Exodus

[Julie Bertagna]

Brilliant, Namorvia, thanks. Love the 'green-orange' windmill.

Here are those links in easy-click form. If you or anyone else spots any other everyday green-tech and can be bothered posting it up, I'll do something on it on my green blog (on my website) soon.

World's 'first' solar-powered mobile phone unveiled | Reg Hardware

Orange goes green for festival phone-fuelling | Reg Hardware

Astrolab electro-solar hybrid, designed like a Formule 1 and works with very little energy .html

Mara could so have done with one of those dinky wind-chargers in her backpack....

Hi portymatt, welcome to the forum. Hope you enjoy your visits, and also enjoy the book - sounds like you have a great teacher! Say hi from me.

[woolleywrld]

Those articles are fantastic! I have been using some of them for doing a Situational Analysis in my Environmental Studies class. I really like Orange's creation of a wind-powered phone, that would be handy in Scotland!

[Namorvia]

Hmm, ok. This pretty much a fake post. My post count is 14 and i need 15 for the links. So the next one is the real one, didn't see much point giving you the [remove the spaces] version so yeah, whatever. It's worth it.

[Namorvia]

BBC NEWS | Technology | Knee dynamo taps 'people power'

Yay! Saw this in the news today (because I like to watch News24). Picture the crowded pavements of New York with everyone having one of those.

You could wire it up to your mp3 player and go running.

[woolleywrld]

Yay for posting links! That article was really cool. Do you guys think that maybe one day it will be completely normal for people to walk around with that on their legs? Oh, who knows what the future holds!

[woolleywrld]

I have a question for anyone out there willing to give their opinion.
There is lots of talk about how Global Warming is completely blown up by the media and the government and that human contribution to Global Warming is about 6%. In other words, if human's change the way they live, temperatures will still go up 96% as much as before so it makes little difference.
Do you believe this? Do you think that if human's change their lifestyle it will make a difference? I'm not entirely sure what to think...

[Namorvia]

I'm not sure about the percentages, but the counter argument to "global warming" was always "climate change" i.e. the world has natural cycles of hot and cold, both due to geological cycles and our distance from the sun (gravitational pull of other planets and all sort of things makes us wobble just slightly but it makes a big difference).

A diagram I saw a couple of years back mapped the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere alongside global temperature and although they couldn't tell whether CO2 raises temperature or temperature raises CO2 there is a link, and we now have lots more CO2 in our atmosphere than their has been in a long time.

The idea that it's a controlling technique by world governments isn't rediculously far fetched either. The oil is running out but if anyone admitted that then oil prices would skyrocket, the east would become superpowers overnight and the world would grind to a halt. Much smarter to tell everyone that if they don't turn out their lights when they leave the room and support the contructions of wind farms then their grandkids will all drown. I don't really believe all that, but I can understand how people do.

So basically, I have no idea how responsible humans are for global warming, but if we can stop it we should, and if we can't no one can think ill of us for trying.

[Namorvia]

Lol, i just happened to have a lecture on this just a few minutes ago.

I could probably actually attach all the lecture notes as an attachment but i think someone from the university would probably hunt me down if they found out.

But I will steal the diagram I mentioned before.


And I'll quote his quotes from the IPCC:
IPCC 1995 (First Assessment Report)
"Global warming has occured, and it may be due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions"
IPCC 1998 (Second Assessment Report) concluded that:
"The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate."
IPCC 2001 (Third Assessment Report) concluded that
"Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have" been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations
IPCC 2007 (4th Assessment Report) concluded that
"The arguing is over"

[Julie Bertagna]

Great posts, Namorvia. I always say, when asked if my 'vision' is true: I've written a story, a once upon a time about the future. It's not a prediction.

There are no absolutes about climate change; as soon as I read one thing which seems definitive, I find another bunch of scientists who disagree completely. (That graph and conclusions seems pretty definitive but no doubt there's somebody out there who will say they can prove different.)

So what I think is: we don't know. But the evidence seems to be piling up. I agree that governments have all kinds of vested interests in turning us 'greener' and as Namorvia says, and not all completely altruistic.

But even if we don't know absolutely, I'd like to live in a less polluted world. So 'green' seems to make sense as an insurance policy and as a better way to progress. If climate change is nothing to do with us then at least we've developed a less polluting way to live on the planet (the world population explosion and diminishing resources are no myths). And do we really want to take the chance of doing nothing? Just seems a pretty big risk.... what do you think?

[woolleywrld]

I agree. I think that even if our actions do not actually prevent global warming, it is nicer to be cleaner. Take care of our planet in any way we can. And also, I hate to waste things, and the diminishing resources problem is getting a bit crazy. I often think that one day we may end up all living like Mara (cut off from the world through diminshed resources, no energy, no transport etc.) even if we are not surrounded by water.
I suppose the diminishing resources is also due to the population growth. But then there are countries who are worried because their population is declining, and I don't understand why some think it's good and some think it's bad. Although, I feel guilty because I am one of those kids from a big family who wants a big family... so I do nothing to help the growing population

[Julie Bertagna]

Retrospective serendipity?

Proof that real life is at least as strange as fiction?

Reading the following article in today's Independent newspaper (UK), I had the most unnerving sense of deja vu. It's tells of the floating villages of Chong Khneas, 'one of the great spectacles of Cambodia' and the deadly threat of pollution and climate change to their precarious watery existence. I was well aware of 'boat people' in various parts of the world when I wrote about the refugee boat camp outside the sky city walls in EXODUS and imagined Tuck's floating pirate city in Zenith, but I didn't research, I imagined how it might be possible to live in such a way, if that were the only way to survive. And here, in the real world, is how they do.

A poisoned paradise: water water everywhere - Asia, World - Independent.co.uk

What really shocked me was that my imagined sea urchins, like Wing, who paddle through the floodwaters in junk vessels like car doors and washtubs exist here and now, as water babies and bucket gangs, in our world.

And they shouldn't.

See here:
Tonle Sap an introduction to Cambodia's great lake

[Julie Bertagna]

March 22nd is World Water Day.

World Water Day: Join an Event on March 22, 2008

[Julie Bertagna]

Lots of questions by email. One that keeps coming up is how did I get the idea for the Noos - the mind-blowing cyberuniverse of the future in Exodus; it wasn't so much part of the story in Zenith but it's key to Fox's story in Aurora.

In the meanderings and detours that I always do when writing (or when I should be writing but it's hard to get the ideas flowing when staring at a blank screen), I discovered trails of beautiful images that echoed each other. A map of internet connections, 'flu viruses, galaxies of all kinds (real and synthetic), even strangely beautiful tumours.... and so my idea of the Noos developed from images like these.

[Namorvia]

The one on the left, that's the internet one? What exactly is it showing. Looks amazing.

Ever since reading Exodus I have wanted to experience the Weave. Its just an intoxicating idea that you could have the vastness of compiled in a visual form that you could zip through as fast as your brain could handle, with the data forming buildings and then cities. That might just be me though, the woman that assessed me recently to see if I was dyslexic said she got the impression I was far more interested in the cyber world than the real one.

[Julie Bertagna]

The image on the left (in my post above) is a 'map' of internet connections.
The middle one is a 'synthetic' (computer-created) galaxy.
The one on the right is a 'flu virus.

What's fascinating is the way the internet mirrors our brain patterns, as if we are recreating an image of our own brains - a vast explosion of human consciousness, for good and bad - in cyberspace. So that might explain your fascination, Namorvia.

The writer William Gibson invented the term cyberspace and visualised the internet before it came to be, in his 1984 novel Neuromancer - I too loved the idea of cyberspace as a 3-D experience with data formed into a vast 'city'. So I just took it a stage further and imagined it as a ruined city abandoned in cyberspace by a lost world....

The image on the left (below) is of blogosphere connections:

"The visual study featured here by Matthew Hurst reflects a plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere from collected link data over a period of six weeks. Green links represent one-way links (that is, blog A links to blog B), and blue links indicate reciprocal links (blog B returns the favor).

1 - On the map, white dots represent individual blogs, sized according to number of links. This one in particular represents DailyKos which is visited by 500,000 people every day.
2 - The popular site Boingboing, a "Directory of Wonderful Things".
3 - LiveJournal users (an isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers).
4 - The blue blob represents a balanced sociopolitical discourse (most links are reciprocal).
5 - An outlying island of blue represents the linked-up world of bloggers who traffic in the latest news and gossip from the world of pornography.
6 - A group of sports enthusiasts in the outskirts, many of whom, unlike the lonely pornographers, have links back to the central hot spot of the blogosphere."

And the image on the right (below) represents the electronic connections of the human brain: Technology Review: A Working Brain Model


Google Image Result for http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2004/1/Ryan/ryan-space_files/image002.jpg

Stunning!