Drapeable fabric turns into solid concrete when it gets wet
popsi.com, Clay Dillow, 18 May 2011
When disaster strikes and permanent structures are leveled, as they were recently by earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand (and more distantly in Haiti), they are usually replaced in the short term by tent cities. Two engineering students thought they could do better and invented Concrete Canvas, a fabric impregnated with concrete that can turn a tent into a hardy, permanent structure in 24 hours. Just add water.
IMF and Britain's foreign aid department both withhold money for reconstruction
By Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady
Sunday, 22 May 2011
EXTRACT:
The Department for International Development (DfID) confirmed last night that it had followed the lead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in withholding contributions to bankroll hundreds of “nation-building” projects in Afghanistan.
The move, to “protect taxpayers' money”, came as the full extent of the scandal at Kabul Bank – described as the biggest fraud in modern times – became clear. A secret US government report into the debacle “indicates that insiders at Kabul Bank used fraudulent loans to misappropriate $850m (£525m), representing 94 per cent of outstanding loans”.
. . . . . . .
And it notes that, in addition to oversights by Deloitte, which failed to spot and report warning signs of fraud, a team from PwC didn't identify any fraud at Kabul Bank and gave it “a clean bill of health” – something
that “may have acted to delay understanding of the gravity of Kabul Bank's true financial condition both among the examination staff and the international community”, according to the document.
Gold rising further except for profit taking bursts. China is buying all the gold it can get, and unloading all the paper dollars it can dump.. Other countries, including Russia are buying gold. I can see the Yuan or RMB playing a larger role as a global currency, but most people are too ignorant of China to accept the Yuan quickly or easily. The Swiss have a huge mass of gold well stashed, so I can see the Swiss franc playing a larger role. It's hard to make a forecast for the Euro, although it will almost certainly survive the US dollar. It's also possible that the Swiss might make a deal with the EU that would result in the Euro being backed by Swiss gold. Now that the head of the IMF has been burned at the stake, his very good brain is of no further use. The EU is scrambled eggs right now. Sarko can't survive without a miracle. India's potential will take a very long time to organize and get rolling; I went to school there and it's a seething cesspit. It's time for the US to get out of foreign wars, but unlikely that it will because of the weapons market. Obama seems impotent. The Pentagon and its corporate backers and partners seems to be deciding policy. I'm not happy about Petraeus at the agency. I think the USG and the US are totally hosed. Desperate for a new demon. Good time for Lee Kuan-yew to retire. Wise of him. The immediate future does not look good. War and more war. Civil war. Revolution. Take your pick. The cupboard is bare. It's all been looted. What a mess America has made since 1945. Moments of glory, decades of folly and stupidity…. Israel and the Palestinians are a parody of the world as a whole.
I think the last real ingots of gold in Manhattan were in the basement of the Twin Towers. The Fed and the Treasury don't dare be transparent or audited, because whatever real (solid) gold they ever had was moved to Malta and other offshore or mountain stashes long ago, replaced with Play-Dough. Christ, even the Bureau of Engraving and Printing stops now and then to change engraving plates and produce “Presidential dollars” to be used as bribes by the White House (ever since Truman); we have that from a guy who is now retired after running the shop since 1945. The satellite imagery boys, where I have sources, dream of being about to electronically penetrate the earth to a depth of 100 feet or more from satellites but when I last checked 3 or 4 years ago they were still dreaming. They fiddle with HAARP trying to achieve earth-penetration, and only end up causing huge earthquakes and tsunamis; measurements already show the poles have begun to shift partly due to melting ice masses, but also due to fiddling with HAARP. The Fukushima quake and tsunami have been attributed to fiddling with HAARP, possibly the Sumatra disaster as well. Not all scientists are smart and prescient. We're damn lucky they haven't already blown us to smithereens, while scratching their backsides. Never forget that the Fed has always existed as a fraud by intent and design. President Wilson commented years after enabling the Fed in 1913: “I have destroyed my country.”
Doc Searls has posted a slideshow explaining how Amazon’s user experience is broken, in the context of a discussion about vendor relationship management (VRM), which is about evolving a world where customers have at least symmetry in the power relationship of customer and vendor. The slides are old (January 2010) and things might have changed, but I don’t think they’ve changed as much as they should’ve, because I still experience similar frustrations when I visit Amazon.
Phi Beta Iota: Amazon is a great company with an extraordinary cloud offering and enormous potential they have chosen to leave unattended. They rejected a 2007 proposition (Amazon as the Hub of the World Brain) that would have seen them create a markeplace for informed relationships and knowledge by the call or page, and they have rejected all suggestions for enabling buyers, readers, and reviewers to “co-create” the Amazon experience. It's a pity mostly because the world need multiple forms of M4IS2 hybrids, and this is something Amazon could have provided as a service of common concern, with both the cloud for melded shared information and the authors and their readers as the human intelligence component.
Three-Dimensional Orientation Mapping in the Transmission Electron. This image shows the arrangement of crystals in a 150nm thick nanometal aluminium film. The crystals have identical lattice structure (arrangement of atoms) but they are orientated in different ways in the 3-D sample as illustrated by the labels 1 and 2.
The colours represent the orientations of the crystals and each crystal is defined by volumes of the same colour. The individual crystals of various sizes (from a few nm to about 100 nm) and shapes (from elongated to spherical) are clearly seen and mapped with a resolution of 1 nanometer.
(Credit: Image courtesy of Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy)
ScienceDaily (May 16, 2011) — Scientists from Denmark, China and USA have developed a new method for revealing 3-D images of the structure inside a material.
EXTRACT: Strip away the mathematical language of economists, and conventional theories of economic growth are rather crude. Economies produce “stuff,” and if you want more stuff to come out of the process, put more stuff in (like human capital, say). Yet economies do not produce stuff so much as billions of distinct types of goods — perhaps 10 billion, according to Eric Beinhocker of the McKinsey Global Institute — ranging from size 34 dark stonewash bootcut jeans to beauty therapies involving avocado. The difference between China's economy and that of the United States is not simply that China's is smaller; it has a different structure entirely.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very promising line of inquiry. It does not include the vital but poorly understood interactions among political-legal (integrity), socio-economic (fairness), ideo-cultural (education), and techno-demographic (balance), and natural-geographic (true cost, sustainability). As with most intellectual work these days, it is a thin slice across one dimension of very complex sphere–the world is NOT flat.
I'm excited to announce the release of my new movie “Where is Away: Solving
Plastic Pollution in 4 Minutes”. It tracks a plastic bag that I use in my hometown of Santa Cruz California, all the way to the north shore of Oahu, demonstrating both the destruction and solutions along the way. Famous musician Jack Johnson, and Story of Stuff Annie Leonard join me in this fast-paced journey to highlight the power we all have to end plastic pollution.
