Railway creeper

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This is a picture Whitney sent me a few months ago.

Thanks to Slice of the day, I can now identify this plant as Ipomoea cairica.

The Railway Creeper or Cairo morning glory (Ipomoea cairica) is a vine native to tropical Africa and Asia. This morning glory vine is beautiful, climbing on to whatever it finds – the purple flower studded vine wrapped around bending bamboo stems, is a pleasing sight. Its stem is hairless, readily set roots when in touch with the earth.

This species can be identified by its leaves which are hairless to 9cm long with 5-7 lobes, middle lobe the largest. Flowers purple, pink or whitish pink, to 8cm across, solitary or in groups of 2-3. Fruit a 4-valved capsule, about 1cm across, each valve with 1 seed. Seed with wispy hairs attached. Spread by wind, water and humans.

Since Whitney is currently in Australia, I guessed the plant was introduced by humans. The Pacific Islands Ecosystems at Risk website for the plant confirms my guess. And it’s invasive.

cairo

energy solutions from space!

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If we want to maintain the standard of living developed countries are used to and if developing countries are able to adopt this standard, we’re going to need more energy than we can capture and use using available technologies. Here’s a pretty cool way to get around the problem:

Solar power from both the Moon and from satellites would provide energy for operations in space and could be beamed down to Earth using either lasers or microwaves. The great advantage of beamed power is that it does not have to be transmitted across the giant transcontinental grids as it done today. Multiple solar power satellites, along with a large set of arrays on the Moon, would be the basis of a system that would be far more robust and reliable than our current one, which suffers from occasional blackouts such as the one suffered along the US East Coast in August 2003, or the terrorist campaign that is being carried out today against the Iraqi electricity grid.

It is expensive, but it would help with our energy problem in a relatively clean way and we’d probably make a lot of cool discoveries setting stuff up on the moon.

Via 3QD.

Putting Big Brother out of business

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The FBI thinks that Hasan Elahi is a terrorist and he doesn’t trust them to get things right. So, he records pretty much everything about his life and puts it on his website.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they’d been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn’t their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn’t been detained since.

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.” [link]

I wonder if he uses AT&T?

angry feminists

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grafittiI know this picture is old and an ad that so openly supported sexual harassment [definitely? probably? hopefully?] wouldn’t get published today. But feminists from the 70s, when this picture was taken, get a bad name sometimes. And this demonstrates 1) how terrible it was and 2) a fantastic sense of humor.

Via Feministing.

On doing well in a world without women’s rights

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

So the French veecount is going to call up in the morning but I am not going to see him again. Because French gentlemen are really quite deceeving. I mean they take you to quite cute places and they make you feel quite good about yourself and you really seem to have a delightful time but when you get home and come to think it all over, all you have got is a fan that only cost 20 francs and a doll that they gave you away for nothing in a restaurant. I mean a girl has to look out in Paris, or she would have such a good time in Paris that she would not get anywheres. So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.