It passes
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civilization
The World Without Us
The World Without Us describes how Earth could react to our as hypothetical as istantaneous disappearance. It is clearly a pretext to write about some fundamental properties of this planet and, indirectly, about the temporary nature of our human adventure.
How could I have refrained myself from reading a book so close to the concept of [...]
Local maximus of Oil extraction
Passing peak oil, skeptical people would say:
Sooner or later, we’ll reach again the past peak… it’s just a question of time.
Strictly speaking, it’s not possible to negate this statement but, thinking about it, I’ve started to wonder about another question:
What is the longest period in history between a local peak and its next greater or [...]
They call it “sea”
How many times did you hear these words:
Oil? There’s plenty of it. There are countries floating over oil!
Of course it’s just a metaphor but decades hearing the same old metaphor have lead people to think that it’s mostly true.
So my naive question is: what is the total volume of crude oil on Earth? :)
BP (formerly [...]
Deep thoughts hardly vanish
Reading the referers of this website, I found that someone reached it querying a search engine for
Why do we need to do a campfire at night?
Perphaps this is not the right question: a better question would be “Why do we want to have a campfire at night?”. We don’t live in the wilderness anymore and, [...]
Electricityless
A few days ago I was wondering what life would be like without electricity: no hot water in the morning (using a traditionally controlled boiler, of course) and no light after sunset either. I know that it’s not so rational but one of my concerns at first blush was that I would never be able [...]
Peak Oil Survival
Yesterday we reached the so long awaited price of 100 USD per barrel for front month crude oil… could you imagine a better opportunity to publish the first, pessimistic, post/review of this snowy new year? :)
Peak Oil Survival is one of the saddest books I ever read: don’t read it until you are acquainted with [...]
Do we need nouns?
Reading the referers of this website, I found that someone reached it querying a search engine for
Why do we need nouns?
I think I’ve spent many years abstracting ideas so I could say that we need nouns to better understand the world… but when I’m really tired, I rock myself with anarcho primitivism ideas. I remember [...]
The five holy reasons
I think that I can list five main reasons to explain why good suggestions are so hard to follow (and it doesn’t matter if we are talking about the economy of a country or the settings of a GNU/Linux server).
we are lazy
we are unskilled
we would like to make clear to everybody that the work of [...]
100 USD each
In a few years, some survivors, roaming through the ruins of our cities, could find the front page of an old daily newspaper, printed during November 2007, the day that the price of crude oil reached 100 USD/barrel…
The price of the row material that keeps this civilization going has increased by more than 50 percent [...]
Diodato Ughi
Yesterday I tried to attend a performance of Uto Ughi, the world class violinist and conductor: it was not his fault but, I suppose that it was one of the worstly promoted and organized events of his career… what a way to think back to the catastrophe that, under our feet, is waiting for us!