Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

I recently aquired a large amount of domestic wool top. From mixed sources it's tough and springy and spins up in a jiffy! I made four 100 yard skeins (~4oz each). Two of which I dyed a cherry red/pink and one I left as a sweet bubble gum pink. The fourth I have left as pictured in natural white/cream. I'm working on a fifth skein and hope to open my Etsy shop soon with a group of nuetral, dyed by me and dyed by others (but handspun by me) yarns.

I'm torn between leaving them single ply and having a larger number of the same type of yarn (better for people wanting to make a larger project), or plying them together, reducing my stock but making better yarn. I suppose single ply is also pretty good for knit felting projects as well, though for straight knitting I like double ply. It's just a personal preference I guess.

My little drop spindle is a work horse! But man I would LOVE a wheel. I love the iPad, but I think asking for a spinning wheel for Christmas/Birthday, might have been a more practical way to go. Oh, boy... you know your a geek when a SPINNING WHEEL, seems like a practical gift! I enjoy reading and web browsing on the iPad though so I'm glad I got it!

Plans for the Holiday: Write an iPad/iPhone app, spin my 5 lbs (!) of wool, make my crocheted flowers into hair pin christmas gifts for my girl friends, find christmas like beer for my guy friends and maybe do a bit of skiing. Looks like I need multiple weeks for all of this and not just one!

My new climbing shoes and Daisy the cat! These were great fun today, though I haven't been climbing and my muscles couldn't keep up with my feet in my own pair of climbing shoes.

I Voted!

Off to VOTE!

Now mobile blogging!

Post-Carbon

As our conference speaker Daniel Lerch from the Post Carbon Institute iterated yesterday, our problems are following an exponential pattern of growth. While his point that renewable energy and high tech solutions is not sufficient to handle our environmental and energy problems, this graph gives me hope. And it a relief to know that, despite the recession, PV installation is following that exponential growth. If our problems are growing fast, at least it's good to know that our solutions are growing fast also.

If our political system is broken, or simply not meeting our needs, it's uplifting to see that communities are taking up creative solutions to get their needs met. People coming together to help each other. I like the idea of distributed PV because it provides some of the resilience that Daniel talked about. A home or community that produces and manages it's own energy needs is one more step to being sustainable and resilient. It can withstand stocks to the entire system more readily. Energy is one component of a community that needs to be resilient - other areas are food and waste.

Here perhaps is where I can get on board with biodegradable products. From an industrial perspective, we want the larger system to be able to recapture reusable materials and biodegradable materials are not reusable - they are broken down and used as nutrients to life. However, if a community needs to handle it's own waste, or is cut off from the larger industrial system, it's products must be able to degrade and not pollute the environment that the community depends on.

Other good news...

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2010/09/why-solar-will-make-or-break-its-own-future?cmpid=rss