Bengaluru Gay Pride Parade 28th June, 2009

The three of us friends gathered at National College at 2.15 in the afternoon. It was sunny and the pockets of people already gathered there didn't portend the coming festivities.

As people strolled in, a few began to pull out colourful umbrellas, wigs, hats, flags and masks and within a few minutes I found myself surrounded by rainbows. Slowly, the media began to jostle and shove its way through for sound bytes and photographs.

The MOST vibrant lot were the transgenders. They displayed their sexuality with such flamboyance I was transfixed for many a moment.

The drummers arrived shortly after ward and then there was mild mayhem as people gyrated their hips and raised their hands towards the skies in utter enjoyment.

I felt my pulse begin to race and a smile creep up from the corner of my lips. It was so infectious that I had found it difficult to walk while tapping my feet to the rhythm of the drummers.

Three djembe players then performed intricately weaved beats in perfect synchrony as the two dogs in the car behind them looked on in mild confusion. :)

The march began and so did the sloganeering. At some points, people didn't even know what to say into the microphone. They were too busy enjoying themselves.

After much dancing, shouting, waving and photographing, we reached our destination - Town Hall and the gathering turned to listen to a few words from various members of the LGBT community.

In the middle of this, I noticed some magicians gathered at the Town Hall as well. A substantial number of activists and LGBTs went across to see what they were upto while a throng of avid magic lovers came over to see what these people in strrraange get ups were doing. Quite fascinating to watch such different sets of people mingle. Magicians and LGBTs :)

A small disagreement broke out and was quickly drowned by the voices of people, the cheering of the crowd and the drummers' intoxicating beat.

Then one final dance and almost as suddenly as it had erupted, it was all over. Brightly coloured feathers rode the gentle breezes to reach the other side of the road and silence embraced me once again as I tried to collect my thoughts on the event I had just been a part of.

We jumped into an auto and headed back home, completely exhausted and happy that we had participated in something as vibrant as this.

Man in the Mirror - RIP MJ

Gaon chodab nahi

The song describes the present day exploitation of tribal land and forests in the name of development.

How to make a RED swing

How to: Make a Red Swing Project from Red Swing on Vimeo.

Concrete Steps

100 Awesome Open Courses for Those Who Want to Change the World

100 Awesome Open Courses for Those Who Want to Change the World

Shared via AddThis

Future-Proofing Urban Energy: Germany

In an interesting bit of synchronisity today, both the Victoria Times Colonist in Canada and the Times of India run stories today about local energy generation in Germany towns and cities. The centre of the two stories couldn't be much more different: Freiburg is a city of 200,000 that has been winning prizes and attracting attention since the early 1990s for its environmental efforts, Freimat on the other hand is a lesser known cluster of agricultural villages of 4,300 people in the Black Forest. Both generate an impressive amount of power from solar or wind power, often generating a surplus that they can sell back to the grid. The result is both the self-sufficiency and low-transmission losses of locally produced power, a decreased reliance on imported carbon-heavy energy, and a financial profit for those involved.



The Freiamt difference, and what has got it into the papers, is that the region has not only achieved total energy self-sufficiency, but has a net energy surplus. By pooling their money local residents purchased first a series of wind turbines, a array of solar panels which is distributed across rooves in the area and now a series of biogas digesters that both process agricultural waste and generate energy.

Support from local citizens is part of the equation that has made these successes possible. In Frieburg it began with opposition to a proposed nuclear power plant close to the city. In Freimat it was local farmers looking for another way to make ends meet. But the other crucial component is the support these local groups got from Germany's federal energy laws. The national "feed-in tariff" not only make it possible for small renewable energy producers to feed energy into the grid, but also guarantees them a premium price for their juice. The tariff went in in 2004 and since then enough solar has gone up on houses and business to replace 6 conventional power plants ( 3,000Mw).

Newsweek quips that: "Freiamt is no hippie commune trying to shut itself off from the world." Maybe that still needs to be said, but the idea of towns and cities that produce as well as consume is loosing some of its old cultural associations. In both the developed and developing world local energy generation can do a lot to tie the crucial knot between more livable and more sustainable cities.

Source: http://openalex.blogspot.com/2008/07/future-proofing-urban-energy-germany.html

Creative Imagery by Eric M Gustafson

Clickit

TED talk - The amazing Gecko

Biologist Robert Full studies the amazing gecko, with its supersticky feet and tenacious climbing skill. But high-speed footage reveals that the gecko's tail harbors perhaps the most surprising talents of all.

UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full is fascinated with cockroach legs that allow them to scuttle at full speed across loose mesh and gecko feet that have billions of nano-bristles to run straight up walls. He's using his research to design the perfect robotic "distributed foot," adding spines, hairs and other parts to metal legs and creating versatile scampering machines.

He's helped create robots, such as Spinybot, which can walk up sheer glass like a gecko -- and he even helped Pixar create more realistic insect animations in the film A Bug's Life.

Jane Poynter on Biosphere 2

Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2 -- an experience that provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments. This is the first TED talk drawn from an independently organized TEDx event, held at the University of Southern California.

The Selfish Green - David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Richard Dawkings and Richard Leakey!

Zoology - Elephants

WWF's Ecozones

The ecozones are based largely on the biogeographic realms of Pielou (1979) and Udvardy (1975). A team of biologists convened by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) developed a system of eight biogeographic realms (ecozones) as part of their delineation of the world's over 800 terrestrial ecoregions.

* Nearctic 54.1 mil. km² (including most of North America)
* Palearctic 87.7 mil. km² (including the bulk of Eurasia and North Africa)
* Afrotropic 22.1 mil. km² (including Sub-Saharan Africa)
* Indo-Malaya 7.5 mil. km² (including Afghanistan and Pakistan, the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia)
* Australasia 7.6 mil. km² (including Australia, New Guinea, and neighbouring islands). The northern boundary of this zone is known as the Wallace line.
* Neotropic 19.0 mil. km² (including South America and the Caribbean)
* Oceania 1.0 mil. km² (including Polynesia, Fiji and Micronesia)
* Antarctic 0.3 mil. km² (including Antarctica).

The WWF scheme is broadly similar to Udvardy's system, the chief difference being the delineation of the Australasian ecozone relative to the Antarctic, Oceanic, and Indomalayan ecozones. In the WWF system, The Australasia ecozone includes Australia, Tasmania, the islands of Wallacea, New Guinea, the East Melanesian islands, New Caledonia, and New Zealand. Udvardy's Australian realm includes only Australia and Tasmania; he places Wallacea in the Indomalayan Realm, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and East Melanesia in the Oceanian Realm, and New Zealand in the Antarctic Realm.

Source: Wiki

The Natural Wonders of the World - David Attenborough

Dan Dennet - 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea'

The lost temples of India

The secret of El Dorado

In danger of Falling Food - Bill Mollison Permaculture

The Black Pixel Project - Greenpeace Brazil

The Meatrix Trilogy

Symbolic Interactionism

A Social Network Analysis Diagram



Herbert Blumer (1969), who coined the term "symbolic interactionism," set out three basic premises of the perspective:

1. "Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things."
2. "The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society."
3. "These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters."

Blumer, following Mead, claimed that people interact with each and other by interpret[ing] or 'defin[ing]' each other's actions instead of merely reacting to each other's actions. Their 'response' is not made directly to the actions of one another but instead is based on the meaning which they attach to such actions. Thus, human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols and signification, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another's actions (Blumer 1962). Blumer contrasted this process, which he called "symbolic interaction," with behaviorist explanations of human behavior, which don't allow for interpretation between stimulus and response.

Symbolic interactionist researchers investigate how people create meaning during social interaction, how they present and construct the self (or "identity"), and how they define situations of co-presence with others. One of the perspective's central ideas is that people act as they do because of how they define situations.

Although symbolic interactionist concepts have gained widespread use among sociologists, the perspective has been criticized, particularly during the 1970s when quantitative approaches to sociology were dominant.

In addition to methodological criticisms, critics of the symbolic interactionism have charged that it is unable to deal with social structure (a fundamental sociological concern) and macrosociological issues. A number of symbolic interactionists have addressed these topics but their work has not gained as much recognition or influence as the work of those focusing on the interactional level.

Source: Wiki

Mario Benedetti

Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti Farugia (September 14, 1920 – May 17, 2009) was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet. He was not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he was considered one of Latin America's most important 20th-century writers.

On January 26, 2006, Mario Benedetti joined other internationally renowned figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Ernesto Sábato, Thiago de Mello, Eduardo Galeano, Carlos Monsiváis, Pablo Armando Fernández, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Pablo Milanés, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Mayra Montero and Ana Lydia Vega, in demanding sovereignty for Puerto Rico.

Before dying, he dictated to his personal secretary, Ariel Silva what would become his last poem

-
Mi vida ha sido como una farsa
Mi arte ha consistido
En que esta no se notara demasiado
He sido como un levitador en la vejez
El brillo marrón de los azulejos
Jamás se separó de mi piel

(Fragment)

(translation with Google Translate)

My life has been like a farce
My art has been
That this notice is not too
I've been like a ghost in old age
The brightness of the brown tiles
Never left my skin


Sources:
Text: Wikipedia
Image: Los Sabandeños

Ken Wiwa speaks

Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr. , son of slain author and television producer Ken Saro-Wiwa, poses in New York May 4, 2009. The civil trial that judged the involvement of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell in the executions of protesters in Nigeria started in May in New York City, more than 13 years after their deaths. Shell was accused of human rights abuses, including in connection with the 1995 hangings of prominent activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other protesters by Nigeria's then-military government. Picture taken May 4, 2009.

Some release from the torments of the past

Murdered activist's son on his reaction to Shell's $15.5m settlement

There was no hat-in-the-air moment, no popping of champagne corks. Instead it was a steady accumulation of conviction conveyed by email to my BlackBerry over the course of a long transatlantic day that included the red eye from JFK in New York to London. Each email was a little less tentative than the previous one until the final confirmation arrived with the curiously tentative subject line: "its done???"

Anti-climax doesn't quite describe this moment because you know, deep down, that the settlement is only the beginning of a process that you hope will lead to a better outcome for all the stakeholders in this issue but it is the end, for sure, of a 13-year-long court case.

It actually feels like those years all happened in the last month or even over this weekend but the reality is that the case moved along in fits and spurts. Looking back now I would have started out with far less optimism had I known how many hours I would spend in airless rooms, how many animated discussions, how many sleepless nights mulling over the pros and cons of settling the case.

Nothing. Nothing about this has come or will ever come easy. Every word, every phrase and every comma has been weighed, scrutinised and debated. These are life and death matters. Head versus heart. The case has been freighted with all kinds of agendas that it cannot possibly satisfy. In the end a settlement is a compromise; both parties agree to settle their differences by meeting in a so-called middle. That middle is a matter of perspective of course. To some this must be bewildering. To others it was too long in coming. In the end it is only those who are intimately involved, who have everything to lose and everything to gain that have to make a decision that will not satisfy everyone.

History will show that this was a landmark case. Multinationals now know that a precedent has been set, that it is possible to be sued for human rights violations in foreign jurisdictions.

In the end we collectively agreed to settle because the terms and conditions of the offer from Shell enabled us to gain some measure of psychological or financial relief, provided for a contribution towards the future development of our community.

But it also enabled us to advertise the settlement as a living, breathing example of how and why the commitment to peace, non-violence and dialogue is the best way to resolve the challenges in the Niger Delta.

How the Ogoni community and the rest of the actors in the Niger Delta respond is the next, critical, step. There are other cases outstanding against Shell. Feelings still run high. Many people suffered and many more are still suffering unnecessarily.

This settlement will not in itself immediately provide them with any restitution other than the consolation that with enough perseverance and commitment to justice, a better, safer, more humane and more prosperous world is possible.

For the plaintiffs and more specifically for me, it is time to pause for breath, a time to contemplate that this settlement can finally release us from the torments of the past so that we can face the future with a tangible measure of hope.

Or just maybe it is time to stop being the son of my father and be the father to my sons.

-Ken Wiwa Jr., writing in the Guardian

Good news about Shell vs the Ken Wiwas

Kenule "Ken" Beeson Saro-Wiwa (October 10, 1941 – November 10, 1995) was a Nigerian author, television producer, environmental activist, and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Saro-Wiwa was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic Nigerian minority whose hometown, Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and which has suffered extreme and unremediated environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate oil waste dumping. Initially as spokesperson, and then as President, of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and natural waters of Ogoniland by the operations of multinational oil companies, especially Shell. He was also an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government, which he viewed as reluctant to enforce proper environmental regulations on the foreign oil companies operating in the area.

At the peak of his non-violent campaign, Saro-Wiwa was arrested, hastily tried by a special military tribunal, and hanged in 1995 by the Nigerian military government of General Sani Abacha, all on charges widely viewed as entirely politically motivated and completely unfounded. His execution provoked international outrage and resulted in Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations.

Beginning in 1996, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), EarthRights International (ERI), Paul Hoffman of Schonbrun, DeSimone, Seplow, Harris & Hoffman and other human rights attorneys have brought a series of cases to hold Shell accountable for human rights violations in Nigeria, including summary execution, crimes against humanity, torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest and detention. The lawsuits are brought against Royal Dutch Shell and Brian Anderson, the head of its Nigerian operation.

The cases were brought under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 statute giving non-U.S. citizens the right to file suits in U.S. courts for international human rights violations, and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows individuals to seek damages in the U.S. for torture or extrajudicial killing, regardless of where the violations take place.

Shell has made many attempts to have these cases thrown out of court, which the plaintiffs have defeated. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has set a trial date of June, 2009. The plaintiffs eagerly await their day in court to hold the defendants alleged to be accountable for their injuries and the deaths of their loved ones.

On 9 June 2009 Shell agreed to an out of court settlement of 15.5 million USD to victims' families. However, the company denied any liability for the deaths, stating that the payment was part of a reconciliation process. In a statement given after the settlement, Shell suggested that the money was being provided to the relatives of Saro-Wiwa and the eight other victims, in order to cover the legal costs of the case and also in recognition of the events that took place in the region. Some of the funding is also expected to be used to set up a development trust for the Ogoni people, who inhabit the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The settlement was made just days before the trial, which had been brought by Ken Saro-Wiwa's son, was due to begin in New York.

Sources for Above History

Text: Wiki
Picture: The Poor Mouth

.....................................................................................

Shell pays out $15.5m over Saro-Wiwa killing

Source: The Guardian

* Ed Pilkington in New York
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 June 2009 22.22 BST
* Article history: The article was published and last edited on the Guardian website at 22.22 BST on Monday, 8th June, 2009.

The oil giant Shell has agreed to pay $15.5m (£9.7m) in settlement of a legal action in which it was accused of having collaborated in the execution of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni tribe of southern Nigeria.

The settlement is one of the largest payouts agreed by a multinational corporation charged with human rights violations. Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC have not conceded to or admitted any of the allegations, pleading innocent to all the civil charges.

But the scale of the payment is being seen by experts in human rights law as a step towards international businesses being made accountable for their environmental and social actions.

In the past, it has been notoriously difficult to bring and sustain legal actions involving powerful corporations.

The settlement follows three weeks of intensive negotiation between the plaintiffs, who largely consisted of relatives of the executed Ogoni nine, and Shell. "We spent a lot of time trying to put together something that would be acceptable to both sides, and our people are very pleased with the result," said Anthony DiCaprio, the lead lawyer for the Ogoni side working with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights.

The deal marks the end of a 14-year personal journey for Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr, son of the executed leader. Among the other plaintiffs was Karalolo Kogbara who lost an arm after she was shot by Nigerian troops when she protested against the bulldozing of her village in 1993 to make way for a Shell oil pipeline.

Though the settlement cannot compensate for individual losses of loved ones or livelihoods, the plaintiffs will now be able to pay all legal fees and costs. A sum of $5m will be used to set up a trust called Kiisi - meaning "progress" in the Ogoni Gokana language - to support educational, community and other initiatives in the Niger delta.

Shell has consistently denied any involvement in the decision of the Nigerian regime to execute the Ogoni nine. It argues it tried to plead with the government to grant clemency to the prisoners but to its great sadness the appeal went unheard.

Supporters of the legal action said the fact that Shell had walked away from the trial suggested the company had been anxious about the evidence that would have been presented to the jury had it gone ahead.

Stephen Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, said Shell "knew the case was overwhelming against them, so they bought their way out of a trial".

Among the documents that were lodged with the New York court was a 1994 letter from Shell in which it agreed to pay a unit of the Nigerian army for services rendered. The unit had retrieved one of the company's fire trucks from the village of Korokoro - an action that according to reports at the time left one Ogoni man dead and two wounded. Shell wrote that it was making the payment "as a show of gratitude and motivation for a sustained favourable disposition in future assignments".

Shell's involvement in the oil-rich Niger delta extends back to 1958. It remains the largest oil business in Nigeria, owning some 90 oil fields across the country.

The Ogoni people began non-violent agitation against Shell from the early 1990s, under the leadership of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his organisation Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Mosop has long complained that the oil giant was responsible for devastating the ecosystem of the delta upon which Ogoni farmers and fishermen depend, through a combination of oil spills, forest clearance for pipelines and the burning of gas from oil-wells known as gas flares.

Human rights experts believe the settlement will have a substantial impact on other multinational corporations. DiCaprio predicted it would "encourage companies to seriously consider the social and environmental impact their operations may have on a community or face the possibility of a suit".

Things we can learn from the Mother

TRANSPORTATION
Learning Efficiency from Kingfishers
The Shinkansen Bullet Train of the West Japan Railway Company is the fastest train in the world, traveling 200 miles per hour. The problem? Noise. Air pressure changes produced large thunder claps every time the train emerged from a tunnel, causing residents one-quarter a mile away to complain. Eiji Nakatsu, the train's chief engineer and an avid bird-watcher, asked himself, "Is there something in Nature that travels quickly and smoothly between two very different mediums?" Modeling the front-end of the train after the beak of kingfishers, which dive from the air into bodies of water with very little splash to catch fish, resulted not only in a quieter train, but 15% less electricity use even while the train travels 10% faster.


TOXICS
Learning from Lotus Plants How to Clean without Cleaners
Ask any school child or adult how leaves keep water from sticking to them, and they'll almost certainly say, "Because they are so smooth." Yet one of the most water repellent leaves in the world, that of the Lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), isn't smooth at all. The myriad crevices of its microscopically rough leaf surface trap a maze of air upon which water droplets float, so that the slightest breeze or tilt in the leaf causes balls of water to roll cleanly off, taking attached dirt particles with them. Now, microscopically rough surface additives have been introduced into a new generation of paint, glass, and fabric finishes, greatly reducing the need for chemical or laborious cleaning. For example, GreenShield, a fabric finish made by G3i based on the "lotus effect", achieves the same water and stain repellency as conventional fabric finishes while using 8 times less harmful fluorinated chemicals


ARCHITECTURE
Learning from Termites How to Create Sustainable Buildings
We generally think of termites as destroying buildings, not helping design them. But the Eastgate Building, an office complex in Harare, Zimbabwe, has an air conditioning system modeled on the self-cooling mounds of Macrotermes michaelseni, termites that maintain the temperature inside their nest to within one degree, day and night (while the temperatures outside swing from 42 °C to 3 °C). The operation of buildings represents 40% of all the energy used by humanity, so learning how to design them to be more sustainable is vitally important. Architect Mick Pearce collaborated with engineers at Arup Associates to design Eastgate, which uses 90% percent less energy for ventilation than conventional buildings its size, and has already saved the building owners over $3.5 million dollars in air conditioning costs.


MEDICINE
Learning From Chimpanzees How to Heal Ourselves
One-quarter of all modern medicines are derived directly from plants, and there are hundreds of thousands of other plant species yet to examine, each with dozens of unique chemical compounds that could prove of medicinal value. If one wanted to discover more valuable medicines, where would one start looking? It could take millions of years, literally, to sort through this enormous variety of plants and plant compounds to find ones with medicinal value. Fortunately, this is exactly what researchers have discovered that chimpanzees (Pan spp.) have already done, over millions of years of evolutionary time. By observing how chimps and other species cope with illness, researchers have acquired leads on plants with promising medical applications to human health. Trees from the Vernonia genus, for example, which chimpanzees regularly seek out when ill, have been found to contain chemical compounds that show promise in treating parasites such as pinworm, hookworm, and giardia in humans.


HUMAN SAFETY
Learning from Dolphins How to Warn People about Tsunamis
Tsunami waves dozens of feet high when they reach shore may only be tens of centimeters high as they travel through the deep ocean. In order to reliably detect them and warn people before they reach land, sensitive pressure sensors must be located underneath passing waves in waters as deep as 6000 meters. The data must then be transmitted up to a buoy at the ocean's surface, where it is relayed to a satellite for distribution to an early warning center. Transmitting data through miles of water has proven difficult, however: sound waves, while unique in being able to travel long distances through water, reverberate and destructively interfere with one another as they travel, compromising the accuracy of information. Unless, that is, you are a dolphin. Dolphins are able to recognize the calls of specific individuals ("signature whistles") up to 25 kilometers away, demonstrating their ability to communicate and process sound information accurately despite the challenging medium of water. By employing several frequencies in each transmission, dolphins have found a way to cope with the sound scattering behavior of their high frequency, rapid transmissions, and still get their message reliably heard. Emulating dolphins' unique frequency-modulating acoustics, a company called EvoLogics has developed a high-performance underwater modem for data transmission, which is currently employed in the tsunami early warning system throughout the Indian Ocean.

Human Lung
CLIMATE CHANGE
Learning from Human Lungs How to Sequester Carbon
Studying the way human lungs work is inspiring new technologies that remove carbon dioxide from sources like flue stacks, preventing this greenhouse gas from reaching our atmosphere and warming the planet. Our lungs have 3 major adaptations which give them their carbon dioxide (CO2) removal effectiveness: a super thin membrane, allowing CO2 to travel across and out quickly (how thin? About one thousandth of the period at the end of this sentence), an enormous surface area (if you laid flat your lungs' gas exchange surface, it would be 70 times your body surface area – about the size of a volley ball court), and specialized chemical translators, namely carbonic anhydrase, which allows CO2 to be removed from our bloodstream thousands of times faster than possible without it. In tests by a company called Carbozyme Inc., human-made filters inspired by the way our lungs work removed over 90% of the CO2 travelling through flue stacks. Meanwhile, other technologies based on the carbonic anhydrase enzyme found in animals such as mollusks have successfully transformed CO2 into limestone, which can be stored or used as a building supply.


ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Learning from Nature How to Create Flow Without Friction
Stand quietly just about anywhere and you are likely to hear a fan running – in the computer you are using, in the air conditioning unit of the building you are in, and throughout the water, air, and electrical systems upon which the city around you depends. Fans and other rotational devices are a major part of the human built environment, and a major component of our total energy usage. Although we've been building such devices in one form or another since at least 100 B.C., we've never built them like Nature does until now. Naturally flowing fluids, gases, and heat follow a common geometric pattern that differs in shape from conventional human-made rotors. Nature moves water and air using a logarithmic or exponentially growing spiral, as commonly seen in seashells. This pattern shows up everywhere in Nature: in the curled up trunks of elephants and tails of chameleons, in the pattern of swirling galaxies in outer space and kelp in ocean surf, and in the shape of the cochlea of our inner ears and our own skin pores. Inspired by the way Nature moves water and air, PAX Scientific Inc. applied this fundamental geometry to the shape of human-made rotary devices for the first time, in fans, mixers, propellers, turbines and pumps. Depending on application, the resulting designs reduce energy usage by a staggering 10-85% over conventional rotors, and noise by up to 75%.


Whale
ENERGY
Learning from Humpback Whales How to Create Efficient Wind Power
Like a school bus pirouetting under water, a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) – 40-50 feet long and weighing nearly 80,000 pounds – swims in circles tight enough to produce nets of bubbles only 5 feet across while corralling and catching krill, its shrimp-like prey. It turns out that the whale's surprising dexterity is due mainly to its flippers, which have large, irregular looking bumps called tubercules across their leading edges. Whereas sheets of water flowing over smooth flippers break up into myriad turbulent vortices as they cross the flipper, sheets of water passing through a humpback's tubercules maintain even channels of fast-moving water, allowing humpbacks to keep their "grip" on the water at sharper angles and turn tighter corners, even at low speeds. Wind tunnel tests of model humpback fins with and without tubercules have demonstrated the aerodynamic improvements tubercules make, such as an 8% improvement in lift and 32% reduction in drag, as well as allowing for a 40% increase in angle of attack over smooth flippers before stalling. A company called WhalePower is applying the lessons learned from humpback whales to the design of wind turbines to increase their efficiency, while this natural technology also has enormous potential to improve the safety and performance of airplanes, fans, and more.

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Learning from Trees and Bones How to Optimize Strength and Materials
The next time you drive through a forest, go ahead and thank the trees out your window for helping on your car's crash safety and gas mileage. Trees engineer themselves in a number of ways to maximize their strength, such as arranging their fibers to minimize stress and adding material where strength is needed (take a look at the extra material beneath a heavy branch, for instance). Bones – unlike trees in that they must carry moving loads – go a step further by removing material where it's not needed, optimizing their structure for their dynamic workloads. Engineers have incorporated these and other lessons learned from how trees and bones optimize their strength and minimize their use of materials into software design programs, such as Claus Matteck's “Soft Kill Option” software, which are revolutionizing industrial design. Using these programs to design cars, for example, has resulted in new vehicle designs that are as crash-safe as conventional cars, yet up to 30% lighter.


TreePrairie Landscape
AGRICULTURE
Learning from Prairies How to Grow Food Sustainably
Take a look at any natural ecosystem, such as a prairie, and you will see a remarkable system of food production: productive, resilient, self-enriching, and ultimately sustainable. The modern agricultural practices of humankind are also enormously productive, but only in the short term: the irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticide inputs upon which modern food crops depend both deplete and pollute increasingly rare water and soil resources. The Land Institute has been working successfully to revolutionize the conceptual foundations of modern agriculture by using natural prairies as a model: they have been demonstrating that using deep-rooted plants which survive year-to-year (perennials) in agricultural systems which mimic stable natural ecosystems – rather than the weedy crops common to many modern agricultural systems – can produce equivalent yields of grain and maintain and even improve the water and soil resources upon which all future agriculture depends

Shell is Guilty

The video Shell doesn't want you to see

Posted using ShareThis

The video below was originally displayed on wiwavshell.org - the website for the plaintiffs filing a law suit against the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell - but was removed by court order after legal motions were filed by the multinational. Thanks to YouTube, however, the video has a new lease of life and has at time of typing been viewed over 65,000 times since being uploaded two weeks ago. It’s a decent introduction to the atrocities committed by the corporation in collusion with the Nigerian government and its military, spotlighting their determined efforts to put down a peaceful and popular movement by the citizens of Nigeria against the violent, corporate control and destruction of their lives, land and resources.



Among the plaintiffs are family of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an author and environmental activist who lead The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Mr. Saro-Wiwa, with eight other martyrs to the cause, was executed in 1995 to the horror of the local Ogoni people and the international community - after a tribunal, with a Shell lawyer in attendance, that appears to have been nothing more than a hollow formality; a farce. Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues were tortured in the lead-up to the trial, were denied access to legal counsel and were given no right of appeal. It appears their only real crime was making life difficult for a company that wanted unrestrained access to land and oil, and the freedom to profligately pollute the Niger Delta.

For more than a decade since, a team of human rights attorneys have endeavoured to have Royal Dutch Shell and the head of their Nigerian operations brought to trial and held accountable for repeated and serious human rights and environmental abuses. Attempts by Shell to have the case thrown out have been overturned. Due to wrangling over the release of the video below, Shell’s lawyers managed to delay a May 27 start date for the trial. The latest news is that a pre-trial Conference for the Wiwa v. Shell case is now set for Wednesday June 3rd.

Shell is the largest oil producer in Nigeria, and their destructive activities continue to this day. You can read about their environmental disasters, such as gas flaring and oil spills, here.

An estimated 1.5 million tons of oil has spilled in the Niger Delta ecosystem over the past 50 years. This amount is equivalent to about one “Exxon Valdez” spill in the Niger Delta each year. - wiwavshell.org

Wikipedia has this to say about gas flaring in the country:

Much of the natural gas extracted in oil wells in the Delta is immediately burned, or flared, into the air at a rate of approximately 70 million m³ per day. This is equivalent to 41% of African natural gas consumption, and forms the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet…. The biggest gas-flaring company is the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd. - Wikipedia

Around 27 million people are dependent on the health of the Niger Delta environs to meet their base needs - but the survival of subsistence fishing and farming activities has taken a back seat to corporate profit.

With around 85% of Nigeria’s oil revenues getting funneled to a mere 1% of the population, and the vast majority of the nation living in abject poverty, this is one case that will be closely watched by those whose lives have been turned upside down by the so-called ‘black gold’. And for us in the North - may we realise the gross ugliness of our fossil fuel dependence. When we complain about the price we pay at the pump, consider that no matter how high it may get, it will never be enough to pay its true cost.

If you want to stay up to date on this topic, and help out in some way, join the ShellGuilty Email Action List here.

Oil in Darfur

clickit