Life on Saturn’s moon Titan? Maybe. It seems like something’s happening there. If it’s life, it would be a very cold sort of gas-eating, “methane-based” life that does not require water. Such a life form has never before been identified.
Although Titan’s water is frozen as solid as granite, many other conditions conducive to life exist on the moon. Here’s a story I wrote about the possibility of lightning there. Lightning may have sparked life on Earth — and, perhaps, Titan?
The New York Times reporting today that Roundup-resistant superweeds may force farmers to go back to their pre-Roundup ways.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
Meanwhile, Businessweek notes a shift in focus for seed sellers, including Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, all of which are working on drought-resistant crops.
With agriculture accounting for 70% of global freshwater use, “The biggest single issue in farming going forward is…water availability,” says Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant.
[Note: I made a small edit for precision]
Green investors who went in for Jimmy Carter-era tax incentives got burned in 1985, when the credits disappeared, taking renewable energy research projects with them.
Funny how people forget the day before yesterday but remember not to trust US clean energy opportunities. A Deutsche Bank study last fall found North America to be a relatively risky bet as far as green investment goes.
The study (.pdf) also found that Spain triggered a downturn in the solar market when it reduced its solar subsidies in 2008, but demand picked back up once policies stabilized.
Now Spain is reducing solar-energy subsidies again as it tries to avoid a Greek-style debt crisis, but solar-energy investors may be getting sick of the policy ride.
“They’ve put the fear of god into all these investors,” Paul Turney, CEO of Madrid-based Solar Opportunities told Bloomberg News. “By the time they’ve finished dithering around, they’ll have hurt their credibility so badly that no one will want to invest.”
Spain is trying to convince investors of its responsibility here, to avoid any debt-crisis contagion, calculating that solar investment either isn’t that big a deal or already had it too sweet and will come around to the new reality.
The question now is: Will the cutting of green energy subsidies itself become contagious, putting the sub-industry on shaky ground around the world because it’s the first thing scared governments cut?
Apple’s CEO published a long (and probably compelling) letter today explaining why the iPhone and iPad don’t and apparently won’t deal with Flash, the Adobe format often used for Web video, animations and interactive games and graphics.
The decision demonstrates Apple’s power to change the nature of the Internet — and kill a format, though it’s not totally for sure Flash will die, insofar as it hasn’t happened yet.
The absence of Flash on the Apple devices — and the implications of this absence — didn’t go unnoticed. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo asked a few months ago if the iPad would kill Flash.
Earlier in the week and unrelated to the Flash issue, Jon Stewart said Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one, but now Apple is the too-powerful bad guy (for backing a police search of a blogger’s home) while Bill Gates of Microsoft is saving the world. Here’s the (Flash) video:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Appholes | ||||
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[Update: Maybe Jobs can't initiate the demise of Flash after all. FTC and Justice Dept weigh antitrust inquiry.]
Major breakthroughs on the site this evening.
I’m using the Branford Magazine theme for WordPress. And what’s especially great about this world is that both the theme and the software are free. But then you have to figure out how to use them.
The Branford theme requires a little more CSS & .php tinkering than less interesting themes.
My stories kept repeating on the frontpage: I would categorize a story as News, Featured, and Politics, for instance, and it would show up three times under each of those categories.
I finally found a fix on the theme’s support site, where the designer, Michael Oeser, answers questions (also for free — but he may limit that to reasonable questions), and it involved a big copy/paste of .php code into the index file. And it wasn’t working. It took me a while to figure out that I was copying open-close quote marks but my .php file required straight quotes, for whatever reason.
Then the square pictures weren’t showing up and I realized that some goofy things seem to happen when you copy/paste code. Maybe I should have pasted it into a simple text editor and then copied it from there. But I didn’t. I just retyped all the code that I don’t understand and did a little more copy/pasting for reasons I don’t understand, and then — it worked!
I don’t know why it’s free or why it didn’t work or why it does now. I’m just plodding around this planet like everyone else.
Searching through the support site, I noticed a question about the size of the frontpage tabbed area and learned how to fix that to make it look nicer, too.
I also think I’ll be able to fix the video tab (tomorrow or some other day), and then I’ll add sidebar material (but I don’t know what to put on the sidebar) and then the About page, and then I’ll be done.
It’s a little bit of a pain entering stories because I have to do all this photo stuff (and find public domain photos) and add the logos and remove the automatic borders from the logos, etc. But the images really make it much better, I think, so I’ll see if I can endure.
And while I can’t imagine this post being interesting to anyone, I sort of like it that way. I like knowing that my friends won’t be reading my blog. Maybe I’ll make it a technology blog.
Marsalis family at the Kennedy Center. 
It was awesome.
Here’s the video.
