Quick update:
Now using optical out from the eeeBox to the AV DACs (better sound).
This is also working for Spotify, which is nice.
Updated to CDex 1.7 for ripping as this now has FLAC encoding built in. No need for EAC any more, though I still have to compress to mp3 for the ‘phone.
Since most of my favourite CDs/tracks are now digitsed on my PC and phone, my hifi has been sitting there feeling a little out of the loop. Last year I bought an Apple Airport Express, which allowed WinAmp to stream to my hifi over the wireless LAN. That’s been OK, but means the PC needed to be on, with WinAmp configured to send to remote speakers, to listen to any of it. Too much faff plus another A-D-A conversion in the path.
I went looking for other solutions, and really – they’re all too expensive for what they do – so I’ve put a simple ‘media server’ solution together for under £400.
Parts:
ASUS eeeBox (B202) / 160 Gig HD (a very quiet mini server) – £200
Lilliput 7in touchscreen monitor – £160
AlbumPlayer – touchscreen optimised player/library £30
Installed, this sits on my hifi rack for touchsceen use.
Album player is designed for touchscreen use – there’s even an on screen keyboard.
My master store of mp3s and FLACs are on the main PC – I simply copy the files / folders I want over the wifi to the Asus. Album player discovers them in a ‘Picasa’ sort of way and off you go. Can create playlists and custom libraries (very different ones for me and Zarina for instance!). Only glitch so far is that the album covers aren’t all being automatically sourced from the album folders.
No specific remote yet – waiting on an iPhone for that 8^).
Now I only have the problem of finding time to sit down and listen to music again…
Hubble was pointed at an area of sky with only a couple of faint stars in this galaxy.
Thus, everything here in this tiny patch of sky, other than the obvious stars, are galaxies.
Give your mind some time to adjust…
Like to know how big, big can be? Zoom out from the local group of stars…
James Lovelock is a hard-nosed scientist. No hippy dippy stuff here. Well, OK, not much. Gaia has ended up being a less than useful label for the earth system purely because its apparent hippydippyness makes many (including myself for some years) skirt around it.
Despite his reputation as a ‘radical’ Lovelock is far from it, he is part of and has mostly operated within the scientific establishment, is an FRS and is one of the few Greens to operate within it. 22 years a biochemist (where he was the first to detect atmospheric CFC levels) before going independent, helping NASA build instruments to detect life on other planets, and coming up with the Gaia hypothesis after seeing the first images of earth from space.
Gaia Theory is conceptually elegant and simple. Simple like evolution by natural selection, gravity or e=mc2 – and how may of us truly understand these concepts? In other words, its a simple concept, but with hugely complex reasoning behind it.
In Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock is very convincing about the imminent critical environmental tipping points we are fast approaching or may actually have crossed. Work on the Gaia hypothesis has led to understanding (not not always accepted) how important factors such as sea algae and trapped fossil methane are to the regulation of global temperature, and thus how planetary heating can induce devastating positive feedback that would move the ‘earth system’ of planetary homeostatis to a warmer state, one devastating to humans among other species. In the next 40-50 years, apart from devastating flooding Europe will rapidly lose its mild, fertile climate and quite simply, crops won’t grow well enough to support current populartion levels. These ideas and propositions are still somethat radical within science, and very Inconvenient to just about everyone else.
Along with other Greens he calls for radical policy and lifestyle change to cut emissions, cut energy waste and stop reliance on fossil fuels – returning to more sustainable relationships with the natural world. He’s convinced sustainable ‘development’ is no longer possible and a sustainable retreat is our only option for the survival of our current civilisation.
One advantage of his being within the establishment so to speak (though having a brain the size of a planet also helps here!) is that he sees that even big ‘environmental’ science done for the ‘right’ reasons can be knee-jerk reaction not always for the good. Examples he gives include DDT (which used properly and with discretion is very effective against malaria but has been blanket-banned), On (the banning of chemical) nitrates, he also points out (to me at least) the quiet revolution in UK agriculture that led to the massive over-farming of cattle in the 80/90s – leading to the pollution of many rural rivers and ending in the F&M and BSE epidemics.
Where he parts company with many Greens is in his proposed solutions to the impending crisis.
He does not think, as capitalists would like, that technology can pull us out of this hole alone. nevertheless he believes that overall it can be a positive force. He advocates nuclear as the only medium term provider of power in the coming decades, to avoid continuing to destroy the earth system.
Did you feel an instant almost emotional reaction to the n word? Many of us now do.
Nuclear power, he says, has been clearly stigmatised by association with its military use, and we need to move beyond that. In fact he thinks moving beyond that is crucial to the survival of our civilisation. Greens of our generation are the sons and daughters of the CND generation: we can’t help our earliest influences.
He dismisses Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as seriously damaging human health on any scale, especially compared to deaths caused by other forms of energy production and presents data to support this.
Another example: In 1962, during the height of US/USSR/UK etc nuclear weapons testing, as much radiation was put into the atmosphere as from two Chernobyl disasters a week for a year.
Let me restate that. In 1962, 104 times the radiation from the Chernobyl accident was released into the atmospshere in one year.
No one has found any correlation between that fact and global health issues, raises in cancer incidence or any other index of human health. Indeed, it improved during those years.
He’s very clear on this and to me its where his whole nuclear thesis rests – given the media/popular view of such disasters. He does not mention however, that nuclear ‘waste’ can be reprocessed for weapons. This is also Inconventient.
He does not think nuclear fission is the long term solution to powering civilisation – indeed he’s clear that renewables are very young and will mature, and that fusion is also a long term option. However, during the critical next few decades in which the pressure to develop could truly bring on a revenge* of Gaia he feels its the source of energy with the least impact on the environment (Gaia).
* Up to 40 meters higher sea level over the next 50-100 years, with the massive population displacement and global crises these will engender if not planned for, a cold Europe if the Gulf stream halts, followed later by (for us) overheating and more extremes as global temperatures rise. Most of the worlds largest cities are close to sea level and many are close to the sea. ‘Gaia’s revenge’ is the wiping out of unsupportable populations.
So. I have work to do. The Revenge of Gaia was very convincing on several fronts and I’m with him most of the way. But on the impact of nuclear, I am not going to sign up to his (and Patrick Moore and David Bellamy’s) agenda until I’ve collated some primary evidence. I’m going to find the time to gather the reports and papers done on the effects of nuclear accidents and the issues surrounding nuclear waste. Just how dangerous is it on a global scale?
Why the hell do that you may ask?
I’m on the brink of a major change in my worldview here – one that possibly all of us, from greens to blues, doves to hawks should be making and as a (n ex-) scientist I can’t do that without reading the evidence first hand if and where I can.
Of course there are plenty of things in the book to disagree with beyond this: Lovelock complains about the impractical ‘romanticism’ of Greens, and yet elsewhere expresses a romantic view of the ‘pre-agribusiness countryside’ being further spoiled – in his view – by wind farms. Of more concern is his contention that ‘organic smallholders’ are also part of this Green utopian vision and are not a sustainable concept – I presume because they don’t produce enough of a profitable surplus. Organic farming, to me, is entirely compatible with ‘intensive’ if by that we mean making agriculture and husbandry as efficient as possible within natural constraints. Improvements in husbanding and working with nature brought on by a deeper understanding of how farms can work within habitats means that such farms are far more productive than the ‘pre-industrial’ smallholder (try not to read ‘peasant’ into this, I might suggest).
He’s negative enough to envision a post apocalyptic world and suggest a monastic approach to the survival of knowledge – all a bit of a post-nuclear Canticle For Leibowitz.
Conclusions
Overall, I am reasonably convinced that Gaia exists. That is, for over 3 billion of its 4 billion or so years, life has changed the environment around it to the point at both now ‘act’ on global scale, to self regulate – keeping conditions dynamically unstable but just right for life. Sold. Also sold (unlike Bellamy) is the fragility of this system and the immanent danger we are in. Small question of how to escape disaster is here, now for those who would listen. Putting the cardboard in a different waste bag is no longer enough.
We are not as important as our planet and we’ve been acting like a rampant virus. Unlike a virus we can understand that our host now has an unsustainable temperature. What’s to do?
I love NASA’s detailed images but why don’t they make them explorable? Here are some of my favourites in a zoomable format.
I am investigating setting up some photovoltaic solar panels at home. Its apparently quite expensive to do in the UK as the granting system is now poor [http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/generate_your_own_energy/grants_for_renewables]. In Germany they seem to have it sorted [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany].
Why photovoltaic and not the direct heating of water type? The water heating type are apparently slightly more ‘efficient’. However, they work best with a hot water tank – we don’t have one as we use a condensing boiler, so it would mean reconfiguring our heating setup; not cheap to do.
I did contact a couple of companies, but was immediately faced with the Hard Sell techniques they seem to have nicked from the Double Glazing companies. I hate this approach.
Also, these systems have moving parts (a pump) and are sometimes not as long lasting as you may expect [].
Photvoltaics (the blue ones) generate electricity directly and feed into batteries or back into the mains. Thus, you can use them e.g. to power all your ‘rechargeables’ off the grid, or feed back into the grid to offset againt your fuel bill. Here’s a basic setup checklist
Where will it go?
We have a garage roof facing SW and will have a new extension roof in the same alignment next year.
This will be a DIY project – I am going to source all the components and built it myself with help from a builder to fix to the roof. If it works out I’ll publish a How To as well as using this blog to diary the build.
So far:
I have found a local maker of photovoltaics so will try to blag a used one to test with. http://www.rayotec.com/solar_power/
Here’s their cute little diagram:
There also seems to be a lot of useful info here: http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/
If you have any used components or experience of doing this, please let me know!
So far I’ve been for a walk every Sunday morning this year (2008). Sometimes on my own, sometimes taking one or more of my kids.
Last weekend I took my son around Burleigh wood and Begbroke and we saw deer, a hare and birds of prey. Also found house I’d love to live in – Village End in Begbroke. Gorgeous.
This Sunday I was up a little early – to find the kids busy with Mother’s day present making, so I slipped out and just decided to walk ‘eastish’ on my own. This meant about 20 minutes walking on roads, but once past the Park and Ride you’re in countryside. I walked down to Water Eaton, now almost a deserted village, but still with its Hall and a couple of farms. Walking past the Hall and looking back westwards the one could almost be in the 17th century – house, dovecote, chapel and walls all clean and bright in the March morning. Google map of the area.
The footpath continued over a bridge on the Cherwell, into farmland. Thirty or so swans were roosting in the field behind the hall and as I watched, nine more flew in to land from the direction of Cuttesloe. The path seems to disappear at the end of this field, by a large drainage ditch or natural stream (it was difficult to tell, but the water was not stagnant) – certainly it felt like the kind of place I might meet Little Grey Men, or at least spot a kingfisher. Eventually I found a footbridge over the stream/ditch – half obscured by a fallen tree, and followed my nose westwards. Walking up a rise I turned to survey a large swathe of Noth Oxfordshire, mist-free and bathed in the morning sun. Eventually there was no further path to the hilltop (I call it a hill, but in my Yorkshire homeland terms it was a low rise – this is Oxfordshire after all!). I’m glad I didn’t break out of the path, as Googlemap reveals an open-caste mine at the top. That would have burst my bucolic rural bubble.
The footpath became a rutted track and snaked south around a large 30’s house in its own grounds, wonderful verandas and horses in the meadow. The farm track turned back eastwards and suddenly in front of me was a Church spire. I had no idea where I’d turned up. I then passed a huge building on the left behind a large but dilapidated wall – it had a somewhat forbidding aspect and I wondered what it could be – some form of prison? Once past it a sign proved it to be Woodeaton School… I don’t envy the students. Googlemap the area.
The path ended shortly in Woodeaton, a tiny hamlet west of Islip. There is a small old church (13Century, mostly) – the Holy Rood – so I chanced that the door would be open. On entering I was confronted with a large medieaval painting of a saint. It appears that not all such decoration was completely whitewashed away and it was interesting to glimpse the sort of decoration most churches in England once had.
I have a strange attitude towards churches. Though I consider my self an atheist, I am drawn to them. The sheer weight of time, architecture, and sense of strength? In Woodeaton it appears that the church remains very much a centre of what community remains in such places, as a weighty local newsletter proved. These village churches are still impressive today – imagine how they were perceived in 1200! The Normans did something right.
Historically the ‘church’ religion does appear to have worked as a physical centre, substantiating the moral framework governing the lives of people. Apart from priest – induced fear, what kept people tied to them? They project a civilising influence of safety, certainty and peace in an era when FUD could make lives nasty, brutish and short, even if the Church’s attitude could be uncivilised. The universe does not scare so many educated people these days and religions lose influence. However, I can see some of why modern villages find them so important.
I turned back the way I’d come – it was such an interesting walk that I was not going to lose anything by repetition. Walking back down the farm track I spotted a couple of tiny black and white birds I could not place. As small as wrens, but more like tits. I will have to look them up. Rounded the corner and headed downhill, into a stiff westerly, but this only acted as natural aircon for me – by now I was warm and up to my usual walking speed. Coming down that hill I had a moment of ‘oneness’, I guess. Looking out over the Cherwell valley I realised I was happy, mind blank, drinking in the essence of it all – the wind, fresh air, skylarks twittering. This has become more than a habit, its become important to get out on these walks. Its grounding me. I think I’ll be back.
The previous post contained a distillation of Will Hutton’s deconstruction of the USA as an economic and political beacon for the UK to follow.
He admonishes us to look away from US to Europe. Its a powerful argument so long as we don’t oversimplify the issues.
For UK sustainable development our culture, via the Government (and enterprise culture as a whole) needs to enable economic development and growth in the longer term by reducing (penalising?) the short termist, shareholder-profit focus of ‘US style’ companies. This in favour of a holistic approach that treats staff (and even customers) as owners, or at least stakeholders, of the business (some of these do exist in the UK already, of course), and not disposable commodities after the US model.
Underlying this is a need to not only accept that ’society’ exists and has a culture that is not like that oif the US, and to embrace it and encourage participation as part of corporate life and its interaction with the rest of life. The ’social contract’. The US pays lip service but its a fundamentally dog-eat-dog society where individual freedom is paramount over all as enshrined in the Constitution, and thus US society fragments and Ghetto-ises even the rich (gated communities anyone?).
The ‘West’ would do better with the US on-side, no doubt. But not the current neo-con US, thank you very much. Gore’s ‘defeat’ in 2000 has been a major stumbling block to ‘world progress’ in my book, and possibly Will’s.
So what does he suggest as an alternative?
Europe.
Not a cow-towing enslavement to Europe but an engagement, with our own solutions where approriate. He also feels that we can heal many of our own ills. An example is pension provision. Barbera Castle, in the mid 1970’s, proposed a system of national pension to exist in parallel with private mechanisms and extend national insurance. This now appears remarkably insightful, and its very sad that it never came to be. Many people face an uncertain old age in the UK because of the pensions debacle and will have to rely on the generosity of future Governments. Many European countries have similar better state pension systems, and if they are struggling in some ways, its only because they are being cautious and saving to meet the needs of thier elderly – we’ve not been doing in the UK, and that’s really worrying.
The social contract – a theme repeated in the book, one pretty absent from UK politics for some decades. And yet many of us do not want to go the American way of widening the poverty gap, social incohesion, fundamentalism and human value secondary to shareholder value – short term profit focus as opposed to the longer term view taken in Europe.
What do we (as British people) want that the US population is systematically being denied?
- high quality public services (health, education, local services)
- properly functioning and non stigmatised public transport
- decent social provision
All traditional Labour calling cards. Only this time, Labour have been acting very Conservative.
Gordon Brown’s government will be judged, at least by me, on how he addresses these points while hopefully, edging us away from the vacuous and ethicallybankrupt US neo-con model.
Amazing book. Some key bits:
Religion and the US:
His contention is that the US overall political outlook is driven largely by the philosophical work of Leo Strauss (Natural Rights and History, Chicago University Press, 1953), a refugee from the Nazis promoting the ‘virtuous, morally cenreted citizen’ who must ‘face the consequenses of thier individual actions’ (i.e. law but without the State regulating too much). A key point is his view that religion and nationalism are two of the best ways to ‘entrench virtue’ . ‘Even if religion were bunk and its moral codes impossible to maintian, the task of the educated elite was to keep quiet and maintain the fiction in the name of order‘. And thus of course he’s only stating what many a leader / government has done over the centuries. But remember – Bush et al are living by these maxims. To me this is more dangerous than secularism and will lead to further polarisation of view and the movement of the US away from rationality. It is as Hatton says, a ‘lethal legacy’.
The mirage of the American Dream:
Bottom 20% of US population are locked in to poverty due to lack of available education and lack of social ’safetly nets’ – analyses have found that poor folk in the US are LESS likely to escape the poverty trap than in the UK, Europe, Canada and even if they do, are more likely to return. 54% of people in the bottom 20% in the 60s were still there in the 90s, but only 1% had migrated to the top 20% (all of this is publically available research). So much for ’social mobility’. For the middle 60% – economics is on a long term down term with stagnating wages, and a crazy mortgage system that is worse than the UK already and getting worse all the time (and part of the cause of the current ‘credit markets flutter’). The top 20% are doing fine of course, as the system remains geared to them.
There’s more on why the UK should look more to Europe. One for later.
