Seed banks

Friend, retired priest Stuart Coxhead came over for leftovers last night (with friend Anne Peterson), and brought a copy of the New Yorker with a fascinating story about the world’s seed banks. American Cary Fowler, descibed as the ‘world’s seed banker’ by writer John Seabrook is also a long term cancer survivor (after being given […]

Industrial revolution

While perusing web pages, I came across this interesting PDF about the Scorpius space transportation system a component of which can be seen above, right. To the left is a Saturn J-2 engine: it’s successor, the RL-10 produces about the same thrust as the Scorpius for about 100 times the cost. The RL-10, like almost […]

Getting a quote for solar power at gulker.com

The new furnace will be considerably more efficient than the old one, reducing both our energy bill and carbon footprint which got me thinking about our other big energy use, electricity.
The RealGoods.com estimator came back with a price of $37,000 for a 5.5 KW photovoltaic system for gulker.com, and promising a $1300 to $2400 reduction […]

Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins

Al Gore will be a part-time Green tech partner at KPCB, according to the Merc and a bunch of other sources. I wonder how many other VCs have a Nobel laureate on board…

More water woe

BBC: A massive rescue operation is under way in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco after rains caused the worst flooding there in more than 50 years. More than one million people are believed to be affected by the floods, and some 300,000 are thought to be trapped in their homes. Most of the state […]

The economics of Hybrids

Good article on WSJ.com on the current state of hybrids. On the one hand, they really do use less fuel and reduce your carbon footprint. On the other, payback times are long, given current US fuel prices (but better in Europe where fuel is heavily taxed). I love our Ford Escape Hybrid… it replaces a […]

‘The Gore Derangement Syndrome’

An amusing - and correct, IMHO - take on the right wing’s attempt to smear Al Gore while simultaneously elevating GW Bush. For all their efforts, Gore seems to be able to rise above the crud…

AlwaysOn: where Green Tech VCs are betting

AlwaysOn pulls up this session from their Davis Going Green greentech conference (I was there) last month where a group of prominent VCs outline their bets. This group said they liked energy efficiency, utility scale projects, plastics, building materials, carbon reduction, and transport.
I interviewed IBM Capital co-founder Drew Clark the week after Going Green, and […]

CFL vs LED

Here’s one of the 6 fluorescent fixtures in my kitchen. They each have a 24″, 1200-lumen fluorescent bulb in them, and cost around 50 bucks, I think. 2 of them have begun to buzz loudly enough that spouse and I want to replace them. I’m thinking of replacing them with the next wave of energy-efficient […]

Painting ourselves into the ‘God corner’

In church today, I was listening to the sermon, offered by Father Fred Heard, who was preaching about faith, as presented in today’s Gospel of the mustard seed. As usual, I was viewing this through my weird faith/science duality (and here): I love faith communities, but don’t believe in a human-like God who […]

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