Atheist, technopagan and vegan.

'A Great Victory': Controversial Brazilian Dam Construction Halted Brazilian Federal court finds Belo Monte hydro-electric dam licenses invalid, indigenous peoples were not consulted A victory came to activists in Brazil on Tuesday when a federal judge halted construction on the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon, saying that the indigenous peoples had not been consulted. The impacts of the dam, which would have been the third largest hydro-electric dam in the world, had long…

Is it real? Suddenly this thing pops up all over the internet. A crystal pyramid, that reportedly has appeared or been discovered on a deep sea investigation about 2000 metres under the surface of the ocean in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. The person who discovered it is named "oceanographer Dr. Verlag Meyer". I did a search online for this person, and found nothing, except the reference to this alleged crystal pyramid. Not very…

Level: expert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother…

(This post originally appeared on Lipsweater and is reproduced with permission.) If you got a chance to read my last post, you’d realize I’m a bit of a tea geek. Part of being a tea geek is trying all the tea purveyors and experiences that you can find around town. An epic Seattle coffee geek post from Jonathon Colman inspired me to come up with my tea short list, so let’s get drinkin’! (Disclaimer: I’m more of an “eastern”…

How did the world turn into such a race track? And before you think I speak riddles: I mean motorways, freeways, Autobahn. Fill in the name depending on where you are. If you have a car, how fast do you drive? And why do you drive it at that speed? Do you stick to the speed limit because faster is an offence? Do you go over the speed limit because it is a thrill? Or…

"The worst nuclear near-disaster that you've never heard of came to light in 2002, when inspectors at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power station discovered that a slow leak had been corroding a spot on the reactor vessel's lid for years (PDF). When they found the cavity, only 1 cm of metal was left to protect the nuclear core. That kind of slow and steady degradation is a major concern as the US's 104 reactors get older and grayer,says…

Something has to happen. The picture here is one most people know and recognise. Have you ever sat in such a mess? If yes, I pity you. If not, then how on earth did you manage that? We are all the slaves of fossil fuel. Diesel, petrol, whatever kind your vehicle likes, it is there for you, and the prices go up and up and up (and down a cent) and up some more. The…

It's amazing but true. Two years ago I published my first little book, about a wicked witch called Grimhilda. Hilda for friends. When I pressed that "publish" button for the first time, little did I know... What followed was a small avalanche of books (at least that is how it seems to me). More Hilda books, and people kept downloading them. I brought out a few books in a different genre too, but Hilda apparently…