Standmic - Slashdot User

Comment Re:A quote for the ages (Score 1) 77

by Standmic on Monday April 16, 2007 @02:01PM (#18753083) Attached to: Amazon Goes Web 2.0 Wild to Defend 1-Click Patent

There is a NYTimes article about the use of Wikipedia in the courts (It's a couple months old so it may be inaccessible to non-subscribers). From the article:

More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court.

But, some of the examples the article gave have the court citing Wikipedia for the definition of "jungle juice" in one instance, and "booty music" in another, for which I feel Wikipedia is an appropriate source.

Everyone complains about Wikipedia's inaccuracy, but for information on...less academic and more cultural topics (Lists of Simpson's Episodes, or jungle juice, for example), Wikipedia is probably the best source you can find.

Journal Journal: Vertical Farming

Journal by MrMarket on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @03:00PM

New York Magazine has an interesting article about vertical farming, or growing food in skyscrapers. Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University believes that "vertical farm" skyscrapers could help fight global warming. The article points out other uses: growing food in close proximity to cities, recycling urban waste, growing more food with less land and resources, sheltering food from pests without chemicals, and producing energy th

Submission + - Can wild grass produce clean fuel?

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @03:33PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "As many other countries, the U.S. want to reduce their dependency on oil by increasing the production of renewable and alternative fuels. Today, the main source of biofuel is ethanol distilled from kernels of corn, with a production of 5 billion gallons a year. As current targets for biofuels have been pushed to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012 and 35 in 2017, using corn ethanol alone would require to convert the combined size of Kansas and Iowa into farmland. But researchers have studied other solutions. And the best one could be to use cellulosic ethanol as the fuel of the future. The main advantage of using a wild grass named miscanthus is that you can produce ethanol from the whole plant body as opposed to corn where you can only use the grains. The other one is that you would need to grow this plant only on an area of the size of Massachusetts — an area 18 times smaller. But will farmers follow this advice? Time will tell. In the mean time, read more for additional details and a chart comparing the respective profits you could expect from the utilization of corn, switchgrass and miscanthus to produce ethanol."

Slashdot Top Deals