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Going Green(er)

KATE AND I HAVE BEEN READING the NY Times Magazine Green Issue from several weeks back, and it's prompted us to make another wave of changes in our habits (the first wave came after we watched An Inconvenient Truth: CF lightbulbs, insulated water heater, and wind energy from our utility). What we're doing:

• A set of changes as part of the renovation we're doing to our house this summer: New energy-efficient windows, furnace, and water heater. During the demolition we've also learned our home was not insulated (!) other than by its siding, so we'll be adding fill insulation throughout.
• Buying groceries that are as close to local, organic, and seasonal as possible, with a preference on seasonal.
• To help with that, joining a local produce CSA.
• Using cloth bags at the grocery.
• Buying products with the least possible packaging.
• Leaving off the furnace and aircon as much as possible (helped greatly now that, due to the construction on our home, we have no aircon!).
• Line-drying much of our laundry.
• Leaving the lights off as much as possible.
• Using cruise control in the car as much as possible, and leaving the current MGP monitors on so we can better judge our consumption.

There are other changes we hope to make soon: Walking to any destination within a mile's distance is one. I've also been toying with getting a bike or scooter (90 mpg!) for local trips. Next summer we'll be planting a large garden in the yard, and will begin composting as much of our garbage as possible (probably now) in anticipation of the garden (with one of these).

The real problem is air travel, and my personal carbon footprint is enormous as a result (over 50,000 lbs of C02). I'm not certain how I'm going to crack that, save via carbon offsets. But there has to be a way ...

@Google Talks

WHAT A GREAT FIND: Goolge has created a YouTube channel for their "@Google" series of in-house lectures and presentations. There are 341 online as of this moment. Many authors, policy wonks, and nearly every 2008 presidential candidate (go here for Obama, Clinton, and McCain). I'll be watching Michael Pollan.

Is Urban Violence Viral?

IS URBAN VIOLENCE VIRAL? It might be according to experts cited in this New York Times magazine article. The essence:

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

It seems plausible, and interestingly, very similar to our approach to stakeholder management at the office--except in that case, we're trying to foster the spread of behavior rather than hinder it.

Either way, the central issue is network effects, and in particular, the role of hyper-connected actors within the network. Think of it this way: If someone catches the cold, but only interacts with a few other people, the rate of transmission is likely to be low. If on the other hand the ill person shakes 100 hands a day, well, a lot of people are probably going to get sick. Substitute the willingness to enact violence, or support for your company's SAP implementation, for the common cold, and it's clear that not everyone in the network is equal in the effects they exert on the whole. It's all about dealing with the critical few.

For the seminal academic piece read Rogers; for the seminal popular piece read Gladwell (the book or the original article).

Internet Power

BEHOLD! A DUSTY ARTIFACT from the land before time! (via Kottke)

Id's Wild!

"DEHS HUNDREDS A PEOPLE frozen ever'whe ... id's wild!"

Ike Predicts The Future

ONE OF THE GREAT but for most people unknown pieces of American Presidential rhetoric is Ike's "Farewell Address." It seems an awfully opportune time to revisit it, and you can read and listen to the text here (and yes, that's where the term "military-industrial complex" was coined).

Eater's Manifeto

"EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS." Folks who have seen me speak know that I often invoke these lines, written by Micheal Pollan, as an example of a "sticky message": A message that quickly summarizes a complex topic in a memorable way. I first read that message in the opening to Pollan's NY Times Magazine article about food, and he's recently posted a manifesto about the same topic at ChangeThis. Very worth reading, and you may do so here.

Also, I've recently finished Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillema. Also very much worth reading, and if you do, you will likely make lasting changes in your eating and purchasing habits.

Finally, Pollan has a site on the Web here.

Santa Comes Home

MELT YOUR HEART.

A Brief History Of Everything

A NICE SUMMARY of a the history of the Universe. Early this year I had the chance to hear some leading astrophysicists and cosmologists describe the Universe's first moments, and their description was very much the same. After telling the story, a person in the audience noted, "You mean to tell me that in the first moments of the Universe everything was dark, then there was light, then there was matter ... that sounds an awful lot like Genesis." The reply: "That's not lost on us." 

Housecleaning: The del.icio.us "post" Tag

YOUNG MASTER JAMES decided to wake up his ol' dad a bit early this morning, which is a unfortunate as ol' dad was up past midnight on Xbox Live. Turns out that after my bringing him downstairs to my office and making my coffee, he's been content to go back to sleep.

So it goes.

I thought I'd kill some time by posting some of the items sitting in my del.icio.us "post" tag. Thusly the list begins:

• Fantastic visual evidence of the Green Flash, and from one of my favorite places.
• The fantabulous Rebecca Blood points to advice on how to seed a new wiki.
• Truth: CEOs must be designers, not just hire them. This is very solid reading for leaders.
• A Google Video of the planets (our planets, that is) and stars in scale.
• A picture says 1,000 words ...
• A YouTube video of one of the world's most impressive stadium beer vendors, who also happens to be the vendor that works our section at Citizen's Bank Park. "Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighht!"
• An incredible Google Video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Mac in 1984. Nice tie! Before you roll your eyes at the reaction, remember that the world had never seen a home-bound computer do such things before.
• The now-famous but always astonishing YouTube "Did You Know?" video. Watch it. Now you know!
• ChangeThis.com. Set aside some time, and be prepared to print some stuff for your reading file.

Enjoy!

Catalog Choice Update

SINCE NOVEMBER 6TH we've declined 48 catalogs at catalogchoice.org. For those scoring at home, that's more than two each day. How many unwanted reams of paper are you getting in a month?

* Update on the update: Just got the mail; make that 53 catalogs declined. And one wasn't yet listed.

Baseball Pitch Infographics

A WONDERFUL COLLECTION of infographics that explain baseball pitches. Via Kottke.

Slider

Misconceptions About The Neurological Bases of Memory/Cognitive Losses In Aging

LAST MONTH I asked noted neuro-scientist Dr. Mike Merzenich to speak at a conference I organize for work. He's a fascinating guy, and his research into brain plasticity is incredible stuff. He also has a blog, where he's started posting a top ten list of misconceptions, by scientists and the public, about the neurological bases of memory/cognitive losses in aging. Check it out. (And misconception #1? Drugs won't help. You have to learn your way out of it.)

Kill The Catalogs

CATALOGCHOICE.ORG: Opt out of the catalogs that arrive in your mailbox and save more than a few trees. We enrolled today; it's free, easy, and takes all of three minutes. I look forward to rejecting physical spam with each arrival of our mailman ... (found the site via this piece in the NYT, a use of paper which we're happy to receive).

Barca v. Rangers

FOR THOSE NEAR A TV OR TIVO today at 2:30 EST, FCBarcelona (Spain; my favorite club and the greatest lineup in the world) plays the pride of Scotland, Rangers F.C. , in UEFA Champions League action. Imagine if Boston were a country and New York were a country, and the Red Sox and Yankees, as great teams from each place, were to play in a tournament to determine the best team in the United States.

Ok, they both act like countries, and I think I just described the World Series (rather than the ALCS), but you get the point: The Champions League is an annual, several-month-long tournament to determine the best local football / soccer team in Europe. Because of it, teams that never play each other, like Barca and Rangers, do get play each other. It's like inter-league play in baseball, but for real stakes, as the champion of Europe can likely claim to be the best soccer team in the world. Should Rangers win today, expect the party in Scotland to be so grand that the nation may just break away from England and slip into the North Sea.

It's worth watching just to see Barca. It's lineup is beyond stellar. In strikers alone the team has Henry (French), Messi (Argintinian and my favorite player), Eto'o (Camaroonian), and Ronaldinho (Brazilian, and the best player in the world by most standards). Only three of these guy can play at a time, and that list doesn't even include Giovanni Dos Santos, the Mexican teen sitting in the depth chart who may soon be the world's best player. It's remarkable soccer, and will be unlike any you've ever seen if your exposure has been Major League Soccer.

Stephen Hawking's Lectures

IN A SIMILAR VEIN, a collection of Stephen Hawking's public lectures and physics colloquiums. This is the Interweb Series of Tubes at its best.

ONE PAPER'S LIST of the great interviews of the 20th century (via Kottke). Brando: "The more thenthitive your are, the more thertain you are to be brutalithed ..."

WHERE did the last five minutes go?

WHEN INTERNAL COMMUNICATION counsel goes horribly, terribly wrong. "Leading us all to / higher staaaandards"

Nussbaum On Design

Bruce Nussbaum:

If you are in the myth-making business, you don’t need design. You need a great ad agency. But if you are in the authenticity and integrity business then you have to think design.

[snip]

There are two great barriers to innovation and design in the world today. Ignorant CEOs and ignorant designers. Both groups are well-intentioned and well-dressed—in their own ways—but both can be pretty dangerous characters.

Take the time to read his entire speech. Then buy this book. Understanding the "principle of affordance" alone is worth the price.

THIS MORNING I came across (via Kottke) this very cool, interactive, visual and searchable map of baby names. The data go back to the 1880s. You could play with this for hours (and we likely will).

THIS IS INCREDIBLE (but it will make your palms sweat).

AN INCREDIBLE collection of Grateful Dead bootlegs in downloadable mp3 and podcast format (thanks JR). Also: Yes, posting has been light. Much to do with the arrival of Spring ...

IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIRNESS, the other side of the global warming story. "It is the story of the distortion of a whole area of science ..."

WATCH THIS NOW. (Thanks to Andy S. for the link.)

THIS SHORT VIDEO is the best primer on the Web I've seen. Essential. (Via CA)

A VERY SMART THREAD at Tufte.

SPEAKING OF FRANK LUNTZ, if you've wondered what behind-the-scenes political counsel looks like, read this Luntz memo to conservatives on the topic of the environment (title, "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America"). Position papers such as these, from the right and left, ultimately drive much of the framing and political discourse you hear, read, and see each day.

BOISE STATE WINS against Oklahoma, from the cell phone video of a fan in the end zone seats.

WHEN MY FRIEND said this was the coolest thing since sliced bread, I thought she was engaging in hyperbole. Turns out she was right.

YOUR HERO FOR TODAY.

I HAD REASON THIS WEEK to compile a list of my favorite blogs. I was ultimately only able to suggest one or two, but for the curious here's the list I generated. The blogs are in no particular order, and by no means does the list reflect all the blogs I read and enjoy. Think of it as the blog buffet I'd lay out if I wanted people to sample the best of the blogosphere.

• Dooce
• Virginia Postrel
• Hooked on Golf
• Information Aesthetics
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger
• Joho
• Kottke
• The Long Tail
• The Manolo
• The always incredible and admirable Rebecca Blood
• Tom Barnett
• Chocolate and Zucchini

COURTESY ET, the top ten astronomy photos of the year.

A VISUALLY STUNNING gallery of snowflake photographs. Learn more about their typology and physics at the Guide to Snowflakes. (This particular snowflake is a "stellar dendrite.")

AN EQUALLY EXTRAORDINARY collection of severe thunderstorm images. I vividly remember being a child and asking my grandmother May, who was from Ohio, what tornadoes were like (a reasonable question for a boy from the wind-calmed land of Utah). Over anything else, she'd talk about the color of the clouds, and these images perfectly capture my childhood minds-eye landscape.

AN EXTRAORDINARY personal web page. Extraordinary.

LEE AND SACHI are now in Venice, and they have some beautiful photos to share.

AN ANIMATED DISPLAY of changes in the prevalence of obesity in the United States from 1985 to 2005. Disturbing. And why so fit in Colorado?

AN INCREDIBLE COLLECTION of images from Hubble. This image of the Whirlpool Galaxy is especially stunning; click it to follow a link to the full-sized photo.

INTERESTING ARTICLE in today's NY Times about decorator Dan Ho. Great line:

At the core of his philosophy is the belief that our relentless attention to renovation and reorganizing, to building and rebuilding, distracts us from the more demanding work of becoming better partners, caretakers and friends.

WHAT HAPPENS TO EARTH if there are no people (via Kottke). This passage ...

The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly.

The best illustration of this is the city of Pripyat near Chernobyl in Ukraine, which was abandoned after the nuclear disaster 20 years ago and remains deserted. "From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city."

With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. This has already begun to happen in Pripyat.

... reminded me of the Eastern State Penn, which has only been out of use for 35 years or so. Speaking of Pripyat: photos here. Update: More photos here (and photo above courtesy the same site).

HOW TO WIN the U.S. memory championship.

LARRY SABATO'S LATEST Crystal Ball is up. Get the email subscription to stay current.

Read Blood and Kottke

Rebecca Blood has an interview with Jason Kottke online as part of her "Bloggers on Blogging" series. Rebecca and Jason are figures of historical significance in the new media story, and it's a unique opportunity to learn from both.

They also publish blogs well worth reading: Rebecca's Pocket and Kottke.org. They're also both blogs I like to read directly in a browser rather than through an RSS feed, given their nice designs. You can learn something about design from loooking at them, too.

A Chance to See Feynman

The brilliant Richard Feynman, describing quantum electrodynamics for the layperson.

Jobs Keynote at WWDC 06

Steve Jobs' keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference is online here. Quicktime required (but it's something you should have on your PC anyway, really). Note: As of this posting, demand was outstripping supply and I couldn't stream the speech. But that should change soon.

Goggles

A Google Maps flight simulator. Well worth a click.

For The Curious

I've been thinking about getting my private pilot license recently. It's something I've wanted to do since I was a kid, and through the years I've had enough real and simulated cockpit time that I could manage if my US Airways crew ever happens to eat the fish and become incapacitated half way to Denver.

Anyway, today I came across the FAA's Aeronautical Information Manual, which is available online. Learn the basics from the comfort of your own home.

For what it's worth, I found the link while reading this post at Edward Tufte's site. An information designer doing pro bono work to reduce runway incursions. Cool. Reading the responses to Tufte's post, it's also an excellent example of how communities quickly form on the Web, very often with truly synergistic and beneficial outputs.

And before you give me a hard time about using a variant of "synergy," I'm using it in the true sense of it's original meaning, rather than the buzzword commonly applied to anything one hopes to be productive: The combined power of a group of things when they are working together which is greater than the total power achieved by each working separately. (Cambridge)

Worldmapper

Pascal Venier, a reader of this site, linked to a neat site in the comments of the "Happiest Place on Earth" post. Check out Worldmapper. Thanks, Dr. Venier.

I'm A Mac ...

This is brilliant. Thanks, Doug, for the link.

For what it's worth, the primary use of my MacBook Pro is pursuing a commercial interest--and I'd say (due to increased productivity and ease of use) that I'm better at it with the Mac than I ever was with a PC. Perhaps I should be the Mac guy, in a suit, in the next round of ads?

Go See information aesthetics

I've pointed to it before, but it consistently makes me say "wow." If you've not seen information aesthetics, check it out.

Tour Augusta

This weekend -- Masters weekend -- is one of my favorite sports weekends of the year. With rain in Philadelphia today Kate and I plan to settle in and watch the tournament before going to a show in the city tonight (and we're watching yesterday's coverage now on TiVo).

Augusta is an amazing place. I attended practice rounds a few years ago (I took this shot of the clubhouse while there), and it's very different, and more impressive, in person than on TV. Traditionally the membership has shown little of the course and even less of the clubhouse. In fact, until just a few years ago, the front nine weren't shown at all during weekend coverage. That's changed, thank goodness, and now you can see even more of the course courtesy this "walking tour" at Masters.org. Not only can you scroll the viewpoint from multiple places on every hole, you can also get a look inside the famed clubhouse and the Crow's Nest (where the amateurs traditionally stay -- it's the little box you can see on top of the clubhouse). Very cool.

Go See Google Finance

GOOGLE DOES IT AGAIN with Google Finance, which makes its beta debut today. Type in a stock symbol, company name, or industry (e.g., "cars") and Google offers an overview of online resources or company profile.

The search result for GOOG (Google's ticker symbol) offers a sound demo. I'm particularly impressed with the draggable stock chart that automatically surfaces news stories from the same time frame and the incorporation of blog posts. As with most things Google, my first impression is "Wow. Neat!"

Tags: google finance

Wow

WOW.

* Scheduled post, written earlier.

CellarTracker!

HERE'S SOMETHING TO GO SEE: CellarTracker! -- an online wine cellar management program. There are several such services out there, but I've been using CT for around six months now and it's by far the best in its power and flexibility. What's more, because it's on the web an not your PC, you're able to access your list of wines from any computer with an Internet connection or web-enabled phone (very handy when you're at the wine shop wondering how to best surprise your wife with your lack of self control).

One of the great things about CT is that it's a community-based model. Unless you mark your holdings as private, you're able to see other users' cellars, and they yours. This is very useful: Say you find a wine you like and enter it into your database. CT then shows you all the other users who also hold that wine; browse their holdings for a while, read their tasting notes, and you can very quickly find other wines you're likely to enjoy trying. The community model also makes data entry VERY easy: Every wine entered by every user (and there are 12,000 users and 2 million bottles in the system) is in the shared database; for most wines, entry involves typing in the UPC code, and the software automatically pulls the rest of the information -- maker, vintage, appellation, year ... all of it.

Lots of other features (pasted from the CT home page, and you can click the picture above to see a full-sized version of my CT home page):

Cellar Inventory Management

• Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, drinkability, etc.
• Purchase price and valuation data (locale settable)
• Consumption history
• Barcode support
• Restaurant-quality printed wine lists
• Per-bottle location & bin tracking
• Personal tasting notes
• Uploadable label images
• Wish lists and shopping lists
• Track pending deliveries (a.k.a futures)
• NEW! Automatic valuation of your cellar (read more)
• NEW! Express import tools for existing spreadsheets (read more)

Tasting Notes

• Record your own notes
• Group a series of notes into tasting events
• Read community tasting notes
• See what others say about wine in your cellar
• Automated integration with Stephen Tanzer's IWC (for co-subscribers)
• Store other professional reviews and scores (in compliance with copyright)
• Community bulletin board

The report features are especially useful. You're able to add and consume bottles with a click, so rather than poking through your inventory to find what you still have and what's worth drinking, you can go to CT, run a drinkability report for, say, reds, and instantly see what's ready to pull. It's really very slick. And while it's free, donations are encouraged, and franlky, deserved: I made a donation within several hours of finding CT, and use it to manage all the bottles in our modest collection. Check it out.

Update: While pulling the Technorati tag code for this post I found this interview with CT founder Eric LeVine. I was impressed with his bio when I found CT. Short story: In software early; Lotus, then Microsoft; fateful trip to Italy where he discovers a passion for wine; writes a software program to manage his cellar; makes it web based and collaborative so his friends can use it; retires young and makes CT his full-time job; rides into the sunset. Great story and an interesting guy.

Tags: cellartracker, eric levine

Go See Virginia Postrell

I WAS CATCHING UP with Virginia Postrell's Dynamist Blog this morning and was once again struck by what a solid piece of online publishing it is. Thoughtful and provocative, balanced, never shrill -- one of the first blogs I found and I've been reading for years. VP's a good person, too. She was early to point to Command Post, and has been a strong supporter of my Strengthen The Good project ... and I like her, plain and simple. Bookmark it and read often.

Tags: dynamist, virginia postrell