farlane.blog

OK, so this is a slightly different take on the usual “find a shiny internet thing, match it with a shiny photo” thing. I’m going to add a slightly sappy story. Blog 3.0.

The photographer of this picture is a guy named CAVE CANEM (you have to use caps - he’s that kind of guy). He is one of the funnier people that I have ever met through the internet and quicker with banter than all but a handful of people I know on or offline. Actually, his name isn’t really CAVE CANEM … it’s Race Bannon. Actually, I have no idea what the heck his name is. Probably not all that important.

What is important is that I had a chance to see a show of his photos which I quite like (contrary to outward appearances). Unfortunately, I was Busy in a Winnie-the-Pooh-Grownup Busy way and couldn’t make the drive to Detroit for the show. Next time I said. Then, just a couple weeks later, he packed up and moved to Seattle - the Michigan economy strikes home.

Anyway, here’s the link to his photo, the equal of which I hope to take one day. and here’s that shiny internet thing that loosely ties in with this post.

Don’t wait.

The BBC reports that in the month since CBS signed a deal with YouTube and began uploading videos to the site, the network has uploaded 300 videos and that those videos have netted almost 30 million views. What’s more, the network’s David Letterman show has seen an increase of about 5% viewership over that period.

Every day that passes I see more and more ways that Google is becoming (or will become) a part of our daily lives. My mental jury is still out on whether that will be a good or bad thing.

The photo is by John Constantine, a down-under designer who has a pretty juicy blog called Dogmatic.

Penny writes:

The idea of putting a garden to bed is kind-of sweet and silly. Maybe those words….”putting a garden to bed”….not the actual doing of it. Not sure if other permaculturists would even agree with the idea of it. “Too much work. Let nature do it’s thing.” But, for me, the art-farmer who likes to blend a little ritual and ceremony with my doings–it seems right. It’s the season to say a grateful good-bye and appreciate the magical process of green growing plant life. And, it was a nice day to be outside.

Read the rest of Putting a garden to bed after the Bioneers.

Photo: non-turkey day by Huro Kitty. Although I am not a vegetarian, I am close enough to say that I would quite happily trade my turkey dinner this year for one of those wild rice-wild mushroom-cranberry-apples-almond stuffed delights! (caveat: I still get to make grilled turkey & asiago sandwiches on Friday)

Brian Eno has a brilliant lecture that opened 2006 Free Thinking festival on BBC Radio 3. You should go listen to it.

Photo: Another green world by IrenaS.

Matthew Mullenweg seems to steer me to a lot of interesting stuff (largely because default installs of WordPress have links to the blogs of its development team). The latest is a project called Parakey by Blake Ross, Firefox founder:

In explaining Parakey, Ross cuts to the chase. “We all know ­people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.” Why? Because online is how the world, like it or not, increasingly talks. If Ross’s mom can’t do something as basic as share her recipes or ­photos with her future grandchildren online, then she gets left behind. In the 21st century, this sort of information isn’t passed on at the Thanksgiving table anymore. It’s communicated through the Internet. So without something like Parakey, there’s a chance it’s not going to outlive the baby-boom generation.

Parakey will apparently be a sort of swiss army content slinger that runs inside a web browser - a universal interface to slice and dice media and also to share it one an instance by instance basis using a key system. It will run locally on computers, allowing Parakey coders to do things within Parakey that you can’t do via a web site like interacting with hardware and local media files. Through the miracle of force-feedback, Matt was visited by Blake who clarified that (contrary to the article) Parakey will be open source. I’d like to see Parakey meet up with Croquet.

Over/under on the time until this is bought (or done) by Google? I’ll take May 2006.

Check out Matt’s post Firefox Followup: Parakey, The Firefox Kid in IEEE Spectrum, check out Blake Ross talking about Parakey on his blog and visit the Parakey web site.

About the photo: The photo is titled Lapland George’s Door and the photographer bastish explains “I spent last summer living on a farm in Sweden. Next door to the house I lived in was an old man, a very smart man with tremendous vision. It terms of worldly possessions, he was a very rich man, simply because he found value in every piece of, what most people would call ” trash”, that he collected….” Read the rest of this story.

(I thought this post didn’t really have anything to do with the photo, but now I see that it did after all)

Northern Michigan astronomer and radio program Ephemeris host Bob Moler actually came up with The Meteoric Gales of November to describe the annual November Leonid meteor swarm:

November 18, 2006 Leonid Meteor Shower

At 11:45 p.m. the earth is calculated to pass through the debris trail of Comet Tempel-Tuttle’s 1932 passage near the sun. Comets shed material when they pass close to the sun. This comet’s orbit passes very close to the earth. From Northern Michigan the radiant point, from which the meteors will seem to come will have just risen in the east.

We have a ton more about this on Leonid Meteor Showers in Michigan on Absolute Michigan. I just wanted to point out that although I’m a total slacker here, I am accomplishing things in the blogoverse.  Take The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald & more Michigan Shipwrecks for instance. If you’re a fan of the song, you must click that link.

Photo Credit: The above picture was taken by Gregory Pleau of Halton Hills, Canada. He says that it is of star trails taken during the Perseid meteor shower near Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. He has a blog that has a lot about geocaching but also explores things like “genuine software / product activation“.

Another photo that the guy didn’t want blogged but is nonetheless cool is of meteors over Oregon’s Mt. Hood.

Here’s an excellent NY Times feature on how governmental budgets aren’t up to thechallenge of global warming. While current research topics include algae strains that can turn sunlight into hydrogen fuel, the inkjet-style printing of photovoltaic cells and kite-like windmills to harvest the immense energy in the jet stream, government spending on blue sky research and on the expensive tasks involved in getting something off the drawing board. If we don’t create these technologies now, our infant engineers and scientists won’t have much to build on. For those who say: let the market handle it, the NYT offers:

While private investors and entrepreneurs are jumping into alternative energy projects, they cannot be counted on to solve such problems, economists say, because even the most aggressive venture capitalists want a big payback within five years.

It strikes me (again) that we would be a lot better served if we could cease all subsidies of petroleum immediately and channel it into something like The Apollo Alliance - spending government money to encourage the creation of good jobs in renewable energy.

Mother Jones offers a bit of a silver lining, saying that Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller, (D-W.Va) have written to ExxonMobil demanding that the company “stop funding groups that have spread the idea that global warming is a myth and that try to influence policymakers to adopt that view.”

The recently released Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more. In contrast, the costs of action – reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change – can be limited to around 1% of global GDP each year. What’s more, the investment that takes place in the next 10-20 years will have a profound effect on the climate in the second half of this century and in the next.

About the photo(grapher): 02-08-06 … coal elevator to the fires of Hell is a shot of the Cheshire, OH Coal Power Plant. Jeremy Stump sounds like he has a cool life: designing and building skate parks, traveling a lot. Check out his site jeremystump.com for some awesome photos.

I’ve been spending the last week or so working to help set up a live web cast of the student mock election held at my local school this Thursday (Nov 2) at 9 AM. Our school is the Michigan headquarters and will be (as far as the national organization knows) the only one in the country to do a live webcast. The program has been going on for 20 years and it’s nice to see national recognition for the teacher, Ed Wodek, and all the students and others who have worked so hard for so many years!

It’s great to see how excited the students are and how hard they work.  When I see them, and when I see photos like the one above from election day in Bolivia, it makes me sad that we place so little value in voting and elections.