You're Gonna Get Nailed.

Great TV campaign by the State of Tennessee.

V-Bat Vertical Take Off and Landing Aircraft

I Feel Better About Our Computers

I thought we were not the norm with our three desktops and three laptops.  I guess that is not so unusual after all according to this very interesting article at ZDNet:

How many PCs are enough? 5? 10? | Tech News on ZDNet

Despite a PC market in freefall, it seems silicon.com readers are still packing a fair few pieces of hardware.

Asked how many PCs - including laptops, desktops and netbooks - they own, 45 per cent of ZDNet sister site silicon.com readers who responded admitted to having between three and five.

An even more hardware-heavy 32 per cent claimed to have between five and 10 computers tucked away while another six per cent 'fessed up to having more than 10 machines. And presumably very large houses and/or understanding partners.

At the low end, 11 per cent owned up to having a pair of PCs, five per cent said they own just one and a hardware-shunning one per cent said they have no PCs at all (which presumably means they responded to the poll either in the office or on a friend's hardware.)

Monk Parakeets

Last week my granddaughters and I bought two new birdfeeders. One is a hanging feeder and the other a platform feeder. We told the girls that we were hoping the hanging tubular one would attract some parrots. Amazingly, parrots have visited the feeder. Well, to be technically correct parakeets have visited. We have had one Black Hooded Parakeet and three Monk Parakeets. I grabbed my video camera and shooting through the kitchen window and the patio screens got this short video.

See http://invasions.bio.utk.edu/invaders/monk.html for more info on the Monk Parakeet as an invader.

Gambling the Future? Excerpts from Dave Cohen's article on ASPO-USA

Is Business-As-Usual Likely In A Peak Oil Scenario? :: ASPO-USA: Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas

2010-2020 — The Decisive Decade

If the peak oil hypothesis is correct, world oil production will likely be in decline well before 2020. During this same period, the United States may (or may not) implement a cap & trade system to rein in CO2 emissions. The proposed legislation aims to cut emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Emissions declined in 2008 following on the oil shock of 2007. The financial meltdown in 2008:Q3 guarantees a similar emissions decline in 2009.

As I described in The Reign of Error, Europe already has a cap & trade system in place. Europe’s carbon market, created under the Kyoto Protocol, has not actually resulted in reduced emissions in the Eurozone. This sleight-of-hand is due to allowable offsets whereby a putative reduction outside of Europe (e.g. in Asia, or Africa) is counted as a reduction within Europe. At best, Europe has reduced the carbon intensity of any economic growth that took place since the formation of the carbon market. The proposed cap & trade system in the United States contains the same loophole.

Assuming that peak oil occurs early in the next decade, and the currently envisioned cap & trade system, which goes into effect in 2012, is actually implemented, we can expect an overall decline in carbon emissions in the United States during the period 2010-2020. If growing emissions are a necessary condition for economic growth, as I have argued here and in The Radical Hypothesis, it follows that the American economy will shrink, not grow, in the coming decade.

If world oil production peaks, I predict most people will forget about terrifying business-as-usual climate scenarios. Instead, they will get down to the hard business of replacing oil by any means possible. If the economy is shrinking, any means necessary will be used to jump start growth. I am not so much interested in what should happen. I am interested in what will happen.

Thus, the years 2010-2020 will likely be the decisive decade of the 21st century. We should know by 2020 whether economies can grow as emissions decline. The result will define our response to anthropogenic climate change in all the decades to follow. We will know whether the consensus view espoused by Joe Romm, John Holdren and many others, as I have believed all along, is merely a politically expedient, faith-based “green jobs” guess about how things will turn out. Should that guess be proved wrong, our political leaders will run the other way.


Contact the author at dave.aspo@gmail.com

My friend Troy's Philipine Adventure

Welcome to Troys 2009 Uhaj Native Village Adventure


Rick and Cordella live next door to us and our best friends. They are an extraordinary family who live an intensive life outside their work life which in itself is intense. They travel to Honduras and work at a school for girls with their church. They are involved in a lot of other charitable organizations as well as their church. This summer, their son Troy, traveled to Banaue in the Philippines to study native woodcarving from a master wood carver there. He has documented his adventure with photos and a diary on this website. He will be coming home soon and we all are excited about hearing the details of his summer study adventure in Banaue. Barbara and I believe that this adventure and the experiences he is having are absolutely amazing. Troy has traveled half way around the planet on his own. Lived in a remote village in the Philippines and studied the art of woodcarving with only hand tools for a month. He has also hiked to remote sites and has lived in an area that has farmed the steep hillsides growing rice in terraced fields for centuries. We cannot wait to see him and hear of his adventures and we know he is anxious to return home but will miss the friends that he has made there.

Images of Mass Consumption

There is a strange beauty in these images of mass consumption but also conflicting feelings of horror.  The feelings are like those when you are driving and a bad accident has occurred and you have to drive right by it. You don't want to look but something compels you to.

The Images by Chris Jordan