It has happened before but let’s hope it does not happen again

There have been periods of extreme partisanship before. One need only look to the years before the Civil War to see plenty of violence practiced by political partisans. I’ll pick one that is very personal in its intent.

Read about the severe beating an anti-slavery Senator from Massachusetts received at the hands, and cane, of a pro-slavery Congressman from South Carolina.

The Southerner beat the Northerner so badly in the chambers of the Senate that he broke his thick cane. The Senator did not return to the Senate for 3 years. The Congressman was hailed as a hero by the South and had several new canes sent to him by admirers.

Pretty much all we have had so far are some windows broken, some children threatened and lots of hot talk. I’m hoping that cooler heads prevail but given our history, it seems unlikely.

I’m just hoping we don not end up with something resembling Bloody Kansas.

iTunes University – learning’s future

by Eldar

Harvard joins Apple’s iTunes U program
[Via Edible Apple]

Apple’s iTunes U program is a special area within iTunes that lets Universities provide educational content (lectures, lab demonstrations etc.) typically available only to paying students to the public at large. While some of the content is restricted to students who attend a specific university, the breadth and diversity of information available to the masses is simply astounding.

One of the more popular courses on iTunes U is an iPhone programming course from Stanford University that is typically taught by current Apple engineers and is made publicly available as a video podcast just 2 days after each class session. While iTunes U doesn’t garner a lot of press, it has certainly attracted a lot of user attention, with the aforementioned Stanford iPhone course generating over 1 million downloads in just a few months. Meanwhile, the cumulative number downloads from iTunes U surpassed 100 million back in December.

Now comes word that Harvard University will make some of its course content available for public consumption via iTunes U. And it’s in good company – in addition to Stanford, some of the other top flight universities already participating in iTunes U include UCLA, MIT, Oxford, and Princeton.

“Knowledge quickly becomes inert without a means of easy and open access. The new iTunes channel is yet another fantastic way of allowing everyone from the curious amateur to the professional scholar to explore the amazing intellectual breadth of Harvard,” said Cherry A. Murray, dean of the Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

You can check out Harvard’s launch page at itunes.harvard.edu.

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There are a lot of useful audio tracks at iTunes U, covering almost all aspects of higher education. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Carbon-eating concrete may not be all its cracked up to be

by pareeerica

Exclusive: Science reporter Eli Kintisch, excerpts his book, “Hack the Planet,” on carbon-eating cement
[Via Climate Progress]

Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch, sent me a blog post based on the research he did on Calera company for his new book, “Hack the Planet.

So startup Calera, who seeks to turn CO2 exhaust into limestone for “carbon negative” cement, has struck a $15 million deal with coal giant Peabody. And Monday you reported on various issues facing the technology.

I thought I’d offer more: Harvard geochemist Dan Schrag says its CEO is “pulling numbers out of his a##.” And other independent experts have their doubts as to various aspects.

I cover Calera closely in Hack the Planet, my new book on geoengineering. For a chapter on carbon called “The One-Ton-Sucking Challenge,” I spent a day at Calera’s offices in Los Gatos, California and met its business-saavy and brash CEO, Stanford geologist Brent Constanz.

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One important aspect of many geoengineering proposals to always remember is that they will not be simple and may have all sorts of unintended consequences. So be wary of anyone who does suggest they have an easy fix.

Getting CO2 back into the Earth, by recreating the limestone that used to house some of it, has some really interesting possibilities. But it also involves a lot of complex problems with some important unknowns, as shown in this article.

And it will not be really useful if it requires a lot of energy to accomplish. Unless we have carbon neutral power sources, geoengineering projects should be carefully scrutinized for their energy usage.

It will not help us much if we have to burn more fossil fuels, thus generating more CO2, simply to be able to put in back into the ground.

It’s almost like it creates my photos for me

Content-Aware Fill on Photoshop 5 is the Shiznit
[Via Edible Apple]

In anticipation of the April 12th release of CS 5, Adobe has released a number of videos highlighting some of the more compelling features in its suite of design and editing software. One such feature, Content-Aware Fill on Photoshop 5, is particularly tantalizing. Check out the video below and prepare to be amazed.

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What an amazing video! Watching him doing the clean ups was fun.

But when he removed the tree – Wow. BUt it was the final one where he fixed up a multiple photo panorama which had a lot of white space.

The resulting photo looked like an original, even though more than 10% of it had been generated by the program.

Now if they just had a button that took a snapshot nd made a professional grade photo out of it in just a single click …