Calendar: Ghosts in your Genes

Image via Wikipedia

Many good things happening at the Salem Public Library, but this one stands out:

Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center
Lecture Series

Environment and Disease: The Ghosts in Your Genes

7 p.m. Thursday, February 25, Loucks Auditorium

Dr. Michael Skinner of Washington State University will provide a general overview of endocrine disruptors. He will talk about how his research has shown that environmental factors change the expression of our DNA – but don’t change the underlying DNA sequences – and how these lasti ng eff ects can be passed
on from generation to generation.

Dr. Michael Skinner‘s research has been highlighted in BBC and PBS documentaries and selected in the top 100 discoveries in 2005 and 2007 by Discover.

The presentation is free and open to the public through support from the Charla Richards-Kreitzberg Charitable Foundation, the Salem Foundation, Salem Public Library, City of Salem, and Marion Soil and Water Conservation District. For more
information, contact the Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center at 503- 391-4145 or visit www.fselc.org.

The Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center is a Salem-based, nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental education.

At last: Salem takes halting first steps towards better public outreach

This is the standard icon to indicate RSS feeds. Image via Wikipedia

A first step at last.

If you go to the City of Salem webpage and click on the little (nonstandard) orange envelope icon in the top right corner you will go to a subscription management page (which includes an explanation of what an RSS feed is) and you can sign up for one of three feeds (city news (press releases), police news, and fire news).

The implementation so far is clunky and very incomplete -- all the links on all the city's pages take you to the same place (instead of providing you with a feed for that page), the subscription management page, where there are (so far) just the three feeds (general city press releases, fire news, and police news).

So there is not yet a feed for the things that would be most useful to have promptly: land use applications, zoning change requests, development permit applications, etc. Presumably feeds for those are coming --- after all, we're "streamlining" the development ordinances now, so helping citizens learn of proposed land use changes as soon as they are proposed would go a long way toward making the process better.

If these feeds are implemented throughout all the city's web pages with an eye towards helping citizens stay current, these feeds could become quite helpful in promoting timely citizen participation.

Question: : 1. What is RSS? ‎(1) RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) feeds are free content feeds from websites that contain article headlines and summaries and links back to full text articles on the web.
Question: : 2. What are the benefits of using RSS? ‎(1) RSS is fast and sometimes easier than receiving updates in your email inbox. It doesn't clog your inbox with emails or require you to revisit websites that you're interested in. Instead, the information comes to you when you want it.

Click on the section title link to obtain the RSS URL, which you will see in the "Address" field of your browser. Simply copy this URL and follow the instructions for your particular news reader to subscribe.

Question: : 3. What tools do I need to use RSS? ‎(1) To start using RSS, you need a special news reader or aggregator that displays RSS content feeds from websites you select. There are many different news readers available, many of which are free of charge. Most are available as desktop software that you download and install on your computer.

There are some email programs that can handle RSS feeds (e.g., Thunderbird, Outlook, Groupwise, ...), there are browser-based plug-ins or extensions (e.g., Firefox, IE, ...) or self-contained applications to install (e.g., Feedreader). Another way for you to read feeds would be through a Web-based solution (e.g., Bloglines.com). Some programs are free and some charge a fee, so be sure to read the fine print on the software before installing it.

Several Web-based news readers are available as well.

List of news readers (Yahoo)
List of news readers (Google)

Once you have set up your news reader, you simply subscribe to the RSS content feeds you want.

The person to thank and to contact to suggest improvements is

Mike Gotterba, CSP
City of Salem
555 Liberty Street SE, Room 325
Salem, OR 97301-3503
503-588-6211 or

503-588-6255 or
direct-503-588-6347
cell 503-949-1015
mgotterba@cityofsalem.net

A serious message for the Dems

Possibly NSFW, depending on where you W.

The Healing of America: The one health care book to read if you're reading only one

Americans, learn from others?!? Are you mad? But seriously folks, great book.

He's an engaging writer and, in a fairly short book, manages to provide both a great overview of the principal systems for financing health care and a down-to-earth level view of how the systems work in practice (a perspective gained by actually seeking and getting, or not getting as the case might be, care in each of the countries).

One for Every Block Please!

Very nice.

Salem's One Fair World - Helping Haitian artisans

Immediate disaster aid is fine and necessary --- but even better to address poverty all the time by helping artisans get a fair price for their work, enabling them to escape aid dependency and to build a better life for themselves. One Fair World, Salem's nonprofit fair trade goods store (474 Court St., OneFairWorld.org) is an important part of that better way. Without a reliable market for their goods, artisans in impoverished countries have no way to provide for themselves:

Why CO2 cap and trade is a scam to allow Business as Usual

What LEED needs to become to become relevant

THE PASSIVHAUS VS. THE SOLAR HOME

Tree Hugger - It is hard to believe, but this "mountain hut" in Austria needs next to no heating; it is all done with body heat, cooking heat and passive solar heat. it is an example of a Passivhaus design, built to a standard developed by the Passivhaus Institut in Germany, based on the work of Dr. Wolfgang Feist.

Green Builiding Advisor - An energy-efficient house without solar equipment. Designed by architect Christoph Schulte, this superinsulated home was the first Passivhaus building in Bremen, Germany.

More and more designers of high-performance homes are buzzing about a superinsulation standard developed in Germany, the Passivhaus standard. The standard has been promoted for over a decade by the Passivhaus Institut, a private research and consulting center in Darmstadt, Germany. . .

The Passivhaus standard is a residential construction standard requiring very low levels of air leakage, very high levels of insulation, and windows with a very low U-factor

Unlike most U.S. standards for energy-efficient homes, the Passivhaus standard governs not just heating and cooling energy, but overall building energy use, including base load electricity use and energy used for domestic hot water. . .

Although the Passivhaus Institut recommends that window area and orientation be optimized for passive solar gain, the institute's engineers have concluded, based on computer modeling and field monitoring, that passive solar details are far less important than airtightness and insulation R-value. . .

In Europe, most homes are heated with a boiler connected to a hydronic distribution system. Since residential forced-air heating systems are almost unknown in Europe, many Passivhaus advocates declare that their houses "have no need for a conventional heating system"ˇ - a statement that reflects the European view that forced-air heat distribution systems are "unconventional."ˇ

UPDATE: It's not just the heat, it's the acidity (Part II)

Image via Wikipedia

Ho-hum, just another sign that we're approaching a collapse in the ecosystem in which all terrestrial life ultimately depends, no biggie ...

In addition to contributing to a global greenhouse effect, some of the carbon dioxide from cars, factories and power plants dissolves in the ocean, creating the same carbonic acid that gives soda pop its tang. The process makes seawater slightly more acidic, and also gobbles up carbonate, a basic building block of seashells.

The result can be an environment where shells dissolve, destroying plankton, marine snails and other small creatures that sustain the rest of the marine food web. Acidified water also can kill fish eggs and larvae.

Byrne and his colleagues developed a more precise way to measure pH, using a dye that turns from purple to bright yellow as acidity increases. On board the ship, they used instruments called spectrophotometers to measure the color change and nail pH levels 10 times more accurately than possible before.

Debby Ianson, an ocean climate modeler for Canada's Institute of Ocean Sciences who was not involved in the project, said the approach is a good one. "We need studies like this," she wrote in an e-mail.

As expected, the researchers found acidification was strongest in the top layer of water, closest to the atmosphere. Normal seawater is slightly alkaline, with a pH value of about 8. Over the past 15 years, average pH levels in the top 300 feet of the ocean dropped 0.026 pH units. That sounds tiny, but is equivalent to a 6 percent jump in acidity, Byrne said.

Time for a Repost: crucial 11 minute video

On the heels of Greg Craven's great talk in Salem last night, I was moved to dig up this video, posted a couple years ago -- about 11 minutes. Helps inform your exploration of "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" as Greg's excellent book puts it.