das loft

I've set up a moblog for my travels called moloft. I hope I update it often enough for you to find it immensely entertaining. (Here is a link to the RSS feed so you can add it to your Google Start Page or Google Reader. What, you don't already have a feed aggregator set up with all your favourite blog feeds? Well, I never.)

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I highly recommend the film, The Constant Gardener. It's a drama, based on the novel by John le Carre, about the corruption of a pharmaceutical company leading to the death of an activist in Africa, and her husband's search for the truth. But oh man. I thought it was extremely well done (featuring British actors), and a real eye opener, too. It reminds me how much of a bubble I'm in, here in my happy civilized society. Do watch it, it's really good.

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They're taking the hobbits to Isengard (funny and lame). Here's an OGG I made of it.

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I booked a flight to San Francisco for me and Meta. We leave in a week - Thursday, March 2. I will have received my passport by then, says the passport office. Phew.

Marco thinks San Francisco is the prettiest city in the world. He took some pretty nice pictures during his trip to California. (On the right is one of his photos of Sausalito.) So Meta and I are probably going to spend at least the first couple days exploring it. Then we may venture to other nearby exploreworthy lands. There are lots of parks in the region. As if we'll get bored.

Then I'm most likely off to the Happy Brigade's intentional community (left). Meta's not sure what she'll be doing yet. She might want to head up to BC. I might stay at this community for a week or two, depending on how much I like it there.

There are two other communities/farms that I'd like to visit if I have time. One is an ecovillage called Alpha Farm, outside of Eugene, Oregon. The other is Tryon Farm (aka. Try/on Farm; not sure why they sometimes insert a '/' between 'Try' and 'on'), which is apparently a 15-minute bike ride from downtown Portland. They're playing salmon tag at Tryon Farm in the picture on the right.

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One of the Slashdot editors posted the article by Ken Deffeyes about oil having peaked on Dec. 16, 2005 several days ago, which sparked a lot of discussion by the Slashdot crowd. A lot of the highly moderated comments actually sounded reasonably enlightened to me, but some members of PeakOil.com, who were also monitoring the discussion, had different opinions:

... other than one or two references to peakoil.net (as well as POdebunked.com) I saw nothing but -

ethanol will save us
nukes will save us
hydrogen will save us
we don't need to be saved

What I did see is a lot of fear. Programmers are at the top of the complex world's food chain right now. That changes quite a bit if billion dollar silicon plants are no longer the norm.

Just because they're smart, does not mean they don't still suffer from large doses of denial. The high tech geeks have to face one of the biggest adjustments in the coming 'realignment'. They're as scared shitless as anyone, they just don't grok it yet.

They will.

That just made me laugh a bit. And this:

I don't see why mathematicians couldn't produce food. Many intellectuals are/were gardeners. I don't personally see a conflict. Even mathematicians should get some fresh air and exercise.

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DeeLoaf posted a good peak oil primer: a roundtable with Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler (MP3, 9.4 MB). It's 54 minutes long, and really interesting, especially if you haven't seen The End of Suburbia yet. But it's still worth it if you've already seen it.

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This is rather impressive news. (I'm betting someone gave the Swedish government a copy of The End of Suburbia.)

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Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy
· 15-year limit set for switch to renewable energy
· Biofuels favoured over further nuclear power

John Vidal, environment editor
Wednesday February 8, 2006
The Guardian

Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.

The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.

Continued here...

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"America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world," said Bush, a former Texas oilman, in the annual nationally televised evening address to a joint session of Congress. "The best way to break this addiction is through technology."

This seems to be what most people think - that the energy crisis can be solved by technology. But most peak oil experts would say it's not as simple as that. The problem is that America - and most of the rest of the world - is addicted to energy, and we're approaching an energy crisis because the global oil supply is peaking. According to people well versed in peak oil, like Howard Kunstler, "technology" alone is not a solution. Kunstler instead proposes restoring passenger rail systems, supporting local agriculture in earnest, rebuilding local networks of retail trade and economic interdependency for when the Big Boxes die of oil starvation, and setting legal limits on new suburban sprawl. It's not rocket science, it's common sense.

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