We’ve all heard the spiel about the GDP (I got it in high school first and the media later) and how it’s the measure of a country’s economic blahblahblah, and how it’s the primary scorecard that policymakers, economists, international agencies and the media use to show how well we’re doing… but personally, I never did trust suits, so I decided to look a little further.¬† 
Oh, man. I know you’ll be loving this article from Science Daily, Boy Infidel.
The title alone says it all: Sustainable Fertilizer: Urine And Wood Ash Produce Large Harvest. This is a legitimate science news site telling people to piss on their crops! The good news is that this isn’t actually insane. The study shows that urine on it’s own is a great source of nitrogen and as such a good replacement for chemical fertilizer, but adding in the wood ash just sweetens the proverbial piss-and-tomato pie because wood ash is high in minerals and reduces acidity.
Holy crap! I’ve been wasting mine! Continue reading
When I was a nerdy little boy-infidel I devoured sci-fi novels like petrol-eating microbes in a oil-sands pit! Those novels were full of awe-inspiring technologies like a world-wide satellite network, hand-held information devices and autonomous robots. Flash-forward to the 21st century and now these technologies exist, and they are used in ways even Issac Asimov couldn’t have imagined!
And it’s happening again.
Mitsubishi and IHI Corp are working with the Japanese government to develop a massive 1Gigawatt Solar collector … in space. The idea is simple. Collect solar energy that is unobstructed by our atmosphere and then beam it down to the surface as concentrated micro-waves. If it sounds a lot like a Death Ray you’re not alone, but those involved assure us that the energy would be even less harmful than regular old solar radiation.
Plans are to have the solar station up and running in 3 decades … which will give them time to save up the estimated $21 Billion cost of the project.
The future’s so bright!
Many years ago, I read Clive Barker’s The Books Of Blood on a road trip across Canada with my family. I remember enjoying most of the stories in the books; they appealed to my teenaged dark side and my irritation at the everyday. I was putting the banal horror stories of Stephen King by the wayside and moving on to an author who made more unique and original stories.
In The Hills, The Citieswas one of those stories. In it, the protagonists accidentally stumble across two towns in Yugoslavia locked in a brutal battle. Each town has roped their citizenry together into a collective person (or “superdude”, as I like to call them) and the superdudes are bashing away at one another.