PermaKent Permaculture Ideas of J. Kent Hastings

I’ve heard the Lifesaver bottle advertised on The Survival Podcast, but was not excited about it until I saw this TED Talk video from 2009 of Lifesaver’s inventor and CEO Michael Pritchard’s presentation at Oxford, England.
The Lifesaver system filters out contaminants larger than 15 nanometers. It’s 100% effective against the 25 nanometer sized polio virus […]

Coca Cola was one of the companies listed on an often played TV ad in the U.S. that shows the word “Copenhagen” morphing into “Hopenhagen.”
Maybe Coke’s marketing department was thinking of their polar bear mascots.
The solution to stopping global warming proposed by scientist Saul Griffith, in his SALT talk in January of this year, […]

A recent WorldChanging article, which came to my attention in this TreeHugger article, complains about the alleged “Dark Side of Transition Thinking,” and thus bashes a growing movement active throughout the world.
The author, Alex Steffen, wrote in “Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?” that “All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, […]

ArsTechnica reported a perfect Thirst-Day item about a proposed wireless internet standard that uses the white space frequencies between broadcast channels for the interactive data.
The article, titled “WhiteFi” could be worth $15bn a year—and fix climate change, describes its market potential due to bringing about easier rural datafication and the energy savings implied by its […]

Xeros at GizMag
Catilin non toxic “T300″ nano catalyst replaces caustic methoxide and all the water washing needed to dilute it.
“Our solid catalyst makes it so much easier,” says Larry Lenhart, Catilin CEO. “It’s safe and nontoxic, and it requires less expense to run. You don’t need to do the mixtures with acids and pH balance, […]

After catching up on an old Eco-Tech episode on my DVR, I was inspired to link to new media clips about the “Garbage Into Gold” company TerraCycle.
Products include Worm Poop fertilizer and eco friendly Fire Logs from a biodiesel process byproduct, some garbage, with each log wrapped in used newspapers as part of the […]

The Simpsons MovieAbby Cohn at Berkeley Innovations describes a test by the City of San Francisco to convert brown grease, which normally plugs up sewer pipes, into biodiesel in an item titled From Bacon To Biofuel.
Innovations is the website of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, hence the plugs for its alumni in the article.
” […]

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 […]

http://www.worldwater.org
Times Online UK story, “Ecologists warn the planet is running short of water” references a Pacific Institute press release about their most recent publication, The World’s Water 2008-2009.
The WorldWater.org site has plenty of excerpts and data charts to illustrate their “peak water” scenario. The following is from the introduction to The World’s Water 2008-2009:
“In many […]

This Toilet Lid Sink is a conversation starter. Here’s the product description:
“With each flush of your commode, clean water that would otherwise go straight down the toilet is first routed up through a chrome gooseneck spigot to dispense pure water for hand washing. The Toilet Lid Sink installs easily without tools, is attractive for any […]

Fans of Silent Running will be interested in Art Carden’s latest article for the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, “Should We Be Recycling Paper or Building Battlestar Galactica?”
“Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and […]

This Slashdot post links to an American Chemical Society article about a report by researchers here in Nevada, published in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, about the impact of turning waste coffee grounds into biodiesel.
“The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like java — had a major advantage in being more stable […]

I’ve been on the road helping a friend move his stuff from the house he sold in Culver City, CA to his new home in Pahrump, NV. But while I haven’t posted here for a week, I have been taking notes about all things sustainable.
The first item is the most recent. During yesterday’s Ed Schultz […]