November 2008
4 posts
Looks like I'm staying in DCAR for a while
(DCAR press release below)
Things here have been very touch and go - still mopping up snipers, re-IDing everybody to make sure we don’t have further problems - but the DCAR governing council has very consciously decided to try and push forwards as fast as possible with international outreach after the disaster and has retained me in a new role: outreach coordinator with what they’re...
WatchWhat really went down in DCAR
Attached is the full report that the black propaganda “communications intercept” video was made from. We think that some of Guembe’s backers spun it out trying to make it less obvious what was going on, maybe trying to muddy up the area. In the spirit of full disclosure, we’ve published the entire transmission to try and clear the air, so...
Returning to DCAR somewhat urgently
So I’ve been up in Iceland working on some of the genetics issues from the last sample run from DCAR. We have answers: not reassuring ones, but answers none the less. More about that in the next message.
DCAR is getting probed at a technical level: computer security intrusions, shoving against the democracy software, injecting noise into the process. Not systemic attempts to push one...
October 2008
8 posts
The Quarantine of Iceland
So the geographical isolation, the coldness, and all those other factors which have made life in Iceland so hard in the past have turned out to be a gigantic boon in 2019. Iceland is ReDs Research HQ for the molecular biology crowd. There was a pretty good bioindustrial base here from deCODE genetics and spin-off companies and the pharms which grew various things under glass that you might not...
Reminiscences
Hector Valentine is explaining how they came to live in hexayurts. It’s an interesting case.
When I started this stuff just past the turn of the millennium, I’d spent a bit of time living rough - maybe a year all-told, between backpacking around America, riding freight trains, various other adventures. It was a few weeks here, a month and a half there, short hops between couch surfing...
1 tag
Stuck in the Northern Islands by the...
Damn and blast. I took the UN assessment gig to come up and take a look over the infrastructure implementation plans for the Northern Islands - that’s the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland / Greenland. Obviously the big worries up here are food security, and for the non-geothermal countries, energy security. Also took the opportunity to teach a couple of classes on SERAA mapping to...
Back from DCAR
No bandwidth right now for video but I’ll tell you the basics - PCR is negative for REDS in the sample, and positive for engineered algae strains in the contaminated ponds. We’re continuing to investigate, but the initial hypothesis is that somebody didn’t realize we were running a wild type operation and tried to seed them with an off-the-shelf industrial oil algae many of...
10 tags
WatchSuperstruct field report from DCAR - the Democratic Central African Republic, a self-governing conurbation of refugee camps and transient resettlement areas running on a mix of high and low technology.
We are having some problems down here. “Technological solutions for social problems” is harder than it looks some times.
