Education

Charcoal

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Growing up I knew charcoal as the square, chemical-soaked briquettes people bought in bags and poured into the barbecue grill once a summer. Like so much else in our lives it came from a store, wrapped in plastic and pre-treated for shelf life, with no sense that it shared a name with something amazingly useful, which hundreds of generations had made themselves.

We don’t need no education

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We live in a world governed by education – a small mean god we worship, even without realising our faith. It schools us in the rational mind and teaches us to look at the earth through the heartless and acquisitive eyes of Empire. Depending on what kind of house we are born into we go to school to be shaped by the requirements of our hierarchical culture: to be turned into obedient factory or cannon fodder, to fill in forms, or to arrogantly rule the world. But no matter what school we attend, all of us are programmed to see life in geometric squares, truth as scientific facts, the earth as property, our nation’s history as the rightful conquest of Western civilisation. We are taught that control of the mind is always more important thanl real-life experience.

Peak oil denial: another curious contribution

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Apparently, we Peak Oil advocates are “fleecing the inherently gullible.” Who knew? The author didn’t get around to explaining just how we do so, although he did offer a hint that our “headline-grabbing, money-making blockbusters” are the culprits. (What have I been missing? Woulda been nice if Richard Heinberg, Chris Nelder, Sharon Astyk, Kurt Cobb, Chris Martenson, and others clued me in on how they’ve made their millions and millions of dollars fleecing gullibles. I’ll keep checking my email.)

Battery performance deficit disorder

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Batteries fail—as certainly as death and taxes. Rechargeable batteries at least offer the possibility of repeating the cycle, so are in this sense more like recurrent taxes than death. But alas, the story cannot repeat indefinitely… Add to their inevitable demise an overall lackluster performance in battery storage technology, and we have ourselves the makings of a blog post on the failure of batteries to live up to their promises.

Mother: Caring for 7 Billion (documentary film review)

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The documentary takes a penetrating look at overpopulation, what fuels it and why the world has become complacent about the issue after making a good start in addressing it during the late 60s. The film dispels some key myths about overpopulation – chief among them the belief that it’s long been solved – even if it stops short of admitting the inevitability of a world population crash as the Earth’s resources deplete. And it conveys its message in an engaging, visually immersive style that finds just the right balance between hard facts and ordinary human involvement.

Back to school

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While I’m sure this is true of some of the workers and strivers of the present, the overwhelming justification for education at every level is that you will need it to get a job – education will cost you now in loans, time spent doing activities that look good on college applications, tutors, SAT prep, etc…. but it will return to you your investment many times over. The problem of course, is that as education’s costs have risen and the economy has been less stable, this has become less and less true for most people.

Solar Data Treasure Trove

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I have not kept it secret that I’m a fan of solar power. Leaving storage hangups aside for now, the fact that the scale of available power is comfortably gigantic, that perfectly efficient technology exists, that it’s hard-over on the reality axis (vs. fantasy: it’s producing electricity on my roof right now), and that it works well almost everywhere—what’s not to like? Did you trip over that last part? Many do. In this post, we’ll look at just how much solar yield one may expect as a function of location within the U.S.