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April 30, 2005
Maria Federici's Story
This is the saddest thing I've seen this year. I still recommend it for reading, though, as a reminder that life is precious and fragile and not to be taken for granted, and that you - or any of your loved ones - can be gone in an instant, out of the blue with no warning whatsoever, regardless of all your precautions. Read it and go hug somebody you love.
More on Maria here.
Posted by John at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2005
Better Than TiVo
Make magazine has a contributed article on building your own digital video recorder out of an old PC.
If you have the spare PC and a TV, it will cost you about $300, plus whatever you want to spend to upgrade the hard drive(s). On sale, you can get big hard drives at about $0.50 per GB now.
The author is an engineer by trade and I'm sure he makes it sound a lot easier that it is, but I am tempted. Not that I need a DVR - I got one from the family for Christmas (love it!). But the machine he's built is not only a DVR, but also a media server (streaming your MP3 collection), HTTP server, FTP server, and an SSH server!
Girder and SlimServer are two programs I definitely want to check out. Read the comments, too, if you're interested in a project like this.
Posted by John at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2005
The Darth Side
Yes, Darth Vader has a weblog. He's posting notes from his intergalactic adventures every day. This is a crackup, reminiscent of the Secret Diaries of Cassandra Claire, with entries from each of the LOTR characters.
Short entry today. Full schedule. Deploying killer probe droids across the galaxy.Lord Vader is alternately pensive, giddy, angry and frustrated, and here in The Darth Side he lets it all hang out. Even his all-consuming hatred of the renegade Han Solo.You know what I hate? Idiots.
What I do not understand is why they do not understand that the only way for lower men to maintain any kind of dignity at all is to respect their own limitations. Humility is a virtue, if you are low.
Posted by John at 10:11 PM | Comments (2)
April 26, 2005
AD:TECH - MorganStanley's Mary Meeker
Mary Meeker's latest presentation is already posted online at the MorganStanley site.
I got a kick out of Maslow's "hierarchy of needs", recast for 2005 as shown on the left. Is this true? Have we traded self-actualization for a broadband connection?
This presentation is from the AD:TECH05 conference going on right now (through tomorrow) in San Francisco, where she was the keynote speaker yesterday. The conference theme is "The Age of Engagement". Mary offers a fascinating review of the latest metrics on Internet usage and the prognosis for the future. Go, read, learn.
And on a somewhat related note, streaming audio from the presentation by Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig is now available online.
The topic is "Who Owns Culture?". Together Tweedy, with Wilco's online marketing success of YankeeHotelFoxtrot, and Lessig, whose academic career (and popularity as an author) is dependent on the success of his vision of migration of content to the Internet, make the best case possible for abandoning existing copyright law and intellectual property definitions in favor of something new. Go, listen, learn.
Posted by John at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
Serenity - The Movie
Apple is hosting the trailer for the new Universal movie, "Serenity". Looks like big fun.
Posted by John at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
Guess-the-Google
Grant Robinson was already well known for creating his artsy Montage-a-Google, a Flash program which takes a keyword you input and grabs pictures from the Google Images search results to create an artistic patchwork.
Now he's done it again, this time reversing the process. You are presented with a patchwork of images and have to guess the word that was used to search the Google Images database.
(Note there's a relatively small database of these pre-formatted patchwork images, so if you play it a few times, your score will go up. All the high scores right now are 399 which means they got 9 out of the 10 in under 1 second, with less than 2 seconds on the remaining image. I can't imagine wanting to be on the high score list badly enough to put in that kind of time playing a game.)
Guess-the-google is presented in a timed game format. If you miss one, it will tell you the first letter of the search word used to generate the images. Ten images, and you have 20 seconds to identify each. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Posted by John at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
Stupid email, email stupid
Early on Sunday morning, Julie showed me an article which reports on a study that concluded that the constant interruptions of email and cell phones do more to impair cognitive ability than marijuana.
Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.Since I last wrote about the Blackberry phenomenon and my refusal to participate, I've changed jobs and things at the new company are even worse - at least from the standpoint of demands for 24x7 connectivity. I am still, however, successfully resisting going back down that path. Although now, with my memory of the advantages of being completely offline from time to time thoroughly refreshed, I am not in such a hurry to check out the latest gizmo.Respondents' minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night's sleep.
Plus I can't afford to lose any IQ points, as I might slip into negative numbers and the standardized testing industry would implode, and I don't want that on my conscience.
I suspect that in addition to the impaired reasoning ability due to the constant bombardment of communications noted in the study, that there are significant long term health effects as well. And I'm not talking about the more obvious ones either. I'm reminded of a time back in 2000 when I carried two cell phones - one CDMA and one TDMA as I was doing some business in Europe at the time. I was in the car and both cell phones rang and my pager on my belt starting buzzing all at the same time. I almost drove the car off the road.
No, I'm talking about something more insidious. Being at other peoples' beck and call all the time increases stress and anxiety. It's not simply a matter of wanting to avoid contact with other people, although some people certainly fall into that category. It's loss of control. Stress and anxiety increase as your ability to control your environment decreases. And with constant - and totally unpredictable - inbound cell phone and email contact, you may be called upon to answer a difficult question, sooth an irate customer, resolve a service issue, deliver a report, propose a solution ... at a time and place not of your own choosing, instantly, without preparation and without warning.
Personally, I would also note that this is a major benefit of going to church. The cell phone stays home. I am unreachable for at least three hours every Sunday. You sit quietly in a calm and reassuring environment, you bow your head and spend some time in prayer, you sing some songs. Not to diminish the holy purpose of communal worship, in any way. I'm just noting that there are healthy aspects to church worship that are not purely "religious". Although on second thought, maybe they are. God does, after all, know what is best for each of us.
Although the extent of the effort to kill Him - again - this time in the name of political correctness, is sometimes stunning in its stupidity. As noted in yesterday's Washington Times, which reports on a school counselor who took it upon herself to take God out of the pledge of allegiance altogether. Not to indulge in the schadenfreude, but there was, apparently, an appropriate - if not particularly happy - ending.
Parents said Miss Lucero had been slated to leave Everitt at the end of the year, and Shelley Pierce, whose daughter is in seventh grade, said it appeared that the counselor was clearing out her office.
Amen to that. Or, rather, "an appropriately worded note of affirmation in support of the general principal" to that. But I digress...
The fascination with communications devices is the modern day equivalent of having a nicer lawn than your neighbor. It's competitive, it's prideful, it creates envy and it's a mistake.
Stress is not all bad. It is through hardship that character is formed, and through misfortune that it is revealed. You have to trim a rose bush, and so on. But all stress is not equal. The stress of having to work hard toward a meaningful purpose? Good. The stress of having others depend on you? Good. The stress of doing something important, where failure is not an option? Good. But cell phones and pagers and mobile email create anxiety, the equivalent of having somebody follow you around all day and randomly poke you with a cattle prod. Not good.
I read something the other day - wish I could find it - on the topic of how we are getting more and further separated from the land and the processes by which our food is grown. This is the programming equivalent of having millions of lines of custom code on your system, with nobody who knows how to run them all. It's fine until it breaks. I'm not sure how this relates to cell phones and email, but I think it does. It feels like it does.
I'm no eco-warrior, but if you look at us at Rostow's "pinnacle of human development" - the age of high mass production and consumption - we are by definition more dependent on nature than the African tribes who declare their interdependency with the natural world. Ironic, that the culture that segregates itself most from the physical environment is more dependent on more resources than any other species and any other generation. If the entire world's population consumed as much as the average American we would need over three planets to sustain total consumption levels. London has an ecological footprint that is one hundred and twenty five times the size of its land area.
I also read something recently, a researcher looking at historical societal structures who said that if you want to maximize the value of (1) deep friendships and interpersonal relationships, (2) warm and nurturing community and neighborhood, (3) multigenerational involvement in family, and (4) philosophical commitment to the principals of human dignity and basic equality, you would do not better than the 14th-16th century hamlet. Self-sufficient, diversified enough for specialization, and yet a tight-knit community with shared values and expectations. Fascinating, and a long way from cell phones and email.
I'm not a luddite either, and I'm not recommending a return to feudal days. But I do think that all this technology has a cost. We need rest, we need quiet, we need personal space. These are things that our bodies know, and we're trying to distract ourselves from these facts by bombarding our senses with communication every waking hour. Cell phones, pager, email, advertising, radio, television... it never, ever, stops.
On another, related topic, have you read about the study in January of this year called Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities? (Executive Summary, PDF) The study explores the reasons - and the proposed solution - for the rampant emotional, mental and physical heath problems among our youth today. The authoring commission is a group of 33 interested doctors, research scientists, and mental health and youth service professionals from a wide variety of institutions including Harvard Medical School, Yale University, YMCA, Dartmouth, The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and others.
The commission started its work because depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, conduct disorders, and thoughts of suicide – and a wide variety of physical ailments that have their roots in emotional troubles, such as heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcers - have reached crisis proportions among today's youth.
Despite increased ability to treat depression, the current generation of young people is more likely to be depressed and anxious than was its parent’s generation. According to one study, by the 1980s, U.S. children as a group were reporting more anxiety than did children who were psychiatric patients in the 1950s. (Emphasis in original.)
Related? You bet. The explosive growth in communications devices has another effect as well, that of distancing ourselves physically from our friends and neighbors and coworkers. We've all heard of kids who sit for hours in their rooms IM'ing their friends, or chatting on the cell phone. That's not bad in and of itself, but when it happens in lieu of visiting and relating with real, physical human beings, it's simply not healthy.
It's ironic that the problem that stems from all this connectivity can be thought of as "disconnectedness".
The drop in the IQ scores due to electronic communications is ultimately going to prove to be a drop in the large bucket of problems that are only now starting to manifest. These devices have only been widely available and affordable and easily useable for the last 5-10 years. The generation of kids now coming into adolescence is the first to have had regular access to these gizmos, and the outlook is decidedly not rosy.
In the end, I think all these problems come down to our failure to respect our own time. You cannot take a three week vacation 15 minutes at a time over six months. You can't get a good night's sleep by napping 20 minutes out of every hour in your 24 hour day. And your brain needs time away from the onslaught of communications as well. It isn't hard work to relax, but it does take a certain amount of focus and attention to achieve relaxation in today's environment. It requires a deliberate effort, and it's an effort we had better start to make, and to learn more about, and to teach our children, and to respect.
The cell phone has an "off" button, learn to use it.
Posted by John at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Links update
Keelhauling Links are now up as well. Since my "Favorites" list is now well over 3,000 I had to pare it down a bit. I did not post any of my business links, I'll add those later. Still some work to do with formatting, but I checked most of them and purged the dead ones, added a few I realized were missing. This is mostly for me, but your comments and suggestions are welcome. I hope you find some goodies there.
Posted by John at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2005
SOW: Week of 04-17-05
Song of the Week: Radio Experiencia (Radio Experience)
CD: Encontros E Despedidas (Greetings and Farewells)
Artist: Milton Nascimento
You will like this if you like: Marcos Valle, Elis Regina, Gilberto Gil, Neil Young
Back to Brazil for this week's SOW as I'm anxious to share some of the really hot songs I've uncovered in my recent world music explorations. Milton Nascimento has put out a plethora of albums; I've heard five or six and this is the best of the lot. Only Clube da Esquina and Courage, two disks that pre-date this one, rival it. It's been in my collection since about 1985.
Nascimento's career encompasses 28 albums, and includes Grammy nominations for his O Planeta Blue Na Estrada Do Sol in 1992, and in 1995 for his Warner Bros. debut, Angelus. Nascimento is also winner of the 1992 Down Beat International Critics' Poll and the 1991 Down Beat Readers' Poll. Despite all this, he's virtually unknown here in the states. What can I tell you? He's big in Brazil. This song cooks.
Posted by John at 12:44 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2005
Games page upgrade
The Keelhauling Games Hall of Fame has been updated, upgraded, expanded, and now, through the magic of alphabetization, organized! Sorry about your, um ..., productivity.
Posted by John at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
Speculating on currency
You think we're going to succeed in getting Iraq on track to self-governance and a prosperous economy based on democracy? I do, although it will almost certainly take many years. Well, here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is. Bet on Iraq.
After all, the Iraqi dinar is at a 200 year low. As the site says:
What was once the equivalent of more than $82,500, can now be purchased for around $50. Can Iraq's economy achieve, in a free market, what it once achieved under a brutal dictatorship? We don't know yet. But we know she is not alone in her effort to do so.
But this is a sucker's bet. Googling "buy iraq dinar" generates 13,300 hits. As a former broker and investment manager, I'd put this at roughly par with playing the lottery. First of all, you would have to overcome the dealer's spread. For Iraqi dinar, with 13,000 companies vying for your business, that spread is down to about 9%. (1400 dinar = $1 USD, so 1 million dinar = $715 USD, and they're asking $780.)
But that's not the real risk. For historical perspective, go back and take a look at what happened to the Chinese yuan. On March 1, 1955 the PBC issued the new RMB to replace the old one at the rate of one to 10,000 yuan. The current dinar spot price looks to be about USD $780 for 1 million dinar. If they did a similar currency reissue, your $780 would become $0.078 overnight. You would have to see a lot of underlying economic growth to overcome that.
Of course, it's always cool to have "a million" of anything currency-related in your pocket. But if that's your motivation, there are cheaper ways. Lots cheaper. In fact, if you grab some of those old Turkish lira before they're gone, your "cool million" will cost you about 74 cents in good old USA dollars.
Posted by John at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2005
Jokes with real answers
SomethingAwful has compiled a list of classic jokes with realistic answers, which makes for a pretty funny read (note there is some foul language, though probably less than the original jokes). A few of my favorites:
What do you get when you cross a chicken with a centipede?
A media circus about the debate over the morals and ethics of genetic engineering.
What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?
The Holocaust.
How do you confuse a blonde?
Paint yourself green and throw forks at her.
A man has been trapped on a desert island for 8 years. One day, he sees a boat on the horizon and lights a fire to let it know he is there. The boat comes towards the shore. On board there is a beautiful woman in a body hugging wetsuit.
"Thank God", he says, "I've been trapped on this island for eight years. Thank God someone has come at last."
"Eight years?" she says, "So it's eight years since you last smoked a cuban cigar?"
She unzips a pocket on her wetsuit and pulls out a cigar. She passes it to him, pulls out a zippo, and lights it for him. He enjoys the first cigar he has had in eight years.
"So is it also eight years since you had a drink?"
She unzips a pocket on her wetsuit and pulls out a hip flask, tossing it to him. He takes a swig, and it's 25 year old single malt whisky. It's smooth and mellow and utterly delicious.
"So," she says, beginning to unzip the long zipper on the front of her costume, "Is it eight years since you played around?"
"Oh no," he says, "This is all a dream, isn't it? A beautiful woman with whiskey and cigars wanting to have sex with me? I must be dreaming."
Suddenly he is woken up by a flash of lightning. It's the middle of the night, and he is all alone in his primitive shelter on his desert island. So alone, so terribly alone.
Posted by John at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)
Time to sunset the jibba-jabba
A friend forwarded a link to an article at BostonWorks.com today, and it may not be as funny to you but I hear this every single day at work. The thrust of the article is that corporate buzzwords no longer make you appear smart; instead they give the impression of the speaker being stiff, boring and rude.
The funniest part of the article, though, is where it says that the book was penned by “three repentant consultants”, who
... conducted a study on how average people view corporate lingo. They set up shop in an Atlanta-area Starbucks and showed patrons one of two actual company writing samples. One was straight and clear, the other rife with jargon and corporate-speak.”The scientific method at work.
Posted by John at 07:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2005
chair
Rodney McMillian chair 2003, 33x38x33", courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
As documentation of the decline of Western civilization, this exhibit speaks volumes. Somewhere along the line, the art aesthetic utterly defeated the art intrinsic, and beauty was sacrificed on the alter of appreciation. This "piece" sold for $2,800.
"Piece of what", you ask?
Careful! You only reveal your lack of culture with comments like that. Read the website, where it is all explained so clearly:
Rodney McMillian's work limns absence as an unmitigated presence. His take on absence is more sensuous than cerebral. He doesn't deconstruct the idea of absence and then rebuild it as a dialectical opposition, positing that what's not seen, felt, experienced is as significant, perhaps more so, as that which is.
[No, I did not make that up.]
Gee, I'm thinking I must have had $50,000 worth of art in my first apartment. Who knew?
Posted by John at 06:23 PM | Comments (0)
Can you say "Oxyrhynchus"?
Much buzz in the news about the Oxyrhynchus manuscripts, and the work being done at Oxford University. I have a high degree of skepticism about the hyperbole surrounding this breakthrough.
Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world...
This array of previously unintelligible manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome are being read for the first time thanks to infra-red imaging techniques.
These discoveries promise to change the textual map of the golden ages of Greece and Rome.Many of the scrolls are blackened and decayed by time and mishandling, and hence unreadable by the naked eye. The infrared technique increase the total number of ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts we can read by one fifth. A team at Oxford University is using the technology to view faded or obscured ink on thousands of papyrus scrolls salvaged in 1897 from an ancient rubbish dump. The scrolls are named after the now-defunct Graeco-Egyptian town where they were discovered.
...a breakthrough hailed as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grailOne has to wonder, when we see this sort of technology employed every night in prime time television either as a tool in archeological sleuthing or a forsenic detection technique, what took them so long? Has anybody rubbed lemon juice on the back of the dead sea scrolls and hit it with the hairdryer? Maybe there's a map to the Holy Grail! Don't you researchers ever go to the movies?
I hope the speculation proves true, but I suspect that they may have reams of shipping receipts, tax records and kids' school work. Further suspicion is caused by the mishandling of timelines. The article says the scrolls' material ranges from the 1st to the 7th centuries BC (shouldn't that be the 7th to the 1st centuries BC?) and includes work by classical writers such as Sophocles, Euripides and Hesiod, yet it says they "believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels". Hmmmm, Christian gospels from a bunch of papers that predate Jesus?
The site for the Egypt Exploration Society is supposed to be updated with their findings. The link is to their "News" page, which currently contains nothing about the recent technology breakthrough. I'm bookmarking it with WatchThatPage to keep track of developments.
Posted by John at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2005
Streetsigns on the Road to Hell #8
One of the arguments for legalizing marijuana is that it is a victimless crime. Another is that it is not addictive. Some say it is not carcinogenic, while tobacco products are and yet they are legal. And some argue that it doesn't lead to harder drugs.
But what about causing people to steal a dead man's head from the graveyard to use as a bong? Huh? What about THAT?
Posted by John at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
U of Wisconsin's "Redefined"
Some would argue that college a cappella singing groups are beyond redemption, but I beg to differ. Case in point: the funniest thing I've seen this week is the 8-bit Nintendo rendition by the University of Wisconsin's group, Redefined. QuickTime version. Windows version. Mario Bros., Zelda, Tetris (the Tetris acting rountine that accompanies the singing is hilarious!), even Mortal Kombat, they're all there. Cheesy? You bet. Smarmy? Of course. Funny? Wow. via Metafilter
Posted by John at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)
I Speak American
| Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 50% General American English |
| 15% Dixie |
| 15% Upper Midwestern |
| 15% Yankee |
| 0% Midwestern |
Raised in the South, with a mother who grew up in Alabama and a father who grew up in Mississippi, I had strong Southern accent when I went off to college in Boston. At college, it was no big deal, since the school drew from many countries and every region of this country, and accents were the rule rather than the exception. When I went off to work on Wall Street, however, it quickly became a big deal.
It took about two weeks for me to figure out that I would never be taken seriously by the big money crowd if I had that accent. In the minds of the Ivy-league white-shoe investment banker crowd, a Southern accent drops your perceived IQ by 20 points. So my solution was to buy a microcassette recorder and tape the evening news with Peter Jennings every night. Although Peter was born in Toronto, he has - to my ear - a flat, uninflected voice that is both crisp and clear. It took about 3 months of work to flatten out that Southern drawl. Although it's funny that if you had asked me what kind of accent I was trying to replace my Southernese with, I would have answered Midwestern, and it looks like I was only about 15% successful.
In thinking about why I got the results above, when the test is online and purely based on vocabulary usage, I think it may have to do with travel. Over the years, my vocabulary has expanded and changed as I've lived in the Northeast, the South, the Midwest and the West coast, picking up the best of the local dialects along the way. As you can see from the results, I've succeeded in eliminating most of the regionalism from my vocabulary, and from what I've been told, my spoken words as well.
Of course when I head back down South to visit family, it takes about 30 seconds to demolish years of hard work, and the Southerner inside explodes in glorious relief at his freedom. But perhaps in the wave of politically acceptability that has swept the USA, "hickphonics" has a future. I'll automatically qualify for a PhD and be granted a department chair position at a presitigious university.
I was listening to great album last week from a Southern rock group called the Drive By Truckers, a 2-CD release from 2001. The Southern Rock Opera is a coming-of-age tale about a guitar playing kid wrestling with his Southern upbringing. In the narrative, the youth moves North, takes up punk, and tries to shed his accent; but then, inevitably, he reconnects with his past through Southern rock. Great album, good review here. The band captures some of the essential problem with Southern accents, and they understand that it's not a regional issue, but a class issue. I love this line from the song "The Three Great Alabama Icons":
"Ya know racism is a worldwide problem and it`s been since the beginning of recorded history, and it ain`t just white and black. But thanks to George Wallace, it`s always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent."
Posted by John at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2005
Happy Tax Day!
Well, it's April 15th again. The culmination of many hours of wading through innumerable tax forms, hoping that either the refund you're entitled to is large, or the check you have to write is small.
If you get stuck, though, you better hope TurboTax can figure it out for you. Or get a real CPA to help you out. Because if you're looking for help from the IRS, you could get into trouble.
And of course, if they're wrong, it's still your fault. Presumably, if your question was not addressed in the helpful booklets accompanying your tax forms, you should have gone directly to the tax code. All 50,000+ pages of it.
- If you call, the IRS has the right answer only 86 percent of the time;
- If you visit an IRS help center, it's 67 percent of the time;
- If you send an e-mail, the answer is right only 64 percent of the time.
On a related note, Tax Freedom Day, which last year fell on April 15, doesn't occur until April 17 this year. Tax Freedom Day is calculated by dividing the official government tally of all taxes collected in each year by the official government tally of all income earned in each year. But you can think of it simply as how long you have to work for The Man in order to pay your taxes. If you're one of those average Americans. I think my personal tax freedom day falls in July. Or August.
Posted by John at 01:53 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2005
Plumbing 101
If you have a plumbing problem, or you're wondering how to attack that leaky pipe or clogged up drain, what do you do? You go to Keelhauling, and you type in "plumbing" in the search box, of course. Because that will bring up this entry, which will in turn take you to Plumbing101, an online resource site put together by Friendly Plumber, a plumbing contractor company in San Francisco. To help your search: plumbing, pipe, pipes, tank, toilet, leak, clog, clogged, fixture, sewer, faucet, sink, toilet, water heater, drain, bath, tub, bathroom, kitchen, garbage disposal.
Posted by John at 07:07 AM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2005
Be afraid. (But not too afraid.)
James Surowiecki has a nice summary of the predicament we're in due to the fall of the dollar, now down over 50% from its highs versus the Euro. I hope he's right about the soft landing, for there shall surely be a landing of some sort. The scenario spelled out here six months ago still holds true.
Posted by John at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2005
England, Britain, the U.K and the British Isles
Can you explain the difference? Sam Hughes can. Sam's a math major at Cambridge University in England, and he's come up with a nifty little Venn diagram that makes everything perfectly clear. Nice.
Posted by John at 11:37 AM | Comments (2)
Running Out of Gas
James Howard Kuntstler has written a book - to be released on Sunday - called The Long Emergency in which he offers a vision of a post-oil future. His basic thesis is that based on cheap fossil-fuel energy, we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance over the last 200 years. But the oil age, which peaked in 1970, is at an end. And that means things are going to change.
For example:
I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.Kuntsler's forecast for the rest of the country is equally dreary.
This month's Rolling Stone extracts from the book extensively, so you can get an overview of Kunstler's vision and the logic behind it.
I'm not a subscriber to his near-apocalyptic scenario, but I do think that if we don't do something about the imbalance between current levels of energy production and consumption soon, aspects of this will play out as predicted here.
Also, while browsing around for some background material on this post, I came across Land of Black Gold, a weblog featuring "Reflections on oil, peak oil theory, energy in general, and the investment implications", which is a pretty good read.
Like so many of the important topics in life, the practical side of this was already covered in Alias, when Vaughn mentions that his next car might be a hybrid. Jack Bristow, in his inimitable flat and emotionless professor voice, says, "Well, considering the rapidly growing demand for fuel in nations like China, India, not to mention the world's oil production is expected to peak in the next five years and then sharply plummet, I think it's pretty clear we're looking at an exponential rise in global conflict along with an energy crisis of unfathomable proportion. So, yes, I'd say a hybrid is an excellent idea."
Posted by John at 01:56 AM | Comments (0)
The Sony Matrix
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland. And, I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Posted by John at 01:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2005
SOW: Week of 04-03-05
This track is from an acoustic concert by Tim Reynolds. You might not know the name, but you've certainly heard his sounds. He's the main axe behind the Dave Matthews Band.
Born in Germany of ultra-religious parents, he started out playing electric bass in the church music group. Tiring of the constraints of imposed conservatism, he secretly plunged into jazz and "forbidden" late '60s and early '70s psychedelic rock. At age 18, he left home to join a group of "experimental" musicians. He never looked back. He's been playing alongside Dave Matthews (along with continuing to record his own albums and guesting on others) since 1993 (and perhaps even longer, but that's as far back as the DMB discography lists him on the albums). The drawing of Tim is from a schematic of his electronics setup, courtesy of Tim Rew, and featured at TimReynolds.com.
This concert was never released as a CD, but is a very high quality recording. The improv he does on this piece, both on the fretboard and with the pedals, is amazing. It's hard to believe that's one guy, one guitar. The recordings were labeled "1994" but several of these (Kundalini Bonfire, Jemez Rolling Waves, Valley of Flowers) I haven't seen any anywhere earlier than 1997. I'm still working on identifying all the tracks.
Posted by John at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2005
My Flying Car
While it wasn't exactly what I had envisioned when I was complaining, "It's 2005! Where's my flying car?", I remember reading that one of the Formula One companies had tested its latest F1 race car, the SR8, and found that it generates more downforce than its weight. Therefore, hypothetically (so far) turning it over and driving upside down will generate more lift than its weight and it will fly.
Of course F1 cars fly around the track as it is. David Coulthard set the highest straight-line speed record in a McLaren-Mercedes F1 racecar during the 2000 Grand Prix at 221 mph (362 kph). But for racing the wings are inverted so the "lift" is negative and holds the car to the track instead of taking it airborne. The company that makes the SR8 - Radical Sportscars Ltd - plans next to test the SR8 upside down in a windtunnel. They expect it to fly — literally — upside down and stick to the ceiling.
Radical was started nine years ago by a couple of guys who put motorcycle engines into customized car bodies, and started breaking lap records. And they offer a number of their cars for sale! Some of these beasties are even street legal. So, soon.... for not much more than the cost of a Volvo sedan, less than a BMW, that flying car may actually be in reach!
Posted by John at 09:45 PM | Comments (2)
April 03, 2005
WatchingAmerica
When I pull together all the news resources I use into the LINKS page, I'm definitely going to include WatchingAmerica.com. WatchingAmerica reflects global opinion about the United States, helping us understand what the world thinks of current issues that involve the U.S. They provide news and views about the United States published in other countries.
The stated purpose is not to find favorable or unfavorable news and commentary, but to reflect as accurately as possible how others perceive the richest and most powerful country in the world.
WatchingAmerica makes available in English articles written about the U.S. by foreigners, often for foreign audiences, and often in other languages. WatchingAmerica offers its own translations.
In addition, since the site has translation technology built in, you can surf all of the content of foreign-language news outlets at the push of a button - in English.
Posted by John at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
Creative Commons Search Engine
Yahoo launches a dedicated search engine that will find content licensed under Creative Commons, a system for online copyright lauded here before.
Posted by John at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)
Google Gulp! [beta]
Google is in the business of organizing the world's information, so you probably had a premonition that this was coming. Since, increasingly, the bottleneck in processing large volumes of information is the brain of the human user, Google has come up with a fix for that, too. A line of "smart drinks" called Google Gulp, (in delicious natural fruit flavors!) designed to hike your IQ up to a level where you're no longer a pothole on the path to knowledge.
Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink™ technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex.Very funny. I love the Gmail tie-in (How to Get Gulped), too. [I have five bottlecaps; if you're interested just leave a comment.]
Posted by John at 12:08 PM | Comments (1)
