Wal-Mart has put out a request for proposals (RFP) to several large solar outfits. Apparently the request is fairly confidential, but Joel Makower seems to have seen the RFP and is making some comments about it over at his blog. All that is certain is that Wal-Mart seems serious about the possibility, and that solar installers are right now scrambling to put together what could easily be the biggest private solar project in history.

Xeni Jardin: Noah Shachtman at Defensetech rounds up 20 of the year's most memorable posts about military technology:

(1) Clowns Sabotage Nuke Missile
On Tuesday morning, a retired Catholic priest and two veterans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear missile launch facility, and began beating the silo cover with hammers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. Seriously.

(2) Look Out, Pyongyang? Rail Gun in the Works
One of the big selling points of the Navy's new destroyer is that it can rain a whole lot of hell -- 20 rocket-propelled artillery shells, in less than a minute -- on targets up to 63 nautical miles away... But really, that's the start. The ship's real power will come when it moves away from chemical powders to shoot its projectiles -- and starts relying on electromagnetic fields to shoot projectiles almost six kilometers/second, instead.

Link to full list.

Xeni Jardin: Iceberg liberation activists, rejoice! Scientists reported yesterday that an enormous ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has finally broken free from Canada's Arctic:

The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Link to AP story, here's a related CNET post, here's a related item about how such changes may help rid the world of notoriously unfriendly polar bears, who aren't all that much fun at parties because their breath smells like blubber: Link.

"toxic clouds so big that they can seen from space, drifting across the Pacific to California" "plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000," "where vehicles drive in daytime with their headlights on to grope through the miasma" times

Steven Leckart reports in Wired News about "When the shoot hits the fans:"

Waving your cell phone in the air like you just don’t care? Cool. Using said device to shoot a band’s new video? Way cooler. At the Austin City Limits fest in Texas last fall, the Shins unveiled “Phantom Limb,” a pop head-bobber from their upcoming third album, Wincing the Night Away. But instead of hiring, say, Garden State buddy Zach Braff to capture the moment, the Portland, Oregon-based indie darlings fansourced it, inviting the crowd to record the performance with cell phones and digicams. The result is a groovy (albeit grainy) group effort used to promote the single’s early release.

Originally posted by Howard Rheingold from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by yatta on Dec 28, 2006 at 11:12 PM

This idea would seem to be a no-brainer to anyone who's spent some time on YouTube. It's interesting to see clips from the same concert shot by lots of people. A Tribe Called Quest's reunion show at Bumbershoot is a good example. The quality is horrible, but interesting...maybe more so than the over-edited Shins video discussed in this blog. -- PA

COLOURlovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends.

I had an idea to a painting series like this a few years ago -- minimalist color panels in which the color and ratio of colors was determined by the seasonal color palette of The Gap, Banana Republic, etc. Kind of a data visualization project. Looks like someone's turned that idea into a social network of sorts...? -- PA

Mary Mattingly’s computer-enhanced photography and videos portrait a world she believes the human race will one day inhabit. After the fall of post-industrial civilization, humans will transform into comfortably numb spiritually nomads (the "navigators"), they will wear their high-tech home on their backs and be mentally and materially equipped to survive in a landscape reconfigured by the rising tides and unstable weather patterns.

People will live an inward life, clinging to their gadgets as they wander around the barren landscape. For example, they will carry a G-Simpod, a handheld device that acts as a "God substitute,” providing graphics and sounds (it's basically a music/video player) but it also enable the user to avoid any human interaction by “transforming the intangible into the tangible.” One emergency button on this device makes the user feel warm and fuzzy in his/her brain, heart and erogenous zones. This key is meant when the nomad is in mall-space, filling him or her with a sense of happiness and self-worth that derails his or her thoughts to enter into buying-mode. A second emergency key satisfies all of the user’s cravings, such as hunger, by stimulating the brain or hypothalamus with electrodes.

Mattingly spent a month living in the desert outside of Bend, Oregon experimenting with prototypes that appear in her photographs. “I wore a wearable home, equipped with a “toolbelt,” a tazer and pack of 9V batteries, solar-recording equipment from sponsor companies like Spy Emporium, pockets for a month’s worth of vitamins and other compact food sources, compass, diary, analog camera, and a prototype Blackberry that would pick up signals as far as 50 mi. out of range.”

Stills from A New Breed

Several of her images make us reflect upon the role that corporations have taken into our lives. One of them shows plastic dates, bananas, pineapples, and apples hanging from the tree. All of them are branded, Banana Republic, Lexus, Nestlé, etc. Considering that corporations are currently copyrighting parts of our genetic code this doesn’t seem so far fetched (artcritical.)

Via networked_performance.

Kind of portable houses: Takehiko Sanada's Prefab Coats; Lucy Orta and a very literal interpretation of the idea.

Whoa. Someone's spent some time pondering this in depth. -- PA

Xeni Jardin:

BoingBoing reader Sarah says,

In the vein of inappropriate/unexpected graphic adaptations of literature... my father, a psychiatrist with the Veterans Administration, alerted me to a new training video on the VA website that describes post-deployment health evaluation procedure... as an adaptation of GILGAMESH. What genius government employee came up with that one, eh?

There are some odd (though not necessarily helpful) synchronicities: Gilgamesh was the King of Uruk (now in Iraq). In the vid, his friend comes home from battle with Gulf War Syndrome (I'm guessing), and he with PTSD.

Link to the DoD/VA website.

reader comment: someone whose name I accidentally deleted says,

Using Gilgamesh in a cartoon to explain "Post-Deployment Health Evaluations" sounds like a bizarre combination, but they're following a meme started by VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. His books include "Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character" and "Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming". Link

Xeni Jardin: Smash the crap out of it with a hammer. No, seriously. Snip from Wired Magazine tutorial:

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful – tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison. Not to mention the “special” customs search, with rubber gloves. Bon voyage!

I have all of these! -- PA

Jamais Cascio, former managing editor over at Worldchanging and current proprietor of Open the Future, recently got to wondering: with all the recent hubbub surrounding carbon footprints, credits and offsets, what do everyday, common items contribute to our warming globe? He started with an American institution: the cheeseburger, and, after a little digging and number-crunching he came up with 6.3 to 6.8 pounds (2.85 to 3.1 kg) of carbon emissions per burger. This includes a myriad of factors, from growing the feed for the cattle for the beef and cheese, growing the produce, storing and transporting the components, as well as cooking them all, and he appears to have done a fairly thorough job. So, why choose burgers? The average American eats three burgers per week, or about 150 burgers per year; that's a lot of beef, cheese, shipping and grilling, and it really adds up. According to Jamais' calculations, America's love of burgers contributes approximately 941 to 1023 pounds (that's 428-465 kg) of greenhouse gas per person, per year -- the rough equivalent of the annual carbon output from 7,500-15,000 SUVs if the 300 million US citizens hit the 3 burgers/week average. Will Carbon McCredits soon be appearing on menus across the country (and the world)? Jamais' discerning look at this common food item suggests we may want to think about it. Read more at ::Open the Future

from Car Free Housing in European Cities, Jan Scheurer We hear often how hard it is to live in North America without a car, yet in Manhattan 75% of households get along without one. Then we hear that in the suburbs its different- that is why in the USA nationwide, only 8% of households don't own a car. But what if you designed a community around the principle that one doesn't need a car? That really was green from the ground up? What would it look like? Vauban, near the German city of Freiburg, may be the best demonstration yet.

b.burl writes to tell us a recently released report by the NDP Group supports the horror stories being fed to us by studio execs, but not quite in the way those execs would have you believe. The study shows a continued rise in video piracy compared to legal video sales. The largest target continues to be adult oriented content and TV shows, with only an estimated 5 percent being mainstream movie content. From the article: "[A]mong U.S. households with members who regularly use the Internet, 8 percent (six million households) downloaded at least one digital video file (10MB or larger) from a P2P service for free in the third quarter of 2006. Nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult-film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content."

The Bush administration is proposing that the polar bear be listed as an endangered species. The administration says global warming, pollution and over-hunting are threatening the bear's existence. The polar bear would be the first species listed as endangered because of climate change.

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Whoa, the Bush Administration has actually made some concessions to science on this one. I guess all it took was the first ever instance of polar bear cannibalism to make 'em thunk about it. Thanks, Mr. Decider! -- PA

Xeni Jardin:

Fans of cloned meat and dairy products -- c'mon, we know you're out there -- rejoice! The US government declared today that food products made from cloned animals is "safe to eat," and probably won't require labeling to disclose the fact:

After more than five years of study, the Food and Drug Administration concluded that cloned livestock is "virtually indistinguishable" from conventional livestock. FDA believes "that meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day," said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine.

Link.

Globally, scientists have been warning for some time of an impending anthropogenic mass extinction worldwide. Previous bouts of human-caused extinctions were due mainly to directed take: humans hunting for food. What we are seeing now is probably the first large animal (the Baiji) that has ever gone extinct merely as an indirect consequence of human activity: a victim of market forces and our collective lifestyle....

Hope Yen | Washington DC | December 25

AP - The tally for Hurricane Katrina waste could top $2 billion next year because half of the lucrative government contracts valued at $500,000 or greater for cleanup work are being awarded without little competition.

Federal investigators have already determined the Bush administration squandered $1 billion on fraudulent disaster aid to individuals after the 2005 storm. Now they are shifting their attention to the multimillion dollar contracts to politically connected firms that critics have long said are a prime area for abuse.

In January, investigators will release the first of several audits examining more than $12 billion in Katrina contracts. The charges range from political favoritism to limited opportunities for small and minority-owned firms, which initially got only 1.5 percent of the total work.

"Based on their track record, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw another billion more in waste," said Clark Kent Ervin, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general from 2003-2004. "I don't think sufficient progress has been made."

August background story: Katrina disaster profiteers pocket millions in deals

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Baghdad | Dec 26

AP - The U.S. military death toll in Iraq has reached 2,974, one more than the number of deaths in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, according to an Associated Press count on Tuesday.

The U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers in a bomb explosion southwest of Baghdad on Monday. The deaths raised the number of troops killed to 2,974 since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.

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Slinky writes "According to at least six bloggers, Microsoft has been sending out free top-of-the-line laptops pre-loaded with Vista as a 'no strings attached gifts'. This 'reward' for their hard work on covering tech in general is coincidentally right before the launch of Vista to consumers. To be clear, these weren't loans, they were gifts, and they were top-of-the-line Acer Ferrari laptops. Microsoft blogger Long Zheng broke the silence over the source of the freebies."

Does that go for reBloggers, too? I. LOVE. VISTA. IT. WAS. MUCH. BETTER. THAN. CATS. -- PA

Roland Piquepaille writes "If you were a law enforcement official searching for hunters who don't follow the rules, what would be a good gift for you? In 'Robot Deer Captures Poachers,' Brian Bull, reporting from Mosinee, Wisconsin, writes that you can buy robotic decoys for deer, elks, moose and even bears. These life-like creatures are made of animal hides or skins attached to polyurethane foam bodies and equipped with remotely controlled motors allowing the head and tail to move. After you pay about $2,000 for such a robo-deer, you put it on a side road. All you have to do is wait for an illegal hunter trying to shoot the fake deer and fine him. Many officers have reported collecting well over $30,000 in fines with a single robot. Not a bad deal."

Several search engines produce annual lists of the "top search terms" though these are not always reliable. As the San Francisco Chronicle points out, "the lists are filtered of pornography and, in some cases, generic words and company names. Editing...

Aw, Britney. We're all really pullin' for ya. We really care. Can't you tell by how often we search for you? -- PA

China’s GDP is rising faster than a Beijing office building or housing project. But the color of that tower going up across the street—wherever you are there seems to be a crane and an army of construction workers—is slowly turning from the city’s traditional red to a neat shade of green. Over at China Dialogue, I've written something about the trend towards sustainable building in China’s capital, where the LEED green building standard has already been plastered on the scaffolding for a handful of new developments, like Steven Holl’s "filmic" Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex (above). Sure, greenwashing abounds on the real estate market (as it does in the supermarket), but that doesn’t mean architects and engineers aren’t incorporating low-E and rainwater collection into their vocabulary. LEED guru Rob Watson makes regular trips to the capital to meet with designers and officials (who are working on a homegrown standard), and everyone from developers to home buyers to big companies are lining up to learn more. Sure, LEED may have its naysayers (arguing among other things that the standard can be prohibitively hard), and indeed, getting the necessary materials is still harder in Beijing then, say, New York. But the increasingly easier LEED regime is helping construct greener buildings here, and giving green design something that can’t hurt in an increasingly image-conscious China: a nice shiny brand name. See also the Church of LEED and Inhabitat’s LEED gospel.

Electronic gadgets continue to grow in popularity and many people will give them as holiday gifts this season. Devices that plug in to wall outlets are responsible for a small but growing portion of total household energy consumption, about five to seven percent. Devices powered by batteries also pose environmental problems. More than three billion alkaline batteries are thrown away in the U.S. each year instead of being recycled. The toxic metals they contain (such as lead, mercury, and cadmium) can leak into groundwater and harm local residents or wildlife.

Xeni Jardin:

BB reader Justin says,

After the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Disney theme park designer Art Riley jokingly proposed repurposing the site as an amusement park - seen here in this concept art found recently on Ebay.

Link to Justin's blog post, which also explores a German fun park on the site of an abandoned nuclear power plant.

Reader comment: Mike Outmesguine says,

I happened to catch this news that Unit 1 from Three Mile island (TMI-1) was shut down earlier this month for a few days "due to a grid disturbance" which probably means problems with the delivery of energy to the electrical grid. It's operating at full power now providing 850 Megawatts. (Link). Unit 2 is the reactor that had the meltdown in 1979 and as of 1993 is permanently shutdown and defueled. (Link)