The Phi hopes to do for radio what Apple I did for computing—spark innovation. by Timothy B. Lee - July 5 2012, 9:00pm EDT Published by Arstechnica   In 1976, two shaggy-haired college dropouts founded a company called Apple to manufacture personal computers. The company’s prospects looked so poor that the third co-founder relinquished his 10 percent stake in [...]

If you are interested in any of: > grass energy > cook stoves that do not pollute the air with lots of particulate matter, especially carbon black soot > Haiti > soil stabilization and restoration > biochar > reforestation Then this video is very encouraging. The cookies look delicious. Congratulations to Mike Mahowald and the [...]

Tags: Biochar, cooking, energy, environment, stoves, vetiver

This is a co-creation project that is both open source and open knowledge.  It is based on work first done by Amanda Ravenhill & Hugh McLaughlin at CHAB Camp in 2010. In terms of the quality and quantity of biochar, and the cleanliness of the stack gases, this design is yielding the best balanced results [...]

Description: This is an interdisciplinary activity for grades 9 – 12, revolving around use of biochar to mitigate climate change and promote sustainable agriculture / horticulture.  It involves climate science, plant science, and chemistry.  Advanced students will also encounter some elementary combustion science and thermodynamics, soil science, and botany.  The activity includes hands-on construction and [...]

Explained here.

Back in the bad old days, email vendors limited your communications to the boundaries of their walled gardens. That is, if you had a Compuserve account, you could only send email to other CompuServe account holders. The same was true of AOL, Prodigy, etc. This made operating an email campaign for Clinton/Gore in 1992 a [...]

Tags: abundance, cognitive radio, imagination, market, resilience, sdr, social capital, tolerance, trust, walled garden

Carbon negative solutions are the only way we can honestly address the integrated and hard challenges posed by the synergy of:  1] Climate disruption; 2] Ocean warming; & 3] Ocean acidification.  All of these problems are driven by too high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Simply reducing the rate at which we add to [...]

Author: Karl Frogner – In his keynote address for the ‘09 Asia Pacific Region Biochar Conference, Professor Lehmann indicated that he felt that the greatest potential for global warming mitigation through the sequestration of biochar lay in the utilization of distributed feedstocks. UBI (the Ulaanbaatar Biochar Initiative) is a program dedicated to testing the concept [...]

Tags: Biochar, CCM, Cliimate Change, pyrolysis, TDF

    Basic natural draft pyrolysis and biochar with simple iCan stoves. What can I do with one can? I can make a stove I can cook a meal I can make biochar I can be carbon negative I can start to change the world That’s why I call these stoves iCans iCans for Educators [...]

An open source stove project in progress.   Here we see the Peacham Volcano , closely modeled on the Swiss Volcano stove,  as it is used.  The cup, from a Swiss Volcano stove unit, with the water to be boiled sits inside the iCan made from a single pineapple juice can.  The iCan, in turn, [...]