Gardening for Beginners

Stuck inside due to the coronavirus? Why not learn to garden so when the good weather comes you can socially isolate yourself while also feeding yourself?

Rob Greenfield was nervous and hesitant gardner when he started and wants you to know that it’s ok to be intimidated by growing your own fruits and veggies. He’s created a great guide to help you get started in converting your lawn (which are not good) to a bountiful land of crops!

My goal with this guide is to help you get past the parts you may be nervous about. I want to empower you and activate you into growing your own food and sharing it with your community. Once your confidence level has risen and you feel like you’ve got the hang of it, I’m confident that you can figure out the rest!

This guide is geared toward beginner and first-time gardeners in the Orlando, Florida area. I would not recommend this guide if you are outside Florida. Instead I would use my Free Seed Project Gardening Guide. Florida is a pretty unique state when it comes to growing food and this guide is aimed at helping people working within the circumstances that Central Florida provides. This guide focuses on the basics of growing food and provides a general rule of thumb with ideas. It is by no means the end all be all of beginner gardening. However, I do feel that reading this whole guide will be extremely helpful to those of you who are just getting started.

Read more.

Singularity University Online Conference on COVID-19 Happening Today

It’s free and you can attend from all over the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow and we all need to do our part to help our communities. Step one might be to better understand the coronavirus and how it functions in the context of our health and our society at large. The Singularity University is running a free to all online conference on COVID-19 which runs today and tomorrow (yesterday’s session can still be viewed). In times like this we should all do what we can.

Join us for multiple days of live streamed content from Singularity University’scommunity of global experts on COVID-19, the current challenges and solutions, and future impact on our health, business, government, and communities.Our goal is to bring you the facts about this global health challenge and to give you practical information and tools to keep you healthy and prepared for what might come. The virtual summit will take place March 16-18, 2020 and will be completely free for anyone to join. We’ll be releasing specific sessions and topics this week.

All session will be live-streamed to our following social channels:

SU Facebook

SU Hub Facebook 

Twitter 

Linkedin

Register and watch here.

Play Games and use Your Computer to Fight COVID-19

lab

Without a doubt these are exceptional times; I cannot think of another moment in history in which capitalist democracies basically put their economies on hold to protect people. COVID-19 is causing great harm and we have a chance to do all our parts to fight it. The most important thing is to practice social distancing as much as possible.

Use your work computer and your own to passively help researchers using BOINC. It’s a way to use your computational powers to help researchers run simulations to better understand the Coronavirus.

While you’re staying away from people you can play Foldit@Home to help researchers working on COVID-19. Previously Foldit successfully solved an enzyme problem which AIDs researchers were facing. So now is our chance to play games to help fight COVID-19.

Foldit is a free, online game that anyone in the world can download and run on their Mac, Linux, or Windows PC. The main drive of Foldit is our science puzzles. These are weekly challenges that we refresh every week . . . that are directly related to research we’re doing here in the lab at the Institute for Protein Design or in our other labs. Foldit players can participate in the science puzzles. . .  [which] are constructed in such a way that competing players who develop high-scoring solutions make meaningful research contributions.

Read more.

Thanks to Neva!

Climaginaries: Understanding the Post-Carbon World

Fiction is an effective tool to picture how others live and what other possibilities exist for humanity. Stories like Star Trek inspire people to strive to make the imaginary real through existing science and technology, so why not do that for the transition to a fossil fuel free economy? That’s exactly what Climaginaries is trying to do. The program searches for the best works of fiction that can help people foresee the benefits of a fossil free future.

Lastly, the project aims at enabling new ways of envisioning transitions to a post-fossil world. In this component we turn to the cultural realm to explore creative ways of producing imaginaries that go beyond conventional climate efforts. Through a series of activities, scholars and artists will be brought together to enable the development of new climate imaginaries. Activities could include, but are not limited to, writing climate fiction based on modelling, and modelling climate fiction based on imaginaries in literature, art, TV-series and cinema. Additionally, we will collaborate with local artist-in-residence to produce innovative forms of new imaginaries. The exact form for this is yet to be decided on, but could include an exhibition, an installation or a theatre performance. The creative characteristic of this component also allows us to study imaginaries outside the common framework such as radical and unsustaianble imaginaries.

Check it out.

Next Step: Intermodal Bicycles

Every delivery person knows that driving a truck through a city is stressful and dangerous. Our current delivery logistics tend to rely heaveily on trucks to transport goods to their ultimate destination, which clogs up roads and pollutes our cities. DB Schenker, one of the largest delivery companies, has decide to trial bicycle deliveries for that last step of distribution and it’s working out better than expected!

“We are 40 % more productive on a bike compared to a truck in the big city. At the same time, we saving CO2 emissions and thereby greener solutions. In addition, besides the better accessibility, we have another big advantage: Always easy parking. “

The new e-bikes have two boxes that can carry up to 300 kg of payload with parcels. The bikes’ batteries have a capacity of eight hours, which means that it only needs to recharge once every day. Every day, the deliveryman is stopped by people, who wants a picture of the e-bike. One of the deliverymen is Ion Gushtu, who loves the attention and exercise in the job: “It is very popular driving environmental friendly and I think people are appreciating the new initiative.” Ion has been driving around Bergen since 5th of March 2018.

Read more.