Random news and notes to share with my friends.
Archive
About me: I'm originally from San Diego, CA. My interests are in mapping, renewable energy, climate change, economics, politics, technology, and geophysics. I have a PhD in geophysics from Columbia University. I currently live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

PowerUp NY is hosting an afternoon seminar on rooftop solar power systems at Habana Outpost, NYC’s first solar powered restaurant, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. You’ll get to meet local solar power experts from NYC and a climate scientist from NASA, and enjoy free beer from Sixpoint Craft Ales.
When and Where:
Saturday, October 10, 2009, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
Habana Outpost, 757 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Schedule
1:00 - 2:30 | Talks
- Dr. Jacqueline Floyd, PowerUp NY, Introduction
- Chris Neidl, SolarOne, “Why Solar is a Great Fit for NYC, and Vice Versa”
- Dr. Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “Climate Change and CO2”
- Christopher Moustakis, Solar Energy Systems, “The Economics of Solar”
- Jim MacDonald, Solar Energy Systems, “Commercial and Large-Scale Solar Installations”
- Rob Ashmore, Aeon Solar, “Residential Solar Installations”
2:30 - 3:00 | Open Panel, Q&A
3:00 - 4:00 | Meet and Greet, Registration Opportunity
- Register for a rooftop solar site inspection and talk one-on-one with the speakers.
- Free beer provided by Sixpoint Craft Ales.
Register early to reserve a seat by clicking the button below.

Follow us on Twitter @powerupny
“He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.”
- Stanley Fish, NY Times
“[Whale oil], because of its inherent resistance to extreme cold, is used now only in the most specialized machinery of, appropriately enough, sea and space exploration: deep-diving subs, Mars and lunar rovers and the Hubble Space Telescope. ”
- Watching Whales, NY Times
“Since the way the world occurs for people is shaped by the conversations they are, seeing them as conversations gives us access to altering the way the world occurs for them. You may be a conversation for being uncoordinated or being graceful, for being untrainable or being open to new thoughts. Once you consider that you are a conversation, you have access to yourself. You can begin to change your reality, yourself, and your future by changing the conversation.”
- W. Erhard
The problem with many journalists is that they forget that they’re supposed to be writing about they story and instead try to become the story. That’s ego for you.
Standing by the lake on a jump-or-think basis, the very first spontaneous question coming to mind was, “If you put aside everything you’ve ever been asked to believe and have recourse only to your own experiences do you have any conviction arising from those experiences which either discards or must assume an a priori greater intellect than the intellect of man?”
The answer was swift and positive. Experience had clearly demonstrated an a priori anticipatory and only intellectually apprehendable orderliness of interactive principles operating in the universe into which we are born. These principles are discovered but are never invented by man.
I said to myself, “I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call ‘God.’”
My next question was, “Do I know best or does God know best whether I may be of any value to the integrity of universe?” The answer was, “You don’t know and no man knows, but the faith you have just established out of experience imposes recognition of the a priori wisdom of the fact of your being.”
Apparently addressing myself, I said, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you.
You belong to the universe.
The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage of others.
You and all men are here for the sake of other men.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller