The Naturalist Downunder

My friend Joy Window has just started a blog which is at arovingiwillgo.wordpress.com.  It's called A-Roving I will Go and Joy has gotten this blog off to a good start with many interesting entries most of which are accompanied by photos. The theme for the blog is definitely one of the naturalist in her element.  I'm already eagerly looking forward to and reading (maybe commenting on) each new entry.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/iuq6

Robert Reich Being Clear on Tax Cuts

This does not sound good at all. Robert Reich is a good person to read in order to understand the State of the Union after 30 years of Supply Side Economics.

Amplify’d from robertreich.org

The New Tax Deal: Reaganomics Redux

The only practical effect of adding $858 billion to the deficit will be to put more pressure on Democrats to reduce non-defense spending of all sorts, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as education and infrastructure. Read more at robertreich.org

 

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Schneier on Security: Close the Washington Monument

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/12/close_the_washi....

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Interesting New Social Network Site

I have to admit that I didn't find out about Jumo until I saw a Facebook entry from my daughter. It sounds interesting and I'm going to have to explore this further. Apparently it's focus is on raising awareness about all the non profits and charitable organizations out there.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

Another issue for Jumo is social network burnout. Will people who are spending time on Facebook and elsewhere be willing to add another site to their lineup? Mr. Hughes said Jumo was not intended to compete with Facebook. Instead, he predicts that Facebook will become a ubiquitous backbone for the social Web, and that people will also use niche sites focused on specific interests and communities. Jumo will send out e-mails and updates tailored to its users to help them stay engaged, he said. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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A Different Country Indeed

This is quite a startling graph showing incoming distributions in the US over the last few decades.

Amplify’d from blogs.ajc.com

See more at blogs.ajc.com

 

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Possible Extinction Events Being Assessed

New from Australia about increasing stresses on the environment. A good read.

Amplify’d from www.abc.net.au

More than 400 ocean dead zones - areas so low in oxygen that sea life cannot survive - have been reported by oceanographers around the world between 2000 and 2008. That is compared with 300 in the 1990s and 120 in the 1980s. Read more at www.abc.net.au

 

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Pain Killer Stroke Risk

This is an interesting article from an Australian source about the risk of strokes from taking various pain killers. The risk increases as you get older.

Amplify’d from www.abc.net.au

Anti-inflammatories are best kept in reserve to use intermittently, says Cohen, as a "passport to activity" such as a weekly game of golf. Read more at www.abc.net.au

 

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"The Nation" Apologizes

Katrina vanden Heuvel of "The Nation" magazine is clear about the fact that they should never have criticized John Tyner for his decidedly negative interaction TSA as the magazine just didn't do enough fact checking on his background. It's refreshing to have this sort of response coming back from the editor of a magazine that I generally respect.

Amplify’d from www.thenation.com

I believe the furor over the TSA scans warrants further reporting and analysis. We do, however, pledge to do it with the care and integrity that marks The Nation's best journalistic traditions. Read more at www.thenation.com

 

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Opera 11 Beta Goodies

Now if someone can just get an extension for Amplify up and running so that I can easily clip out a piece (such as the one below) while running the browser and add my own comment for inclusion in my Amplify stream, etc. Incidentally I just used the Amplify bookmarklet in Safari to create this entry.

Amplify’d from www.webmonkey.com

Tab Stacking is the standout feature in this release. It is ingeniously simple and works a little bit like the way you create folders of apps on the iPhone’s home screen. You group related tabs by dragging them on top of each other. Your “stack” then collapses down into a single tab. To access the tabs in a stack, you simply mouse over the group and it expands, or you can click the arrow to the right of the grouped tab, which has the same effect. Read more at www.webmonkey.com

 

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Friedman Not Quite Getting it Right

I thought that SS was an insurance program for people who could no longer work for whatever reason and not an entitlement program. Not sure what Friedman thinks "cutting" SS will do or why it's necessary considering that it's also tied up in a trust fund that's apparently solvent through the next couple of decades. Let's play the game of distracting the voters however and not mention how the rich don't actually pay their fair share for the public commons.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

We need to cut Medicare and Social Security entitlements at the same time as we make new investments in infrastructure, schools and government-financed research programs that will spawn the next Google and Intel. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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Sunday Morning Books

Actually this morning I worked as a volunteer in the UUCA bookstore. It's something that I've been doing for many years now, and I do enjoy the opportunity to both sell books and chat with my fellow volunteers and members of the congregation.

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Those Brits Know How to Debate

I guess it really didn't turn out to be as savage an event as some people were hoping for, but I think I'd have liked to have heard these two trying to justify a war, or a belief or not.

Amplify’d from newhumanisteditor.blogspot.com

what a line-up: Hitchens versus Blair. An atheist and secular internationalist (and arguably the greatest man of letters on either side of the Atlantic) against a Catholic and nominally secular former Prime Minister, admired by Hitchens for his “principled” stance on the political touchstones of Kosovo and Iraq. Read more at newhumanisteditor.blogspot.com

 

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Pizza Night

I think we're going to have a Mellow Mushroom menu this evening

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Cold Again After having one of the warmest Thanksgiving days in my recent memory it's back to cold weather in in Atlanta. Brrr. http://amplify.com/u/gkkd

More on Harry Potter

We've just finished watching the 5th Harry Potter film. One more to go this evening on DVD and then we'll be going tomorrow (probably) to see the latest film in the theatre.

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Dropbox News

Looks like a new version of Dropbox is on it's way. Like many folks I'm a user of the software.

Amplify’d from scripting.com via Google Reader

I recommend trying the latest release candidate of dropbox. it's been incubating for the last 9 months and we're planning to release it in the next 2-3 weeks. it's much better at han Read more at scripting.com

 

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Has America Lost it's Can-Do Attitude?

Op-Ed Columnist - When Greatness Slips Away - NYTimes.com: ""

... As Time reported: “Schools, health services, libraries — and the salaries that go with them — are all on the chopping block as states and cities face their worst cash squeeze since the Great Depression.”

We are submitting to this debacle with the same pathetic lack of creativity and helpless mind-set that now seems to be the default position of Americans in the 21st century...

What an excellent column. Read the rest of this.

 

 

The Importance of Presidential Indignation and Explanation

This really would be a good time for a dose of self-righteous indignation. Obama is surely skirting on thin ice by failing to criticize adequately those corporations who are putting profit ahead of the public good.

Robert Reich (BP et al: The Importance of Presidential Indignation and Explanation):

 

Speeding up the Space Shuttle.

This is pretty cool!

And apparently it was all filmed with a Canon EOS 5D Mark IIS - just a run of the mill digital single lens reflex (SLR) camera plus a lot of time and patience.

Open Web and All That

Digital Domain - World’s Largest Social Network - The Open Web - NYTimes.com:

"But the online world outside of Facebook is already a very open and connected place, thank you very much. Densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets are all visible to anyone and everyone. Instead of contributing to this interconnected, open Web world, the growing popularity of Facebook is draining it of attention, energy and posts that are in public view."

Trying to do my part here by not posting this to Facebook!

Gulf Spill Size Underestimated?

Calculations of Gulf Spill Volume Are Questioned - NYTimes.com:

"Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom"

Things don't seem to be improving on the Gulf with this oil spill.

A Recent Climate Statement

http://www.pacinst.org/climate/climate_statement.pdf:

"We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option."

This  certainly gets to the essentials of the matter. It really does no end of harm in the long run attempting to keep punishing the bearers of bad news. Indeed new opportunities are provided for those societies that can manage to keep their eyes open to the nature of reality via resilient government policies aware of new scientific discoveries of all sorts.

Be sure to read the rest of this very interesting statement.

Latest Krugman on the Need for Competent Government

Op-Ed Columnist - Sex and Drugs and the Spill - NYTimes.com:

"Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do."

Krugman gets it right as usual.  Just part of an excellent column.

We appear to have a hung parliament - Charlie's Diary

We appear to have a hung parliament - Charlie's Diary:

"The Tories are committed to making cuts in public spending. As Mervyn King at the Bank of England said a month ago, 'whoever wins this election will be out of power for a generation,' due to the savagery of the necessary cuts. "

This is an interesting remark by Charles Stross as an added comment to his piece on the results of the British Election. I will be interesting to watch as this plays out.

Gulf Oil Spill - Reaching Shore

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Someone else was saying that this is a teachable moment - maybe.

Gulf Oil Spill: A Symbol Of What Fossil Fuels Do To The Earth Every Day, Say Environmentalists:

"McKibben is the founder of the global grassroots climate-change Web site 350.org and his latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet is about adjusting to a changed world.

'Our problem is not primarily that there's a stuck valve in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. That's a terrible problem,' McKibben told HuffPost. 'The bigger problem is that there's a stuck economy based on fossil fuels that the president hasn't really done anything major yet to fix.... The problem is that the whole system is dirty from beginning to end.'"

 

Facebook Issues Again

Of course it's now possibly  "Too big to fail"!

Facebook is Dying - Social is Not (by @baekdal) #opinion:

"Facebook is really big, it has a ton of features. But, it is also turning into the worst case of complexity overload the web has seen in years. There are so many inconsistencies that it is hard to believe - or even to keep track of."

 

"Climategate" - Update

Some good news for the scientists at East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

More on that Oil Spill

This is a particularly interesting piece in which the author (a geologist as it happens) suggest that there really ought to be stronger regulations for these increasingly risky drilling operations.

Blog Editing

This looks good.  Since I use version 2 of the product I'm going to be most interested in this upgrade. I can already see that the rich text editor, in particular, will be handy.

What's New In MarsEdit 3?

Our Little Blue Marble of Matter

I didn't realize that it had been quite so long since this image was made, but of course that is certainly the case. The Carl Sagan quote present in the link always gives me delicious shivers and really does serve to put things in perspective quite throughly.

Pale Blue Dot « a simple prop

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the famous “pale blue dot” photo – Earth as seen from Voyager 1 while on the edge of our solar system (approximately 3,762,136,324 miles from home). Sagan’s words are always worth remembering:

BBC News - Uganda's highest ice cap splits on Mt Margherita

BBC News - Uganda's highest ice cap splits on Mt Margherita:

"The ice cap on Uganda's highest peak has split because of global warming, Uganda's Wildlife Authority (UWA) says."

It's going to get increasingly difficult to climb in these terrains as the ice continues to disappear.

Latest Ubuntu Install Hints, Etc

The following link is probably a good one to keep on hand for anyone installing Lucid 10.04 especially for someone coming to Ubuntu for the first time or this product, come to think of it. 

All the stuff people forget to tell you

Krugman on Oil Drilling

Op-Ed Columnist - Oil Drilling, Disaster and Denial - NYTimes.com

for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a strangely old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the events that led to the first Earth Day, four decades ago.

Paul Krugman is looking for a silver lining in this environmental disaster and of course it will focus public attention on these issues - hopefully for a long time

Hiking Tips

Since we're going to be up in this area in a few months and out and about hiking I figure that I'd better keep this link handy.  There are some good tips included to keep us from getting into too much trouble.

Making Light: The Happy Wanderer

Commenting on Oil Spill

I'm not sure that I agree with the "changed overnight" statement, but it's still a pretty severe crisis.

Control Room: Oil Spill

Australian Internet Filter

Legislation for censoring web sites is certainly getting a lot of play on Slashdot. Of course I remember an era when horror films were banned, etc so I'm not surprised to be reading this.

Australian Friend Visiting

My friend Joy Window is heading for Atlanta in just some 3 weeks as I write this. I've persuaded her to come visit during May/June (she'd been planning a trip for some time) so that she could accompany us to Charleston for the band events at Spoleto. I know she's quite excited to be seeing/hearing the band and generally having a good time.

Canopy Walk Opening

The Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band led the way through this new attraction this morning at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Even though the day was overcast we at least did not have to march through rain or even any light drizzle. It was actually pretty much perfect, although I suspect that a sunny day would have resulted in even more of an audience for the ribbon cutting and march along the Canopy Walk.

Pictures coming soon to my pbase site.

Oil Spill

Florida Democrat Seeks Offshore Oil Hiatus - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has long studied events that influence environmental policy, sees the potential in the Gulf for a game changer:

This is an interesting development after the Obama Adminstration so recently relaxed the rules of the game for offshore drilling. Of course they've now halted same - at least for the time being - and in any case new drilling is/was not going to be taking place for some years to come.

Further information here, here and here.

What we worry about on getting older.

After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names?

The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

I'm thinking that I need to refer to this article every so often - if I can remember to, that is!

Low vitamin D levels are related to MS brain atrophy, cognitive function, studies show

This link is of interest of people who have Multiple Sclerosis.

Fastmail Changes

Since I use fastmail this of some interest to me.

Ebert on 3-D in Movies

Roger Ebert: Why I Hate 3-D Movies - Newsweek.com:

3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension.

I certain don't think tv shows ("Mad Men", for example) could possibly be improved by watching them in 3-D.

More Web Future Speculation

Interesting ...

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash - Charlie's Diary

"The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath."

An interesting take on the future of the Web by Charles Stross.

Alien Invasion!

Something else to worry about then?

Contrary Brin: Here comes the debate over the other kind of aliens...

The Most General Chrome Extenstions

I think this is the list that I really need to be keeping an eye on!

Top 10 Google Chrome Extensions | TechSource

Chrome and Extensions

This is certainly a useful article. I need to keep it in mind when I start using Chrome more seriously.

Top 10 Google Chrome Extensions for Web Developers | TechSource

Web Futures

Now this article by Doc Searls - author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" gives an excellent perspective on what the web is, it's history, and hopefully where it is headed.