Sunday 29 June 2008

The Energy Question of 2008

Krugman with Olbermann on "The Energy Question of 2008"

Gas Prices Run Off the Road

A report shows that some American families simply cannot afford to drive anymore, with Jeff Rubin, CIBC World Markets chief economist and CNBC's Mark Haines.

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Bill Moyers on Big Oil | PBS

A Bill Moyers essay on big oil. Airs Friday, June 27, at 9p.m.

Running on Empty: Life Without Cheap Oil

It's not a question of if, but when. Futurist and author James Howard Kunstler talks about life in a world without cheap oil.

Tuesday 24 June 2008

Use your brain power Luke!



When you put the headset on for the first time, Emotiv's software takes you through a number of routines to determine what your mind looks like when you think, say, "lift." Then, the next time you think "lift," your brain will (hopefully) produce a similar EEG wave, and the system will know what you want.

When it hits store shelves by the end of the year, Emotiv's $299 headset -- for PC games only, at least at first -- will include one game that incorporates many of these pattern-learning routines. At Emotiv's office here in San Francisco, I played a version of this intro game. In it, you play a martial-arts warrior in training. Your warrior-master guides you through techniques that help you translate your thoughts into on-screen actions.

Thinking my way through a video game was terrific fun. The warrior-master asked me to clear my mind, and then to imagine myself levitating a boulder a few feet off the ground. I concentrated, my brain working as hard as it's ever worked. [Ed's. note: You're making this too easy...]

The boulder began to levitate, but as soon as it did, my excitement that the thing was working broke my concentration, and the boulder tumbled.

I tried again, and this time the game responded within a second -- the boulder floated off the ground. As I pushed through the warrior landscape, I was asked to move more and bigger hurdles -- a mountain, a bridge I had to get across -- and by the third or fourth time, the objects seemed almost to be lifting themselves. I didn't even have to think about thinking: Simply seeing the object, comprehending that it needed to be lifted, sent it flying up. There was something very nearly magical to it.

Monday 23 June 2008

ASPO6 - Time to React?

Peak oil has arrived. Deal with it.

Sunday 22 June 2008

They still dance !

Great clip, thx Rachel.

Friday 20 June 2008

Opening Statement

Ezra Levant's opening statement

Wednesday 18 June 2008

American Theocracy: Radical Religion Oil and Borrowed Money

Kevin Phillips examines the axis of religion, politics, and borrowed money that threatens to destroy the nation. He maintains that every world-dominating power has been brought down by a related set of causes: a lethal combination of global over-reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt. Series: "Walter H. Capps Center Series" [1/2007] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 12093]

Friday 13 June 2008

Focus Fusion: Un flakey energy



Of the three approaches to achieving hydrogen-boron fusion, focus fusion, using the dense plasma focus device, has experimentally achieved conditions that are closest to those needed for net power generation. It is the only approach that can utilize the high magnetic field effect, which reduces the cooling of plasma by x-rays, helping to achieve the multi-billion-degree temperatures needed for fusion. A currently-planned three-year, $2 million experiment, if funded, can demonstrate the scientific feasibility of focus fusion.

This presentation will review the history and status of focus fusion and briefly compare it to the two competing approaches, Field Reversed Configuration (recently funded by Paul Allen) and Inertial Electrostatic Confinement, championed by Dr. Robert Bussard, a recent Google Tech Talk speaker.

Speaker: Eric Lerner
Eric J. Lerner is President of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in West Orange, NJ and Executive Director of the Focus Fusion Society. He has been an independent researcher in plasma physics since 1979, and has become internationally known for his studies linking cosmic plasma phenomena and laboratory fusion devices, especially the dense plasma focus. He has developed original theories of quasars, large scale structure, the microwave background and the origin of light elements. He is the author of The Big Bang Never Happened, published in 1991 by Random House. In 2006 he was a Visiting Scientist at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

Wednesday 11 June 2008

Robert F. Kennedy challenges Gross Domestic Product

I sense that we are in a time of great change, perhaps of the same historical magnitude as the fall of Rome and the descent of Europe into the Dark Ages, the concommitant rise of the superior power and culture of Islam, the Renaissance, and the drive to throw off the Colonial chains of Europe that swept across the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The end of the era of unlimited and cheap energy is certainly part of this sea change.

How the United States adapts to the new environment will determine its future and its standing in the new world order.

A new philosophical framework will be required. Our definition of "good" and "sucessful" will have to change. Over the last three thousand years the ascendent philosophies were, in chronological succession: Paganism, Islam, Christianity and Enlightenment rationality.
"We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missles and nuclear warheads.... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children. "And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials... the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America -- except whether we are proud to be Americans."

The New Age will require a new philosophy, and the people that is the most creative at crafting this new philophy will dominate tomorrow's world, both from a power and cultural perspective.

Tuesday 10 June 2008

Sunday 1 June 2008

Coming Credit Consumer Crisis Part 2

Interview with Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimer and Co.: Securitization Has Dried Up, Consumers Face Liquidity Crisis.

The Coming Consumer Credit Crisis (Part 1)

Interview with Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimer and Co.: Securitization Has Dried Up, Consumers Face Liquidity Crisis.