This is an article about an idea called vertical farming. Basically, the idea is to build high rise buildings for in-door farming. Like massive greenhouses on steroids. They would like to build urban indoor farms in order to meet man kinds increasing food needs.

The vertical farming website lists several advantages to this plan:

• Year-round crop production
• No reliance on weather conditions
• Indoor crops would require far less in the way of pesticides, etc
• Return farmland to nature (I don’t think that this would actually happen).
• The (significant) energy costs of transporting foods to urban centers is also avoided

They are designing the things to produce their own energy so that they are totally self-sufficient. They reckon very little water would be lost (they even want to capture evaporation).

One question that I have is where will all the top-soil come from? And wouldn’t the nutrients in the soil become depleted? Lots of fertilizer.

Anyway, I think that it’s an interesting idea.

This is an article about an elite group of young guys who have made it seriously big on the internet. Many of them got going in their teens and are now seriously rich and famous in their 20’s.

They are undoubtedly talented, but also a little lucky. They were in the right place at the right time, but they were able to take the chance when it came. Yes I suppose I am a little jealous…

Thing is, these guys are a bit like movie stars. Out of the thousands that try, only a few lucky people really make it big – many talented people fail. It’s a risky goal, but if you win, you win big.

For instance Mark Zuckerberg who is more than a year younger than me (he is 23) started and runs Facebook – a great, great website which I often use. Facebook is one of the 20 most often visited sites in the world and has more than 25 million registered users.

You have probably seen the logo on the left all over the internet – trust me, its all over the place. It’s the RSS logo, and when you see it you know that the site you are reading supports one of the most useful standards evolving on the internet.

So, what is RSS?

RSS is a standard format used to let people (and programs) know about updates to a website. Because it is a standard (everyone agrees on a common format) programs can be written to do useful things with RSS publications – more about that later.

An example

This site actually has an RSS feed. You can see a link to it at the bottom of the page – “Entries (RSS)“. The link is to a file in a standard format (XML) which has information about the 10 most recent articles published on alistairpott.com. For each article there is a title, link, and description (in my case the whole article).

RSS readers – Google Reader

This is where RSS becomes useful to you and I. There are lots of RSS tools and readers out there, but the one that I use and recommend is Google Reader. Instead of manually checking each of my favorite sites for updates I just open up Google Reader. It downloads the RSS file from each of the sites I have subscribed to and lets me know if there are any updates that I haven’t seen yet. I can then read the articles from within the program – or link to the original articles if I want. Below is an example of a recent alistairpott.com post shown in Google Reader.

If you regularly visit sites to check for updates, then I strongly recommend that you give Google Reader a try. And if you do, then subscribe to alistairpott.com!

Gizmag have an article on a car which Tata is going to produce which runs on compressed air.  This means the only impact on the environment is the energy used to actually compress the air.  The exhaust fumes are just cool, unpolluted air!

The company says that the car will cost about R30 to fill up at air pumps at upgraded petrol stations.  It will then be able to travel 200 to 300 km with a max speed of about 110 km/h.

If this actually works it will be great for cities.  Almost no pollution and cheap to run.