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sure, they brag about their service but try and use it?
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“It’s one of five giant Polaroid cameras in existence — and this year it will run out of film and chemicals, and then it will become wood and brass and glass and cloth, without function.”
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“I’m devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation,” said another Los Angeles-area mother — why? How has your 8 year old seen the picture?
Category: Uncategorized
history repeats
Speech by Emperor Hirohito accepting the Terms of Surrender, 14 August 1945:
Despite the best that has been done by everyone–the gallant fighting of our military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of out servants of the State and the devoted service of our 100,000,000 people–the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,
Petraeus on Iraq: ‘It has not worked out as we had hoped.’:
In anticipation of the White House’s report next week, Gen. David Petraeus sent a letter to U.S. troops today. Brandon Friedman, who served in Iraq and is now a senior adviser to Vote Vets, obtained a copy of the letter and notes that most of it “essentially says what everyone expects him to say.” On the second page, however, Petraeus admits that “tangible political progress” on the ground “has not worked out as we had hoped”:
Earlier this week, White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten also admitted that “success” on the political benchmarks has not been “as large as we would have hoped.”
what kinda shirt did you say?
Thanks, I’ll pass.
this might undermine my argument
Maybe economies of scale matter more than I thought:
Determining the amount of energy it takes to bring food from farm to table is difficult, but it looks as though shipping in food from afar is, in some cases, more energy efficient than food produced locally and that the transport energy might not matter as much in comparision to the amount of energy it takes to grow the food in the first place. “And it turns out our own part in the chain is often the most damaging, since when we drive to the supermarket, we might come back with only a few of bags of food in the car boot. Such a trip is far less fuel efficient than the one taken by that same food on its way to the supermarket in a truck packed with the assistance of load-optimisation software, which determines how to stack cargo so that barely an inch of empty space is left in the back of the vehicle.”
(link)
Of course, if you walk or ride your bike, your efficiency goes way up š And this assumes your shopping trip by car is a dedicated trip, not part of a chain of other errands as I try to plan mine.
I still think Chilean grapes or canned beans from China are wasteful, though.
links for 2007-09-07
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and people wonder why I like film.
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When making cherry pie, add 1/4 teaspoon almond extract for richer flavor. This works with any stone fruits — plums, etc. But it does add another dimension to a cherry tart.(tags: food)
on ethics and choices
I took a look at a Brooks Saddle the other day at a friend’s house. He’s a serious cycle commuter, not just a recreational punter, so I was intrigued when I saw the Brooks. I didn’t understand the mystique, but a quick look at how they’re made was enough to make me understand. Where most saddles consist of a hard shell with rails that allow it be moved back and forth, the Brooks design uses the rails, but the leather saddle is suspended without the hard inner shell. So you lose the pressure points and gain the malleability of leather.
Pain in [ahem] seat has always been a factor on the bike, coupled with some alarming numbness, so perhaps this was a solution. Looking to see if leather-free alternatives are possible, I found a thread over at the Veloshop in Portland. Zealots (read: people you disagree with) are always irritating.
When I see comments professing a love for synthetic fabrics and materials over animal or natural products, I wonder why I ever thought that veganism and environmentalism overlapped. Plastic saddles, spandex clothes, bike components made in metalworks in countries with lax environmental standards, then shipped from China or Europe, in this age of man-made climate change, all of it preferable to woolens and leather — it just boggles the mind.
I don’t think the modern industrial slaughterhouse is any great thing either, but I think an awareness of where and how our shiny toys are made is just as important as understanding how our food is made.
The only alternative saddle mentioned — a Fizik Arione ti — is Italian and is made of a variety of materials — carbon fiber shell, foam, kevlar, titanium — that likely come with a resource footprint that outweighs leather. Add in the biodegradability and lifecycle of each and it gets really confusing. A worn-out plastic saddle will be thrown away, while a leather one might outlast the rider. After all, plastic is forever, or damn near.
Consider the North Pacific Gyre: an accumulation of plastic debris the size of Texas, estimated to contain 3,000,000 tons of discarded plastic junk. In 2001, researchers found that “there [were] six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton.”
Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic-that is, non-water-soluble-toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.
The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5 x 1015) plastic pelletsĆ¢ā¬āabout 250 billion pounds of themĆ¢ā¬āare produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish?
[…]
And the scale of the phenomenon is astounding. I now believe plastic debris to be the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet’s surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris.
Plastics. The future that may rob us of ours . . . ?
And it’s not like carbon fiber is some kind of natural component either. Very energy-intensive to make, chemically-based. Say what you like about tanneries, I don’t think they compare.
My ethical guideline has been to reduce my footprint where possible, to use less, to re-use or do without where possible. I can’t square that with man-made fabrics and exotic metals and global shipping networks.
Now playing: Grind from the album “Gold Afternoon Fix” by The Church
TIRED, not WIRED
The Black Wire and the White Wire:
On my desk at work I have two ethernet cables. One is black and one is white. The black one is connected to our corporate network. I use that one when I want to print things. I could also use it for Internet access and stuff, but I don’t because the corporate network blocks a number of ports, including those used for Skype and Second Life. It’s also pretty slow.
The white cable, meanwhile, is a standard consumer-grade DSL connection to the Internet, with nothing blocked at all.
Huh. We had this at Turner Broadcasting in 1995. And for much the same reason, as a sandbox for new stuff that couldn’t be justified in a business environment (in 1995, TCP/IP over 10BaseT was still pretty new stuff in a lot of mainstream companies).
But yes, his point that your better IT departments will do more than just make sure the email servers are up is taken. Especially in a media company that is concerned with The New New Thing.
Naveja.net returns
Naveja.net is back on the air. Someone has a long absence to explain. I suspect the rigors of earning a living are to blame though.
I stand corrected
Apple took the best parts of the iPhone and the iPod, and made an ultra-slick little device that’s a mere 8mm thin. I couldn’t be more excited about it, not just because of the killer features and gorgeous interface, but for the true mobile web.
I’ve never owned a portable device that was capable of browsing the web, and I think Apple’s implementation is just spot-on.
I have said repeatedly that speech will be the Great Leveller as far as interfaces go, recalling that typing is an artificial method of communication, unnatural and slow. But I plainly didn’t learn much from having kids of my own: touch and gesture are the first methods of communication we use to interact with the world. We learn how to grab and hold things, what things are safe (blocks) and unsafe (the cat’s tail) to grab, and how to point and wave, long before we can communicate with speech (grunts, wails, laughter notwithstanding).
More evidence why Steve Jobs is phenomenally rich and satisfied and I’m, well, not so much.
The ownership society
This isn’t the most shocking data in the world, but in this period of stock market hysteria, it’s worth remembering that the majority of the country doesn’t own any stock. Indeed, the bottom 90 percent of us only own 20 percent of the market. The top 10 percent, by contrast, control 80 percent, with the top one percent of Americans controlling an astounding 36.9%. What’s that you say? You want to see this represented graphically?
See those tiny slivers of checkered pink, blue, grey, and red? That’s where most of the country is.
I had no idea the ownership society was so stratified. And EPI notes further:
Dow’s all-time high inconsequential for most Americans:
For the most part, lower-, middle-, and even upper-middle-income working-age households depend on their paychecks, not stock portfolios, to meet their everyday needs. Typical working families that own stock do so in retirement plans that are costly to turn into cash. Therefore, increasing stock value does little to help them make ends meet at a time when wages for most workers have been stagnant for several years now.
Stock ownership looks good (that’s what most people think of when they think of capitalism). But at the end of the day, stock certificates, assuming you own a stake directly, as opposed to through a retirement plan, aren’t going to put food on your family, as someone once said.