"Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner,
Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson,
along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea:
Move Your Money
."
Eugene Jarecki's short video based on the story in the classic Frank Capra film
It's a Wonderful Life,
where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter:
"Last month was Javascript season in Europe, with two conferences dedicated to the language that powers interactive web applications, and a third, which featured it heavily. If a common theme emerged, it was the buzz about Javascript leaping out of the browser to serve other domains, and the noise has only become louder in the aftermath."
"Of all the applications outside the browser, server-side Javascript is the most alluring for reasons described in this post. An idea that would have had you laughed out of the room a few years ago is edging towards reality."
"This has been a big year for JavaScript. New, fast engines have tested their legs. Libraries have matured. With the ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the language is growing. However, the language remains largely in exile, to only be used in Web browsers. This year has marked a resurgence of efforts to make JavaScript useful outside the browser. This was patently obvious at this year's first European JavaScript conference, jsconf.eu."
"JavaScript on the server-side has been around a while but is seeing a recent increase of freshly sprouting open source projects. As an ad-hoc grassroots effort, the CommonJS working group is attempting to standardize an API of server-side JavaScript environments and build a standard library, enabling far more code sharing between projects. Why is the CommonJS effort a major step forward for ServerJS and what are the unique contributions ServerJS can make to the future of web development? How can you leverage this spirit when using JavaScript on the server-side in your projects today?"
For the the
World Watch Institute
, two environmental scientists of the World Bank have rechecked the numbers of that 2006 UN report, which you might remember me mentioning
not to long ago
.
That report of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said that global meat production is causing over 18% of men made green house gas emissions, more than the entire CO2 emissions of all forms of transportation combined.
The UN FAO report counted 7'516 million tons of CO2 equivalents. The report did not count 8'769 million tons of CO2 equivalents caused by the respiration of the livestock. Nor did the report account for the at least 2'672 million tons of CO2 equivalents that would be absorbed by the improved CO2 balance of reduced land usage for food production, allowing forests to regenerate, absorbing more CO2.
The report also undercounted methane gas emissions by an additional 5'047 million tons of CO2 equivalents. That's because the report counted the global warming potential of the methane emissions using a 100-year timeframe, while methane, with its 90% lower half-life in the atmosphere than CO2, should more accurately be counted using a 20-year timeframe.
Also, the UN's "Livestock’s Long Shadow" report used partially outdated and undercounting numbers. For example, it uses citations dating back to such years as 1964, 1982, 1993, 1999, and 2001, where emissions today would be much higher. While the report based its calculations on 33.0 million tons of poultry production in 2002, even the UN FAO’s own Food Outlook of April 2003 reports that 72.9 million tons of poultry were produced worldwide in 2002.Taking several additional categories of overlooked, undercounted and misallocated emissions into account, would add at the very least another 8'560 million tons of CO2 equivalents.
Even if we would switch the entire planet completely to renewable energies, suppress all industrial CO2 emissions worldwide and ban all cars, truck, airplanes and boats, new and old, everywhere, the effect for the climate would be smaller than switching to a vegan diet.
Helma... "uses Rhino JavaScript, the oldest language on the JVM besides Java itself. Rhino was created by Netscape and later inherited by the Mozilla Foundation. It is backed by Google, and it is the default scripting language implementation available in Java 6. It offers strong performance and a rich set of utilities, all of which Helma leverages beautifully."
"Helma was the easiest to get up and running. Once you download the package, run ./start.sh [...] and navigate to http://localhost:8080/ to find a page with links to various tools, documentation, and the Helma website."
...attempts to explain Helma concepts...
"The biggest challenge learning Helma is shifting your mode of thinking—not entirely different from first learning JavaScript’s prototype-based object system. Most frameworks are written in object-oriented languages; Helma is an object-oriented framework. It is a subtle, but critical distinction. With Helma, you build one massive object that is the web application. While confusing at first, the final organization seems very intuitive."
...finds some things to reasonably gripe about...
"Helma’s organization does lead to some weird cases. For instance, consider registering a new user. This should obviously be an action placed under the User prototype. Right? Wrong. Every User action must match up to an existing user. Therefore the registerUser action must be stored in Root. As a result, this directory can feel like a random grab-bag.
In theory, you could avoid this issue by creating a default object and cloning it. This would fit nicely with the cloning-based approach of prototype-based object systems, but it does not seem to be the standard for Helma."
...and concludes...
"[...] developing an application in Helma was a pleasure. The organization, while unusual, was also very powerful and will challenge your assumptions about how web development should be done. [...] While its libraries are decent, they pale compared to Rails and Grails. Still, it was the most fun to develop in."
