I think I just met my next academic/intellectual crush - Sherrie Inness. This is my shit, people! I'm so pumped! I'll surely be reading one of her books this summer (if not several), but just check out these awesomely nerdy and right-up-my-alley interests that she has:
Whaaaat. Awesome. I know. Right? Anyone else in?
Now I have to think about what life in Ohio, in a Literature department would be like. At least I have several years to drive myself crazy with this stuff.
]]>If you recall there was a 're-pet' cloning service to get your dog back if you ever lost them. Enter 'Best Friends Again': 'A US biotech company on Wednesday announced it will auction off the right for five dog owners to have their furry best friend cloned, with bidding starting at 100,000 dollars.
hmm. I got scared. How many dogs are killed as guinea pig? I'd heard about FDA OKs meat, milk from most of cloned animals and I thought "It could be". But "re-pet" sounds too selfish, egoistic how we human being are.
]]>From the NYT, it looks like there is a new Capricorn sharing my birthday (January 9th), Supernova 2008D. Apparently its the first supernova that has been caught at birth.
I plan on combining our birthday next year. I would like some carrot cupcakes and 2008D would like several trillion tons of interstellar gas.
but here's another loljennyholzer, featuring Elektra.
Apropos of nothing much, I still haven't fully grokked the appeal of YouTube. Yes, sure, it's useful the way people can embed slow, grainy Flash versions of otherwise sharp MPEG movies on sites all over the place, so to the extent that YouTube has dissolved into the rest of the web, sure, its handy. Maybe not "useful", but "fun", and that's okay.
But I just haven't seen the appeal of diving into the YouTube home page to spend an hour watching.... well, let's see what's on there right now, shall we? Sock puppet theatre. A "Guitar Hero" ad. A mock movie trailer for "There Will Be Bud". Etc. I have a hard time working up a feeling that I'm missing anything here. Likewise with the YouTube widget on the iPhone -- yes, it's there, but why bother with this dreck on my little phone when I could be ignoring it on a proper computer?
I'm gradually coming around, but not on my own behalf. My son, you see -- like many little boys, I'm sure -- is starting to get fascinated with things like Jeeps, and fire trucks, and airplanes, and Batman, and Star Wars. Why then did it take me so long to realize that I could just fire up the YouTube app and, hey presto, anywhere we might be, I can search for "Jeep" and instantly get dozens of clips of the trucks merrily jumping over cliffs and slogging through muddy troughs and plowing through snow banks. Brrrm! Brrrrrm! If he wants fire trucks, there's no shortage of shiny red (or yellow) trucks racing around, putting out fires, or even doing wheelies. Weee-oooo, weee-oooo! If he wants to see Star Wars or Batman, there's plenty of those too -- many of which are in Lego, which is all the better :-)
The best though was tonight, when he wanted to see airplane movies, and I stumbled across a copy of the entire crop duster scene from "North By Northwest". If you haven't seen it, go watch it now, it's the best scene from any movie ever. Much to my satisfaction, my son liked it too: at first he was just watching quietly, perking up a little at the buses and the cars, but mostly getting bored -- which is, in fact, the whole point, and exactly how Hitchcock was trying to get the scene to unfold. But then the crop duster charges in on Cary Grant, and my little boy was squealing with delight -- "whoa! airplane! look out! brrm! brrm! oh no, boom!"
So now that I'm aware of The Oil Drum (TOD), I'm feeling more than a little outmatched in the recent apocalyptic wailing here -- clearly they've thought about it more deeply, for longer, and some of them appear to have advanced degrees in the subject.
Reading a site like TOD is a little bit like reading some of the Y2K fears in the late 90s -- like today, back then there were a lot of reasonable, knowledgeable people making dire warnings that if we didn't take drastic action, all kinds of catastrophes would unfold: transportation would literally be derailed, the food supply would be disrupted, the finance system would collapse, and so would the economy.
Obviously, one might point out that with Y2K, the catastrophes never happened, and it was all a false alarm. The contrary point of view is that it wasn't a false alarm, but a heard alarm, and we had enough time to fix the critical issues before they had a chance to become actual problems. By the time January 2000 came along, we had updated the railroad switches, financial mainframes, etc, so the status quo was stabilized.
With Peak Oil, on the other hand, there are similarities and there are differences. There's a growing mainstream acceptance of the idea, and the financial futures markets seem to be predicting continually rising prices from here on, while in the near term we're debating whether rising gas pump prices are here to stay, and oil executives are testifying about the situation before Congress.
So the hype is there, as it was for Y2K.
But with Y2K, we had both the will and the time to correct the problem. It didn't take an act of Congress to fix Y2K, it took companies hiring armies of Cobol programmers to come in and fix the problem, or upgrade IT infrastructure to something more modern. With Peak Oil though, we as a society seem to be catching on the problem just as it's beginning to unfold, but the solutions available could take decades to become available on a wide enough scale to make a difference.
How long would it take to switch the entire American automotive fleet to hybrid Priuses, if Toyota was able to build them fast enough -- maybe a decade? And that's with existing technology, which isn't even necessarily enough to help.
How long would it take to bring expanded oil drilling in Alaska or the North American continental shelf online? And how much oil is available there to begin with? Look to Brazil, with the massive untapped oil fields suspected off their coast. Even if the new Brazilian fields are brought online, they will take years to become productive, will be very expensive to extract -- in other words, possibly a remedy for oil supply shortages, but probably no solution for rising prices. Exploration of the untapped North American oil fields would probably go the same way -- slow to access, expensive to produce, and unclear how much is available to begin with. (The Machiavellian in me thinks we might as well leave it in the ground until supplies elsewhere dry up and we need some kind of real reserve; going after it now is just a partial solution to a near-term problem, but would make the long term problems worse. Kind of like Chrysler's promotion, but I digress.)
* * * * *
Anyway, the point, which I seem to keep wandering aimlessly around, is that Peak Oil seems to be rapidly evolving from "wingnut conspiracy theory" to "a fact of the world". Maybe now then the debate can move on to how to restructure society to a post-petroleum world, with steps along the way to improve efficiency of cars with available technology, reduce the need to drive to begin with (mass transit, car pooling, walking, telecommuting, etc), and so on. At this point it looks like we really can't stop the wave from hitting, but if we're lucky we'll find ways to ride it out safely...
]]>Working at home is much nicer with a cat.
I had the great fortune to meet one of my favorite artists this week - Marc Johns, better known around here as draw.vox.com!
Marc stopped by the Six Apart office to have a look around and then we headed to the corner pub to have some beers and french fries with Steve and Kimmie.
He even drew another Post-It for Vox!
Bonus: Check out two other Post-It drawings on art is the new religion.