Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Miles wanted to know what a walrus mustache was. So I pulled out the razor and showed him. Chin feels cold – hasn’t felt cool air on it for years. Not sure if I’ll keep it, but change is good.
I love this. c|net: Carbon Sciences says it has come up with a relatively efficient way to turn carbon dioxide from smokestacks into chalk, which can then be used to make drywall or other products. The process still requires a fair bit of energy, but then so does sequestering. And re-purposing carbon is better than hiding it.
Utne Reader, on a Creationist Science Fair that recently took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, including a diorama explaining how a broken motor disproves evolution, plus fossil evidence that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs.
The projects all used classic high school science language: Start with a hypothesis, move on to testing, and then draw a conclusion. The problem was that much of the science was backwards. In good science, you start with a piece of evidence and try to find a truth. With creationist science, you start with a truth (the Bible), and try to find the evidence.
Humans like to keep all options open. Even when we know some of the options aren’t frutitful. Even when it costs money to keep unfruitful options open (i.e. even when keeping options open is irrational). Interesting summary at nytimes.com of tests conducted on M.I.T. students designed to see just how far we’re willing to go to prevent a door from closing. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,†Dr. Ariely says.
Life lesson: Let options go. Simplify. Declutter. Know what’s worth your while, go for it, and don’t sweat the decisions that have already been made. Don’t kid yourself that you can follow every path, investigate every avenue. Know small potatoes when you see them. Keep your eyes on the prize. Obvious stuff maybe, but interesting to see it documented in this way.
Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies…
Righteous CD cover meme image pool happening on Flickr these-a-days.
1. First, you’ll need a name for your band. This will be the first article title on WikiPedia’s random page selector.
2. Now for the all-important album title. Grab the last four words of the very last quote on the quotationspage’s random quote selector.
3. And of course, the album art. Yours will be the third picture, no matter what it is, on Flickr’s most interesting page.
Run your elements through the Photoshop sausage grinder, emulating the style of an album you already own (if you like), and out comes an album cover that looks like it could be at home in the Indie or Alt.Whatever section of your local record store.
To get yours into the pool, you’ll need to join the pool, then go to your uploaded image and click the “Add to pool” link right above it (I’ve always thought Flickr made the process of playing in photo pools unnecessarily complicated).
Last of the Incas. This old Canon PowerShot G1 from the J-School was dysfunctional beyond repair (not to mention antiquated to the point of unusable), so I brought it home for Miles. Took us 45 minutes to remove nearly every screw, pry apart nearly every surface, snip every wire. Turned out the inverting lens barrel made a very good hat for R2D2. Even when something has no remaining value, feels wrong to tear it apart. Wrong but fun.
Robert Scoble came up with the idea to make a list of obsolete skills – things we used to be good at but no longer need to be, including:
A wiki sprung up to flesh out the list, and there are now hundreds listed (I added “Cleaning ball bearings in skateboard wheels without losing them”).
Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell “River” is gorgeous in every way, and wholly deserving of its recent grammy (one of only two jazz records to have won Album of the Year in the past 50 years, yeesh). Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni herself, Hancock’s lush keyboards, horns by Wayne Shorter… what more could an old Joni head want? The kindling power of the album inspired Salon’s Gary Kamiya to write a moving muse on the duality of rock and jazz in his life
Luckily, around this time the rest of the high-culture spinach on my plate started to taste better, which encouraged me to stick with jazz. I had known, in a dutiful art-history way, that Cézanne’s landscapes were better than pretty ones by some officially accredited hack; now I started to actually see them and like them. As a sophomore in high school I had bought an old 78 rpm set of Debussy’s “Iberia” because I thought it was an antiquarian ticket to cultural gravitas; now I realized that you got an incredible rush out of the end of the first movement. The kicks started getting easier to find. The same thing happened with jazz. The dusty old high-culture drugs kicked in there too. I might have started out listening to jazz because it was good for me, but the more I did, the more I realized that I liked it. Those schmaltzy tunes turned out to conceal beautiful modulations — quieter, less obvious than those in rock, but with a complex logic that grew on you. As I learned to follow the mathematics of jazz, I started to be able to listen without so much interior strain.
Worth a read.
Took a couple days off to enjoy a long weekend with friends on the west side of Lake Tahoe, in Homewood CA. Spent four days snowboarding and snowshoeing in spectacular shirt-sleeve sunshine, cooking, drinking wine, hiking around, and just enjoying one another. Had a fun session with The Ungame (1973 version), had a few failed geocaching attempts (everything buried under six feet of snow!), Miles and his little friend took their first ski lessons (and did great!)… Returned recharged and ready for anything.
J-School professor and Birdhouse Hosting customer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a new book titled In Defense of Food – a common-sense manifesto for eaters. Fittingly, Pollan is blogging this month at omnivoracious.com. Don’t have time to read the book? Pollan gives away the kernel: