Once you find an old single-wide mobile home, dirt cheap or even free and in need of some TLC, you can set up your own homestead in a rural area. Not so different from people homesteading in the cities, taking over abandoned and derelict areas and bringing new life to them.

Trailersteading is taking it to the rural places where there isn't a large population (or options for jobs) and making your own self-supporting homestead (or as near to it as possible). Running a trailerstead is a chance to live without debt, growing much of your own food. Living off the grid is possible too. You can create your own green living homestead, living out of a trailer with a very small carbon footprint.

Homesteading On The Internet: "Trailersteading" Makes Beginning Homesteading Easier

Trailersteading: How to Find, Buy, Retrofit, and Live Large in a Mobile Home - Anna Hess

All the advantages of a tiny house at a fraction of the cost!

Imagine what you could do with your time if you didn't have to spend $16,000 a year on rent or a mortgage. Old single-wide mobile homes can often be found for free (and installed for a couple of thousand dollars) in rural areas, so trailersteading is akin to dumpster-diving. A trailer allows you to live without debt, to keep your ecological footprint to a minimum with energy bills at or below the national average, and even to blend right in alongside traditional-house dwellers after a few years.

Trailersteading profiles thirteen mobile-home dwellers who have used trailers as a stepping stone toward achieving their dreams. Some have spent the cash saved to expedite renovations involving extra insulation, pitched roofs, classy interiors, and even basements, while the found money has allowed others to go off the grid. Many also took advantage of a low-cost housing option to pursue their passions, becoming full-time homemakers or homesteaders.

In addition to the case studies, this book presents easy methods of minimizing the negative sides of trailer life and accentuating the positive. For example, did you know a single-wide is easy to retrofit for passive solar heating? That a simple plant-covered trellis can break up the blockiness of the trailer's external appearance? Learn which parts of installing and upgrading your trailer are easy for a DIYer and which parts should be left to the experts, along with how to cheaply heat and cool a mobile home.

Our world is shrinking. The Internet was predicted to save us paper, bring sweeping changes to the way we communicate and bring the world together, connecting us all as a community over distances.

I don't see less paper use, maybe even more as people print things from the Internet, including their bills, statements and such which are sent via email from their paperless accounts with banks, insurance, utilities, etc. The corporations can show a savings in paper but, in reality, it has just been passed to the consumer.

The theory which replaces the Big Bang will treat the universe as an information processor. The universe is made of information and uses that information to define itself. Quantum mechanics and relativity pertain to the interactions of information, and the theory which finally unifies them will be information-based.

The Big Bang doesn't describe an information-processing universe. Information processors don't blow up after one calculation. You don't toss your smart phone after just one text. The real universe – a non-Big Bang universe – recycles itself in a series of little bangs, lighting up old, burned-out galaxies which function as memory as needed.

via The Big Bang is going down - Boing Boing.

Liquid cremation sounds like an option to having bodies burned in cremation, instead of fire this uses water. Instead of having burned bodies in the air from fires we have dissolved bodies in our water. That is the part I find unsettling. (I still drink tap water - though I'm pretty sure a lot of bottled water isn't from some pristine brook in the back of nowhere). Of course the water will be filtered, just as I hope the air would be in cremations. But, air seems easier to filter than water. Just my thought, I don't know if its true.

Would you choose to be cremated by water? There is more to think about than just the science of it. Still, its something to think about, an option to burning.

our bodies are nothing but bags of live bacteria and dead cells. We can attempt to slow our decay (embalming), or we can preempt it with a destructive blaze (cremation). We can also dissolve our bodies with lye, using an increasingly popular procedure called alkaline hydrolysis.

Alkaline hydrolysis - also known as liquid cremation or water cremation or bio-cremation - one of the cheapest and most environmentally-friendly forms of dealing with a cadaver.

One way to think about it is that alkaline hydrolysis rapidly speeds up the ordinary decay process using heat, pressure, and an alkaline substance such as potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide. The body is put inside a steel vessel with 80 gallons or so of water that is heated up to 300 degrees—killing any microbes and even destroying prions responsible for the human version of mad cow disease. After an hour or two, most of the body dissolved into liquid. The remaining bone is ground up into ash.

With air pollution, lack of space, and carbon emissions making traditional burial methods even more problematic, alkaline hydrolysis is poised to become the method of choice.

Paraphrased from What Is Liquid Cremation and Why Is It Illegal?