who Changed The World, And Two Men Who Didn’t Well this seems to have gone well, what with the takeaway platitudes of agreement between Hollande and Harper about the need for growth and for there to be stability in order to have growth. But wait! “After Harper meets socialist president, Tories take ‘sumptuous’ Europe to task.” Well, I’m sure the French ambassador to Canada wouldn’t have taken offence to the good cop-bad cop two step thing the Conservatives had going on yesterday. Do these ambassador types ever notice such things anyway? Then relay such comments back to the mother ship? Let’s ask the German one. Ouf. Onwards with On KPFA’s Letters and Politics show featured an interview with Gabriel Kuhn, on the subject of the West German Autonomen, and the book Fire and Flames (which Kuhn translated into english). i have mirrored the interview here; it is well worth listening to. i found his comments on the evolution of the Black Bloc to be of particular interest, and so i have transcribed the relative passages here: GK: The history of militant resistance is a long one; i think the particular form that the Black Bloc took on in Germany during the 1980s was determined by the . . . → Read More: Sketchy Thoughts: Fire and Flames, Black Blocs, and Militant Resistance Germany continues to show the rest of the industrialized world how to be economical successful thanks to sound energy policy. This past week the country achieved a symbolic victory in their campaign to be a more efficient country and had 50% of the energy consumed come from renewable energy sources. Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources. Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four “Earlier, many of us saw themselves as anarchists, Spontis, or communists, while some had vague, individual ideas about a liberated life. Then we all became Autonome.” Monday, May 28 at 7PMLa Belle Epoque1984 Wellington Black blocs, squats, riots and urban guerillas – but also base groups in the factories, “free spaces”, antinuclear occupations, and alternative lifestylism – all of these formed the context, the terrain, and the world of Germany’s Autonomous movement during its high point in the 1980s. Today best known for the militant street fighting tactics they exemplified, the Autonomen opposed the capitalist State while purposefully not putting forward any . . . → Read More: Sketchy Thoughts: May 28 in Montreal: Fire and Flames Book Launch From Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist movement, recently published by PM Press: In 1981, some autonomous activists who attended a meeting in Padua, Italy, formulated eight theses that tried to capture the most common characteristics of the diverse crowd of activists that had begun to call themselves “Autonome.” The theses were never formalized, and different revised and updated versions have appeared – for example, in radikal no. 97 extra (August 1981) and in the 1995 reader Der Stand der Bewegung – but to this day the straightforward convictions and sentiments listed in the original . . . → Read More: Sketchy Thoughts: From The Memory Vault: Autonomous Theses 1981 Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl warns today’s crop of European leaders not to forget the lessons of Europe’s bloody past. “The current discussion in Europe and the crisis in Greece mustn’t lead us to lose sight of or even question or retreat from the goal of a united Europe,” Kohl wrote in a guest commentary published in Germany’s best-selling daily, Bild, on Tuesday. Kohl repeated his mantra that the euro was about nothing less than preventing war. That view, he argued, still applied despite the decades of peace Europe has enjoyed. “The evil spirits of the past . . . → Read More: The Disaffected Lib: Europe Remains "A Question of War and Peace" German Solar Park. For most of the past winter, Germany’s 1.1 million solar power systems that crisscross the country have sat relatively idle. Overcast skies and a relative lack of sunshine has meant the powerful solar-generating system has produced little energy, forcing Germany to import electricity from nuclear power plants in neighbouring France and the Czech Republic. Public discontent at the high cost of electricity and increasingly shaky support from the coalition government headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel are threatening to undermine German advances in solar-power generation. Merkel has long touted the sector’s “opportunities for exports, development, technology and . . . → Read More: the reeves report: Saving Solar Power in Germany Consumer-ready renewable energy can destabilize the traditional energy utility structure in a similar way to how the internet destabilized a lot of other old school industries. This is a good thing because it makes the production of resources (be it knowledge or energy or physical goods) more democratic and resilient to externalities. Over in Germany the shift from corporations to people has begun in their energy sector. Over 50% of renewable energy production is coming from farmers and regular citizens and not large corporations! The thing that got me though, other than the huge lead in solar PV installations Germany . . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Over 50% of Germany’s Renewable Energy Production Owned by People Well then how ’bout this? Investors paying a premium to lend money to Germany. That’s right, negative interest. The auction of six-month German government bills on Monday produced a negative interest rate. Even the Federal Finance Agency, which manages Germany’s debt, was astonished. “That has never happened before,” said a spokesman. The average rate amounted to minus 0.01 percent. The auction generated €3.9 billion ($4.9 billion). Demand for the securities was so high that the sale was 1.8 times oversubscribed. In December, Germany had managed to place paper at a tiny interest rate of . . . → Read More: The Disaffected Lib: Still Not Sure The World Has Gone Mad? Gay-themed films are pretty commonplace nowadays. Nearly every major city (metropolis, if you will) has a GLBT film festival, and pictures that would previously have been restricted to exactly these sort of venues have slowly found their way into mainstream cinemas. Some, like Brokeback Mountain and Milk, are Oscar-winning successes. This certainly wasn’t always the case, though. Tackling such contentious topics was considered hopeless not too long ago, both financially and professionally. So, given that storytelling of this nature has only recently gained widespread acceptance, how long do you suppose gay cinema has been around? Go on, guess. . . . → Read More: Slap Upside The Head: Interesting Stuff In Gay History: Cinema Two final thoughts today on the Greek crisis: 1) Under immense political pressure from within his own party, the opposition, and the EU – i.e., Germany – Papandreou was forced to cancel the referendum. But the basic idea was a good one: he knew Germany… . . . → Read More: Politics and Entertainment: Cancelling the Greek Referendum and Angela Merkel’s Steely Focus |
||
|
Copyright © 2013 Progressive Bloggers // Blogues progressistes - All Rights Reserved |
||