God The Universe And Everything Else
Hosted by Magnús Magnússon, with Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke.
Slums Urban Living « Prospect Magazine
“Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living…
“It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.“
Article continues..”The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.”
Mississauga Canada Debt Free City
City of Mississauga with Mayor Hazel McCallion.
Boulder Ranked #1 By Gallup-Healthways Well-Being
Boulders setting, including a greenbelt of public lands around the city, may help explain its top ranking, Mayor Susan Osborne says. “We tend to have lots of opportunities for being outside,” she says. The jobless rate is 5.7%, below the nations 9.7%.
via Western cities fare best in well-being index – USATODAY.com.
Ice Energy :: Ice Bear: How it Works
The Ice Bear energy storage system works with a standard commercial air conditioning system. Requiring no modification to existing ductwork, each Ice Bear unit can be applied to 85% of air conditioners ranging from a 3-5 ton system to a 20-ton system, providing 30 ton hours of cooling.
The Ice Bear energy storage unit operates in two basic modes, Ice Cooling and Ice Charging, to store cooling energy at night, and to deliver that energy the following day.
Bloom Energy – Fuel Cells
KR Sridhar and Bloom Energy premiered on 60 minutes tonight. Bloom Energy is developing fuel cells and is currently funded by Venture Capital.
The Bloom energy box is a fuel cell capable of producing electricity for homes, offices etc… The units are “fuel agnostic,” Sridhar said, meaning they can be powered by a variety of inputs, including biomass and natural gas. Looks very promising. They are field testing with Google, Ebay and other companies. According to the interview on 60 minutes. The fact they they are already field testing and resolving real world issues is encouraging that this will be a real world option soon.
Here is an audio interview via freshDialogues
Currently their sites has a countdown clock set for 2 days and 14 hours from now. http://www.bloomenergy.com/ Looks like the stealth mode is officially over.
Click here to read more.. »
The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition. – By Deborah Blum – Slate Magazine
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
DaVinci Institute Bootcamp
Saturday morning at the DaVinci Institute’s boot camp on affiliate marketing. Good turn out.
Presentation by Jeannine Crooks.