snowdeal.org - conflux

the smell of schadenfreude was thick in the air.

2007-05-05T13:33:00.000-04:00

Paris Ordered to Serve 45 Days in Jail. what are the odds that she'll emerge from prison with a ghostwritten book manuscript in hand that will be turned into a late summer/early fall made for tv movie? high, i say.

oh moto ,where's the mojo?

2007-05-01T22:13:00.000-04:00

while it's been nearly three years since in was pink-slipped from motorola ( which, incidentally, was ultimately a great thing, even if it didn't seem that way at the time ) and i have almost no ties to the company, it still saddens me to watch its continual troubles, well, continue. save for the brief success of the razr, it's staggering to contemplate just how long the mothership has been slumping. i wish my former colleagues who stayed on all the best in what must be a tough slog.

Climate change hits Mars

2007-04-29T21:30:00.000-04:00

i've been seeing more and more articles on the increase in surface temperature on mars and the implications related to global warming here on earth:

"Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena."

innumerable questions come to mind that are never answered in the press, not least of which being: what is the error associated with the measurements on mars ( is the warming on mars exactly 0.5C which just so happens to be the amount of increase here on earth? prolly not.) and given the differences between the martian atmosphere and our own, wouldn't you expect the warming effect of solar rays to be much greater on mars than earth ( due to the lack of a robust atmosphere to buffer the effect)? put another way, if the solar rays are only increasing the surface temperature on mars by 0.5C why wouldn't you conclude that its role in the increase on earth temperatures would actually be less so? even if they're ultimately silly questions, i'm surprised they aren't addressed in the press articles.

the natural evolution of twitter.

2007-03-17T13:50:00.000-04:00

for the life of me, i can't remember how it's exactly worded, but there's an old software development axiom that any piece of software will gradually evolve to send email. over the years, i've come to believe that a corollary exists for messaging/status software and services that states that any such service will eventually serve status reports from home automation systems.

a case in point, twittering your home.

linkage: Tuesday 13th of March

2007-03-13T22:03:00.000-04:00

Chemicals May Play Role in Rise in Obesity - washingtonpost.com
"The chemicals under scrutiny are used in products from marine paints and pesticides to food and beverage containers. "
[tags: conflux health science ]
Mike Whitney: Is Cheney Betting on Economic Collapse?
"Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney's financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money
[tags: conflux finance politics ]
What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing - New York Times
"Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about g
[tags: conflux research science ]
Wired: AP Technology and Business News from the Outside World on Wired.com
"Office workers glued to computer screens are at greater risk of deadly blood clots forming in their legs than long-distance air travelers, the author of a New Zealand study on thrombosis said Monday."
[tags: conflux health science ]
OpenID: Too many providers, not enough consumers | New Web Order - Nik Cubrilovic
"We now have 100 million+ OpenID’s with nowhere to go..."
[tags: conflux openid ]
Starbucks organic milk is ultra-pasteurized -- megnut.com
"I drink organic milk because I don't want rBGH milk. But in the order of rBGH vs. organic vs. ultra-pasteurized, I wasn't sure which way to go."
[tags: conflux organic ]
Internet Outsider: ISPs Are Selling Your Clickstreams!
"How much are your clicks worth? According to David, about 40 cents a month per user (per customer)...and he estimates that there are 10-12 big buyers of this data. In other words, your ISP is probably making about $5 a month ($60 a year) off your click
[tags: conflux privacy ]
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Moodgeist, Skype and Twitter IM Overlay
"But this is the consumer internet and Twitter has less to fear. Twitter is a cultural product."
[tags: conflux twitter ]
Science hopes to change events that have already occurred
"If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life."
[tags: conflux science ]
Google’s Buses Help Its Workers Beat the Rush - New York Times
"The company now ferries about 1,200 employees to and from Google daily — nearly one-fourth of its local work force — aboard 32 shuttle buses equipped with comfortable leather seats and wireless Internet access. Bicycles are allowed on exterior racks,
[tags: conflux ]
Signal to Noise ? Vonage and Covad (Doom vs. Prosperity?)
"Covad has chosen to compete head-on with the phone company–not on the basis of price alone, as Vonage does, but on the basis of innovation."
[tags: conflux ]
Time Magazine: Is Local Food Going Mainstream? (TreeHugger)
"The best of both worlds is of course community supported agriculture (CSA) that is both local, thus seasonal, and organic."
[tags: conflux sustainability ]

a twitter confession.

2007-03-12T21:10:00.000-04:00

i don't know why i feel the need to fess up to this in public, but i'm going to do it anyway. i don't get twitter. i mean, conceptually i think i understand it but the more i read about it - and there's certainly no shortage of stuff to read lately - the less i understand why it has become such a phenomenon. clearly i must be missing something obvious and should probably just kick the tires so i can have a more informed opinion.

update on the linkage.

2007-03-11T18:09:00.000-04:00

i finally got around to getting del.icio.us and blogger working together ( easy as pie with simplepie, but still it's more difficult that it needs to be ) and i'm working on cleaning out my google reader "starred items" which means that over the next few days you'll be seeing a firehose of linkage that i've found interesting.

i do plan on posting original content, but for now maybe one or two people will be interested in what i've been reading.

update: i hacked in the ability to show del.icio.us tags for each item.

linkage: Sunday 11th of March

2007-03-11T17:34:00.001-04:00

BBC NEWS | Health | Early man 'couldn't stomach milk'
""Although the benefits of milk tolerance are not fully understood, they probably include the advantage of a continuous supply compared with the 'boom and bust' of seasonal crops, its nourishing qualities, and the fact that, unlike stream water, it's unco
[tags: conflux ]
When 1st Life Meets 2nd Life: The 1685 Pound Avatar and the 99 Ton Acre
"Every year, every Avatar in Second Life produces CO2 emissions equivalent to a typical, honking, bloated, arrogant SUV driving 1,293 miles, based on the assumption that this kind of SUV generates 1 lbs of CO2 per mile."
[tags: conflux sustainability ]
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine
"Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The âsmartâ kids took the cop-out."
[tags: conflux parenting ]
Make your own foaming dishwashing detergent: Parent Hacks | Parenting tips
"I made my own using an old foam hand soap dispenser and filled it up about 4/5 with water, then squeezed a good long stream of dishwashing liquid into it. Shake it up, and it works great. I've been using the same bottle of dishwashing detergent for 6 mon
[tags: conflux di y howto ! ]

Starbucks' 'venti' problem - Los Angeles Times
"Sadly, this is a fate that befalls many American companies. Time and again in recent years, we've seen small, cutting-edge and quirky brands gain critical mass â" only to lose their charm and customer appeal after they engage in breakneck expansion."
[tags: conflux ]

dailywireless.org ? Meraki Rocks
"The Meraki Mini is a tiny 802.11 b/g wireless router that simply plugs into a wall outlet and an Internet connection, and can also work as a repeater for an existing Internet network. It was based on the MIT RoofNet project (but is not directly compatibl
[tags: conflux meraki mesh wifi wireless ]

Coding Horror: Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service
"At any rate, my goal is to use S3 as an image hosting service."
[tags: conflux s3 ]

How Industrial Farming Hurts Us, Even if We Don't Eat It (TreeHugger)
"The Food and Drug Administration is about to approve the drug cefquinome for use in cattle, where there are more than a dozen other drugs capable of treating bovine respiratory disease, a common ailment in factory farmed cattle. Yet the drug is an antibi
[tags: conflux sustainability ]

O'Reilly Radar > Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam
"When I learned how much spam was hitting our servers at O'Reilly, I decided to ask several long-time Internet luminaries these questions. Was the situation as bad as I thought it might be? In short, the answer is yes, which only makes me wonder why more
[tags: conflux spam ]

Serving Compressed Content from Amazon's S3
"By default S3 will serve the files as uncompressed text files, increasing the load time for the clients, so a solution for compressed files serving was needed."
[tags: conflux s3 ]

TechComparison - Linux Virtualization Wiki
"This table compares the features and performance of the various virtualization technologies available for Linux. "
[tags: conflux virtualization ]

Geek to Live: How to move an iTunes library from a PC to Mac (and back) - Lifehacker
"Moving your song ratings and playlists from a PC to Mac isn't impossible, but it takes a little elbow grease. Here's how to get the job done."
[tags: conflux howto itunes ]

Per! macultur e Magazine: Solutions for Sustainable Living (TreeHugger)
"Published in the UK, but available worldwide, this magazine includes accessible, how-to information on all aspects of green living, from alternative energy, to peak oil, to community planning, to specific food growing techniques and more."
[tags: conflux sustainability ]

O'Reilly Radar > My "Outdated View" of the Semantic Web
"I'm still not completely convinced that my ideas about the semantic web are wrong, but I'll certainly accept Stefano's assertion that they are "outdated.""
[tags: conflux ]

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Twitter Tips the Tuna
"A s Twitter turns 1 on March 13th, not only is there a quickening of users, but messages per user."
[tags: conflux twitter ]

rc3.org: Better backups using S3
"I'm going to try to create a series of blog posts describing my progress through setting up S3 for backups."
[tags: conflux s3 ]

mamamusings: why twitter matters
"This isn't about conveying complex theory--it's about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you're doing. And we crave this, I think."
[tags: conflux twitter ]

Email as we know it is doomed. (by Jeremy Zawodny)
"That's it. I've had enough. I'm fed up."
[tags: conflux spam ]

what exactly do they expect you to do while driving?

2007-02-10T22:46:00.000-05:00

States Mull Bans On Driver Distractions:

"Vermont lawmakers are considering a measure that would ban eating, drinking, smoking, reading, writing, personal grooming, playing an instrument, “interacting with pets or cargo,” talking on a cell phone or using any other personal communication device while driving. The punishment: a fine of up to $600."

i jest! mostly.

life in wisconsin.

2007-02-10T22:27:00.000-05:00

40 tons of cow intestines close I-43:

"A truck driver distracted by a digital music player overturned his semitrailer early this morning on Interstate 43, spilling nearly 40 tons of cow intestines and bones, according to Sgt. Blaine Spicer of the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department."

the hidden costs of bottled water from fiji.

2007-02-08T23:36:00.000-05:00

i'm tend to walk around with filtered water from the tap so i have to admit that i don't tend to pay attention to the latest trends in bottled water and had no idea that fiji water is all the rage and is the # 2 in premium bottled water, second only to evian. self-described sustainability engineerpablo päster calculated the total amount of water and green house gases used to produce and deliver one bottle of imported water to the u.s. the final tally was 6.74kg of water and 0.25kg of greenhouse gases.

i'm all for supporting the fijian economy, but jeez!

the relative meaningless of megapixels.

2007-02-08T23:09:00.000-05:00

the emphasis on megapixels by consumer camera marketers is just as ridiculous as the now waning fixation on cpu clockspeed by consumer computer marketers.

Breaking the Myth of Megapixels:: "For the nonprofessional, five or six megapixels is plenty, even if you intend to make poster-size prints."

Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Out to Get You!

2007-02-07T00:31:00.000-05:00

former googler nelson minar provides easy instructions on how to opt out of most of google's search history.

that said, google still retains the history linked to IP which is easily resolvable to a person, which makes the opt-out virtually meaningless from a law enforcement standpoint.

Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes.

2007-02-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

for some reason this video was able to briefly disrupt my cynicism shields that typically do a good job of deflecting any of the web 2.0 hooohah that comes my way.

new and somewhat obvious dietary guidelines. the abridged version.

2007-02-06T23:02:00.000-05:00

unhappy meals - "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

The antioxidant myth: a medical fairy tale - ""Stick to flavonoid-rich foods, red wine in moderation, tea, fruits and vegetables," says Halliwell. "Don't start taking high-dose supplements or heavily fortified foods, until we know more.""

me and punxsutawney phil .

2007-02-02T15:53:00.000-05:00

having lived in woodstock, illinois which was where groundhog's day was filmed ( oddly, the town makes a big to-do about being the fictionalized version of the real town punxsutawney and has a yearly celebration of life imitating "art" imitating life ) i can't help but feel a strong connection to the ol' groundhog even if his predictive ability is dubious at best.

on miswanting and the paradox of choice.

2007-01-30T22:28:00.000-05:00

as someone who occasionally feels that he didn't get The Handbook On Career Planning in particular or life planning in general, the central point of "why career planning is time wasted" rings true to me and makes me wonder how those that do seem able to plot meticulously crafted career trajectories pull it off while maintaining their happiness and sanity:

"In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it. That's why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you're going to do next, is so unpleasant. It's no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps."

"The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed 'miswanting' by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future."

it's fascinating that we've reached a point in human development where we've saturated our evolved ability to rationally deal with the opportunities presented by an ever expanding array of possibilities.

the phenomenon isn't limited to The Big Life Decisions. think you're the only one left unhappy with all the myriad of choices on the shelf at the grocery store? you're not alone:

"Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be "de-motivating." In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational—surely you’re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large—but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts."

is corn a food or fuel?

2007-01-14T22:20:00.000-05:00

even just a few years ago it would have been inconceivable to imagine that people would be wondering if corn is food or fuel. but with nearly 80 ethanol plants under construction and estimates that our increased, er, appetite for the fuel could use as much as half of america's corn crop next year it's suddenly become a timely question.

think it's an academic point? tell that to the mexican poor hit by the 400 per cent increase in tortilla prices fueled, ahem, by demand for corn-based ethanol.

not entirely coincidentally, new research sponsored by bp shows that the "energy balance" of producing ethanol is essentially neutral which means that converting corn into ethanol doesn't necessarily use more fossil energy than the energy contained in the ethanol produced.

organic foods and environmental stewardship

2007-01-12T23:01:00.000-05:00

if you look at market research reports that detail why people buy organic foods, you'll typically see 3 different groups of buyers categorized as core, mid-level and periphery; the core group is the most engaged in the organic "lifestyle" while the periphery folks believe it's all a bunch of unsubstantiated hoo-hah and the mid-level folks fall somewhere in between. surprisingly, even amongst core consumers, "environmental stewardship" ranks fairly low on the list of reasons to buy organic foods ( falling below attributes such as "taste", "quality", "healthfulness" etc ), which is why it's nice to see efforts such as mission organic 2010 which highlights what might be the most underappreciated reason to buy organic ( from the treehugger writeup on the site ):

"The purpose is to convince consumers that if they increase their organic consumption just 10% by the year 2010 (that’s 1 out of 10 items in a grocery cart), pesticides will disappear from 98 million daily servings of drinking water and antibiotics and growth hormones from 20 million daily servings of milk."

higher education leads to memory deficits?

2007-01-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

msnbc: going to college may be bad for your brain:

"Participants in a new study, all more than 70 years old, were tested up to four times between 1993 and 2000 on their ability to recall 10 common words read aloud to them. Those with more education were found to have a steeper decline over the years in their ability to remember the list, according to a new study detailed in the current issue of the journal Research on Aging."

one wonders if they controlled for differences in collegiate binge drinking.

art garfunkel's library.

2007-01-11T23:14:00.000-05:00

wow. it's kind of depressing to know that if i started reading 12 books a year, i probably wouldn't be able to make it through all of the books in art gafunkel's library ( or, more properly, the books that art garfunkel had read ) before i died. i'm sure he's a busy guy - how on earth has he found time to read 1,000 books since the late '60s? [ via kottke ]

wsj: checked out.

2007-01-07T22:17:00.000-05:00

What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?"

the self-esteem myth.

2007-01-07T21:02:00.000-05:00

until reading debunking the self-esteem myth is hadn't even occurred to me to question the validity of the conventional wisdom that self-esteem, or the lack thereof, is the cause of this or that woe:

"Of course, the science on self-esteem has matured over the past few decades… and we’ve determined that, in fact, we were dead wrong in our initial inferences about the effects of self-esteem on people’s abilities to function and perform in society.

More recent studies tracked the behavior of children over time, and showed that their self-esteem levels rose when they received good grades, and fell when they received bad grades. Grades were the cause, not the effect of low self-esteem. And pregnant teenagers more than likely suffered from low self-esteem after they became pregnant teenagers… because they were pregnant teenagers. And violent criminals, counter to assumptions of many, actually tend to have higher self-esteem, which enables them to feel far enough “above” their victims to commit their crimes."

the authors go on to claim that the lack of self-control is the root cause of at least some of problems formerly attributed to the lack of self-esteem which is interesting and worthy of more investigation ( note to self: look into their reference, "Rethinking Self Esteem: Why nonprofits should stop pushing self-esteem and start endorsing self-control", published in the Stanford Social Innovation review. ).

the blog post doesn't provide much by way of support for "self-esteem myth" but a commenter left a link to "exploding the self-esteem myth" that more thoroughly summarizes the evidence that the lack of self esteem is not casually related to academic performance, interpersonal conflicts, drug use or aggression. the topic is also much more exhaustively covered in, "does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness or healthier lifestyles?" included amongst the many summary points:

"With the exception of the link to happiness, most of the effects are weak to modest. Self-esteem is thus not a major predictor or cause of almost anything (again, with the possible exception of happiness)."

"There appear to be relatively few personal costs to high self-esteem. If anything, the costs of high self-esteem (and especially of certain subcategories of high self-esteem, such as narcissism) are borne by other people. People high in self-esteem or narcissism are prone to bully others, to retaliate aggressively, and to be prejudiced against out-group members. Self-enhancers are sometimes annoying or obnoxious to others. They may be willing to cheat and perform other antisocial, self-serving acts. The most palpable cost to the self is that of overconfident risk taking (see Emler, 2001), and the evidence supporting this possibility is quite sparse."

the peak/end rule.

2007-01-07T15:37:00.000-05:00

the new yorker: boom and gloom: "When people assess a past experience, they pay attention above all to two things: how it felt at the peak and whether it got better or worse at the end."

from the nothing-new-under-the-philosophical-sun department

2007-01-04T22:41:00.000-05:00

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t: "A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

wow. that's the most concise description i've seen of how i feel every morning when i wake up :-)