Remember Jose Padilla?

Greenwald makes an excellent point: People aren’t terrorists just because the President says so. The Padilla case should cause Americans to question any time the President says someone is a terrorist or some group is a group of terrorists. Or killers. Or murderers. These are the terms the President uses just about every time he’s behind a podium, and he’s always been full of shit when he uses them. They’re not intended to be an indictment of the person or group in question; his use of those terms is intended to scare the shit out of you so you’ll do whatever he says.

I’ve been a-croppin’ some of my pictures for use as wallpaper on the wide screen of the MacBook (1280×800). So I’m going to put some of them on my flickr account, and see what people think of them.

I’ve started with this (click through to get the full size):

I’ll be adding more, and have already recycled at least one old image into this set of photos.

If anyone out there in Xangaland is interested in other sizes of photos you’ve seen here for use as desktops, let me know below.

Update: FYI, it’s Navajo sandstone, and here’s a ‘blog entry about the day I took the picture. And another one.

Via boingboing we learn of workFRIENDLY, a web site that will transform whatever web page you’re viewing into something that looks like a Microsoft Word document.

There should be a Mac version.

Today I ate an apple. It had a little sticker on it saying ‘Royal Gala – New Zealand.’

Sometimes when I encounter such a thing, I think of Ben Franklin. What would Ben Franklin say about the idea of apples in the New World, shipped from New Zealand before they went bad. And I thought maybe Ben would say, “Do they have the tree on the ship?”

A while back I read a thing on BLDGBLOG about dumpster gardening, where you take a dumpster and fill it with earth and then plant plants, and then you can move the dumpster wherever you want it. You could grow plants where they grow best, and then move them wherever you need them later.

And also, a while back I mentioned The Great Patch, a Texas-sized gyre in the Pacific ocean that’s cogged with floating plastic detritus, caused by the rotating current.

So let’s put these things together, shall we?

You plant some apple trees. You get some shipping containers and dumpsters, and you weld them together to make pontoon barges. You fill the barge with yard waste and put it in the current. It comes back composted, and you are ready to transplant the trees into the barges. You do so and set them adrift again. They come back full of apples.

At least, that’s the principle. Or perhaps you make these barges and set them adrift in the middle of the Great Patch, where they stay put. You could even set up drift lines of some sort to passively collect the junk plastic floating there. Maybe someone will figure out a use for it.

So then I thought: Maybe not apple trees. They’re somewhat delicate, so let’s find something that grows near the ocean and produces oil. So coconut trees. Intead of just the seed traveling by ocean, we’ll have the whole tree traveling by ocean. We’ll call it Project Unladen Swallow. Harvest the coconuts and trees for use in biofuels. Re-use waste as compost.

I thought someone else must have had a similar idea at some point, so I searched the ‘net. I found Nexus: The Floating City, which, while interesting in a Jules Verne kind of way doesn’t actually talk about what I’m interested in. But dig those pictures. And check out how if you build a floating city, a big part of the infrastructure you must design is the political system.

I found a lake in Myanmar where the people grow floating crops.

And in HoloWorld, they make passing mention of floating farmland on the ocean. The HoloWorld’s recommended reading list includes some of my favorite books… I’ll have to delve deeper there, and through its WorldTransformation parent site.

Anyway. Anyone want to go farm coconuts in the middle of the Pacific ocean on barges made from shipping containers?

Update: Maybe this is all just so I can have an excuse to visit Johnston Island, harvesting bird shit to make the coconuts grow. Who cares if it’s radioactive? The oil’s to burn in your car, not to eat.

And here’s another from BLDGBLOG about floating islands made up of sphagnum mosses and boyed by gasses from decomposing plants, and linking to custom floating island manufacture.

And bonus mystery location (click for a bigger view):

(You can zoom in to the cabin, but it’s little more than a smudge.)