Q: What’s worse, ignorance or apathy?
A: I don’t know and I don’t care.

Treehugger:

Jerry Falwell is decrying global warming as “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism. “Naive Christian leaders,” in fact, have been duped—DUPED, I say—by dirty hippies like Al Gore.

Meanwhile, Mark Morford has an entertaining piece on the 13% of Americans who claim never to have heard of global warming. Think about that. Tens of millions of Americans. Never heard of it.

Reality is just crushing sometimes.

Dylan points to a dust-up amongst librarians sparked by a paragraph in the latest Newbery award-winning children’s novel:

“The Higher Power of Lucky” is the story of a 10-year-old girl in rural California and her quest for “Higher Power.” The opening chapter includes a passage about a man “who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ‘62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” Librarians have been debating whether “scrotum” was an appropriate word for young readers, especially from a book with the Newbery seal.

The librarian was apparently not perturbed by the fact that the story covers a dude drinking half a bottle of rum — in his car — but by the inclusion of the medically correct term “scrotum.” Which made him think his readers could probably craft even better examples of inappropriate-for-kids content trailed by a “shocking” last word. He’s offering a copy of a Roald Dahl book to the weener, so jump in. I made a quick attempt on his site, but could have done better*. Bring it on, before I win that book.

* The idea of course is that the offensive content would not trigger prude radars, while the innocent word at the end would - my attempt fails the first part of that test.

Literalbarrage on Anna Nicole and the media choking on its own vomit.

It’s unseemly, it’s barbaric and it borders on a near stalker/sexual obsession with a dead woman. Thus, I feel that current words to express the depths to which the media have sunk are insufficient, yet I struggle to find the right word or combination of words to best describe the flogging of a dead woman’s corpse. The closest I’ve come has been “necromediaphilia“, although I think it’s a bit too long and slightly misses the point.

Now, I will confess to being one of those people who had not heard the name Anna Nicole Smith before she died. In fact, I still haven’t seen any actual coverage of her life or death, even though this frenzy is apparently going on under my nose. But I have seen plenty of coverage about how much coverage her death has received. Which, in a way, seems like par for the course for me — I always seem to get more of the meta-story than of the story itself. But it does make me wonder: Would she be getting this much over-play if people hadn’t been lapping up her life/style all along? Have the people made her important, or has the media? I guess that’s, like, the oldest question in the book, but if the coverage about the coverage is getting tiresome, I can only image what life must be like for mainstream news viewers right about now.

Tip: You can turn it off with your mind.

It’s been a light week on Birdhouse - very stressful work week, which by Thursday afternoon had combined itself with sleep deprivation and morphed into some killer mutant flu/sinus hybrid strain of je ne c’est pas, but whatever it was, I was laid out flat until Sunday afternoon, sweating, starving, hallucinerating, and watching a lot of bad TV (and also Genesis and Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus - both excellent in their own rights and “excellent-when-you’re-sick,” if you know what I mean). Just sort of checked out and was grateful to let Amy run the show. Slept almost 24 hours at one stretch, then started to emerge from the cocoon this morning. Still a bit woozy. Just enough personal horsepower remaining to digest some pre-masticated Oscars proceedings tonight.

Miles apparently digested my illness in his own way by reproducing the many types of viruses and germs in his bookshelf with ZOOBs and foam letters. Amy: “There’s the throw-up bug, the cold bug, the flu bug, the ear hurts bug, the sore throat bug, the sneezing bug, etc. No doubt he got the idea after his preschool teacher read them all a story about various germs and how to keep them away from you by eating healthy food and washing your hands.” The tall one in the middle is “Daddy’s flu bug.”

The US radio frequency allocation chart and a visual inventory of your hard drive.

Heartbreaking photo. “Wounded US Marine returns home from Iraq to marry.”

Showing Miles images last night of Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing two and three saxophones at once, and the nose flute to boot. Miles was quite taken with this, and started explaining that he add extra, invisible nostrils placed at strategic locations around his head (specifically, three on his head, one in his chin, and two in his nose - an arrangement which provided opportunity for some interesting mathematical word problems: “And if you had five nostrils in your head and three in your chin, then how many nose flutes could you play?”).

This morning he started rummaging through spare parts left over from a recent bathroom remodel and pulled out some plumbing. Stuck one piece in his mouth and another in his nose, claimed he was Roland Kirk, and performed a full half-hour set.

Was Kirk the Hendrix of the police whistle? (see last 60 seconds of Volunteered Slavery)

Quote: “I didn’t ask my mother to buy me a trumpet or violin. I started right on the water hose.”

John Lebkowsky takes umbrage at the fact that wordpress.com doesn’t allow advertising on its free blogs, saying “I’m enough of a libertarian to see this as excessive control.” I disagree. First, I’d think the libertarian view would be that wordpress.com is free to run their service however they see fit. Second, it’s a free service, so who can look a gift horse in the mouth? Third, people wanting to run ads are free to install their own blogging software and run all the ads they like. And fourth, without a policy like that, wordpress.com could become the ultimate splog magnet. I totally respect that Mullenweg and crew have stuck to their guns on this one.

J-School professor Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and others, boils it down for the New York Times. Just what can we eat, anyway?

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

The piece is very long, and very good. All about the rise of “nutritionism” and big science in food. Amazing the way he ties it all together. If you haven’t got time, cheat and skip to the bottom, where you’ll find his nine rules of thumb, tthe most concise of which is embedded in #1: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Easier said than done.

From a camera mounted on a rocket booster on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, as it’s jettisoned and tumbles to earth. This is so… human without humans, if you know what I mean.

via Squublog

Dwight, on tonight’s ep of The Office:

Best advice I ever received? “Don’t be an idiot.” Whenever I’m about to do something, I stop and think: “Would an idiot do that?” And if the answer is yes, then I DON’T do that thing.

Raine Wilson is a genius.

Have recently become enamored of subversion, not just as a developer’s tool but as a software management system. WordPress and Drupal installations and updates become trivial when you throw away FTP.

Realized there was no WordPress Codex page on managing WordPress via svn, so I wrote one (Codex is a MediaWiki site). Covers installing and tracking the trunk release, but also (and this is the info I originally set out to find but couldn’t), installing and tracking stable release versions. Linked from the Getting Started/Installation section.

Since there are probably thousands of WordPress blogs that were originally installed without subversion, but that people might want to convert over for the sake of dirt-simple future upgrades, tossed in a recipe for converting “traditional” WP installs to subversion-style installs.

1958 prototype for “An Inconvenient Truth?”

From the educational documentary “Unchained Goddess” produced by Frank Capra for Bell Labs for their television program “The Bell Telephone Hour.”

50 years of denial, and here we are.

Bruce Eckel (author of Thinking in Java) on his personal transition from Java to Flash/Flex for RIAs (rich internet applications). He chronicles his disillusionment with client-side Java on the web/desktop, from the early, optimistic days of “Write once, run anywhere,” to the current state of affairs, where Java applets on the web are virtually non-existent, and Ajax / Flash have become what Java always wanted to be. And Ajax, he argues, has already pushed JavaScript just about as far as it’s going to go, leaving Flash/Flex as the only real contender for quality RIAs. Only he says it much better than I can.

It’s not impossible to build GUI applications with Java, but it’s been 10 years and there are still installation hiccups with applets, Java WebStart, and regular applications. After 10 years, people don’t trust it anymore. If it’s not there after 10 years, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that someone doesn’t consider this problem important enough to fix. And even if they did, there have been so many bad experiences among consumers that it would take years to get the trust back.

Amazing. Everyone’s guilty.

Went with Miles yesterday to the exhibition of Bruce Nauman’s 1960s work, A Rose Has No Teeth, at the BAM (the title is a Wittgenstein reference, from the Tractatus: It is false that a goose has teeth, nonsensical that a rose should have teeth; non-intersecting language games yield nonsense, though syntax seduces us into thinking that a logical proposition is concealed in there somewhere).

In one small, empty room, opposing speakers leaked Nauman’s disembodied voice, hushed and garbled, intelligible words seeping out at intervals. Miles and I danced in circles to a-rhythmic ghost tones until the guard cast an admonishing glance our way.

At one point, a chair facing a sculpture. Miles looks up at me and asks, “Daddy, is it okay for me to go on this?” I answered, “Of course, it’s a chair!” He looked at it and then back at me. “Oh. I thought it was part of the artwork.” Poor pomo kid, confused by the boundaries between life and art before he’s had his first art history class.

Later, bought a copy of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, back in print after 30 years. Grapefruit is a book of instructions and notes for conceptual performance pieces. Sat and read through some of the instructions with Miles tonight, including:

PAINTING FOR THE SKIES

Drill a hole in the sky
Cut out a paper the same size
as the hole.
Burn the paper.
The sky should be pure blue.

PRESCRIPTION PIECE

Prescribe pills for going
through the wall and have only
the hair come back.

Asked Miles if he could think of a performance piece. He came up with:

Turn a chicken into a ball and then the ball eats itself.

I think he “gets it.”

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes westcountyreads.org, “A volunteer community collaborative of individuals, businesses and organizations working in collaboration with parents, schools, libraries, and community groups in West Contra Costa County to improve literacy outcomes for young children.” The site addresses student literacy issues for parents of school children across the county, and was created by Jenna Jacques of cozmikdesign.com (also a Birdhouse site).

I haven’t posted new Birdhouse site announcements for quite a while, but it’s not because new users haven’t been coming on board. The reality of any hosting operation is that 50-75% of people sign up with the best intentions, register a domain, and then do nothing with it. Coincidence has led to an unusually long string of such sign-ups over the past six months. Some cool things brewing though…

J-School student David Gelles writes for the New York Times about green homeowners deploying mud, rather than wood, bamboo, or carpeting for their home flooring.

It is hardly a new or chic movement: millions of poor people around the globe use natural materials like dirt for their homes whether they want to or not. But with the growing environmental awareness in this country, Mr. Kahn said, there is greater interest in natural building materials like dirt.

Not without their problems, but can be made moisture resistant with beeswax and linseed oil, and more crack-resistant by adding paper pulp or fiber. They do sound gorgeous and comforting.

Some scientists estimate that if we could prevent 1% of all sunlight from reaching the earth, we could offset the effects of all global warming that has taken place since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Global warming? No problem! Block out the sun!

While steering a recent UN report on warming away from the role of emissions, the US wants to include provisions for plans to install giant space mirrors in the atmosphere as “insurance.” Alternatives include floating bajillions of shiny balloons, or injecting the atmosphere with reflective droplets that would mimic the cooling effect of a massive volcanic eruption.

Of course it’s good to be thinking through all possibilities and preparing for last-ditch scenarios, but to emphasize post-facto band-aid solutions while de-emphasizing root causes is both foolhardy and arrogant. And therefore not surprising.

Last month I expended what were probably too many words in a discussion on a mailing list, making the point that Apple inherently values DRM-crippled music. How else to explain the fact the iTunes store attaches DRM to music even when the artists don’t want it there? Buy 100 songs from iTMS, I argued, and you’ve invested $100 in music that can’t be played anywhere but in iTunes or on the iPod. If Sony comes out with an iPod killer next month, you’d be reluctant to switch because you wouldn’t be able to take your purchased music with you. DRM is valuable to Apple, Sony, and Microsoft (who all exercise the same kind of data lock-in) even when there’s no direct profit in it, consumer convenience be damned.

Steve Jobs’ recent open letter to the music industry knocks a neat hole in my argument, making the point that, based on their data, 97% of music on all iPods is not protected, and that 3% is hardly sufficient incentive to prevent users from switching. Hmmm… Good point, but then why is some music available at eMusic (my favorite online music store by far) without DRM while the exact same music is sold as cripple-ware at iTMS?

Not sure what to think, but I appreciate that Steve is calling for an end to DRM. His letter is extremely cogent (one wonders how many lawyers’ hands the letter passed through before publication), and provides a great primer on the opposing forces with which Apple and other music providers find themselves wrestling. Of course, the fact that much of Europe is threatening to follow in Norway’s footsteps in making the iPod (or rather the breakdown of consumer choice its DRM represents) illegal is likely a contributing factor.

Digital camera consumers tend to think of megapixels as simplistically as some car shoppers view horsepower: More must be better, right? Shoppers are blinded by increasing megapixel values, at the expense of better image sensors, higher quality lenses, image stabilization, etc. Result: Many people are wasting more storage and ending up with noisier images, rather than getting higher quality images, as they often think they are. c|net, calling the megapixel arms race on the carpet.

As the digital-camera market matures, consumers are becoming aware that lens quality, processor quality and image stabilization technologies are at least as important as pixel counts when determining image quality.” … “We went past the point where more megapixels made a difference years ago,” MacAskill said. “In the last 3 million prints we’ve made for very discriminating eyes, none were returned for lack of pixels.”

Pingos are small Arctic and Sub-Arctic hills - sometimes above-ground, sometimes submerged. Some pingos are formed when warming water thaws layers of permafrost, allowing mounds of methane hydrate to emerge from the hard ground below. Remember, methane is a virulent greenhouse gas. Pingos are appearing with increasing frequency, and that’s not good. When pingos pop, they release methane, which heats up the atmosphere, which warms the oceans and thaws the permafrost, which spurs the formation of more pingos, leading to more methane release… From a comment at Salon.com

Mankind’s emissions will be the fuse, rapidly melting permafrost will be the detonator, and melting ocean methane hydate will be the bomb. … Unfortunately, mankind’s emissions are a much stronger trigger than past severe runaway global warming episodes, so the chain reaction will happen sooner, faster, and therefore will be much, much more severe.

Suddenly I’m thinking of pingos like some kind of skin rash on the face of the earth, or as the geological equivalent of buboes, pre-saging worsening health.

A little after the fact, but this tans my hide:

The league’s long-standing policy is to ban “mass out-of-home viewing” of the Super Bowl except at sports bars and other businesses that televise sports as part of their everyday operations…

Which means that bars can show the ‘bowl to a group of people and profit from it, while church and other large groups cannot. Your old friend Copy Right at work.

via Milan

Every time some short-thinking state decides it would be a great idea to dam up a river and swamp dozens (or hundreds) of square miles of forest land, a kazillion trees are drowned in the backwater. Drowned, but not necessarily wasted. Forests die beneath the chilly water, but remain perfectly preserved for many years, and their lumber is still usable. Until recently, it was not possible to harvest drowned forests.

Triton Logging has created a remote-control submersible called Sawfish. Wielding a pair of giant pincers and a 54-inch chainsaw, the craft grabs hold of a tree at the base, jams a balloon into its trunk and inflates it, and cuts through its trunk in a few seconds flat. The tree floats to the surface, where it’s dropped into a “bunk.” Waterlogged trees are hauled off by barge, hundreds at a time. Wired, in Reservoir Logs:

There are environmental advantages to the Sawfish method as well. Conventional aboveground harvesting contributes to deforestation, a cause of global warming that’s responsible for the release of 25 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. But because underwater trees are already dead, cutting them down doesn’t worsen the situation. And with underwater logging, there are no unsightly clear-cuts and no spotted owls to worry about.

The supply of submerged trees is immense:

Most salvage loggers believe that reservoirs conceal 200 million to 300 million trees worldwide. “That’s a low estimate,” Godsall says. “We’re continually discovering reservoirs with trees in them. There’s one in Brazil called Tucurui with $1 billion worth of timber.”

Andrew Leonard reviews Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg’s new book, “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. For several years, Rosenberg followed the (now largely stalled) development process of the open source PIM Chandler, and was also dragged through the development process for Salon.com’s custom content management system (a process I myself went through last summer). On why Vista and other large development projects are almost predictably over-budget and very late:

… the incredible difficulty of estimating the time it takes to do this stuff, whether you are building a little content management system for a relatively modest-size Web company or whether you are building the operating system that will be used by three-fourths of the known universe. The difficulty in saying, A) How long will it take to do what you want to do? And B) When are you done doing what you want to do?

The answer, it turns out, is incredibly elusive, and very few people are capable of estimating these things with anything approaching precision. On build vs. buy:

And the programmer who says “it will be faster for me to write it, rather than to learn it,” is usually correct. Except that what he will write, most likely, is something that will work but will not have its rough edges worked out.

Touche’. I’m becoming convinced that the ideal middle-ground on the build vs. buy spectrum is to use a development framework like Rails or Django. Then you aren’t building all of the plumbing yourself, and you still get to lean on the hard work of others, but you also aren’t constrained by the models and methods of fully-baked systems (like pre-rolled content management systems). The downside to frameworks is that, to be productive, you need more up-front training than you would when building from scratch, or when using an existing product. To that end, I’ll be doing another week of pure research/training next week - this time on Python/Django (after I get some molars removed, that is). Whether a week will be enough to start feeling productive with it is something I’ll soon find out.