Have you noticed? People are beginning to pay attention.
After decades of finger pointing, opposing scientific conclusions and flat out denial, if seems now as though the general populace of the nation is starting to come to it’s senses and realize we’ve got a problem on our hands. In the past few weeks I’ve been an enthusiastic witness to series of events and media portrayals which exemplify this trend.
You may have seen that I wrote about one such story back in early February. Richard Branson with the endorsement of Al Gore announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, sponsoring a $25 million dollar prize for researchers who could create a process to effectively remove large amounts of CO2 from our atmosphere.
Since then news of the wave of public awareness has been pouring in.
The documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” which features Al Gore’s campaign to raise awareness of global warming won an oscar for best documentary. Winning this award not promises to increase the market exposure of the film itself, it presented an opportunity for those involved to snag a few moments of time in front of an estimated 35 million US television viewers, and countless millions more worldwide. Gore, along with oscar winning songwriter (for her original song in the same movie) Melissa Ethridge and the film’s creator Davis Guggenheim brought the topic of global warming to the forefront and urged those watching to educate themselves and take action.
Yesterday brought an even more significant leap forward in this fight as 5 governors of Western Sates announced an agreement to develop a target to lower greenhouse gasses and create a program aimed at helping industry reach these goals. The specifics are unclear on what these goals will be, or exactly how significant the motivation will be to comply for businesses. While this coalition of states doesn’t equate to national representation, it is significant. It has been said that if the 5 states of Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Arizona where to be considered an autonomous nation state, the emission of greenhouse gasses from that state would rank among the top 10 worldwide. Here’s to hoping that the regulations they implement at least measure up to those of the Kyoto Protocol… but, I’m not holding my breath.
Today the big news is of the proposed buy out of the Texas power giant TXU by a group of private investment firms. On the surface it’s a big dollar business deal which stands to make a few people a lot of money right? The real story from an environmental perspective here however is that this buyout comes with some strict environmental requirements. Specifically, TXU is to scrap plans for 8 of it’s proposed 11 coal fired power plants which where to be built in Texas, in favor of alternative energy sources. Should this come to fruition, we’re talking about a reduction of 56 million tons of carbon release into the atmosphere every year. This deal is a long way from being set in stone, but the fact that these environmental regulations are even factoring into the negotiations of what would be the largest private equity buyout of a publicly owned corporation in US history, is significant.
More than any one of these stories is the sum of the movement which they represent. After years of frustration, it finally feels like things are beginning to change. Only time will tell…
Tags: Al Gore, Climate Change, Global Warming
A good friend of mine sent me an instant message the other day. To paraphrase, he said ‘you have a Wii? I have two…‘
SOLD! I said, without hesitation, and proceeded to write a check.
Since their initial release, I’ve been telling myself that when the Wii becomes more readily available at retail price, I’d buy one. I’m not a huge gamer (in fact, I realize now this is the first game system I’ve ever purchased new), but I’ve been keen on this new little system and shift in gaming mentality that it brings with it. Now one was quite literally laid at my feet, while others are still clambering to purchase them for above retail price elsewhere. I couldn’t pass it up.
I brought home the box with the game system, one controller set (remote & nunchuck) and two games (three if you include the bundled Wii Sports.) After about 10 minutes of setting it up and configuring it, I was in business. By ‘in business’ I don’t mean that I was actually in and playing a game right away - though I easily could have been. I found myself plenty entertained by just navigating around the menus, creating Miis, and generally playing with the various features of the system. Of course, at it’s heart it’s a video game system. After a 10 or 15 minutes of mucking around I reached for my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess settled in to give the new toy a good test run.
More than any other game, it was the new incarnation of Zelda that most interested me when I first heard that Nintendo was to release a “next-gen” console. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES was still is my favorite video game of all time. As I write this, I’ve only logged maybe 2-3 hours of game play on a game which Nintendo claims will take up to 70 hours to complete. I’ve seen enough of this game, and the others to come up with a couple of initial conclusions about Zelda and the system however. Here they are in an only a somewhat particular order:
Pros:
Cons:
That makes 4 pros and 4 cons, with the majority of the words being written on the side of the cons. Don’t let that stat fool you though, the benefits of the pros far outweigh the detriments of the cons. I experienced very little if any buyers remorse after purchasing this thing (which is saying something for me) and would happily do so again.
One thing is for certain, really looking forward to trying some of the next wave of games which are truly built from the ground up to support the Wii and it’s innovative control system. I’m a sucker for sports games, so I’m especially interested to see how that genre adapts to the new possibilities.
The bottom line? I’m very happy with this toy. Could I be more impressed? Yes. But hey, I’m hard to please.
Tags: Nintendo Wii, Video Games, Wii, Zelda
Inspired by Chris…
I like that harmony created Conor Oberst and Jim James when they sing “The whole world’s waking up”.
Brilliant backup vocals from James.
Tags: Bright Eyes, Music
Base jumpers and budding equipment designers are scrambling to create what amounts to a human flying squirrel rig. The wearer will be able to huck off a typical base jumping cliff, but rather than pulling a chute after a period of free-fall, they will be able to spread their wings, and glide gracefully to a landing.. or so they hope.
Notice the guy testing this particular design is still wearing a traditional parachute during testing. One of the advantages of such a design is that it can easily be stored in a small backpack during the approach, and whatever climb is necessary to reach the launch point. This benefit is undoubtedly negated however by the large cases required to cary the wearers balls in..
Tags: base jumping, extreme sports
Our last water bill came a couple of weeks ago. We where charged $341.62 for December and January. This, apparently, is what it costs to use an average of 311 gallons of water every day - ouch. Not only does this hurt financially, it’s also a tremendous waste of natural resources.
This was Friday evening, and I immediately phoned up a few plumbers looking for some help fast. Of the plumbers that I spoke to however, most couldn’t help me on the weekend. The one that could required me to first have a professional underground leek finder service out to pinpoint the leak - who couldn’t come out on the weekend. I suspected that the leak was in the front of the house near the old shutoff valve, which would explain the moisture I noticed a couple of months ago in the crawl space. With nothing else to do, I started to dig…
It turns out the hunch was right on. After about an hour of digging and clearing roots, I was still a ways away from clearing the pipe itself. I had however confirmed my suspicion that the leak was coming from the area around the valve. At this point, there still wasn’t much that I could do since the leak was coming from the shutoff valve itself. If I cut the pipe, I’ve got hundreds of gallons of water flowing out every few minutes.
I called up the surprisingly helpful folks at the Seattle Public Utilities looking for help. For a small fee they sent someone out to shutoff the water 6 feet underneath my sidewalk, down at the main line. Fortunately this was accomplished fairly easily and he was able to cut in a permanent and easy to operate shutoff valve just upstream of my water meter. Whit this in place I was able to shutoff the water to the house and stop the hemorrhaging for the night. The next day, I got to work.
Technorati Tags: Home Ownerhsip, plumbing
There have been many blockbuster prizes offered recently to spur scientific ingenuity. Some of them like the tremendously successful X prize have helped the world realize that we as a people are capable of much more than public funding can pay for and standard motivation would suggest. Today came word that Sir Richard Branson has once again raised the bar, challenging the worlds top minds to address the very real problem of climate change.
LONDON (AP) — British tycoon Richard Branson dangled a $25 million prize before the world’s top scientists Friday seeking to spur research into devising ways to suck greenhouse gases out of the air.
Former Vice President Al Gore lent his support to the challenge, which came a week after a landmark report by the world’s leading climate scientists and government officials warned that global warming will continue, creating a far different planet in 100 years
This is only one small step in the overall battle to put right what we have for so long been making wrong. That’s saying something considering the twenty five million dollar sum. Still, it represents a much needed and, at least from me, appreciated effort.
Technorati Tags: Global warming, Richard Branson, Virgin Earth Prize
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
I completely disagree, but this made me laugh.
Rather than writing on and on about all the reasons I feel that Charlie is wrong, I enjoy sitting back and watching the Mac vs PC dirt fly. With the help of my macs, I’m a very satisfied computer user these days which is something I’ve never truly been able to say before.
I know very well that I’m not going to convince anyone of anything by adding to the fight, so I’m happy to just ignore most of it, and enjoy some of it.
After watching the fluctuations in airfare for the past few months and being repeatedly disappointed, I finally bought our tickets. Next month, Mrs. fall-line and I will be whisked away to London from Seattle where we will briefly explore before taking a fast train to Scotland.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to visit the land from which so much of my family history (and hair color) comes. This year we decided that enough is enough - we’re going!
Before buying the tickets this evening I was feeling kind of stressed out about the expense of airfare, hotel, car rental, train tickets, whisky and the like.. Now that the purchase has been made I can’t help but being somewhat overwhelmed with excitement.
Sure, it’s going to be expensive. After all, it’s been years since I’ve taken a trip overseas which was completely unsubsidized. Weather that subsidy came in the form of a fully expensed business trip or, as with our recent trip to Russia, we were provided with lodging, food and gifts by family members, it significantly reduced the out of pocket expense. This one will be entirely on our dime, but now that the ball is in motion, I’m totally OK with that. In fact, I wouldn’t want it any other way. While there, we will be completely on our own, free to do as we please.
As of now, we have very little idea what our itinerary will look like, outside of a basic skeleton. After visiting London, and the quick train ride to Edinburgh, we will rent hire a car and explore the Western Highlands. I’ll no doubt be spending a lot of time playing with the amazing google earth in the coming weeks plotting possible destinations. Distillery tours are a must, as are a few of the historical sites including those that I’ve got a family tie to. Other than that, we are just going to go with the opportunities that present themselves to us. Whatever we end up settling on, I’ll just be happy to be there.
Seth Godin has shared some very good insights on how to use Powerpoint (or Keynote) to deliver an effective and powerful presentation. I feel that his suggestions could have improved nearly every presentation I’ve witnessed or delivered in recent memory. I’ll certainly be rereading this article when it comes time for me to prepare my next deck.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/really_bad_powe.html
Technorati Tags: powerpoint, public speaking
