Freshwater from salt water using only solar energy

Japanese food production company, Kaiteki Fresh has announced a new state-of-the-art hydroponic facility in Bunyip, one hour east of Melbourne. The multi-million dollar investment will be the first facility of its kind outside of Asia, and will create 40 new local jobs. Kaiteki Fresh Australia, a subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation, is a global leader in food production and technology.

Fresh sausages are one of the most popular types of processed meat. Fresh sausage is available in a wide variety of flavors and styles.

Not the cheapest, but may be of interest to some.

Whittakers Peanut Slab Bar 50g (Pack of 50) also available for the same price.

Artist Christina Spann considers art a conversation or a symphony…

I looked for a previous post for this, but the one closest to my ask is ten years old. I'm looking for websites with good writing on current events – not even mostly political, but also pop culture, accessible science-y content, and other stuff I might not even know I'll like...

I've realized that my online perusing world has gotten very small, and after this past week I've had to stop looking at some to save my sanity (farewell Reddit main page randomness). I like Boing Boing and Laughing Squid, for reference. That old ask recommended these, all of which I've read here or there, but never had as regular online visits:

The New Republic
The Atlantic
The New Yorker
Vox
Raw Story

Thoughts on their current quality? What other sites do you head to after you catch up on MeFi?

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An 11-page document that’s attributed to a Pentagon whistleblower has provided new cases in the controversy over unidentified anomalous phenomena — also known as UAPs, unidentified flying objects or UFOs. The document, released today in conjunction with a House subcommittee hearing on UAPs, lays out details about what’s said to be a special access program …

Continue reading "Congressional Hearing Fuels Fresh Debate About UFOs"

The post Congressional Hearing Fuels Fresh Debate About UFOs appeared first on Universe Today.

All eyes are on Hudson Malone, the star of a particularly sultry Freshmen.net presentation; as he strips naked, his exquisitely chiseled body is quickly exposed. In preparation for the show, the thrilling newcomer will shortly be clutching his rock-hard dick. Hudson looks at the camera sensuously as he strokes his cock and then lets out... View Article

The post Freshmen.net: Hudson Malone appeared first on QueerClick.

The Nissan Magnite is one of the most popular compact SUVs in South Africa. Now, the Japanese automaker has unveiled its facelifted version. We have specifications and pricing.

The following article, Judge Greenlights Fresh Evidence In Missouri v. Biden Deep State Censorship Case, was first published on Conservative Firing Line.

(Natural News) The massive Missouri v. Biden censorship case is moving forward after the Western District of Louisiana’s U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the State of Missouri, which means additional discovery will now take place. Back in June, the Supreme Court overturned an injunction against the case, then called Murthy v. Missouri, that barred the White House, the …

Continue reading Judge Greenlights Fresh Evidence In Missouri v. Biden Deep State Censorship Case ...

Centre County’s pre-eminent classical ballet school’s annual production of "The Nutcracker" will transport audiences to a magical world where life-sized toy soldiers fight giant mice, snowflakes dance, and the Sugar Plum Fairy welcomes all to the Nutcracker’s Kingdom from the Land of Sweets. 

Former Australian cricket team Ricky Ponting took a fresh jibe at India head coach Gautam Gambhir amid their ongoing feud over the former's comments on Virat Kohli's recent form.

Referees' body PGMOL says it is taking new allegations around Premier League official David Coote "very seriously".

Jonathan Pratt, Head of CRM at DPD explores the process of implementing and managing the delivery of fresh food at Post&Parcel Live: The Food Delivery Seminar.

Chris Sheldrick, CEO and Co-Founder at what3words explains how technology is being used in food delivery at Post&Parcel Live: The Food Delivery Seminar.

1. Stocks Eye Fresh Peak as CPI Boosts Rate-Cut Bets: Markets Wrap | Company Business News  Mint
2. Stocks rise as traders assess state of postelection rally, new inflation data: Live updates  CNBC
3. Yields Sink as CPI Puts December Fed Cut in Play: Markets Wrap  Bloomberg
4. Stock market’s fierce post-election rally faces another CPI inflation test  MarketWatch

We've gone way past plugging it in (plugging it in)!

Mysterious metal group Sleep Token are one of three headliners announced for Download festival.

Cebu, Philippines :: Pastors and their wives who serve in the region affected by Typhoon Haiyan are invited on board for a time of rest and refreshment.

An OMer in Turkey who likes to bake is able to bless her neighbours in their apartment block.

When Rev Graham Clay, Pastor of Stratford-Upon-Avon Baptist Church, decided to have an OM ministry team work with his church, he didn’t hesitate to take action.

Parts of Spain are bracing for more dangerous flooding on Wednesday as a fresh storm system is set to release huge amounts of rainfall.

The torrential downpours come just 15 days after a storm system triggered catastrophic flooding, killing at least 223 people and devastating the province of Valencia.

Once again, the affected area is under orange alert for heavy rainfall.

In Valencia, dozens of municipalities have cancelled classes.

While the meteorological agency does not predict Valencia will get the worst of this storm, sewage systems are still full of mud from the last floods, which could complicate drainage.

This time, the areas under red alert are around the Malaga and Tarragona regions.

In Malaga, around 3,000 people have been evacuated from their homes on the banks of the Guadalhorce River. The same area also experienced flooding two weeks ago.

Residents of the province of Malaga received cell phone alerts on Tuesday night, warning of an “extreme risk of rainfall” and advising them to avoid travel.

Schools will not open on Wednesday across all of Malaga and the Granada coast. Meanwhile, some roads are being blocked, schools are closing, and rail lines are being cancelled in Tarragona, in the south of Catalonia.

The preventative measures on Wednesday stand in contrast to the lack of an early warning in Valencia two weeks ago.

There, despite being on red alert for rainfall, residents were generally not advised to stay home or seek higher ground until the flooding had already reached catastrophic levels.

Both storm systems were caused by a weather phenomenon known as a Dana in Spain or a “cut-off low.” These occur when low-pressure areas get cut off from the westerly winds of the jet stream. Since they are isolated from the jet stream, they can move slowly and erratically, releasing huge amounts of rain over small areas.

This storm system began affecting Spain on Tuesday and is expected to last until at least Friday, according to Spain’s meteorological agency.

Speaking at COP29 on Tuesday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez linked the intensity of these weather events to climate change. “Climate change kills,” he said, urging more action to reduce greenhouse gases to prevent future natural disasters.

Last week, hundreds of residents of a Valencia suburb particularly badly hit by last week’s deadly floods protested during a visit by Spanish King Felipe and Prime Minister Sanchez, with some throwing mud at them.

Chanting “Murderers, murderers!” they vented pent-up anger over what has been widely perceived by local residents as tardy alerts from the authorities about the dangers of the storm and flooding in the Valencia region, and then a late response by the emergency services when disaster struck.

“It was known and nobody did anything to avoid it,” a young man told the king, who insisted on staying on to talk to the people despite the turmoil, while the prime minister had withdrawn.

The glass bottles are eco-friendly and sustainable, says the company

The Centre has rushed 20 additional Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) companies comprising about 2,000 personnel to Manipur in the wake of fresh attacks and law and order issues in the state, official sources said Wednesday.

Salesforce may derive a grand majority of its revenue from large customers employing 1,000 or more people. But it reached out this week to the smallest of small businesses -- 20 employees or less -- with the release of Salesforce Essentials.

The new suite of Salesforce small business cloud tools, which manage both sales and customer service/support, will replace current offerings Desk.com and SalesforceIQ. The company will retire those in 2020.

complete article

It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought.

The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually determining what the alleged sources of human happiness are. The neuroscience tack is really just a defensive ploy to ward off the eternal charges that utilitarinism is simply a euphemism for an authoritarian imposition of values. As for espousing his positive program for what constitutes human happiness, it is simply the usual liberal middle-class canards, with not surprisingly a socialist edge: more time to spend with family, a decent wage for everyone, blah blah blah. But he seems to make two pretty criminally unsubstantiated assumptions: one is these sources are essentially the same for everyone, or at least could be under certain conditions, and the other is that they do not inherently conflict with anyone else’s.

I say under certain conditions could be, because in evaluating our current society he seems to privilege envy of other’s material well-being as the principal determinant of happiness. His theory is that above a certain level of material subsistence people are motivated primarily by status-seeking and the desire for a high rank within their social group. Therefore, the increasing wealth of the society will not increase happiness because people measure their well-being relative to the group, not by their absolute prosperity. This is always been a flaw in the concept of the “war against poverty”; I’m not sure it’s much of an argument for socialist economic redistribution. But actually if you read his section on the value of income taxes carefully, he doesn’t even seem to be arguing that they are useful insofar as they can be redirected to the less prosperous, although he does evidently believe that a certain amount of money contributes more to the happiness of a poor person than to a rich one’s. Rather, he seems to think that taking money away from the properous is valuable in and of itself, because it will supposedly make them less focused on the “rat race,” more family-oriented, etc., etc. In short he seems to be advocating a net impoverishment of society.

All of which may be consistent with the program of a good little socialist, but does not necessarily accord marvelously with his own evidence about the supposedly quantified happiness of humanity. The research that he cites non-specifically supposedly indicates that people’s feeling of happiness has not risen in the last half-century, but he does not cite anything which indicates that it has necessarily declined. He cites rising rates of depression and crime as presumably implicit indicators of greater unhappiness, but he does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that in our hyper-medicated and surveillance-based society perhaps people simply report depression and crime more. In any event, if roughly similar numbers of people today as in the ‘50’s report themselves happy (and we believe them), despite the increase in prosperity, that might perhaps indicate that happiness is not fixed to material well-being. Which may be consistent with his general point, but not with his idea of increasing happiness by manipulating income levels.

And even if it did, it seems rather difficult to countenance any social program predicated upon appealing to one of humanity’s most depraved instincts, namely envy. The author acknowledges that his ideal of taxation is mainly motivated by the desire to pander to people’s envy, but he seems to think that their envy will be sated by the loss of prosperity of those around them and that after that point there will be no more. So the envy of the less prosperous will be satisfied by the losses accrued by the more prosperous, which will somehow not be counter-balanced by the chagrin of the more prosperous at the prospect of seeing their status diminished. Very logical.

One of the more egregious presumptions of utilitarians is that non-utilitarian social systems somehow aren’t concerned with seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the contrary, that’s the defining problem of practically every social and political theory I can think of, and they all either seek or claim to have found the answer—whether such a solution exists, I have my doubts, but that’s why I’m a skeptic about politics. This is a handy trick by utilitarians: they say “I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Which is practically begging the question: “As opposed to whom?” It’s useful because it tends to conceal the fact that their real agenda is generally somewhat more specific, and tends to consist in the autocratic notion that one or two measures of social living can be authoritatively determined to be the sources of happiness, and then divided up in a centralized fashion. Those that are the most insistent on the idea of liberty are generally those that are the most skeptical about the possibility of the notion of happiness being either quantitatively defined or generalizable. In other words, only indviduals can determine their own sources of happiness.

For the author, on the other hand, the fact that certain stimuli trigger certain areas of the brain at the times when test subjects profess pleasure has solved the problem of determining happiness. Of course, as mentioned, he never really bothers with the results that those studies have yielded. Somehow the fact that he considers envy to be a principal element of human happiness does not place very severe limits on the harmoniousness of individual happiness. Nor does it constitute a tyranny of the majority, because he claims that in an ideal utilitarian society the happiness of the most unhappy would be considered of pre-eminent importance. Of course, at the beginning of the article he cited the equal importance of each individual’s happiness as the fouding tenet of his theory, but I’m sure it all sorts out in the end.

Among social factors responsible for unhappiness, he cites divorce and unemployment as of pre-eminent importance. Of course, rates of both divorce and unemployment in the crassly materialistic and religious United States are much lower than in the much more overtly utilitarian-embracing Europe, but it would be a bit embarassing for him to admit this after avowing that all traditional value-systems outside of utilitarianism and “individualism” are dead.

Personally the question of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people doesn’t exactly compel me constantly, although the issue of personal happiness tends to impose itself intransigently. I would have thought that evolutionary biology would have provided an adequate explanation of this, as well as the recurrence of what we call altruism. But such an idea of course suggests that happiness, whatever that is, is not really the point of our little existences, and that the more imperious competitiveness of life will ultimately subvert all of these little trifles of pleasure and pain. But in the meantime, we have these debased statistical notions of happiness to amuse us in an idle hour.

It seems to me that if one’s “objective” measure of happiness is electrical stimulation in the cerebral cortex, the most efficient utilitarian solution to the problem of human happiness would be strap everyone onto hospital gurneys and stimulate the “happiness” part of their brain all day long. If one does not wish to be this deterministic about it, perhaps one should allow more latitute to individuals to discover their own conception of happiness. Personally, I have found happiness generally to be an idea for the unhappy and something rarely spoken of by the happiness; mention of practically guarantees that it is not present in the environment where it is uttered. I don’t deny that what you might call love is the real bridge between personal happiness and moral obligations, and the only true means by which the desires of oneself and of others are united, but such a sentiment can never be mandated; it is entirely resistant to intellectual compulsion. Utilitarianism, which sometimes does a decent job of faking morality, is nevertheless ultimately predicated on the pleasure principle, and hence is wholly inadequate to uniting the moral and the pleasurable except when love truly pertains. In that case, of course, political theory is entirely superfluous, which is why this is all a waste of time.

p.s. I don’t claim that people’s behavior necessarily reflects what really would make them happy, but presumably it does at least reflect what they consciously value. Hence, if I were the author I would have been a bit skeptical of using the results of “surveys” of what people claim to value when the results don’t correlate with their behavior, i.e. they claim that spending time with family is most important, but they spend a disproportiante amount of time working (at least according to him). So either people are not really being forthright (consciously or unconsciously) in responding to surveys, or there is not actually a problem of priorities. In either case, he’s way over-valuing surveys as a guide to what will make people happy.

Marshall Brodien's TV Magic Cards, Christina's International Introductions, and the Three-Minute Samba (Intermission time). These and more are also on the Tulsa TV Memories YouTube Channel.

Quick breakfast to prepare hign in protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals to start your day.

Fresh vegetable salad with tune and side of brown lentils recipe..

Oatmeal for breakfast with fresh blueberries and strawberries.

Thoughts ==> Here's another great place to ping when you podcast, complete with resources. Hopefully Pingomatic and Feedburner will support this soon. Link ==> Freshpodcasts.com.

Free 2 - 3 day shipping for U.S. orders over $40!

Nobody likes wasting food or money, yet spoiled veggies and fruits often go unnoticed in the fridge until it's too late. Fortunately, a few simple storage tricks can keep your fruits and vegetables fresh for longer and help you save on groceries.

You can search for newly published patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but if you want the latest patent applications served to you by RSS syndication and email alerts, you'll need to visit FreshPatents.com. Industry list RSS feeds filtered by USPTO class number are particularly valuable. The content is crawled and indexed by Google as well.

Browse for new patents by industry category or do a keyword search. For example, if you browse USPTO Class 715, Data processing: presentation processing of document patents you'll notice that it has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to for updates. That makes it easy to find new applications such as application #20040221226 "Method and mechanism for processing queries for xml documents using an index" applied for on November 4, 2004 by inventors Wesley Lin, Yasuhiro Matsuda, and Garrett Kaminaga.

Sign-up for free email patent application monitoring service which will send you a weekly email with new applications that match the keywords you select.

This site is one of those rare examples in which even if you subscribe to the feed, you'll want to routinely visit the website. The site provides searches by keyword and provides lists of patent applications by location (state and city), agent and law firm name, city of the agent, and inventor name.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware addressed the topic of "The Church in the Traditional Orthodox Countries" as the first session (out of two) on the larger theme of "Orthodoxy in the 21st Century." The lecture was delivered in Cambridge in the Institute's seminar room during the Community Lecture Day of 22 February 2014.

A 26 minute documentary on an Orthodox coffee house/bookstore in Colorado Springs

Fr. Pat reflects on goodness, beauty, and truth in Jesus's encounter with Photini of Samaria.

Stoke-on-Trent is looking to rekindle its relationship with its German twin town.

This paper describes the FISHNet project, which developed a repository environment for the curation and sharing of data relating to freshwater science, a discipline whose research community is distributed thinly across a variety of institutions, and usually works in relative isolation as individual researchers or within small groups. As in other “small sciences”, these datasets tend to be small and “hand-crafted”, created to address particular research questions rather than with a view to reuse, so they are rarely curated effectively, and the potential for sharing and reusing them is limited. The paper addresses a variety of issues and concerns raised by freshwater researchers as regards data sharing, describes our approach to developing a repository environment that addresses these concerns, and identifies the potential impact within the research community of the system.