Ethan Zukerman is blogging from the TED conference. THe opening keynote was from Carolyn Porco who showed this amazing picture of Saturn eclipsing the Sun. Ethan write about the moon Enceladus:
More amazing is Enceladus, a much smaller moon, about the tenth of the size of Titan. She shows Enceladus as if it were hovering over Britain (it’s not a threat, she promises” – the moon is roughly the size of England and Wales. It’s got a white, fractured surface lined by geological and tectonic activity.
The amazing part of Enceladus is the South Pole, where these white canals are lined with green – they’re much warmer than the rest of the planet and are rich in organic material. There are jets of fine icy particles flowing out in space, feeding a plume that goes thousands of miles into space above the surface of the planet. These jets suggest that there’s liquid water under the ground on Enceladus, which leads to a planetary trifecta – excess heat, liquid water and organic material, which could be an environment suitable for living organisms.
Porco ends with an extraordinary image – a total eclipse of the sun from the other side of Saturn. What’s most extraordinary, in my mind, is that the haze around the rings comes from those icy particles coming from Enceladus, particles that might represent liquid water, the potential for life, and the strong chance that there could be lots of worlds in the galaxy capable of supporting life.
You can follow along with TED at the TED blog and elsewhere.
-
ParticipatoryBudgeting.org is a companion site to the book, Militants and Citizens, and a general resource site on participatory budgeting.
-
This page contains papers, links, and other information about research and other projects related to participatory budgeting that are being developed throughout the world.
-
Articles and books in English, Spanish and Portugese
-
Including some great fortnightly 2 hour mixes. From the host of Ultima Thule
-
Ton on patterns
-
Some thoughts on Open Space, unconferenceing and action planning
-
Jon husband on why Open Space is more than unconferencing
-
Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to
-
A moving radio piece about killing a homegrown turkey
-
A study of medieval Islamic art has shown some of its geometric patterns use principles established centuries later by modern mathematicians. Researchers in the US have found 15th Century examples that use the concept of quasicrystalline geometry.
-
Attention pessimists! For optimists, this just means we have to get on with it.
-
Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.
-
A great article on how to use wikis for solving large problems
My friend Jeff Aitken has been a strangely influential person in my life. He has been an interesting guide across intercultural spaces, helping me to frame and see my own journey as a person of mixed ancestry facilitating cross-cultural groups and helping to find the creative spark in the space that are created when we all claim our centres and show up whole. Jeff and I met in 2001 and have had a few conversations over the years, but I’ve always felt very close to him.
Now at his blog rio grand-i-o, he is posting his doctoral thesis which documents his journey to his complex and liquid centre, as a man of mixed ancesrty cultivating an indigenous relationship with the land upon which he lives. Worth a read, worth subscribing to and worth following if you are interested in how white people can participate in the decolonization process on this continent.