Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Archive photo of the Fremont Troll, a famous denizen of Seattle*.
Without a doubt, there are myriad kinds and types of tyrannies out there, many of them petty.
Tyranny of the day: software that seems to work in a certain way merely because it could be written that way, not because it’s wise, or even particularly useful—judged by this Ye Olde Average User.
You do not want to know more.
* …a city known for its software, both good and not-so-hot.
Monday, 30 June 2008
Look at the stored carbon in Kitch-iti-kipi, near Manistique, Michigan (2005 photo).
I think I have this right. Carbon levels in the air are affected by how much is emitted into the air. Reduce the amount entering the air (or reduce the amount already in the air), and we’re ahead.
So, one way to keep carbon out of the air: dead trees that don’t emit the carbon they hold. This article says by keeping dead trees emerged in water stores their carbon. Makes sense, they’re still trees, albeit waterlogged, and still holding their carbon.
What they don’t say is that if the trees are converted into building material or sculptures or whatever, it seems to me that stores carbon, too. It’s not decaying, so it’s not releasing its carbon….
Lesson? Cut more trees and keep the wood around.* Either submerged—or in your coffee table?
The difference, I guess, is that you can sell the fact that you’ve submerged the trees as carbon credits, but not that you’ve turned logs into lumber and into furniture, etc. Those you have to sell as material objects.
* Damage to the environment…priceless?
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
When the body shop saw the Prius after the tree hugged it, they said it’d take two-and-a-half weeks to fix it. Well, they had it four, and must have decided that they just wanted to divest themselves of it. I don’t even remember that the spoiler needed any work, but this is what the right end of it looked like when we picked it up (blobs on top of paint, holes through paint). Yeah, we need it, so we took it like this, with the assurance that they will fix it NEXT TIME. I’m sad!
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Have you ever heard of Paul Otlet? I hadn’t. This NYTimes story by Alex Wright is fascinating.
Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY—French, right?) lived in the early 20th C and envisioned a global network (réseau) “that joined documents using symbolic links.” Of course, at his Mundaneum, begun in 1895 in Mons, Belgium, all he had were (clumsy) analog machines, which became bogged down in all the paper (index cards; Really!) he used to store the data. He toyed with this problem, eventually deciding “the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.” Sound familiar?
The Nazis came through Belgium in 1939, and destroyed many of the boxes of index cards. Poor Otlet died in 1944. Some cards survived, however, and a young grad student rediscovered them in 1968, and has lead a (long, slow) resurgence of interest in Otlet’s work.
Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet’s index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.
The archive’s sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet’s original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.
And the picture? Oh, that’s from years and years ago when I was over in Athens working on my Master’s and an undergraduate in a journalism photography class recruited my friend Adam and me to do some jumping for one of her assignments, so she could get some action shots. À la covering a basketball game, I assume. We did so much jumping we got a bit silly.
Friday, 6 June 2008
The summer heat has arrived with a vengeance. At 10:30 am, it was already 88°F.
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
You’ve heard of soap-on-a-rope; here’s a flag on a cable!
The iPhone is a great travelers’ tool.
One thing I find particularly useful is the real-time traffic info displayed on a map. Today, however, for the first time, we had faulty data. The iPhone indicated poor conditions along our route in Cincinnati. We decided to chance it and found…traffic running 5–10 mph above the speed limit. Well, at least the error went in our favor.
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Something to think about when you take your Geo Bush gov’t check aka economic stimulus bux to the store/online to buy consumer electronics made in Asia, as so many are predicting:
Any idea how far the largest container ships can go on a gallon of fuel? Try 37 feet. That adds up to 2 billion barrels of petroleum a year. “If the shipping industry were a country, it would be No. 7 in carbon emissions,” says Michael Hirshfield….
…—From Newsweek dated 5 April on web and 14 April on my dead-tree version….
Wikipedia’s article on container ships says the first container shipping was in 1956, the current containers are 40 feet/12 m long, and the larger container ships carry something like 7500 of them—if my math is right.
Monday, 17 March 2008
I was going to blog about the lovely chicken with mustard sauce that Mouse made, but we ate it all up before I got a picture taken, and who wants to see an empty cook-pot?
And I could blog about all the laughing we did with KW and GG, but then I’d have to explain too much.
So, I’ll settle for a photo of the U-Scan that KW mentions so often in her blahg (or used to).
Monday, 10 March 2008
Today’s NYTimes has a series of stories and graphics that make me quite uneasy. I do wonder what They (meaning anybody out there, individual or corporate, private or government) can learn about me from my web activity, carried out from the safety of my own desk chair/couch/etc. I know They do want to know what I’m up to, so as to market Stuff to me more efficiently—highly targeted marketing is what They tell clients They provide.
Take the time to look at the graphics: 1) a simple bar graph of frequency of data collection at several domains at least several of which you probably visit regularly, including FOX, AOL, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, EBay, and Wikipedia (watch out!); 2) a table of the data behind the bar graph along with another pair of bar graphs that amplify all this; and 3) a blog discussion of the whole situation.
My conclusion: 1) make sure I have my doubleclick opt-out cookie in place; 2), regularly delete cookies; and, 3) assume strangers can see what I’m up to, maybe in considerable detail.
Which is what Eliot Spitzer apparently forgot. Well, maybe not about web tracking, but at least that a phone tap can reveal all. And that nobody’s immune to them in the good old US of A….
Monday, 4 February 2008
Thinnovation they say on the Apple page…. Offset hinge….
The new Mac Air is without a doubt a cool machine. Superb design. Eye-catching. I didn’t even notice the built-in iSight camera, but then we weren’t at the store and in its august presence very long…. And I certainly didn’t dig beneath the surface to find the 37-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery*….
I see the Mac Air as a rather overgrown PDA, good for the high-end business-types. I suspect I’d need to lug around a separate hard drive for all my photos and miscellany, though.
And what the heck is a lithium-polymer battery anyway? Sounds like a gizmo from Star Trek!