Author Archives: Mike Reeves-McMillan

Jan 05

Sustainability and self-sufficiency are themes for our future, I believe.

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Sustainability and self-sufficiency are themes for our future, I believe.

Originally shared by Greg Batmarx

Two acres of land is enough to farm a sustainable food supply for as many as 150 people, and now a San Francisco startup is making it even easier to get that farm growing. Farm From a Box is a shipping container kit that holds all the essentials for setting up a two-acre farm (except the land, of course).

Founders Brandi DeCarli and Scott Thompson got the idea after working on a youth center in Kenya where shipping containers were being used to substitute where infrastructure lacked.

That project didn’t address food insecurity, though, which led DeCarli and Thompson to found their own venture specifically for that purpose.

Farm From a Box is a kit designed to make it easier for all types of organizations to start growing sustainable food. Nonprofit humanitarian agencies, schools, community groups, and even individuals can buy a $50,000 kit, which comes with a complete water system including a solar-powered pump and drip irrigation system.

Together, those features help conserve water by using it more efficiently, delivering water directly to the roots of growing plants.

All of the kit’s components are solar-powered, so the kit also includes 3 kW of solar energy capacity which is enough to power the water pump as well as WiFi connectivity that makes it possible to monitor the farm conditions remotely. Because the built-in solar power technology generates more than enough energy to power the farm’s equipment, the farm is suitable to run completely off the grid.

All the prospective farmer needs to have is viable land, of course, and seeds. Luckily, the Farm From a Box team realizes that farming is largely about skill and science, so the kit also includes three stages of training materials on sustainable farming, farm technology and maintenance, as well as the business of farming.

In a recent interview with Smithsonian Magazine, DiCarli explained that the farm kit was designed to “act as a template” and that it’s possible to “plug in” components that specifically fit the farm’s local climate and the farmers’ needs. Those options include internal cold storage, to help preserve crops between harvest and consumption or sale, and a water purification system, if needed.

So far, Farm From a Box has deployed one prototype at Shone Farm in Sonoma County, California.

A project of Santa Rosa Junior College, the farm is part of a larger outdoor laboratory in which students learn how to cultivate crops in drought conditions, and then the harvest is used to supply the farm’s own community-supported agriculture (CSA) program as well as the college’s culinary arts program.

DiCarli said the Shone Farm prototype turned out to be “more efficient than we had even planned,” with “really high” production and energy output. Farm From a Box has a number of other potential sites lined up already, in Ethiopia, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan, as well as additional test farms in California and a veteran-partnered site in Virginia.

http://inhabitat.com/solar-powered-farm-from-a-box-is-a-compact-farm-kit-that-feeds-150-people/

Jan 04

Putting this one under Collective Endeavour, because that’s part of what we’ll need to be good at in the future.

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Putting this one under Collective Endeavour, because that’s part of what we’ll need to be good at in the future.

I’d note that the job I do as a business analyst kind of existed (as a very specialised thing that a few people did) when I was at school, but I wasn’t aware of its existence until several years after I’d graduated from university, with a degree that theoretically doesn’t qualify me to do what I do. Fortunately, people hire me largely for the skills that are mentioned in this article.

(Laura Gibbs will enjoy this one, I think.)

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

“65 percent of children entering grade school this year (2011) will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.”

http://suhub.co/2iAwH8k
Jan 04

You can depict your heroes standing up to oppression.

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You can depict your heroes standing up to oppression.

You can show a despised group sympathetically.

Or you can just normalise the “other”.

Originally shared by Steve Turnbull

Making art to bring about change, probably more important now than it ever has been.

This article is specifically about film-making, but applies to all art, in my opinion.

https://cuttingroomtales.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/can-movies-cause-political-change/
Dec 30

Well, it’s the last day of 2016 here, and I’m going to assume that I won’t receive any more rejections or…

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Well, it’s the last day of 2016 here, and I’m going to assume that I won’t receive any more rejections or acceptances in the next 12 hours, and sum up my year’s progress in the field of short stories.

My goals this year were to write 15 stories, make 60 submissions, and (a late addition) have 15 stories on submission at one time.

Partway through the year, I achieved the 60 submissions and set a new goal of 75.

I actually wrote 10 stories (that I subsequently submitted), made 74 submissions – one short of my revised goal – and had a maximum of 13 stories on submission at one time.

I’m relaxed about the fact that I didn’t make the numbers; they’re a way to keep score and motivate myself, not some kind of mystical obligation. And I did, after all, exceed my initial submission goal, which was already up from the 52 submissions I made last year.

My number of form rejections, predictably, went up more or less proportionately with the number of submissions: 45, versus 29 last year. Personalised rejections also went up, by approximately the same percentage: 18, versus 13 last year. The number of acceptances actually halved, though, from 8 to 4. My explanation for this is that I was being more ambitious in the markets I submitted to this year.

Three out of those four sales were at professional rates, versus only one out of eight last year, and that’s reflected in the fact that my year’s income from short stories went up from $354.09 to $680.78. (I’m counting the $200 I got from providing two “treatments” to a futurist consultancy, since I wouldn’t have got that opportunity if I hadn’t already been a short story writer with professional sales.)

This means my lifetime income from short stories is now over $1000 (USD), based on 13 paying acceptances out of 174 submissions. That’s a hit rate a little better than 1 in 14, which actually isn’t bad for the industry.

Full details behind the link, if you’re interested, including markets, timings, and statistics.

http://csidemedia.com/shortstories/goals-aspirations-and-achievements/

Dec 30

This is an excellent example of a mundane murder by a conspiracy of terrified incompetents which became magnified…

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This is an excellent example of a mundane murder by a conspiracy of terrified incompetents which became magnified into a legend by various interested parties – a legend which persists in the popular consciousness today, despite the facts having been known for many decades.

One of the things you can do if you have a generational jump in your series is to turn the earlier events, and characters, into legend. Sherri S. Tepper does it in Raising the Stones, and Brandon Sanderson does it between the first and second Mistborn trilogies. But it doesn’t need to take generations; the legend of Rasputin was well established within ten years of his death.

Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette

The Murder of Rasputin: The 100th Anniversary of a Mystery That Won’t Die https://shar.es/1DJUYH

https://shar.es/1DJUYH