The Vertical Farm Project, led by Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University, aims to deal with the problem of feeding the growing world population. The idea is to build vertical indoor farming structures within urban centers.
The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.
This second rendering looks like an eco-friendly data center.
I am deeply interested in projects that make an effort to take waste out, the least power needed for the most beneficial outcome, that way things work more efficiently. This concept of simplicity in design can apply to many different things, Gentoo Linux (optimized and customized flavor of linux), fixed gear bicycles (less parts, less weight), or farming. We must learn to farm efficiently and locally because “by the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers.”
Self watering containers remind me conceptually of The Vertical Farm. The self watering container takes out the effort of that goes into the watering and maintaing of a garden, and work well for urban or apartment living because they are compact and self-contained.
We must have a solution for the future and the Vertical Farm Project has many good ideas. And as they point out, “we cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on earth.”
A classic typographic goof. I’ve been seeing this kind of problem all over. It is a bipartisan problem. It is on tons of campaign signs. About half of the time it is wrong. How does this get by?
THE WRONG WAY: ‘08
THE RIGHT WAY: ’08
Last night Laura and I were talking about how we both feel weird about celebrating our birthdays. This does not seem to be a problem for everyone. The feeling happens every year around my birthday. It isn’t that I don’t want to celebrate. I’m not really sure how to celebrate. Birthdays, like all holidays, have so many expectations. Expectations makes celebrations feel totally weird.
So what should happen on birthday? I celebrated my 22nd and 23rd birthdays at the Brown House. (I don’t imagine I will celebrate my 24th there.) I tried to get tickets for Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, but that didn’t work out. My idea for this year was to use my birthday as an excuse to do the things we never do. So I want to make an apple pie, have french fries, drink a soy chocolate milkshake, have a really hoppy beer, maybe hang out at a park? Who’s with me?
I’ve been liking Movable Type less and less lately. A lot of the problems stem from it being written in perl and performance issues related to that (I assume). I’ve been looking at different ways to make Existential Media work better (faster) and be more stable. I’ve done some optimizing lately of Movable Type and my templates (as far as I can with my know-how), but it hasn’t helped terribly. I’ve looked at different hosts and hosting plans, but there is always cost to consider, as well as effort it takes to move to a new host. So in the short term it looks like we are sticking with Movable Type and Dreamhost.
I’ve started to look at this problem and set long term goals. Although I have learned a lot about Movable Type and although it would be a pain to learn a new platform, I’ve been “shopping” around. I’ve looked at Textpattern, which though I like a lot, wouldn’t be good at handling something like Existential Media. It works better to power one site / one blog. Managing users and permissions and blogs seems like it would not be fun. There is also ExpressionEngine, but there is the problem of cost, so that’s a no go. I’m getting to the point now. I’ve been heavily considering using Drupal. Drupal is what is used to power the Onion’s website. I installed it and have been tinkered around with it for a last couple days. So far so good I guess. There is a huge learning curve. It’s a whole new deal. I don’t really know how to come at it just yet. And they focus on being easy on the resources, which is also a good thing. I’ve also looked at Wordpress MU, which is what they use to power wordpress.com. It might be exchanging one problem for another, but Wordpress is very fast and pretty. I’ve more or less decided to go with Wordpress (that is, unless Movable Type is rewritten in PHP or something). Also, the most recent version of Wordpress was designed by Happy Cog, which is pretty cool.
At first I thought heavily about going with Drupal, but I decided against it. Although it would work, Drupal doesn’t have blogging first in mind, it is a full featured CMS. I also was having trouble getting to know it. Before I decided against it though, I started writing this post. So I’ve modified it. Here is my original game plan for Drupal:
I have to figure out how this all works. I need to “port” my themes over to Drupal. I need to move all the data too. There is a Typepad/Movable Type convertor, but I’m not sure exactly how it will work. There is a list of things I can’t figure out just yet and I thought it would be good to present here.
- Giving a user a blog: I’m a little confused about this. I want it to be like it is now. I give Laura a blog named ladyparts and it has a certain design. And the content does not get intermixed with the rest of the site. I’m not really clear how to manage “blogs” yet. A project that I’ve been looking at is Drupal MU. This solves the problem of having a different theme for each blog. Somethings I’m confused about though. Like does the blog name always have to be the same as the user’s? (Like “Laura’s Blog” … existentialmedia.org/laura)
- Having many users to one blog: I’m not really clear on how this would work. Thinking about WIWT, how can I have a blog named “What I Wore Today” and have the url (/today) and have different users post to it? Is this possible?
- I need to figure out how to have a list of the most recent posts on the homepage with the blog colors, but that might come once I figure out the other things.
But since we probably won’t be using Drupal, there is no need to worry anymore about that. Here is why I like Wordpress.
- It is easy to manage, and although it is very different than Movable Type, I felt at home almost right away. It has the same idea of blogs and users, and trying out the import feature it imported all the posts and comments on my blog flawlessly.
- I did need to install one plugin right away to embed youtube, vimeo, etc which isn’t the most ideal. But was painless.
- Wordpress is very fast because it is written in PHP. I like this part a lot. No more rebuilding! I plan on installing one of the caching plugins too so we shouldn’t have any problems.
- The only reason we aren’t there yet is that I have to figure out the templates. It looks to be not that hard, but will take some time. I want to make the templates more easily customizable and this seems possible to do with Wordpress themes.
Do you have any questions? Fears? Knowledge to impart on this subject? I would really like to be in communication with everybody as much as possible on this.