Carbon capture and storage in Australia

There’s a useful new article on envirowiki on CCS and Clean Coal: Carbon Capture and Storage in Australia.

The article covers all the projects planned in Australia. If you find any more info on each of these, feel free to add more detail on the pages, it’s a wiki after all.

If you don’t feel like editing it yourself, feedback would be most welcome here on my contributions, or on the discussion page for the article.

 

Climate camp video

Video to promote Climate Camp Australia.

This video was made with Kdenlive. I have to say, I’d never enjoyed using a program that crashes every 5 minutes (including system crashes) before using Kdenlive. It’s easy to use, and intuitive. Can’t wait for version 1.0.

 

Discussion about the semantic web

The following is a discussion from #swig on irc.freenode.org - the Semantic Web Interest Group. It’s logged here if you don’t believe me: http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/2008-04-15#T10-32-11. Edited slightly for clarity.

I think the semantic web is an extremely useful tool, but as I mention down the bottom, I probably would have agreed with Francis Bacon that cutting up animals in the name of science was a good thing at the time. For the record, I don’t believe this.

Reading the comment first might help.

naught101: check http://www.semanticfocus.com/blog/entry/title/5-problems-of-the-semantic-web/

naught101: my comment down the bottom, would love feedback from anyone here

bengee: simplification is a feature, not really a problem

bengee: URIs and triples reduce the complexity to a level that computers can do useful things with it

bengee: e.g. <#product> :rating “***”; :rating “****”; :rating “**”. what might seem contradictory to you may be very useful to an app

naught101: na, I wasn’t talking about that kind of information bengee

naught101: Say philosophy for instance… let me find a nice quote

naught101: Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.

naught101: * Cree Indian Proverb

naught101: Obviously a computer could use this sentence, but would it be able to use it a a way useful to humans?

naught101: Obviously it’s not TRUE, as most of us already know we can’t eat money

bengee: <#only1> a :CreeIndianProverb; rdf:value “Only when…” .

bengee: that triple could be useful for programs that list proverbs

naught101: yeah, sure, but that’s triplification ABOUT the proverb, not about the information contained within the proverb

bengee: well, then you have to increase the granularity if your app wants to provide richer functionality

naught101: how do you mean?

bengee: extract more triples from the human-readable text

naught101: but what triples could you extract from a one-sentance text that has no quantitative truth, but which holds more qualitative truth than many many paragraphs of, say, a science text book?

bengee: exactly

naught101: huh?

bengee: you may misunderstand what the semweb is mainly for

naught101: sure, that’s a true sentence

bengee: it’s not for implementing automated philosophers, or compete with humans with respect to intelligence

bengee: well, OWL folks might disagree with me here

bengee: the more rewarding approach (IMHO) is to think about use cases that semweb tech *can* enable/simplify, not to think hard about things that are near-impossible for computers in general

naught101: I agree. but I’m not talking about what the semantic web should be

naught101: I’m talking about possible problems with what it currently is

naught101: I mean, I don’t want bite-sized chunks of information taking over the world of ideas

naught101: I think the philospohy or the public is degraded enough without chopping it into bits even more

bengee: oh, semweb tech can clearly improve the distribution and discovery of ideas

bengee: just like the web did

naught101: but it could also hide them

naught101: I don’t think the ‘web did, neccesarily

bengee: you just google’d WRT, no?

naught101: correct

naught101: I don’t think finding an accronym compares to finding meaning in life.

naught101: (if I sound like I’m attacking the semantic web, I’m not, I’m just exploring ideas)

bengee: yeah, don’t think I can contribute too much here, sorry.

naught101: no worries

naught101: I see it something like baconian/descartian science. it’s useful for finding out the little bits of information, but it’s not particularly useful for figuring out the interrelationships, or looking at the information holistically

naught101: I mean, for example, the semantic web can take information from a wikipedia article, but it couldn’t write a wikipedia article

kjetilkWork: right

kjetilkWork: I don’t think it is a very significant goal of the semweb to produce that kind of information

kjetilkWork: we have a billion people out there that can do that much better

bengee: the semweb can be a great aid in helping you write the article, though

naught101: sure, but thinking of the possibility the semantic web a large part of the web should probably include thinking about what it can’t do, and how to not impede that work

kjetilkWork: rather than the AI world of natural language analysis to reason and infere relation, I think the semweb is much more about using the collective intelligence of all its users, i.e. real intelligence

naught101: bengee: yes, it could. it could also be a hinderance (information overload)

naught101: kjetilkWork: good. I like that. I just hope we’re collectively intelligent, and not collectively stupid

kjetilkWork: well, that’s what it means to me, at least

kjetilkWork: hehe, yeah

kjetilkWork: I think semweb can help us be collectively intelligent rather than stupid, though…

naught101: I haven’t got that far yet

naught101:

 

Dear Mr. Quinn

Daniel,

You argue that the major defining factor of population size is food limits. Australia (to give an example), currently has a birthrate less than 2 births per woman. We have an overall annual immigration, so our population is growing, but if we had no immigration, our population would be decreasing. Australia is a fairly affluent country: plenty of food, people are educated, well supported with social services, and generally feel secure. They don’t need the added security of a large family (I don’t claim that this is causal, but believe it may have some impact). This seems proof that it is at least possible to disconnect population growth from food supply (and then be able to decrease food supply due to decreased demand). You answered this in response to Q&A 122: “the country has traversed the “demographic trap” and gotten through the growth phase of the population dynamics”.

Obviously, as you have pointed out, there’s plenty of food in the world, and if it were (able to be) shared out equitably, then no-one would starve. This being so, wouldn’t the best course of action be, after figuring out the relevant system dynamics, to attempt to give those in the highest population growth areas the same security we in the affluent, and low-population growth, minority world have? This might include immediate food aid for a period or, preferably, some kind of “food asylum”, which might lead to an immediate population spike, but a combined approach of social support services and education, seems like a population growth control method that is more than equitable, just might work, and doesn’t seem like a “sci-fi fantasy”, as you label other birth control schemes.

As an aside, what do you think of permaculture? Seems like a way of at least starting to break the food lockup, and something that doesn’t rely on some kind of fascist revolution.

(This was originally posted on the Ishmael.org guestbook)

 

Post-Taker culture and other questions

I just finished reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael for the second time (I previously downloaded the audio-book, which was amazing, but I think the book is slightly better). If you haven’t read it, read it. I’d say it’d be life-changing for anyone wants to do something about the state of the environment but don’t know where to start. For the ones how have already started, it’s perhaps even more recommended. That said, the rest of this post won’t make sense unless you already have read the book.

Ishmael answers a lot of questions for me - primarily the one that goes “if this isn’t the right way, then what is?”. But of course the answer isn’t final, it isn’t an end point, it’s just an opening. It’s another method of looking at things, and realising how much could change. Which basically means that it brings up more questions than it answers.

 

Why I use a non-commercial license.

There’s a huge wave of open-licensing sweeping the ‘net, and it’s starting to get into the real world. This is definitely a good thing - freedom of information is a great. The most common licenses, such as the GNU FDL, or the Creative Commons BY-SA stipulate that anyone can use the works, as long as they acknowledge the author keep it free (usually by using the same license). The last tactic has been called “viral” by numerous capitalists, and they are correct, it is. Eventually it will take over the world, or at least a large part of it. I can’t wait.

Creative Commons, and perhaps a few other licences, give people the option to license their work with a “non-commercial” (NC) clause, This is strongly derided amongst the free software movement particularly, as economic exploitation by a creator is considered a freedom and a right. This is argued well on the Freedom Defined wiki.

There are two main arguments against using an NC license, the first is economic, the second in a matter of compatibility. A third minor argument against the CC-BY-NC-SA, is an argument against creative commons itself. I will deal with these in the above order.

 

Recovering files on ext3 the easy and shoddy way

I just deleted about 100 photos from an ext3 external hard drive that I really would have preferred to keep. With shift+delete (do not pass the trash, do not collect $200). So I went looking for an answer.

If you’ve looked around the ‘net for a way to recover files from an ext3 partition, you’ve probably found lots of people saying “it can’t be done, because the inodes get wiped”. Well that’s true. There’s no way to simply mark the inodes undeleted and have your files back, BUT your actual files don’t get wiped, and if you’re lucky, you may be able to retrieve some or all of them.

First step: after you delete something accidentally, DON’T WRITE ANYTHING TO THE PARTITION. If you do, you are likely to overwrite the blocks containing your files. This means, if you deleted something accidentally from your root partition, home partition, or any other system partiton, un mount it immediately. This may mean you need to turn of your computer, remove your hard drive, and put it in another computer as a slave. I was working on an external hard drive anyway, so I didn’t really need to worry, as nothing would get written to it without me telling it to write to it…

Second, I recommend you read this: Brian Carrier’s “Why Recovering a Deleted Ext3 File Is Difficult . . .”. It’s where I got most of my information from. Most wise is the cry of “don’t forget to backup anything important”. Unfortunately, I was working on an old backup with no redundancy. ie. I was screwed.

Third, you need The Sleuth Kit, and you need Foremost, both of which are in the ubuntu repositories, and are probably available packaged for most distros. You REALLY need to read the man page for Foremost, and it would be a good idea to read the man page for dls, a sleuth kit program.

Lastly, you need some spare space somewhere. depending on the files you’re looking for, you might need a lot of space. I had an empty 40gb partition, so I used that, but in the end I only needed 180mb of space to retrieve 160mb of photos (this is probably NOT typical)

The Magic phrase:

$ dls /dev/sdb5 | foremost -T -o/media/MUSIC/parish -tjpg

Ok, an explanation:

• dls simply reads a partition, straight out. Don’t ask me how or why. In my case, I needed to read /dev/sdb5.
• The output of dls is piped to foremost, which read from stdin by default
• -T timestamps the output directory. It isn’t necessary, but if the directory you’re outputting to is not empty, foremost won’t write to it.
• -o<dir> is your output directory. In my case, a folder in my spare partition.
• -t<filetype> is where I specified foremost should look for jpegs. Foremost actually looks for signatures such as the first few bytes of a file, to see if it matches a certain pattern. There are a set number of filetypes included by default (Read the MAN page), or you can create your own.

So that’s it. I ended up getting all 108 photos back, minus filenames, but that’s fine, because I usually just rename my files with the EXIF date/time data anyway.

Because dls only looks at unallocated block be default, the process ignored about 8000 other jpgs on the 95gb drive, and only recovered ones that had been deleted. Very handy for me. I left it go over night, but at a guess, I think it probably only took about 3 hours max (the hard drive is very full, so it probably only ran over about 5gb total).

fuckin’ yay.

---

so… it works, but it doesn’t join the blocks back together correctly, so I have my ~100 photos (jpeg files), but each of them is damaged about 10% into the actual image. I can still read the thumbnails, but not the whole image. If anyone has a good suggestion for how to fix this, please let me know.

ned

technorati: ext3, linux, data recovery, undelete

 

Horse-Electric Hybrid: The Way of the Future!

You heard it here first, folks!

Layperson’s guide to the favoured transport of the future:

1. Horse. Equus Caballus. This will eventually replace the petroleum internal combustion engine as the power source of a large percentage land based transport. Smaller versions of this vehicle may be powered by pedal, and one or more Homo Sapiens.
2. Bloke on top. There’s no reason that this couldn’t be a woman.
3. Big Battery. Made with what ever means are the least polluting and toxic. Hydrogen fuel cell? maybe…
4. Combined electromagnetic braking device and electric motor. Braking charges battery, saves on wear and tear on manual brakes and horses. Electric motor makes life easier for horses, especially on starting.
5. Blokes on back. Could be replaced with food, or other goods. Or a solar panel, to take even more work off the horse(s)

 

To keep the Internet?

In wanting to create a new society, I have a few obvious “core” values (quote marks due to our ex-prime minister’s bastardisation of the word in the phrase “core promises”) .

These consist of:

• Best practice environmentalism (not best as in better than everyone else, but best as in as good as possible).
• Autonomy/self governance for groups and individuals
• Freedom of information

In that order. These are fairly solid for me, and I won’t really bother discussing why in this piece. I think that the second point is basically my ideal for best practice social organisation.

So how to go about the third? I think the internet might be the answer.

 

A fall from grace for one man, a step forward for the rest.

Howard is gone.

Not only have the libs lost the election, by an avalanche, but it’s pretty certain that Howard has lost his seat as well. Fucking good riddance.

Not that Rudd will be much better. He’s definitely got some things going for him over Howard, but his acceptance speech contained a few things that I’m definitely a bit uncomfortable about.

The first of these is his line about “leaving the old debates behind” - most of these arguments were pretty dubious, but one was especially worrying  -  the debate about “growth verses the environment”. So we’re going to leave that behind are we? And continue to blindly assume that continuous growth can be OK for the environment? It’s not possible, Rudd, it’s mathematically impossible. Simple equation. I wonder if any politician will ever understand it?

Another point - “I will be a politician for indigenous australians” - all well and good. If they want it. Have you asked them if they want a smarmy white guy as a leader, Mr. Rudd? Somehow, I doubt it. What about some autonomy? Aboriginal people don’t need leadership, they need self detirmination!

At least he noted that climate change was the number two election issue (very close second to your-rights-at-work, a well run campaign, by the looks of it). With work choices out of the way (the liberals won’t have a comeback to that), climate change will logically be the largest election issue at the next federal election (it won’t be going away, and ratifying kyoto just won’t be enough). Which kind of makes me think: Wow. the liberals are dead. Seems like the greens are the new opposition!

technorati: Election, politics, climate change, environment, Greens, indigenous