Not only is there no strong evidence that organically-grown food is better for health, there’s also good evidence that it’s worse, not better, for the environment on a number of measures (though it does depend which measures you choose, and what you’re growing).
I will pay extra for “free-farmed” or “free-range” meat and eggs, for animal welfare and health reasons, but I won’t pay extra for organic.
I’m envisaging a journey by self-sailing ship, passing thousands of turbines far out to sea.
Originally shared by Danie van der Merwe
First floating wind farm, built by offshore oil company, delivers electricity
According to Ars Technica, the world’s first floating offshore wind farm began delivering electricity to the Scottish grid on 18 October 2017.
The 30MW installation, situated 25km (15.5mi) from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, will demonstrate that offshore wind energy can be harvested in deep waters, miles away from land, where installing giant turbines was once impractical or impossible. At peak capacity, the wind farm will produce enough electricity to power 20,000 Scottish homes.
The installation, called Hywind Scotland, is also interesting because it was built by Statoil, a Norwegian mega-corporation known for offshore oil drilling. Statoil has pursued offshore wind projects in recent years, using the company’s experience building and managing infrastructure in difficult open sea conditions to its advantage.
Big grats to Steve, who, because he’s British, didn’t finish the first sentence of his post with an exclamation point. But he’s entitled to one.
I haven’t read this particular series, but what I have read of his has been good.
Originally shared by Steve Turnbull
My forthcoming SF novel KYMIERA has just been optioned by B7Media for TV production.
It’s been a long road for the story because it started as a pilot script over 10 years ago but special effects were way too expensive then. I shifted to writing books and last year I decided to make it into a novel. And now it’s been optioned.
Order your copy of KYMIERA now, it’s available in all formats at a special launch price of 0.99 [$/£/€]:
Every purchase makes it more likely to be made because more book success = more confidence. Help make this happen!
B7Media.com produce TV, film, and audio. They’ve done a ton of stuff for Big Finish, produced the award-winning Dan Dare audio series and the “I, Robot” radio series for BBC Radio 4.
The assumption that nobody would create anything if there was no way to profit from it has long been disproven in practice, but if profiting from your digital creations is one of your goals, blockchain could help you attain it.
This article makes so many points that are relevant to me.
As someone who’s worked in project teams my whole working life, the idea that collective intelligence is more important than individual intelligence resonates with me strongly. In a typical project team, there’s no one “hero” who can legitimately claim all or most of the credit. What’s more, no one person, no matter how long they worked, could possibly achieve what the team achieved.
Then there’s optimism. The person being interviewed here makes the excellent point that good news is gradual while bad news is sudden, so bad news tends to be what we notice. But with a consistent history of things improving, why are we convinced that they’re going to get worse? (That’s not to say that some things in particular will not get worse, but things in general tend to improve.)
Culture and society provide a kind of “ratchet effect” which mean that, on the whole, we build on what the people who came before us made. That’s why I’m typing this on a computer that’s the size of a large (but not thick) book and sending it out to people all over the world. Once we collectively solve a problem and encapsulate the solution in technology (or culture), we don’t have to solve that problem again; we can use the solution to solve the next problem.
One Nation Is Single-Handedly Inventing the Future of Transportation
“All over the world, the way people get around is changing quickly. However, it’s possible that there’s no greater hub for developing the future of transportation technology than the Netherlands.
The country is uniquely poised to facilitate this kind of work. It’s got great technological infrastructure, with complete 4G coverage that helps vehicles grab routing information and other updates quickly and efficiently. Moreover, it’s relatively small, making it easier to implement big changes to the transport network than it would be in a country like the US.
Coupled with strong governmental backing, these factors are incubating a lot of interesting projects that could have a profound effect on how the Dutch get from A to B…”
Good trends are not inevitable. Even the ones that stupid, heartless leaders and short-sighted decisions can’t stop can be slowed by them, and even though a lot of the best work is being done outside governments, governments still matter.