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Dang! I've expressed great enthusiasm for desalination as one of the technological end runs we might make on water fickle Mother Nature. YaleGlobal Online (yep, published by Yale) takes a pretty hard anti-desalination position with: Desalination is not a solution to freshwater shortages being reported by many dry regions around the globe, including many sections of the United States. Adam Scow of Food & Water Watch argues that conservation of water is the better strategy and notes that “the technology is being pushed by private interests looking to profit from the sale of water while sticking the public with its high financial and environmental costs.” Desalination has high energy costs, and the leftover salt is a pollutant. He explains that about 80 percent of California’s water, for example, is used for agriculture purposes. Farmers could plan for efficient water use by using more care in selecting crops appropriate for their region’s climate and ecology. The United S

Every Little Bit.. . So I got so upset with the banks after the BushCrash that m'Wife and I moved our money from Wells Fargo and BofA to a local credit union (spoiler alert: another post on co-ops of all kinds is coming).  I was so miffed at the banks I even adopted "banksters" as a new perjorative. Granted, my bottom-99% funds will not even tickle the banksters, much less give them a stabbing pain. BUT... every little bit one can do just might do some good.  Every time we repair-reuse-repurpose and recycle we do a tiny little bit. So good old Steven Pearlstein   writes in the Washington Post, "Occupy Wall Street? Just defund it." And it's all about moving your money from wall street to co-ops.  My credit union - yours too, if you have one - is a co-op.  Owned by its customers, as opposed to Wall Street FatCats. And there are all sorts of co-ops out there, just look at this and this . We shop at grower-owned Farmers' Markets, too. O

The Red/Blue States Map Now Makes Sense You know I'm a Good-Graphics-Make-Good-Communications nut ? This is NOT a good graphic.... ...because it looks like Red States win! And we all know what really happened. So map genius  Mark Newman , using programs he co-invented modified each state to reflect how many electoral College votes it has to come up with this wonder.... Lotsa votes = bigger state on the map. Voila!   Now you see why the blue states called the election. There are lots of other great maps of this ilk on Dr. Newman's site .  Check it out.  Then ask your favorite TV news source why you haven't seen this kind of graphic.

Improve Your Attitude About Everything I  have assigned this book to "transformative" in my personal rating system.  In his recently adopted "dual track" evolutionary idea, E.O. Wilson explains everything.  At least he explains such as why one guy is a hard nosed Republican, another a softy Democrat.  And why there is such intractable polarization.  And so much more.  That's why I say "improve your attitude."  There might be a bit much ant lore in the middle of the book for some folks, but I liked even that.  After all Wilson is a world renowned ant guy too.   He's prolific, original and a fine writer.  This book pulls you along like good narrative fiction, but its ideas are pure science. It goes to my fixation that evolution explains pretty much everything about everything alive.   Strongly recommended.

The HUGE Three If you're just sit around picking your toes -- or listening to right-wing radio - you might think nothing is happening in scientific progress.   Truth is (ah, truth, facts, actualities!), there is an astonishing acceleration in new discoveries, breakthroughs and invention.  I've picked my fav three, and they are so big I call 'em HUGE. These are going to affect us all.  Big time.  But take any random sample of the population of us U.S.-ers, and you will find darn few aware of even one of them, much less all three.  Why is that?  Simple.  The less simple, the less likely the 'mainstream media' is to cover it.  Methinks: Pix credit:  Duffer's flying pencil [Thus my snide comment about right-wing talk radio, home base for simplistic.  "Nuanced" is their word for anything smacking of complexity.  The huge, complex set of information that spells out "global warming" becomes a "hoax." (Interpretati

Never mind the Higgs Boson, the really BIG science news is our growing ability to “see” invisible dark matter. Check this out: My fav science-for-laymen magazine ScienceNews has the article about seeing a huge filament of dark matter connecting two galaxies. SN has been all over this story for a while. This kind of news plucks my awe twanger.  I love it. Pix credit:  July 8, 2012 ScienceNews

Jim Ramsburg and I worked together in L.A. at KLAC in the deep, dark '60s. He was a whiz kid then and is a whiz olde farte now.  If you were conscious during the '30s, '40s and/or the '50s, you will find yourself riding Dorothy's tornado down Alice's rabbit hole of memory and nostalgia reading his book. If you are student looking for a great media paper, there is endless potentially plagiarisable stuff. If the ratings biz interests you, this will be fascinating. Plus there are a bunch of great stories.  You will grin, giggle and grimace.    Gotta get it!  Do the Amazon boogie. [Check out Jim's web site at http://www.jimramsburg.com/]

We Are Both Misguided and Well Informed Today's NYTimes.com has two articles that come from two different realities.  I couldn't pass this up without a comment.  These days "amazing" must be way more so to kick over the threshold of "gotta blog about it." First I read " Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot" Its about Tea Party types who believe the U.N. is trying to undermine our freedoms and American Way of Life by encouraging hiking trails and reducing greenhouse gases.  Just a sample: " Across the country, activists with ties to the  Tea Party  are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy.  They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a  United Nations -led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities. They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lane

I Say It Again... BURY THEM! OK, I said it before.  But here a very nice piece noting that in Connecticut, every big storm that cuts the power for long, expensive, uncomfortable periods of time reflects prior identical problems.  Check it out here Point is, we could end this madness of 19th Century power distribution.  Huge savings in money and inconvenience. Put the returning vets on the case! Please..... .  Feb 2  (what? 2008? Bury Them! UnderGrounding So how much did that Kentucky ice storm cost? Millions of people without power, plus of course, their factories, shops, offices, banks, government installations, plus the call-up of the whole Kentucky National Guard... on and on, the costs skyrocketed. Main problem? Power lines. Wires on top of poles, the way we have distributed electricity since the first days of the telegraph set the standard. Power line wires run by and through trees. They not o

EVERYTHING Is Explained by Evolution ...At least everything human.  And I actually think pretty much everything that's alive, including plants, "germs," bugs and irresistible puppies are all fully explainable by evolution. I've bought into the idea that if a human trait - even a weird one - is around today, it was survival-positive at some point in our evolution, thus became part of what the human race is.  For instance  schizophrenia , not a trait you might consider all that valuable these days.  But back there in deep pre-history, the schizos probably were very effective shamans, and a tribe with a really wild shaman had survival advantages.  You can write the scenario as well as I can.   Could'a Been Us In one of my fav magazines NewScientist writer  Kate Ravilious   put together a fine piece ( 07 November 2011)  expanding on current thinking on this " EVERYTHING Is Explained by Evolution" bit.  She summarizes (and adds to) the work o

No More Floods; No More Droughts (Future) Historical fiction (Revisited) As our Congress messes around doing absolutely nothing about improving America's infrastructure, I can't resist pulling up my RBI (Really Big Idea) from 2003.  Put on your "government could really work" rose-colored glasses and read this. May 2020     The Mississippi River is approaching flood stage in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.  The Corps of Engineers monitors the levees and dikes with the giant web of depth gauges and flow meters.  The U.S. Weather Bureau is predicting major rainstorms in several of the watersheds.  Supercomputers are crunching trillions of numbers and putting options in clear graphical displays in front of Corps decision makers.   The top Corps engineer picks up the Red Phone and calls the White House.  Connections are made and the Secretary of the Interior, the Vice President and The Woman Herself come online and listen to the report. “It’s an e

JUST WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO PAY FOR? More Thrill of Getting Published. The whole warped argument about our national debt must be seen in a different light if we are ever going to see the light. I took a modest whack at it in this piece, printed in The Mountain View Telegraph , one of our weeklies hereabouts. (Unreadable, but cute, no?) Here ' tis , readable: Thursday, 21 July 2011 09:09 Willis Duff Tijeras resident The word "government" has been mutated by some into "monster," a conniving enormity out to "get in your way." Perhaps it's because the combination of local, state and federal government is just too big for us to see clearly, like fleas have trouble seeing the dog. So it must be a monster. In truth, government is a huge nonprofit whose purpose is to keep our civilization functioning the way we want it to. In the U.S., the government works for you. You are the client. "You" are all of us c