A positive idea for us to use now to grow healthy local food in cities...

I was inspired tonight by a different perspective on producing our food: the
vertical farm!

http://www.verticalfarm.com/

Producing food in stacked greenhouses (or possibly better designs that allow
us to use more sunlight), in cities, to grow our food instead of ship if
from who knows where. Totally hydroponic, no dirt required, add a few
nutrients to water that circulates and is therefore conserved. Very low
technology, but the cost of doing this in cities is limited by the price of
real estate. There are practical solutions out there.

This Japanese man has invented a machine to convert plastic garbage back to the oil it was made from. Clean up the envirnoment and need less oil too - double win!

It used to be a six character password would take days to crack and the help of powerful expensive computers. Not any more. Amazon's cloud computing, useful for rapidly scalable graphics and database projects, can also be used by hackers to create a cheap super computer password hacker system that can crack a password in less than an hour for a cost of $2.10. So make your passwords longer and more complex (upper case and lower case letters, numbers, and special symbols such as !@#$%^&*()_+)

NY Times article on a energy bubbles discovery in our galaxy that are nearly as big as the galaxy itself. Wow this is a major shift in what we know about where we live! Maybe relates to 2012 stuff too as we align with the galactic core.
Michael

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/science/space/10galaxy.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=galaxy&st=cse

A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.

“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them.

 

The source of the bubbles is a mystery. One possibility is that they are fueled by a wave of star births and deaths at the center of the galaxy. Another option is a gigantic belch from the black hole known to reside, like Jabba the Hutt, at the center of the Milky Way. What it is apparently not is dark matter, the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together.

 

“Wow,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work.

 

¶ “And we think we know a lot about our own galaxy,” Dr. Spergel added, noting that the bubbles were almost as big as the galaxy and yet unsuspected until now.

 

¶ Jon Morse, head of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said, “This shows again that the universe is full of surprises.”

¶

One of the most surprised was Dr. Finkbeiner. A year ago he was part of a group led by Gregory Dobler of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., that said it had discerned the existence of a mysterious fog of high-energy particles buzzing around the center of the Milky Way. The particles manifested themselves as a haze of extra energy after all the known sources of gamma rays — the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation — had been subtracted from Fermi data that had recently been made public.

¶

At the time, Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues speculated that the haze was produced by dark matter. The center of the galaxy is home to all manner of wild and woolly high-energy phenomena, including a gigantic black hole and violently spinning pulsars, but cosmological theories also suggest that dark matter would be concentrated there. Collisions of dark matter particles, the theory goes, could produce showers of gamma rays.

¶

But in the follow-up analysis, the haze — besides being bigger than Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues had thought — turned out to have sharp boundaries, like, well, a bubble. Dark matter, according to the prevailing theory, should be more diffuse.

 

“Dark matter has been there billions of years,” Dr. Finkbeiner explained. “If something has been going on for billions of years, you wouldn’t expect a sharp edge.” He and the other scientists said this did not mean that dark matter was not there clogging the center of the galaxy, but that it would be harder to see.

Did you know that building a revolving house it is comparable in cost to building a conventional house? Built largely of glass and steel, and powered by an electric motor not much bigger than a washing machine motor, the 'Everingham Rotating House' is a brilliant testimonial to the ingenuity of its owner/builders. It also encapsulates many aspects of ecologically sound building principles, such as optimising natural light and heat, while rotating 360° to take advantage of sunshine and shade.More at http://www.everinghamrotatinghouse.com.au/

I came across foraging at Rainbow Gathering this summer - eating a wild food salad. Interesting article from the Gaian-Mind festival folks on foraging and other eco activities.

"For 99% of human history we've been foragers. Our nomadic ancestors gathered and hunted for food. Gardening, farming, and animal raising are recent developments in human history going back only about 10,000 out of 3 million years of our evolution as hominids.

The goal of The Gaian Mind is for our eco-arts and education collective to nurture a culture of ecological awareness and provide the means to connect urban youth and families with bioregional natural living systems.

-We hope to build and test replicable modules of alternative sustainable natural living systems that can be applied/adapted to any community throughout the world. Malcolm X advised that the only way for communities to experience liberation would be to create better working systems that make oppressive systems obsolete. We combine this axiom with the wisdom of indigenous cultures and the science of ecology which tell us that the answers to the world's problems are to be found in the ground beneath our feet. The path towards global peace, harmony, and liberation we believe starts by developing permanent local subsistence strategies that rely on the abundance of nature, not the scarcity of the industrial economy, for survival. Our purpose is to reunite people with each other and the land to restore resilient systems of human ecology.

-In this life-time we're committed to growing bioregionally sustainable communites that can survive with or without the global industrial economy.

Which is better for photo sharing online -Google Picasa or Yahoo Flickr? I am experimenting with Picasa at home and we have used Flickr at work for years. I like the Picasa photo editoring tool - fast and good features.

This review gives a detailed comparision of the two. And this one adds some thoughts too. You can even use the Picasa editor to upload to Flickr. The cost of storage differs too with free and unlimited options on both services.

I eat Marmite on toast sometimes (a British upbringing I guess). I always wondered how it got into those small jars - the answer it arrive by tanker from the marmite oil fields! :-)

Photo by Cross Duck

12/31 is a Blue Moon - the second full moon in one month. Pretty rare and also there is a lunar eclipse that day and it is last day of the year. Additionally Mercury is retrograde that day. So plenty of astrological excitement to go around.

Eve Ensler writes about grass roots womens rights actions in Pakistan. Bringing in the light, bravely these activists help improve society.

"As I leave Pakistan, I think of Fauzia, Abaaz and Samar. One reveals her destroyed face to stop the burning of others, one disguises her face to support her child and protect her security, one uploads an explosive video on Facebook to expose and stop a hideous practice. Each one of these strategies involved creativity, originality, bravery and very little money. I think the U.S. government and the military, the Pakistani government and army could all take heed from the vision and bravery and work of women like these. The change needs to come from the ground. Religious extremism is a virus. It feeds on poverty, malnutrition, humiliation, sexism and fear. As President Obama gets ready to formally announce his plans for a troop increase in Afghanistan, we must recognize that putting more US troops on the ground will only increase the violence, bombings and terror in the region. Our strongest methods of inoculation are to feed, help educate and honor the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan and to support the women, providing them with resources to do what they need to do, what they know how to do."

Some folks at Sandbox gathering asked about the relaxing music I play before dinner. I get it from Spirit Voyage. More info at:
http://www.spiritvoyage.com/sc/Kundalini-Yoga-Meditation-Sadhana/1.aspx

Another good source of meditation music, and chanting, etc is:

www.innersong.com

This weekend I noticed my eyes were so dry that my contacts hurt. This is very unusual for me. And also some old patterns repeating so that I could clear them. If you are getting similar stuff it just might be Venus being retrograde (started on 3/6 and I think goes on til early May). I got this from Dana's Kundalini class:

"This week I’ll be sharing a chanting meditation for the heart and third eye. To open them both is to gain insight into one’s mode of relating. With Venus now in retrograde there might be a greater opportunity and tendency to rehash old relationships (money/job and love) and the beliefs that surround them. Yogi Bhajan said if you hold beliefs about relationships, you will keep waiting. When the third eye and heart is open, beliefs give way to “knowing” by that quieter wiser voice within you.

And this from Eric's website
http://planetwavesweekly.com/resources/venus_retrograde.html

"The Course in Miracles takes the position that the search for this kind of relationship is a substitute for finding our inner core and living from there. In effect, what we think of as "love" becomes a substitute for what we think of as "God" and at the end of the day, or the end of our lives, this particular effort typically leads to neither. [snip]

Venus retrograde in Aries takes us into the territory of the relationship we have with ourselves. For one thing, it emphasizes the point that we have an inner relationship at all. That relationship is often suppressed because there is so much misgiving in there, which we call things like "low self-esteem" or "depression." Most humans, so far as I can tell, have not come to terms with their own existence, and so our self-relating is fundamentally an exercise in doubt. [snip]

Plenty of what we experience in relationships -- the adulation, the cruelty, the admiration, the love -- is about projection. Venus retrograde in Aries is about taking back those projections, and seeking something within ourselves. That could be a feminine identity within the prevailing masculine concept of "self" that we exist with. That sounds like making a discovery of the inner goddess, a core feminine identity that is entirely different than what we normally think of as ourselves. For both men and women, Venus retrograde in Aries is about seeking the beauty we see outside ourselves, within ourselves.

I lost my "What if everyone's a different gender?" button at PDF so I figured a google search for the text might find me someone who sold the button. Little did I know that I would find an amazing button store with hundreds of cool buttons for at Nancy's buttons!

Some of my favorites are in the math and programming sections:

• "There are 10 kinds of people, those who are comfortable with binary, and those who aren't "
• " x^n + y^n = z^n has no integer solutions other than 0 for n>2 I have a wonderful proof, but it won't fit on a button"
• "One of the main causes of the decline of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs"

Also check out sections on Bush, religion, pagan, magic, logic and many more!

Good tips on PWYC or free theatre plus Karen's reviews at http://dctheatrereviews.com/review/karens-tips-tix/.

I remember programming Conways's game of life on a BBC micro in the early 80s. I was fascinated by the way the patterns defined by only a few simple rules could have such, well, life in them! Here is a web based version of the game that let's you set up patterns and watch them evolve. It also lets you play with the rules and see how that effects the game. Enjoy! http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/

I made this one minute video "Erotic Encounter" with some friends in my Art group


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHT___aDOY

This letter was read at George's memorial last week. He ran
Beltane, PolyLiving and FSG. He was great at getting things done
and encouraging others to do the same. - Michael

Greetings to you all, friends and acquaintances of my late
husband, George Marvil. I wish I could be there today with you to
mourn and share your good company. Please know that I am thinking
of you as I work at my business this afternoon and try to do all
the things I believe George would want me to do to keep our home
and family running on an even keel. I want to take a moment of
your time to tell you some things about George.

George was a difficult man to know. When I first met his father
years ago, he asked how long I had known George. I said I'd been
dating him for six months. He said, "Six months is hardly a hello
with George." He had depth to him that he almost never let anyone
see. In the last 18 months, he had let down some of his guard.
I'm so thankful we had this time together. I'm an Aries, and we
tend to make war, not love, but in that time, things changed for
us dramatically.

Our previously stormy marriage transformed into a source of
strength for both of us. We learned something about loyalty, and
something about the true meaning of love and of marriage. He
learned to let old angers go, and I learned the value of being
present in the here and now. Hard lessons learned, but good ones
nonetheless.

As most of you know, he was fiercely devoted to Free Spirit
Alliance, spending many years donating hundreds of hours to its
service, and serving as its president. Not a perfect man by any
stretch of the imagination, he always strived to give his best
efforts to FSA. He had a dream that the organization's events
would reach more and more people each year, eventually drawing
Pagans from all over the world. He shared my dream that we could
help the greater Pagan community's kids get a good education
through scholarships and an environment that valued college
degrees and learning. Thus was born the scholarship fund which
will now bear his name.

His favorite way to pass the time was developing ideas and
serving this community. He cared deeply about building it into
something we could all be proud of. I hope you all know how
important you were to him as members of that community.

Before I let you get on with this service, I want to tell you
something that I have learned. Maybe some of you already know
this, but I'm going to say it anyway. Time is the only thing we
have that is truly of any value. You never know when your time is
going to be up. I thought we'd have at least a few more years
with George around to share his hare- brained ideas, boss us
around, get things done, make us crazy, do the things he did. I
was wrong, and I feel much the poorer for it. He would tell you,
and I will, too, that you must make the most of your time. Live
life to its fullest. Don't hold grudges. Don't dwell in the past
and, by the same token, don't live for some future dream without
regard for the gifts of the present. Tell those you love that
you love them. Tell them every day. Live and be as happy as you
can be. That's what he would want from all of us.

Thank you for being a part of this service. There will be
memorials held at Beltane and Free Spirit Gatherings in 2007, and
some of George's ashes will be scattered at Ramblewood in the
spring. I hope to see some or all of you there for those
memorials as well.
Blessings,
Cat Castells