Archive for March, 2010


Spaceship Earth – Our Only Home

Published March 20th, 2010 in Green | No Comments »

Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth." (03/20/2010 13:00:07) http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/images.pl?photo=AS17-148-22727

One of the first impressions astronauts get with their initial view of the Earth from orbit is just how small it really is. Below them they see the entirety of civilization, the whole of our home in a single gaze. They see just how limited it all is. We live on a rock surviving within a very thin sheath of moisture and air. Take a basket-ball and dip it in some water and shake off the excess moisture and you have our oceans being represented. It’s hard for us Earth-bound folks to conceptualize it. We look out our windows and see… what? A few miles around us. Which seems vast to us. The sky look endless because there’s no reference point for size comparison. The clouds, are they just a few hundred feet up or thousands? It all seems so big to us and it is so easy to get lulled into believing that we cannot possibly have any affect on the world around us. However, a change in perspective is all that’s needed to make us realize that what we have is so very rare and so very precious and so very little compared to the cosmos around us. And most importantly, so very limited. We are effectively on a space-ship.

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Incandescent light bulb’s days are numbered…

Published March 17th, 2010 in News - Green | No Comments »

It’s been a long time in coming tho – this demise of the incandescent light bulb. But, it seems that it’s inevitable. So little energy is converted to light in these bulbs and so much to heat that it’s a wonder it’s still so popular. Only 2.6% of the energy put into the average 100 watt bulb is converted into light! Think you’re saving money with a 60 watt? Only 2.1%! How about a 40 watt? 1.9% of the energy put into it becomes light! It’s like putting the pedal to the floor in your car then with the throttle wide open riding the brakes to obey that school zone speed-limit. Worse even.

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Wave energy may become a reality

Published March 16th, 2010 in News - Green | No Comments »

This is one of those “Oh it’s possible and it’s neat” type things that remained pretty much at the vaporware stage, if even that. However, recent developments indicate that it just might migrate from “What if” to, “There it is.” Harvesting energy from waves has long been discussed and dreamed of. It’s not a complicated thing. Waves and tides go up and down – all we gotta do is harness that energy. In most cases it’s a LOT of energy potential. From the article:

“Ten sites on the seabed off the north coast of Scotland have been leased out to power companies in an effort to generate wave and tidal energy.”

Read more here.

It seems to be slow in coming tho, in spite of the tremendous potential for less costly energy production. Let’s hope it doesn’t fall to the wayside like Picken’s Texas windfarms.

All those Surreptitious NY Beehives are now… Legal!

Published March 16th, 2010 in News - Bees | No Comments »

From the article:

“Urban beekeepers in New York City no longer have to keep the honey of their labors a secret. The city’s health board voted Tuesday to overturn a longtime ban on beekeeping within city limits…”

Read more here.

This is absolutely AWESOME! The house of cards is surely going to come down. First the White House gets their own bees. And now this highly visible event, none other than the Big Apple taking honeybees off the banned list. May this provide more ammunition for the rest of the beekeepers to hopefully convince their local politics to overturn similar prohibitions. We need more beekeepers and this will help enormously.

I want to live under the sea…

Published March 13th, 2010 in Ocean | No Comments »

…that is a dream I have fostered since I was a young child. I grew up daydreaming about undersea life ever since I first as a six year old child watched 2000 Leagues Under the Sea -- a masterpiece of cinema of its day:

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Roasting Coffee

Published March 7th, 2010 in Coffee | No Comments »

My Coffee Cabinet

My Coffee Cabinet

Once you have roasted your own, you will have embarked on the path few leave. After getting in the driver’s seat of your coffee experience, after having control over every aspect of the coffee, after experiencing just how good coffee can be, nothing on the store shelf can remotely compare, no matter how many artificial flavors they stuff in there. In short, you are transformed into a coffee snob. My journey began about ten years ago. And thanks to the internet. In my research – an act of self-improvement that my wife calls playing – I came across the home-roasting coffee possibility. And I came across Sweet Maria’s – a company owned and run by Tom that imports coffee after meticulously cupping each lot and determining it was of the quality he demanded. I was amazed at how easy roasting is – his website opened a whole new world of culinary possibilities. Each coffee from each region is distinctively different – I was essentially able to tour the world in my cup.

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