If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of September 4th, 2009
Links for the week of August 28th, 2009
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of August 28th, 2009
Links for the week of August 20th, 2009
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of August 20th, 2009
For Love of Information
I’m a little bit of an information pack rat. I started blogging before there were blogs, from UGCS. It seemed mildly neurotic and self involved and exhibitionist at the time. I mostly did it for my mom as a way to keep in touch without having to e-mail all the time. I’ve lost information here and there, even digital information (which seems kind of unforgivable), but analog too. Actually, I think more I just didn’t create much analog information. Five intense months of life, bicycling across Europe in 1994. Maybe 2 rolls of film total? Almost no photos from my summer in Russia. Both my parents were avid photographers. My dad professionally (though eventually he tired of the weddings and quinceañeras, and retreated to a steady stream of passport and similar photos… para las micas rosas, y para amnestia…) and my mom (so far as I can tell) more personally. Family pictures, documentarian style, wildflowers, and some prizes in the Fresno County Fair. But I never got into it, until I got a digital camera in 1999. My first piece of digital film was a 64 MB compact-flash card (incredibly, several times larger than the 20 MB hard disk in my first computer, which I got in 1993). It cost about $100. The camera was a Nikon Coolpix 700, with 2.1 MP sensor and no zoom. I bought it in an online auction (at Yahoo!) for $425, but had the seller leave me feedback at eBay (you could leave anyone feedback for anything back then). I mailed the check, and he mailed the camera, simultaneously, trusting each other. I still have our e-mails. The pictures could go directly to the web… via the web server I had running in my bedroom in Santa Cruz. I still have those pictures. No developing. No cost-per-click of the shutter. Kayaking through Southeast Alaska with Becky in the summer of 2000 I had to limit the resolution to 640 x 480 to avoid running out of space over 3 months, and I couldn’t use the LCD lest I run out of batteries, but at least I took the pictures, and kept them.
Links for the week of Aug 14th
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Continue reading Links for the week of Aug 14th
The Tragedy of the Marine Commons
I’ve made this parody before:
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat until the fish are extinct.
All indications are that our grandkids won’t be big fans of sashimi, as it will either be too expensive for them, or virtually non-existent, because we have driven the large fish species to (or near) extinction. We’ve been making fish smaller, and less plentiful for millennia. This is no huge surprise. We ate all the tasty North American megafauna when we got here too. We were hungry, and we didn’t know any better. The world and its resources seemed vast beyond our comprehension.
The situation today is tragic partly because we know exactly what we’re doing, and partly because we could be sustainably harvesting vastly more fish today than we are currently mining at an unsustainable rate, if only we could somehow contrive to let fish stocks rebound to their Pleistocene levels. At those very high (pre-human) stocking rates, the sustainable take would be enormous, but we would have to manage the harvest carefully with quotas (which we didn’t do the first time around, and which we are much better equipped to do now). Such quotas are sometimes discussed as if they were purely economic or political quantities, but in some important ways they are neither.
California traffic signals should detect bikes
Hello Mr. Singh,
As a person who uses a bicycle as almost my only form of transportation, not being detected by traffic signals often makes me feel like some kind of outlaw, even though I am very explicitly operating my vehicle within California law. This difference between the letter and the implementation of the law contributes to the mistaken perception, by drivers, law enforcement officials and cyclists alike, that bikes somehow have both fewer legal rights and less responsibility to obey the rules of the road.
It has come to my attention that there is nobody on the California Traffic Control Devices Committee (CTCDC) who represents the interests of the non-motorized elements of traffic, though there are multiple representatives from the state’s automobile clubs. Under AB 1581 (now CVC 21450.5) bicycles are entitled to be detected by the devices that CTCDC oversees, but with no representation on the committee it seems unlikely that the decisions it takes will reflect our needs. Many other jurisdictions (e.g. Copenhagen, Denmark) that have decided to incorporate cycling meaningfully into their transportation networks have successfully solved the technical problems associated with detecting and directing the flow of bicycle traffic, and so I do not feel that “we don’t have the technology” is really a viable excuse. What we lack is the political will, and I think that having some direct representation of non-motorized traffic on the CTCDC would help facilitate finding that political will.
Sincerely,
Zane Selvans
CC: Ken McGuire (Caltrans Bicycle Program Manager)
Continue reading California traffic signals should detect bikes
Does this look Freegan to you?
Why are labels so attractive? One word shortcuts for frugal thinkers. Am I a freegan? What would that mean exactly? Who curates the definitions of our cultural -isms?
Reading through the Wikipedia article on Freeganism (which is as close to a cultural consensus on anything as I think we get these days), it seems like I’m close. Except that I’m not fundamentally opposed to eating meat (it’s the environmental degradation, antibiotics resistance, health detriments, and massive resource consumption involved in meat production that get to me… but a little free meat from the dumpster? Tasty!). I also have a soft spot for shiny new laptops and other information technologies, and I believe in the greed based toolkit of money, markets, and open competition as a way to foster innovation. But I also love composting, and creative re-use, and free non-materialist forms of entertainment and recreation like reading, and writing, and cooking from scratch, and I believe that unmitigated greed, and thus so-called laissez-faire (or perhaps in many cases more accurately crony) capitalism, left unchecked, are in the end destructive forces. Greed and self-interest are kind of like dynamite: the right amount in the right place is a wonderful tool. Too much, or even small amounts in bad places, and you’ve got a mess. So how do I respond to an e-mail like this:
Links for the week of Aug 5th
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of Aug 5th
Will there be no more public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings?
That’s what the advisory commission rumor mill is saying anyway. I hope we can ensure that the gossip is wrong.
In February the Pasadena Department of Transportation said that we would have four (count ’em: 4) public meetings or workshops throughout the spring to get input on the Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan, and that a draft would be finished by around June. I posted a summary of the meeting.
We have so far had one workshop, in May, which many people felt was not adequately publicized beforehand (the City did not, for instance, send an e-mail to the list of interested parties it had collected at the first meeting, which it did use to get more than 1000 responses to the online Pasadena cyclists survey). At the workshop we were told that a second draft of the new plan’s goals, objectives, and actions would be posted on the web within one week, incorporating our feedback from the workshop. I posted the first draft of these items with commentary.
Continue reading Will there be no more public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings?