PermaKent Permaculture Ideas of J. Kent Hastings

Daily Mail pic detail
A “permaculture” Google Alert brought me a link to this Design Thinking blog post with a transcript of a brief excerpt from a recent BBC2 show, Natural World: A Farm for the Future.
There’s also a link to the programme (UK only, maybe someday they’ll make the program available to the world).
I was […]

Wildman Steve Brill
A Slashdot post reports that Space Energy, Inc. claims to have a rock solid business model for their plan to beam down power via microwaves from solar energy collectors in space. I’ll get to survivalism and foraging in a minute, stay with me.
In a page linked from that article, at Universe Today, “aerospace […]

Kurzweil AI post.
The supreme Chancellor says he loves democracy and will give power back to the Old Republic. Oh wait, this isn’t Star Wars, Sarah Connor, or Battlestar. This is real life.
Ray Kurzweil is the Chancellor of a new interdisciplinary college called Singularity University.
“The Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of […]

A Cory Doctorow Boing Boing post today describes a recent SALT talk by Dmitri Orlov comparing the impact on Russians of the fall of the Soviet Union with what the USA is about to endure. The talk’s title is “Social Collapse Best Practices.”
No doubt the podcast will appear at The Long Now Foundation site any […]

Mother Earth News reports that a DIY homebrew car, “MAX Wins 800-mile Race, without Gas.”
The challenge was to drive from Berkeley to Las Vegas without using petroleum based fuel, and without buying any fuel directly. This is a step in the MAX team’s attempt to win the $10 million automotive X-Prize for a 100 MPG […]

The Los Angeles Times Housing Scene column in their business section is warning readers about con artists selling “insider reports” about supposedly free real property under the Homestead Act. The article says the Homestead Act giveaways stopped over 30 years ago.
“The Homesteading Act of 1862 was repealed in 1976 because all the good agricultural land […]

BioPro automation YouTube
From the Freeways To Fuel website, linked from Green Tech Media coverage of the National Biodiesel Conference in San Francisco this month:
. . .we estimate that 10 million acres of non-traditional agronomic lands are available to grow about 1 billion million gallons of biodiesel feedstock on our country’s rights-of-way.
Daryl Hannah made news at […]

Here’s a direct link to the Instructables page for a thousand watt wind turbine project.
“We built a 1000 watt wind turbine to help charge the battery bank that powers our offgrid home. It’s a permanent magnet alternator, generating 3 phase ac, rectified to dc, and fed to a charge controller. The magnets spin with the […]

Do I win a prize for the most bizarre headline? While we’re digressing, what’s up with “Cardinals” as a football team name? I think it’s fine for Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown, but on the gridiron a tweety bird is like a boy named Sue. Now give me some more tofu.
First some good news for energy […]