jackd

This is an awesome guide from the DOE entitled "Engineering Symbology, Prints, and Drawings" and it covers P&IDs, wiring, Electronic, Mechanical and many, many more. If you like symbols or engineering or graphing/drafting, check it out.

From the Internet Engineering Task Force, the group who sets the standards you know and love, comes a new protocol to CHANGE YOUR LIFE.


"This document describes HTCPCP, a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots.
1. Rationale and Scope
There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which computing is ubiquitous, the computists want to make coffee. Coffee brewing is an art, but the distributed intelligence of the web- connected world transcends art. Thus, there is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee. Coffee is brewed using coffee pots. Networked coffee pots require a control protocol if they are to be controlled.
[...]
2.3.2 418 I'm a teapot


Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error
code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and
stout.
[...]"

This is an awe-inspiring, tragic, funny, heartwarming, unique, bizarre film about a family farm handed down to a different kind of farmer. Pseudo-hippy-commune in the 60's, almost lost during the 70's, revived as a permaculture CSA in the 90's, this farm and this man have been through a lot and have the character to show for it. PBS has more.

"Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities." By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and "evolve to freedom.""


And they are doing some amazing work. Be sure to check out the accompanying Development Wiki for information on how to build the LifeTrac tractor with accompanying tools like a compressed earth block press to build your dwellings. Also considers heat and power generation, constructing the tools to construct more tools, of course agriculture and MUCH MUCH MORE. Highly detailed and superbly thought-out, this is one of the most inspiring and ambitious projects I've seen in quite some time.

Awesome. I'd like to see the city buses in Milwaukee do this - lord knows we have enough fried food here to get the oil from.

"Students in Pioneer Westfield High School's agribusiness classes are turning used cooking oil from area restaurants and a chicken factory into biodiesel fuel for the district's fleet of buses. As a bonus, they're turning the byproduct - glycerin resulting from the chemical process - into earth-friendly citrus-scented soaps, which they're selling.

District Administrator Roger Schmidt says all 22 of the school district's buses are running exclusively on an 80/20 blend of biodiesel and petroleum-based diesel, saving between $60,000 and $100,000 per year, depending on the price of diesel."

This is an excellent paper by Stanislov Graf on 2012 and human transformation.

More on junk DNA, this research shows its importance in allowing adaptation to new environments. Think of all the billions of years of life experience it took and the extent of the abilities that may be encoded in the 670 billion base pairs of the Amoeba dubia. Compare that to the relatively specialized (or maybe just compressed?) 2.9 billion that we have.


"These changes affect the local DNA packaging, which in turn alters gene activity. In this way, unstable junk DNA allows fast shifts in gene activity, which may allow organisms to tune the activity of genes to match changing environments -- a vital principle for survival in the endless evolutionary race."