Yesterday was the birthday of Nero, the Roman emperor who is said to have fiddled while the city burned in 64 CE. It’s not clear whether the fire was a case of arson, or just an accident, which wasn’t unusual in the day.
In any case, whenever I come across a reference to “fiddling while Rome burns,” I’m compelled to think of the parallels to our civilization today, and how we as a society are so strangely uninterested in and disconnected from the dangers we face in terms of wrecking our home planet. (more…)
Linked here is a prototype Green Home just done this year in California (of course). (Note: Clicking the link downloads the file.) It has 3 bedrooms / 3 baths, is 1,700 sq. ft. and targeted to sell for $ 300,000.00. Backers of the demonstration project say that the Craftsman-style house just finished at the Orange County Great Park can be reproduced for just $85 to $125 per square foot — equivalent to what most tract homes cost to build today.
I had a terrific time introducing myself to a room full of investors yesterday at the Maverick Angels’ Christmas party. I really like these people: bright, articulate, successful, and altruistic. I got some really good engagement from half a dozen or so on our summary of cleantech business opportunities, including a few very positive email discussions and a meeting set up for next week. These angels are not exclusively into sustainability, but there’s a sufficient level of interest to make the group of great value. More soon.
Like me, you are inundated with requests for financial support. We write annual checks to our old schools out of a sense of loyalty, and profound gratitude for what we took away. But beyond that, where does smart philanthropy go?
Obviously, we try to give where it makes the most difference. And to that end, here are two good candidates you may want to consider:
Amazon Watch. The Amazon rainforest is the source of 1/5th of the total oxygen and fresh water on the entire planet, yet we’re hacking and burning it down at the rate of 1.5 acres per second. The folks at Amazon Watch have both the raw guts to tackle the problem, and the teeth to get things done; they use the international legal system to halt the devastation of this region, on which all seven billion of us depend, whether we know it or not. I hope you’ll check out the video linked above; I found it truly inspirational.
Turimiquire Foundation. This is perhaps the best example of a group whose work symbolizes efficiency, as more than 93 cents of every dollar you donate goes directly to addressing real-world issues. Their efforts also get at the very root of a key source of human misery on this planet: a skyrocketing population of desperately poor, uneducated, and malnourished people, who themselves bring into the world many times more children on a per capita basis than those in the developed world. For three decades, Turimiquire has proven its effectiveness in breaking the cycle of poverty, largely with education and family planning.
As you contemplate your gift list this holiday season, I hope you’ll consider a donation to one or both of these fine institutions.
The annual Smart Grid Distribution Automation conference is in Raleigh, NC next February. If this were local, I’d probably check it out, but it’s too specialized to warrant making a trip out of town.
American short-story author Grace Paley. She grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx, where she was surrounded by a wide variety of languages. Her own parents spoke Yiddish and Russian at home, and English in public. She loved to hear the different tongues, and especially loved listening to all the gossip, but when she first started writing poetry, she wrote in a formal, stilted British style because she thought that’s what poems were supposed to sound like. Then, in college, she met W.H. Auden and he agreed to read her work. She later recalled: “We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, ‘Do you really talk like that?’ And I kept saying, ‘Oh yeah, well, sometimes.’ That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you’d better talk your own language.”
I do enough writing that I tend to notice comments like this, and take what I can from them. Auden’s advice seems spot on to me. In fact, when I’m helping my kids with their writing assignments in school and they are having trouble getting started, I often ask them to look at me and tell me about the subject at hand. Then I say, “Excellent. Write that down.”
This is incredible. I had to view it twice. It’s another reason why we have to focus on China as a country that is soaring ahead of us in so many areas. This 30-story hotel took 15 days to build!
Notice each of the sections already has electric and water pipes installed and were tested for accuracy all prior to them leaving the factory. It appears like those “sections” formed and pretested at the factory, snug together like Lego building blocks. And look at the earthquake resistance level.
Thanks, Penny. It most certainly is incredible how the Chinese have zoomed past the U.S. in terms of technology, enabled by a number of factors – some praiseworthy, others not. In any case, it’s up to us to work hard to develop the cutting-edge technologies in the chief disciplines that will be important to world leadership in the 21st Century. Needless to say, clean energy is key among these arenas.
