It’s my third week in Uganda’s Karamoja province. It feels like I’ve been here for years.

We load the pick-up truck with tools. There’s a village 5 km north of town. The name of the village is too hard to pronounce for a Mazungu like me so I call it “the 5 kilometer village”. We load steel shovels, hoe rakes, steel digging bars, large sacks for hauling dry manure, and the African hoes.

The women’s group at this village have promised to build a fence for their vege garden. I don’t expect much because I know they don’t have any tools. If they make an effort I’m going to help them.

We arrive and they are waiting under a shady tree beside the road. Its hot and a fierce winds blinds us with dust as we get out of the ute. The mountain behind is on fire. The wind is fanning the flames to amazing heights. The fire eats he vegetation off the mountain like a hungry monster.

The women clap and cheer when I shake hands with the chief. He’s the only man in the group of 30. He has a list of everybody’s name. He’s done this before. The charities have trained him well. I tell him I don’t want names just a garden. He smiles and translates this to the group. I drop the tailgate and pass the tools to Santos and Ram my trainees.

The women go nuts. They whoop and make a lee lee lee lee noise between their teeth. The enthusiasm is genuine. I’m a bit embarrassed.

They take me over to where they have cleared an area for the fence. The shrubs have been chopped down and piled up at one end. We mark out an area for the first garden with a shady tree at one end. I visualize the tree as the meeting point for the garden crew. Lots of kids sneak up all around. Some are brave and touch the blonde hair on my arm and run away. I spin around and growl as they shriek and evaporate. Everybody laughs when they realize I’m not going to eat the children.

This is one of my pilot projects to test my designs for the manual. The women ask about seed. There are 40 kg of non hybrid seed at HQ. You get the seed when the garden is dug, I tell them. They begin to sing this time. I wonder why after 40 years of aid somebody hasn’t taken the time to cover the basics. water and food. Grow your own is better than American GM flour off the back of a truck! I tell the women no more cheering until the garden is dug and the fences are up.

We head to the prison in Moroto with the first sample of seeds. This time we get invited in to the inner prison. As the guard closes the heavy doors as we enter I feel a little apprehensive. Inside the prisoners are playing volleyball. Whew!

The governor ushers us in to his office. We make a deal. The garden project will grow all the new crops, and some for seed. Our crew will consist of several Karamajong rival tribes all mixed up. Traditional enemies will be working together.

The Guv, as I call him, shows us around. He takes us to a patch of open ground where he wants the project to start. The soil is heavy dark clay. It needs a fence. The water pump is nearby. Yep it’ll work. The Guv’s happy and the head warden looks on with a big grin. We have to go. Lots to do.

We visit a farm run by ex-warriors. Its way out in the middle of the bush. The leader speaks english. He sees the permaculture designers manual in the back of the landcruiser. I show him the mandala design. He gets excited. We need training, not handouts he says.A deal is made. We’ll train his mob if he trains warriors in the future. He offers us land for a field school. I tell him we’ll be back in 10 days with tools. He’ll have the leaders ready for a training session. I give him some seeds. Very happy guy.

On the return trip I decide to take the dangerous short cut. The security dudes warn us against it. My gut says go. We go. We drive like rally drivers. Nice road most of the way. The four of us are tense. No warriors. We make it no worries. Next day we find out warriors ambushed the safe road where we were supposed to go. One motorcyclist killed, a truck shot up and occupants kidnapped. My guys say lucky we listened to our gut! The gut is smarter than the security guys.

My garden is taking shape back at HQ. Many villagers watch its progress through the bamboo fence. Every demonstration is a teacher. The kids watering the garden each day are proud now the seeds have sprouted. They talk to the other kids through the fence as they water. They are junior trainers whether they know it or not. Everything is growing…Thank God!

Source: Steve Cran, Ugana

MP3: http://symphonyofscience.com

“Our Place in the Cosmos”, the third video from the Symphony of Science, was crafted using samples from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Richard Dawkins’ Genius of Charles Darwin series, Dawkins’ TED Talk, Stephen Hawking’s Universe series, Michio Kaku’s interview on Physics and aliens, plus added visuals from Baraka, Koyaanisqatsi, History Channel’s Universe series, and IMAX Cosmic Voyage. The themes present in this song are intended to explore our understanding of our origins within the universe, and to challenge the commonplace notion that humans have a superior or privleged position, both on our home planet and in the universe itself.

RIP Dr. Sagan and Dr. Jastrow!

For more science remixes, check out http://symphonyofscience.com

As always, view in HQ mode for better sound and visuals.

Source: Symphony of Science

Explore Australia and learn how to survive with legendary Bush Tucker Man, Les Hiddins

In a battered army truck, his home a simple roll of blankets, Major Les Hiddins seeks out and records the different kinds of bush food and medicines used by Aboriginal people for thousands of years.

He’s a bush survival expert for the Australian Army and travels alone through the vast, almost totally unpopulated lands of northern Australia to carry out his unique job. And despite the solitude he’s a chatty, humorous man who is as entertaining as he is informative.

Buy DVD from ABC

Major Leslie James (Les) Hiddins AM (born August 13, 1946 in Brisbane, Queensland), aka “The Bush Tucker Man” is a retired Australian Army soldier and war veteran, who is best known for his love and knowledge of the Australian bush. Hiddins is recognised by his distinctively modified Akubra hat and big grin.

As a soldier with the Australian Army, Hiddins did two tours of duty in Vietnam between 1966 and 1968, the first as a forward scout in the infantry. In 1987 he was awarded a Defence Fellowship to research survival in northern Australia. He was the principal author of the Australian Army’s Combat Survival manual (1987) and was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1987 ^[1].

Source: Wikipedia

Myths of Main Street: What does it really mean to “Go Local”?, Written by Adam Bessi

Rudy – Cuban Gynecologist and American Autosalesman – is the latest YouTube sensation, whose unbelievably cheesy local ad for T.D.M. Auto Sales out of High Point, NC hit national fame when it was featured on Leno as a “Bad Ad.”

Rudy’s ad wasn’t designed by Rudy, but outsourced to two self-proclaimed “Internetainers”, Rhett and Link, who look as if they stepped straight out of a Mac ad on their highly polished website. The duo – who have had a TV show, and have made web videos for Taco Bell, Hummer, Cadillac, and other major, multinational corporations – appear to have a knack for getting millions of hits on YouTube, and to “entertain first, advertise second”. In other words, Rhett and Link are professional marketing humorists, who produce funny content….which also happens to really advertise products.

So what would these guerrilla marketers for major corporations want with Rudy?

While the “Internetainers” are from North Carolina – like Rudy – the ad isn’t authentically local, by their own proud admission. Rather, Rudy’s ad is part of a larger – and very successful, in terms of number of hits – ad campaign sponsored not by Rudy, but by Microbilt Corportation, who wanted a series of “intentionally ‘local’ feeling commercials (complete with bad edits and ridiculous concepts)”.

In other words, the ad is a simulation of how a local ad is – it looks like one, is for an actual small business, and Rudy really is a Cuban Gynecologist turned car dealer. Yet, unlike a “real” local ad, this one is intentionally raw and unrefined by design, like a pair of $80 ripped jeans from the Gap. Further, the ad appears not just for Rudy’s potential customers, but is designed for a national audience, to promote Microbilt – a national corporation which makes its business supporting small and medium size businesses.

And while Microbilt may encourage local business, its ad campaign vividly illustrates a real danger of the new “local” zeitgeist: “Local” is not a reality, but a feel, a style, not a substance.

Source: Dailycensored.com

First corporation runs for congress with slogan Corporations are people too

Murray Hill, Inc. is a Maryland corporation and a public relations and advertising firm that announced at the end of January, 2010 that it intends to run as a Republican for Maryland’s 8th Congressional district. The company’s announcement that it will run for office came after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark January, 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case that corporations have the same political and free-speech rights as U.S. citizens. The company is selling mugs and T-Shirts with the political slogan, “Corporations are people, too!”

Source: Sourcewatch

“The real key to genetic engineering is control of intellectual property of the food crops that we depend on,” says author Michael Pollan of companies like Monsanto. He advocates an open source GE model.

Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle.

“American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.” - The Long Now Foundation

Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a New York Times bestseller. His previous books include The Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own (1997); and Second Nature (1991). A contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harpers Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing 2004, Best American Essays 2003, and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.

A significant contributor to rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is the information technology and communications industry itself. As campus researchers increasingly employ computational and cyberinfrastructure technologies, these tools are coming into question due to their growing contributions to GHG emissions. Consequently, some universities and R&E networks are exploring new CI architectures that will both benefit research and reduce associated GHG emissions. Optical high-speed research networks and distributed zero-carbon CI data centers with network virtualization, web services, and grids are critical to this emerging architecture. This session will review trends and spotlight projects that offer hope for averting a cybercarbon crisis

During 2009 Nicholas Roberts and Kirstie Stramler visited permaculture, transition and cooperative sites throughout Australia, California, New York City, Spain, France, England, Scotland and Denmark. An earlier draft of this presentation was given to the Swansea Heads Sustainable Neighbourhood on Saturday, 6th February, 2009. Thanks to Kate Beswick and Tom Toogood

Lake Road to Copenhagen - 2009 Permaculture Cooperative R&D

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested?

The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based “honest signaling,” evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

“Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World”

Professor Alex (”Sandy”) Pentland, is a leading figure at the MIT Media Lab and is a pioneer in the fields of organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. He co-directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets. In 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
This event took place on November 19, 2008

“We Are All Connected” was made from sampling Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The History Channel’s Universe series, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music.

MP3 available at www.symphonyofscience.com