When I was a kid , I harboured fantasies about driving the Paris-Dakar road rally . People who have seen me swerve through traffic will not think this is completely out of line. And when I lived in Paris I came so close as to almost sneak in as a navigator for a realdriver though it just didn’t happen.
Still, even here on the Western edge of civilization and an ocean and continent away, I haven’t given up hope.
I think it was Lawrence Lessig who said words to the effect that open source is good, but Open Culture is everything… and the Creative Commons will become a much bigger battle with private firms and IP advocates in the coming years (and this is why you need copyright laws that favour innovation rather than dusty old companies lobbying to extend their tired old revenue streams ad infinitum).
Examples abound of how it has changed how we do with knowledge, for example take a look at how transformative Wikipedia or Open CourseWare at MIT has been, but where does the rubber hit the road in terms of changing the world in real, substantive terms (ie. stuff that doesn’t just matter to geeks)?
Without question, one of the worst things for the environment is air travel.
Air travel is the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause climate change. Globally the world’s 16,000 commercial jet aircraft generate more than 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the world’s major greenhouse gas, per year. Indeed aviation generates nearly as much CO2 annually as that from all human activities in Africa. One person flying a return trip between London and New York generates between 1.5 and 2 tonnes of CO2.
I once tried to explain why this was such an important issue to someone without success.
I wish I had spoken with the clarity of zefrank’s explanation .
Lurvin zefrank these days. Just added him into the oh so important podcast subscriptions.
I have to admit that the multitude of emails I get from work, friends, pro bono and charity work were getting to the point of near unmanageability for me. It was causing a lot of stress. Rather embarrassingly, two important mails slid by me the other week because I had been depending way too much on Apple Mail’s ability to have everything in one Inbox and just search it via Spotlight and flagging, marking as unread and auto filtering rules to try and manage things.
While I find it hard to believe that there can still be sceptics on the climate change front, the fact is climate change deniers are on the uptick as the mighty PR machines that fuel lobbyists and crackpots swings into line against solid scientific evidence, major environmental campaigns and movies like An Inconvenient Truth
(check out for instance, these very scary ads from a fossil fuel funded lobby group (dead link unsurprisingly).
While personally I’m busy trying to learn all the other languages, I loved this clever German ad for learning English. Dedicated to mein grossen schister IW in Wuppertal.
I’m like to think I’m pretty good with goal setting every year. It’s the followup I suck with. Generally, I try and look at the month end tracking on what I want to accomplish in a year and fall off somewhere around September as my life gets crazy.
I just need to get nagged a little more. That’s where HassleMe (dead link) comes in.
It chimes in at irregular intervals you’ve set to bug you about the things you’ve asked it to bother you about. It’s like emailing yourself a nagging at a fuzzy time in the future.
Good experience has a great list of fun online games to play if your brain needs a break from XMas stress and your current boss’s tyranny.
Good Experience Games - good games, fun games
One of my favourites, an online version of Snowcraft (dead link sadly) is on here as well.
A little something for MM. A few things to add to your “Movies to Watch” list. Some of my favourite films of all time are on here so, bon appetit.