Do the British love their children too? – Two girls run over while biking to their school 3 miles away. British (and probably American) "solution": re-allocate a school bus to their area (removing the bus from somewhere else). Dutch/German/Danish solution: provide better cycling infrastructure for everyone. Guess which one I think is better. (tagged: bicycletransportationinfrastructureaccidentbike )
LEED Platinum Prefab Home Now Available – Taking all the design work out of building zero energy homes should make it a lot easier to build them, but the contractors doing the actual construction still need to understand what they're doing, and how their application of building techniques will affect the end performance of the building (and their profits need to be tied to that performance somehow) (tagged: greenarchitectureleedconstructionbuildings )
Kidnapping Chrysler – Of course Cerberus (private equity firm that owns Chrysler, not three headed dog guarding hell) has a "fiduciary obligation" to seek a handout from the Feds. And by Jove, the Feds have a fiduciary obligation to refuse to give it to them! (tagged: bailoutchryslercerberuscrisiseconomygm )
Where data goes when it dies – Following from the Ma.gnolia implosion, Chris Messina muses on data loss and recovery… kind of an information grieving process. What are we going to do with all of this information anyway? 100 years from now, all historians will have to be AI. (tagged: dataarchivebackupslossmicroformatsrecovery )
What really happened at Ma.gnolia – The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia was, despite its surprisingly large user base, basically run like Ideotrope – one guy with a server, and some (in retrospect) pretty janky backups. A couple of weeks ago, the 500GB MySQL database file got corrupted, the backups failed, and the site imploded. Lessons to be learned indeed: number one is don't do your own IT, now that S3, EC2, the Google Apps Engine, and other such scalable enterprise systems are available. We gotta get that server retired… (tagged: backupsmagnoliadataservershosting )
Baseline Scenario for 2009-02-09 – A rundown of the current global financial situation, and governmental attempts to get things under control. These guys aren't particularly optimistic at the moment about our ability to acknowledge just how beholden our supposedly powerful and developed governments have become to the banking industry. We're acting like Indonesia or Russia with their oligarchic overlords. (tagged: financeeconomyeconomicscrisis )
I wriggled appreciatively and sighed quietly, enjoying the way that he slowly and gradually aroused me without rushing into it too quickly. After a while and with a gentle touch he started to undo the buttons on my blouse. It slid down from my shoulders onto the ground, and he ran his fingers lightly lower over my shiny bra, producing a gentle guy seem to indicate his enjoyment, as his fingers moved to unclip the button on the top of my trousers.
The history of cosmology is not the easy story of the rejection of absurd ideas in favour of what (perhaps after a little thought) is seen to be patently true, but the heroic saga of the hard-won rejection of the patently true in favour of the absurd. — Michael Hoskin, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy (1997)
Incoming Memes
Twitterfeed
Saying goodbye to the Internet for about 10 days. I'm sure it will be fine without me. 1 week ago
Is Facebook really censoring a NYTimes article about gay marriage in DC? Or is a link-shortening glitch? http://nyti.ms/crWznQ1 week ago
I realized today that my black bike actually makes me want to dress up when I ride it. 1 week ago
The handyman from Beven and Brock was a sociology major, liked the play Copenhagen, and also metaphysical quantum mechanics... 1 week ago
US to require all cars have brake-override. Great. I feel so much safer. Personally I'd prefer we just banned engines. 1 week ago
Retirement talk seems to have gone pretty well... It was probably the tie. 1 week ago
Laid low all day long by some stupid stomach bug. Now missing @CICLEorg party too :( 2 weeks ago
Pasadena Babalon was good. A kind of Caltech/JPL/Pasadena folk art/history. We need more of that kind of thing. 2 weeks ago
Made a poster for a conference I'm not going to. Working on my talk for next week. This retirement seems a little bit like employment... 2 weeks ago
Made (dumpster) banana bread w/ zest from (salvaged) naranjas agrias, and flaxseed. Breakfast for before climate and media talk tomorrow. 2 weeks ago
SEC Charges 'Prophet' With Fraud2010/03/04 Sadly, this guy really isn't any more dishonest than most investing newsletter publishers, or actively managed mutual funds. His problem is he was too honest about his dishonesty.
Should We Clone Neanderthals?2010/03/03 Apparently the quest to resurrect our nearest hominid relatives continues! This is going to be so weird.
City Response to “Water Conservation: Sober Up San Diego, The Water Party Is Over.”2010/03/03 Although they won't come right out and say it, it does appear that the City has no intention of proactively dealing with the possibility of long term undersupply/overdemand of water. Ironically (I think) San Diego gets about twice the reainfall of Taos, NM, where the earthships happily collect and process all the water they need for domestic living... suggesting that if you're creative enough, actually *both* sides in this SD debate turn out to be a little bit absurd.
The truth about risk2010/02/26 A great interactive info-graphic and discussion for exploring various investment returns over the last century.
The American poor spread to suburbia, but we’re not ready2010/02/25 We already have a word for a large annulus of poor people surrounding a relatively wealthy urban core, and it's not "suburbs". For instance, we don't talk about the "suburbs" of Jakarta, or Mexico City, or Cairo, or Nairobi.
Enceladus' Warm Baghdad Sulcus2010/02/24 Thermal IR overlaid on a visible light mosaic of Baghdad Sulcus on Enceladus. Basically the whole fracture is warm and spewing geysers into space. Weird weird awesome icy place.
The Case For An Older Woman2010/02/22 No surprise: men disproportionately prefer younger women, but it turns out women are fairly even-handed when it comes to age and dating. However, if you look at many other preferences (sex frequency, dominance/submissiveness, etc.) younger men and older women actually aren't a bad match. I certainly don't regret having had experiences with older women when I was younger.
Attribution of climate forcing to economic sectors2010/02/22 A paper in PNAS on relative climate effects of different industry sectors, which emit different relative proportions of aerosols (cooling) and GHGs (warming). Cars are "clean", and so are almost exclusively warming both short and long term. Power is "dirty", and so is less warming short term. However because the time-constants for removal of aerosols and GHGs are so different, in the long term, all these emissions are warming. Suggests cutting out car emissions first, then going for power/industry, lest we also remove our inadvertent sulfate aerosol geoengineering. Interesting way of looking at the problem, but I fear it will be latched on to by the deniers/geoengineers and misconstrued to suggest that dirty emissions are actually a good thing...
I wriggled appreciatively and sighed quietly, enjoying the way that he slowly and gradually aroused me without rushing into it too quickly. After a while and with a gentle touch he started to undo the buttons on my blouse. It slid down from my shoulders onto the ground, and he ran his fingers lightly lower over my shiny bra, producing a gentle guy seem to indicate his enjoyment, as his fingers moved to unclip the button on the top of my trousers.