Bring back the horse-drawn carriage + garbage in

13.II.1430

And the electric tramway too. We ought to push to bring back clopping the horse-drawn carriage for transport in downtown areas, with larger omnibus variants. Word!

We ought also to unleash the power and cleanliness of the bicycle (and scooters) for most delivery jobs as those circulate only in small-radius zones.

Motorized transport should only be between city districts , not within the same area. For instance, want to go from point A to point B within Mohandesseen, or from Mohandesseen to Zamalek, or from Zamalek to the oepra house, take a horse-drawn carriage. Want to hitch a ride to Heliopolis or Maadi? Then hail an automobile for-hire.

We ought to restore the inset-rail tramway in downtown streets , that does not disrupt other traffic flow , like we used to have in Cairo and Alex - use the dedicated rail strip variety only for transport between suburbs (like the present-dat Cairo and Alx metro).

Also clean up the act of bus drivers, livery cabs, microbus service, and for God's sake update and enforce a single taxi fare for each city. Taxi drivers and their customers should not have to bicker over rates. (Personally I never bicker over rates; the problem is that cab drivers refuse to hire their cars because of their expectation of getting stiffed by the riders - leaving me and countless others stranded waiting for a ride , whether there's an emergency or not - unless I start waving hundred-pound bills, which I do now often just to get a cab to stop and listen to where i'm going).

And BTW, as a P.S., the municipal authorities are obligated by the same law that taxes homeowners on their property to collect residential garbage at publicized schedules, not leave the garbage bags prey to the unminded stray animals (weasels, cats dogs and rats) for days before collecting only the emptied torn plastic bags.

These are the conditions in the supposedly middle-income residences. Naturally people manage by pulling rank and threatening lazy and irregular garbage collectors with punishing actions involving abuse by cops. This mode of doing things - extra-legally - however leaves single-person households like myself at the mercy of the whims the of Oliver Twists that collect my garbage (if we can call it collecting) - which translates into a mound of trash outside my kitchen door.

UPDATE 27.II.2009:
See Rome bans horse-drawn carriages
... Read more

Stop improving nature

07.iI.1430

In response to things like , "RuBisCO is very important in terms of biological impact because it catalyzes the most commonly-used chemical reaction by which inorganic carbon enters the biosphere. RuBisCO is also the most abundant protein in leaves, and it may be the most abundant protein on Earth[2]. Given its important role in the biosphere, there are currently efforts to genetically engineer crop plants so as to contain more efficient RuBisCO (see below)," I'd like to say a few words ...


Stop messing with stuff. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
You're paid to keep / use the stuff not improve it.
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!

This is not the only instance. I keep running into stories about how some idiots with degrees discover new gene or protein function and then promise to set to work on improving it or making it more pronounced.

Does it occur to anyone in the "biohack" community that stuff is the way it is for not just any reason , but for an OPTIMAL reason ?

Doesn't anyone who funds them realize that?

Hey Monsanto, Archer Daniel Midlands, Go To Jail, Do not collect $300, Do not pass Go.


I looked at Monsanto on the nearest/easiest source, wikipedia. I saw this as their logo(done up with a goofing slogan?)



Hey, Monsanto, stop imagining!

If I had an agribusiness or a biotech affair I wouldn't mind the slogan

"We like it the just way it is"

... Read more

Genetically modified lies

examples of uninformed apathetic design extend above & beyond the domain of software. GM crops with their tons of fertilizers and insecticides apparently do not match the crop yields of Akkadian farmers of 40 centuries ago - and we're not even talking the unusually rich egyptian soil - without any of the disasters attendant on GM agro. ... Read more

The planet of seas

One thing to notice about the world, or nature , is abundance.

Though I once in derision called our home planet, blighted as it is by our human mass stupidities of choice , the planet of apes, in more general terms one might as well call our planet (by which I include its different superposing spheres: the biosphere , the culturesphere , the cybersphere and so on) the planet of seas, or an ocean planet.

In any domain be it natural or speculative, one is confronted with an abundance of detail and of substance.

Every taxonomy, and every subject catalog contains more than we can incorporate. In every field is more information and discourse than one could ever want to learn. The phrase that often comes to mind when exposed to the vastness of information in any given field of human interest , is (at least in arabic parlance) "it is a wide sea".

These figurative seas, our world overflows with them.

Even for collectors, usually of artisanal objects from tin cans or stamps to exclusive artwork, paucity is an issue only in the artificial terms of economics and collectors price markets. But taken globally, there is an abundance in these items too.

This all contrasts with the voices that sound the call on "scarcity". Those voices happen to come, nearly ironically, from the richest corners of the earth. They are our self-appointed experts (perhaps by virtue of their accumulated wealth) on matters of quantity abundance and scarcity. Yet they also appoint themselves regents on the wealth of the world, never allowing too much of it to escape being at least partly under their control.

Those bugle calls of "scarcity" ring hollower than empty oil drums, however.

For in this world of immense material abundance , after the most rudimentary of physical surveys one scarcely finds anything more abundant and more ubiquitous in nature than energy. Right down to the nittiest grittiest littlest confines of nature , there appears nearly a limitless flow of energy.

Indeed it should strike us as an astounding shortcoming and failure on our part that we have so far found no better way to convert or redirect the abundance of energy surrounding us, than to burn fossil fuel.

So there are two possibilities here. Either it is the case that we , while we like to prize ourselves on our "technological achievements", are in fact monumentally stupid. Or, alternatively, our technological shortcoming when it comes to energy is willful, in the sense that it may be a symptom of a sort of generational hegemonic agenda that seeks to spread the notion of scarcity as a means of controlling the flow of the world's resources - in the process sustaining self-enrichment while needlessly and stupidly impoverishing the vast majority of the world's population.

If this were the case, then the false prophets of "scarcity" are not only fear-mongering and disinformationists but also war-mongerers.

Getting over those morons (or bastards) for now, what need concern us more , however , is that in the innocuous observation of abundance of things in our world, we find an overwhelming abundance of energy.

I am (not almost but fully) certain we can tap into it without recourse to the traditional methods of "dirty" energy.

I'd like to take advantage of the present ephemereal zeitgeist in the cybersphere of "yes we can", to sound a consonant note regarding our potential to cleanly tap unprecedented amounts of energy (i don't know how (;;) but what is clear is that there are tons of it lying all around us in the form of various potential fields). ... Read more

We must not mine the moon يـنـبغى عدم التعدين على القمر

يتوجب على البشرية الإمتناع عن إستخراج المعادن من القمر لحين توفر تقنيات الدفع التى
تسمح بإستغلال الثروات المعدنية للأجرام السماوية الأبعد.

ذلك لأننا لا نعلم الا القليل عن أثر القمر على الدورات الحيوية و المائية على الأرض بخلاف الآثار التجاذبية المتمثلة فى حركة المد و الجذر.

من شأن عمليات التعدين الصناعى على القمر ما قد يؤدى لتكون غلاف من التلوث ناتج من غازات العادم و تناثر جسيمات التربة القمرية قد يؤدى الى إحتباس حرارى غلى سطح القمر.

بالإضافة الى هذا ما هى آثار الكثير من عمليات الهبوط و الإقلاع على جسم يقل فى كتلته و حجمه (مائة مرة فى الحالتين) و كثافته (النصف) عن الأرض؟

لذا يتوجب الحذر المتمثل فى حظر على الإضرار بالتوازن الدقيق للنظام الأرضى-القمرى فى أى تخطيط بعيد المدى لإستغلال ثروات المجموعة الشمسية.

One cannot stress this strongly enough: there must not be any mining on the moon.

This must be an important component in any space colonization strategy.

Once with propulsion costs overcome there is ample opportunity for mineral extraction throughout the solar system. But until we have the breakthroughs in propulsion and efficiency to motivate the endeavour we must persevere and resist the temptation to exploit the moon minerally as the prohibitiveness of the cost of moon mining will likely be overcome before that of the mining of much further objects like asteroids or Mars.

The moon's importance to the global biotic and water cycles is known only through the tidal effects of gravitation. But little else is known. Thus we do not know how a lot of high powered landings , take-offs and mining can affect the moon , its properties and perhaps even its motion.

Unforeseen effects which have haunted much of human modern (==global-scale) technology can be as bad as those experienced on Earth today or worse.

Such risk is definitely not worth it.

There are enough minerals in Earth to cover humanity's needs indefinitely or until some ecologically-imposed limit. There is no need whatever to risk damaging a delicate and intricate Earth-moon system in the time it will take to make heavy-payload interplanetary travel cheap enough for industrial exploitation. ... Read more