The full title is “The Story Of Stuff: How Our Obsession With Stuff Is Trashing The Planet, Our Communities, And Our Health — And A Vision For Change”. Annie Leonard brings up what many of us either don’t know or don’t think about: that it’s pretty complicated, dangerous, and irresponsible the way our stuff is[...]
I saw this on the GearCulture blog: a soccer ball that “converts the kinetic energy of the ball’s movement into electricity. Just a few minutes of play can provide hours of light.” It’s “[c]urrently used in rural off-grid areas of Mexico and disadvantaged regions of the US with plans to go global and help out[...]
When I first heard someone suggest “we need to conserve water”, I remember thinking: “We can’t run out of it; the water will always be here.” Whether you use more water or less water, it all runs downhill, then evaporates and rains back onto us, right? But a little more research has made me re-think[...]
I think I first heard the term “save the rainforests” while in high school (late 1980s), though it might have been in the early ’90s. I’d never seen a tropical rainforest (I was a baby when I lived in Hawaii, so I don’t remember it), nor did I know anyone involved in deforestation, so what[...]
In The News: Not Even Close: 2012 Was Hottest Ever in U.S. (New York Times) In The News: 2012 Was the Hottest Year in U.S. History. And Yes — It’s Climate Change The previous record for the contiguous United States was 1998, after which temperatures dropped a bit — a slight decrease that was used[...]
In the News: Plastic bulb development promises better quality light (BBC News) In the News: New Lighting Could Replace Fluorescents, CFLs, and LEDs As The Light Source Of The Future Have you fully replaced your home’s incandescent light bulbs with CFLs? (We did, about three years ago.) Thinking about how LED bulbs are a little[...]
In the News: Temps set to soar as emissions grow: report (ABC News) In the News: Carbon Pollution Up to 2 Million Pounds a Second (Time Magazine) Last year, all the world’s nations combined pumped nearly 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and[...]
In The News: Study: Sea level rose 60% faster than UN projections (Inland News Today) In The News: Polar Ice Sheets Melt Faster (Wall Street Journal) In The News: Icy Greenland Melting At Accelerating Rate, Study Finds (FOX News) (Note that at least one of the sources above is FOX News.) The Intergovernmental Panel on[...]
In The News: Worst US drought in decades deepens to cover 60 percent of lower 48 states Aside from the distracting misnomer “lower 48 states” (they meant “contiguous 48 states”), this is disturbing news. Here in Central Texas, we had the wettest summer in several years, but that’s only because the previous summers were astoundingly[...]
I hereby announce that I’ve changed my view of Climate Change and mankind’s role in it. First, I never considered myself a “denier” of Climate Change or Global Warming. I’m almost never an immediate adopter or denier of any point of view; that’s just not my way. Over the years, my position on this subject[...]
Flickr’s marketing department is taking care of publicizing what’s been added to the site, and how the design has changed. They’re real proud of it. So far, I haven’t seen anyone documenting what’s been taken away from Flickr users. I’ve made a page just for that, here. I’ll be updating it as I learn more.
Title: The Raven, A Biography of Sam Houston Author: Marquis James Year: 1929 Publisher: University of Texas Press, Austin ISBN 0-292-77040-5 View it on Amazon View it on Google Books Sam Houston on Wikipedia This book was awarded the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for “Biography or Autobiography” (James is one of the very few people who’ve[...]
Flickr holds a special place in my heart, at least compared to other internet sites. I’ve spent more time on Flickr than most people have spent on Facebook or Twitter — daily participation since I joined in Sept. 2005. Not only have I uploaded over 30,000 images to my photostream (most of them now non-public),[...]
“I thought the left loved freedom of the press and open government. I guess that’s only when ‘The Man’ is someone else.” That’s what one commenter said on a news story about the federal government hoping to charge a journalist for publishing news. It’s an astute observation about the way our two-party political system works:[...]
Commentary: A record Powerball jackpot isn’t a record to celebrate (Christian Science Monitor) The editorial board of CSM concluded their piece with this: Before the news media play up the next record-setting mega-lottery like Powerball, they may want to add these kinds of caveats in their reporting. It could deter people from rushing to the[...]
Following are some passages I underlined during a reading of To Sail Beyond The Sunset (1987) by Robert A. Heinlein, the last novel he published before dying in 1988: “I remember Earth. I knew her when she was clean and green, mankind’s beautiful bride, sweet and lush and lovable… It is futile to mourn over[...]
There is a school of thought, albeit a relatively unpopular one, that poor grammar or punctuation on printed signs should be corrected with a Sharpie or other tool, vigilante style. In the News: Vigilante Copy Editor (New York Times) And there are older instances, such as this one (The Virginian-Pilot).
Following are some passages I underlined during a reading of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls: A Comedy of Manners (1985) by Robert A. Heinlein: “It does not do to encourage bad banners; one should retaliate, urbanely but firmly.”
In The News: Adobe starts subscription for Photoshop and Dreamweaver (BBC News) This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone; many software companies are moving in this direction. Instead of having to ship millions of boxes and discs every year when they upgrade the software, they’re just going to add the updates to the online[...]
Following are some passages I underlined during a reading of I Will Fear No Evil (1970) by Robert Heinlein: “…most people think of money as something to pay the rent. But a money man thinks of money in terms of what he can do with it.” “…it’s impossible for a woman to lay it on[...]
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