So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

The Joy of Less - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com

Global investors spent about $250 billion building new power capacity in 2008, and for the first time the lion’s share of that money went to renewable sources, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Clean Energy Funding Trumps Fossil Fuels - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

But let's look at the claim that using biofuels lowers overall carbon dioxide emissions. Essentially it isn't true. null

The Ethanol Lobby: Profits vs. Food - BusinessWeek

In weeks of closed-door negotiations with these Democrats, Mr. Waxman doled out billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, known as allowances, to cushion any price shock caused by imposing a cap on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

In the end, 85 percent of all pollution allowances were given at no cost for various purposes, including compensating energy-intensive industries, state governments, oil refiners and low-income households, at least in the early years of the program. Mr. Obama’s position during the presidential campaign was that all of the permits should be auctioned, not given away, but the White House did not object to Mr. Waxman’s generous allocations.

Climate Bill Clears Hurdle, but Others Remain - NYTimes.com

NASA's triumphant mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope this week has cracked open a policy rift within the space agency, with a top NASA scientist saying that the United States is on the way to losing the capability of doing what it has just done so dramatically.

Successful Hubble Repair Mission Widens Policy Rift at NASA - washingtonpost.com

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts | Threat Level | Wired.com

Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornet's nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-ed was a professional rapprochement with the New York Times, a chance to make things right once again (though why they were then wrong is a story left mysteriously (and thankfully) out of the book).

(Read the rest of this insanely long review in the extended entry. You can download a better formatted PDF here.)

The Solipsist and the Internet (a review of Helprin's Digital Barbarism) (Lessig Blog)

The real issue for this debate is: why does human space flight and space science have to be lost link. In breaking from LEO-dominated strategies, Constellation has the opportunity to embrace multi-tasking and multi-role missions that could once again converge these two oft disparate priorities. Get us back to where we thought we were going in the late 70s and early 1980s.

First see the comments in the video from Dr. David S. Leckrone. This comment is way down the thread from David Baker, a veteran of NASA, etc.

Candid Comments on the Constellation Program | NASA Watch

The world of American copyright scholars is very familiar with the poetic passage of Jefferson's, written in a letter:
...
David Ellerman writes to point to an earlier version of the same point, this one penned by Augustine. As Augustine wrote:
...
Ellerman is a researcher who had worked for Stiglitz at the World Bank. Thanks to him, Augustine is the new Jefferson.

Jefferson's remix of Augustine's insight (Lessig Blog)

Can Germans laugh at Hitler?

This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.

Abroad - The Führer Returns to Berlin, This Time Saluted Only by Laughs - NYTimes.com