News from Azerbaijan about Iranian dam and hydroelectric projects in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and elsewhere:

Iranian Energy Ministry plans to build dams and hydroelectric power stations in 10 countries in the near future.

Deputy Minister of Energy and Water Resources of Iran Rasul Zargar announced that a dam and an electric station of 220 MW will be built in Tajikistan.

A similar project will also be implemented in Azerbaijan.

According to the Deputy Minister, discussion of the construction of a dam and hydroelectric power station at Araz river in Armenia has already been launched.

- Today.Az: 08 September 2008.

“IBM is launching a new, free to play MMO called PowerUp that will challenge players to solve problems involving solar, wind, and hydropower before the environment of a fictional planet is destroyed by mounting crises.”
- Kotaku.com: Link.

More from Worlds in Motion:

The game features three missions for solar, water and wind power that must be solved, either by players alone or in groups, before various environmental crises destroy the planet. IBM says it developed the online world to support educators in engaging children on environmental issues, leveraging kids’ interest in virtual worlds and games. Interaction between players is restricted to phrase-based avatar chat, IBM says, to ensure safety.

IBM says it took 16 months to develop the online game, with advice from nearly 200 teens in the Connecticut Innovation Academy. IBM’s TryScience team from the New York Hall of Science worked with The Tech Museum in San Jose, California and the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the activities and game content.

The game will be accompanied by classroom lesson plans associated with the topics presented in the online experience, and will also include an interactive module to educate kids on 3D technologies used in virtual world building.

- Worlds in Motion: Link.

See powerupthegame.org.

“Massacres and paramilitary land seizures behind the biofuel revolution”

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for “green” fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia’s population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world’s worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.

… A government investigation reportedly found irregularities in 80% of palm oil land titles in some areas.

… The paramilitary groups, first formed in the 80s by businessmen, landowners and drug lords to fend off guerrillas, became a powerful illegal army which stole land, sold drugs and massacred civilians. Under a peace deal with the government they have officially disbanded but many observers say remnants remain active.

… Coca production in Colombia has surged despite US-funded eradication efforts, according to an estimate that casts fresh doubt on Washington’s “war on drugs”. Satellite imagery collated by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy survey suggests that cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, jumped 8% last year to 156,000 hectares.

[Guardian]

Nikolai Tesla … an archetype of genius and tragedy.

Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serb family, in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in Croatia). He was baptised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28, 1856 (Julian calendar); July 10 in the Gregorian calendar ….
[Link]

Tesla disliked Thomas Edison. Upon Edison’s death, most of the remarks made in his epitaph were kind, save those from Tesla, who said of Edison:

“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene.”

- Tesla on Edison, via Jason Bellows @ DamnInteresting.com: Link

Via Boing Boing

From a recent talk with Lawrence Krauss:

We’ve discovered the universe is flat, which most of us theorists thought we knew in advance, because it’s the only beautiful universe. But why is it flat? It’s full of not just dark matter, but this crazy stuff called dark energy, that no one understands. This was an amazing discovery in 1998 or so.

What’s happened since then is every single experiment agrees with this picture without adding insight into where it comes from. Similarly all the data is consistent with ideas from inflation and everything is consistent with the simplest predictions of that, but not in a way that you can necessarily falsify it. Everything is consistent with this dark energy that looks like a cosmological constant; which tells us nothing.

It’s a little subtle, but I’ll try and explain it.

We’ve got this weird antigravity in the universe, which is making the expansion of the universe accelerate. Now: if you plug in the equations of general relativity, the only thing that can ‘anti-gravitate’ is the energy of nothing. Now: this has been a problem in physics since I’ve been a graduate student. It was such a severe problem we never talked about it. When you apply quantum mechanics and special relativity, empty space inevitably has energy. The problem is, way too much energy. It has 120 orders of magnitude more energy than is contained in everything we see!

Now that is the worst prediction in all of physics. You might say, if that’s such a bad prediction, then how do we know empty space can have energy? The answer is, we know empty space isn’t empty, because it’s full of these virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, and we know that because if you try and calculate the energy level in a hydrogen atom, and you don’t include those virtual particles, you get a wrong answer. One of the greatest developments in physics in the 20th century was to realize that when you incorporate special relativity in quantum mechanics you have virtual particles that can pop in and out of existence, and they change the nature of a hydrogen atom, because a hydrogen atom isn’t just a proton and electron.
[Lawrence Krauss: Link]

Via Slashdot

See also:

• Physical Cosmology
• Lawrence Krauss images

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore changes his mind, calls for nuclear power

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands [see Amchitka]. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
[link]

via Dave’s Picks

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (and many other admirable initiatives), is another old-school environmentalist who has come around to nuclear power

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. [link]

Jared Diamond, author and lecturer, also endorses nuclear power. Diamond spoke at a conference sponsored by the Long Now Foundation (another Stewart Brand project). Mark Hertsgaard chronicles the event, and calls both Diamond and Brand to task –

During a public lecture in San Francisco last month [July 2005], Jared Diamond, the mega-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming.

Addressing an overflow crowd at the Cowell Theater about why some societies fail and others don’t (the theme of his most recent book, Collapse), Diamond three times cited global warming as a threat that could ruin modern civilization. During the question period, he was asked if he agreed with Stewart Brand, whose Long Now Foundation was sponsoring the lecture, that global warming posed such a grave threat that humanity had to embrace nuclear power. It was a delicate moment, for Brand, the former editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue , was on stage with Diamond.

“I did not know that Stewart Brand said that,” Diamond replied. “But yes, to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power.” Nuclear, he added, should simply be “done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents.”

“I did not expect that answer,” Brand said.

Neither, it seemed, did much of the audience. Overwhelmingly white and affluent, they had nodded reverentially at everything Diamond had said thus far—about the self-destructiveness of ancient civilizations that leveled forests (Easter Island) or eroded soils (the Mayans) in pursuit of short-term gain, about the need for America to rethink its “core value” of consumerism if it hopes to survive. They had clapped when Diamond mocked President Bush’s see-no-evil approach to environmental protection.

Yet now here was Diamond urging an expansion of nuclear power, a technology most environmentalists regard as irredeemably evil.

“Deal with it,” crowed Brand as the crowd sat in stunned silence.
[link]

“Crowed” …? Maybe: crows are tricksters, and Brand has long been that.