2 Needs for UK Sustainable energy infrastructure

A financing company or quango - needs to allow people and businesses to invest in renewable energy - solar panels, wind turbines, etc but pay it back slowly so as to immediately see any rewards in terms of lower monthly prices etc.
Home energy management infrastructure: So that lots of small renewable energy solutions can be used together seamlessly - all plug into "inverse" plugs for example, which feed energy into the house (or back to the grid, but mostly people won't have the money to invest in something that generates that much energy - only the Camerons of the high income world). Lots of renewable tech charges batteries for example - perhaps this aspect should be seamless: on a windy day more energy would come from a turbine, on rainy days from the hydro, from sunny days from the sky... This shouldn't matter to people. The equivalent of the IBM PC or of USB plugs - if one thing doesn't work, plug in another one and use that...

Problem is, the government might never fund or start this kind of thing on their own! Who will do it?

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Eduserv Symposium 2008

I came to attend this symposium out of the blue, having seen an email late one Wednesday afternoon, saying our assistant director was too ill to go, and after a quick look at the programme, I realised it was a follow-up to an event I'd seen on video a while back where an entire conference on Second Life had been trashed by a talk which had argued it was all pretty much useless hype. So if this year's presentations were going to be in that vein, it sounded like like a fun time. This being a web 2 conference, lots of it was used, including a live chat backchannel ( http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/livechat powered by cover it live streaming software: http://www.coveritlive.com/ ), a ning based conference centred social networking site (which as expected didn't achieve critical mass but was a nice feature all the same), and of course lots lots more. Eduserv's Andy Powell started the day talking about these "Disruptive technologies" we know so...

Poem for peace, from a pirate recording in a Cairo Museum.

My love With peace I have placed loving flowers at your feet With peace With peace I stopped the seas of blood for you Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come Come and live with me my love Under a blanket of peace I want you to sing, beloved light of my eyes And your song will be for peace let the world hear, my beloved and say: Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come And live in peace These I believe are the words of a widow at the tomb of her beloved. I got the words from this italian website . It was used in a seminal Italian anti-war song " Luglio Agosto Settembre Nero " by the band Area (although I guess they weren't called anti-war songs then) - whose vocalist Demetrio Stratos indirectly gives the name to this blog, and whose music is the inspiration for a lot of my mine. It's adapted in turn from a greek folk song, but no-one knows who wrote the original words, except that Stratos was probably...

10 More minutes: From gift economies to celebration economies

An article by Richard Heinberg, " Economic History in 10 Minutes " which I read the other day, inspired me to look a bit more into more elaborate economies than simply gift/tribal based, that might escape people's thoughts as they search for alternatives to the current (failed?) economic system. His article is a good summary of a lot of peak oiler economics although I've heard him and others say these things before lots of times and in different ways. Heinberg points to our addiction to fossil fuels as the central reason for lots of current problems, and the article treasures hunter gatherer cultures with their gift economies as a possible future or as something to move towards. Doing something in 10 minutes is bound to leave something out. It would be easy to believe, reading his article, that we once were all happy and shared everything, then - boom! - iPods. (He actually says " So letting go of the gift economy was a trade-off for progress—houses, cities,...

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