The Deep Carbon Observatory: Going underground | The Economist

“Current estimates suggest that half of all the living matter on Earth lives underground, at depths of up to 5km. Some people think the share may be bigger than that. Indeed, there is loose talk of life having originated more than once in the distant past, and of there being entire shadow biospheres of organisms completely unrelated to anything on the surface.”

Read this in an Economist article this morning. Blew my mind. Gotta love it how every time we think we know something, nature throws us a new doozy.

“Shadow Biosphere”

Bookmarked in Delicious.

Read this article…

There is nothing wrong with your TV

You really shouldn’t be concerned with my machinations behind the curtain. I’m just moving sites from one provider to another and merging some other stuff. If all goes well, you won’t even know.

Though these past 24 hours have been full of disruptions. Sorry about that.

All the posts are seemingly intact (merged two old blogs). What I can tell right now is that it seems like I need to futz with getting my images to display again (might need CSS jockeying), reconnecting Delicious, and getting the template and theme closer to where I want it to be.

Kickstarting a great new documentary

I'm a film hack. Yeah, some of my short vids have hundreds of thousands of views or even millions, and some (nameless) have contributed to big donations, but I'm still a hack. Last fall I had a very very brief moment of insanity when I thought, just thought, fantasized, really, that, maybe, I could do a documentary on iGEM, synthbio, and DIYbio.

Y'see, we're living in the early days of a renaissance in Biology. Wouldn't it be great to capture all that, travel the country, talk science in a broad-sweeping documentary?

But then I realized what it would take for me to do it: being a hack, it would be much harder to get to the level I wanted. The gap between my skill level, equipment access, time, and money and what was needed was way too large, even to try and fund it via Kickstarter.

But then, at iGEM 2010, I bumped into two guys whom I had initially met at iGEM 2009, and who now had a cool project they were working on (see video below).

Yeah, it's a documnetary about synthetic biology.

And they are raising funds via Kickstarter.

And I pledged $300. Don't know about you, but $300 is a big deal for me. But, it's also a big deal that this documentary get made.

Will you join me and help these guys get the funds they need?

These guys have great style, sensibility, and focus (loved the trailer, below, and check out the cool excerpts). It's gonna be an awesome documentary and will kick ass at Sundance. But only if you join me in helping them.

What are you waiting for? Head over to Kickstarter and pledge something. Wouldn't you say 25 bucks should help?

And then get all your friends to help out too.

 

links for 2011-02-20