Sorting Family Photos

...t home, with a friend and in the cloud (Though I feel some guilt about the energy used for cloud storage of photos I might not look at). And they don’t’ suggest throwing out the originals. Lacking a way to project the films and slides, digitizing is the only way that I’ll be able to see them. But there’s a funny way in which grief works. With the photos in the shed I could put off dealing with the loss of my parents by keeping that grief at a dist...

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127 Apocalypse Now with Father Mark Kowalewski

...ent opinions on the nature of this end, everything from climate change, to energy depletion, to nuclear war to more fringy ideas such as near term extinction. I’ve always been interested in the stories that our cultures tell about the end of the world and what those stories say about present realities. Behind, on one end, the grim future of Mad Max, to another extreme, the techno optimist Mars colony fantasies of Silicon Valley executives is a gho...

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Saturday Tweets: Lyme Disease, Unuselessness and a Plum Mystery

...gether. (This, and well, stadiums, to be fair) pic.twitter.com/OSR91WCoPF — Angie Schmitt (@schmangee) May 2, 2018 This is a mind-boggling story. The fossil fuel industry hired hundreds of actors to pretend they were citizens and testify at pubic hearings against renewable energy. And it worked.https://t.co/rSuPmMcWJY — Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) May 4, 2018 i just published a new blog post: "The Terribly Thin Conception of Ethics in Digital Te...

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Natural Cooling: The Fresh Air Bed

...t the window. The idea lives on, but only for cats, in the form of the Cat Solarium and in many homebrew kitty window solutions. But enough about cats, what we really need is to bring back the California Fresh Air Bed Company’s clever indoor/outdoor bed. As many consider downsizing to smaller houses, space and energy saving furniture such as this make more sense than the oversized sofa sectionals that plague our modern mega-houses. Save Save Save...

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What Does California’s Prop 64 Say About Home Marijuana Cultivation?

...the cause of a lot of environmental damage and violence. Indoor growing is energy intensive and inefficient. It’s my hope that Proposition 64 will improve the current situation by legalizing personal growing (though I wish that municipalities did not have so much control over outdoor growing). Enacting laws against plants seems arrogant, and reminds me of King Canute’s demonstration of the futility of willing the tide not to come in. I have no int...

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