What the Internet Will Look Like After the Zombie Apocalypse

...k at a node. The routers can even be powered by small 12 volt batteries or solar panels. To be clear, this is a wireless network that is independent of the internet (though you could route the internet over it). Such a network could be used in an emergency such as an earthquake or weather event to send digital messages. It’s also the means by which I could continue to send out cute cat photos even if things go full-on Cormac McCarthy You could use...

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Our Keyhole Vegetable Bed: What Worked and What Didn’t Work

...to our chickens and the compost pile. Ignore the large pot–that’s a future solar powered fountain that will be incorporated in a new vegetable garden we’re working on. Here’s what the keyhole bed looked like just after I installed it back in October. Note the compost repository in the center of the bed. I used straw wattle (available where professional irrigation supplies are sold) to form the sides of the keyhole. A month later in November a few...

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“Interstellar”: Leaving the farm for the stars

...is our place in the universe. And, practically speaking, the rest of this solar system is inhospitable to life and the stars are so remote we’ll never reach them. We really need to tell different stories than this one. Kelly: Yup. And to be clear, neither of us is anti-science — we just want to look a little more closely at the stories we tell ourselves in this culture. For instance, why can’t we see a story which tells about people rebuilding af...

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The Elf and Ethics

...YHRNG95duU The Elf is a kind of aerodynamic, electric assist tricycle with solar panels to charge the batteries. It’s a type of vehicle, somewhere between a bike and a car, that a number of inventors have tinkered with over the years. Good arguments exist for and against this type of transportation. On the one hand it uses far fewer resources than an automobile. But one could also argue, as does the owner of a bike shop in this video, that we’d al...

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