PureGin.org

Using current 'baseline' solar photo voltaic (PV) electric technology, solar farms covering approximately 2.85 percent of the area of the Sahara desert could generate enough electricity to equal the energy generated worldwide in 2005 from fossil fuels.

Such a solar array would cover approximately 256,500 square kilometers (somewhat larger than Honshū, the largest island of Japan) and cost in the neighbourhood of 150 trillion US dollars to construct, assuming costs of about $500 per square metre of PV cells.

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that we've been down to a single car for the last month or so. Last weekend, after a good deal of discussion, we bought a new vehicle: an electric bike. The goal is for this to replace one car for my 4 times per week 20km each-way commute, thus saving 80-120Kg CO2e per month over taking my 2004 Golf TDI (the numbers are from this article). So, we made the trip to Victoria to Scooter Underground.

I started thinking about the whole concept of 'print on demand' a.k.a. 'just-in-time printing' yesterday after I printed off 304 pages of Squeak By Example, an introduction to the Squeak implementation of the Smalltalk programming language. The book is available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, and is freely available for download, though I elected to support the authors by purchasing the PDF from Lulu.com for $8.95 USD.

It's one of those things you hear about but think will never happen to you.  This morning we dropped off Pamela's car (a '97 Cavalier) at the VIU automotive repair shop, which is run by the Automotive Service Technician programme at Vancouver Island University.   Like most schools of this kind, they encourage the public to provide vehicles requiring service, which is provided at cost.  We asked to have the oil and filter changed, and to have the brakes looked at.  A couple of hours we got a call... apparently some students were test driving the car, hit a patch of ice, and lost control of the vehicle, which ended up in a ditch.

The current "credit" crisis would be absolutely fascinating if it were not so terrifying. How did we get here? Somewhat like the wily coyote, we are suspended over a precipice, slowly coming to the realization that the road we were on ended abruptly, some time ago.

And how are our politicians and captains of industry responding to this?

Today is Rememberance Day here in Canada, and I've been thinking about "war and war's alarms", to quote Yeats. One of the books I've been dipping into a lot lately is Thomas W.

I greatly enjoyed Zak Greant's keynote talk at OpenWeb 2008 on The Age of Literate Machines in which he reminded us of the many attempts by rulers and government over the ages to curtail freedoms such as the ones defining "Free" software.

I just checked in again at Ohloh, a site which gathers, analyses and presents information about various open source projects on the web. Dries blogged about this a few months ago in his post on CMS codebase comparisons.

Something that seems to be new at Ohloh since my last visit is a box that presents an estimate of the cost of a given project's codebase (using the basic COCOMO model of software costing).

I was challenged to find my elementary school on the web just now, and was pleased, surprised, and for some reason amused to discover that it is running a Drupal website.

And not only that, but every school in the district has its own Drupal site. There is obviously some tech-savvy, thoughful decision-making going on back in the old home town!

I walked down the street to our local park yesterday after dinner and thought to take along my boomerang, which I'd just unearthed in the process of packing up house.

Fun!

I'd totally forgotten how much fun it is to just be outdoors for half an hour throwing things (and hoping they come back!) I suppose it will get to be less exercise when I get better at this and the boomerang actually comes back to me, but for now, it's great to just be outdoors, having fun, without spending money, consuming or being part of some kind of movement.