tingilinde

earth minus one and getting into hot water...

Two nice pieces in the July 2007 Scientific American

An interview with Alan Weisman on the decay of human evidence from the planet if people suddenly vanished. Lots of fun --birds, trees, mosquitoes and cats win ... cockroaches, rats and cattle loose... , suspension bridges last about 300 years and CO₂ levels return to pre-industrial levels after about 100,000 years.

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Kevin Trenberth summarizes research on the number and strength of hurricanes as climate change plays out ... nothing here that hasn't been covered in realclimate, but the discussion is clear and should be read by a wider audience.

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Many other good pieces and all rendered using that amazingly usable paper and ink technology.

one in twenty made it

Nineteen out of twenty species didn't make it though the Permian-Triassic Boundary.

In Our Time, the excellent BBC Radio 4 program, has a nice program on the subject this week - available via podcast.

Of particular interest is the mention of methane hydrate. Hopefully what we are witnessing today won't trigger a methane hydrate (or methane clathrate) event, which is something of a positive feedback loop is is held by many responsible for dirty work of the Permian-Triassic Boundary event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

this.is.so.wrong

A breathtaking flight from logic

But they will probably be listened to more than carefully reasoned commentary from outside the industry...

thanks for the link Dewayne

oh rats!

But in a good way...

something fun for the weekend.

the anti-griddle

A toy for the serious cook...

12A at 120V is serious kitchenware

Nancy?

defending witchcraft

Bjarne and Sara both pointed out this amusing piece by Sam Harris...

excerpt:

...

What sort of criticism would these misguided authors likely encounter? In the following essay, I present excerpts from actual reviews of recent atheist bestsellers, replacing terms like "religion," "God," and "atheist" with terms like "witchcraft," "the Devil," and "skeptic." Observe how much intellectual progress we have made in the last five hundred years:

"

"If [magic], by definition, exceeds human measure, the demand that the existence of [the Great Horned One] be proven makes no sense because the machinery of proof, whatever it was, could not extend itself far enough to apprehend him. Proving the existence of [the Devil] would be possible only if [he]... were the kind of object that could be brought into view by a very large telescope or an incredibly powerful microscope. [The Devil], however--again if there is a [Devil]--is not in the world; the world is in him; and therefore there is no perspective, however technologically sophisticated, from which he could be spied. As that which encompasses everything, he cannot be discerned by anything or anyone because there is no possibility of achieving the requisite distance from his presence that discerning him would require. The criticism made by [skeptics] that the existence of [Satan] cannot be demonstrated is no criticism at all; for a [Devil] whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn't be a [Devil]; he would just be another object in the field of human vision. This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of [witchcraft]; for if I were to claim that I would be making the [skeptics'] mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the [skeptics'] arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it."
--Stanley Fish, The New York Times

the natural

cool in a strange way

The officer who conducts the driving test for this young woman may be in for a surprise.

3569

American military deaths in Iraq ... 26129 seriously wounded.

Being wounded can be bad

(thanks for the link Sukie)

my silly iphone prediction

Hey, why not...

My guess is that something is going to be done with .mac for the iPhone. A way to encourage Mac and iPhone use. (of course .mac needs to be brought out of the stone age; -- one feature - synchronization - works very well, but many other features have a poor price/performance ratio).

So I'm guessing iChat (perhaps with audio) will appear in .mac for the device. One can think of a few other services to bundle, and historically Apple has shown a fondness for annuities.

the death of open source radio...

sigh.... this email arrived today"

This is not the news we ever dreamed of sharing with you.

After tomorrow's broadcast we are putting Open Source on a summer hiatus. We learned late last week that a brand-name media company that had asked to partner with us had changed its mind. So for now, the best hope on the near horizon of relaunching the program and refinancing it has gone aglimmering.

Without a substantial new funder, we cannot keep paying our bills. Your help and support has helped bridge the cost of production these last six weeks and helped pay some of our debts. For now the most responsible thing seems to be to regroup and think realistically about a new program for the fall.

We are actively dedicated, all day every day, to the essential mission: seizing the epochal opportunity of the web to stretch the public conversation... to hybridize media, to enlist the audience, to extend the palette of colors in the cultural as well as the political conversation; in short to democratize and globalize one model forum of constructive talk for the new century.

Many of you have told us to forget about conventional public broadcasting and concentrate on producing the best damn podcast on the Internet. So in order to clear our heads, accentuate the positive and focus resolutely on the future, we need to step back for the moment from daily production.

Keeping the OS website alive and dynamic is a top priority. Please don't just watch the site. Help fill it. We want to post content regularly. What would you like to see or hear? We'll post conversations we've already scheduled with Harold Bloom and Larry Summers. We've asked Sonny Rollins if he would care to stretch out again before his 50th anniversary trio concert with Roy Haynes and Christian McBride in Carnegie Hall in September. So many things to talk about, so little time! You've helped us create this space... now what do you want to do with it?

If you can help us reconceive all the fundamental things -- a conversation that's a little different, that's global and alert to the interactive possibilities of the Internet -- by all means consider yourself enlisted. If you see a threads of successful shows -- passion series, race-and-class series, musical series -- that could be models going forward, please speak up.

By far the hardest part of this decision is disbanding our amazing staff. They've stuck by us over the last two years in an intense colleague-ship of work and learning together. They have contributed mightily to the interest of the show and the website. We want to work with them again.

As always, Emerson speaks to a great deal of what we're feeling. This comes from the end of his marvelous essay "Circles."

"Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

Thank you for passionate, engaged listenership and commentary these last two years. And let us all together keep this "community of the curious" alive and growing.

In the spirit of Emerson: Onward, ever onward!

Christopher Lydon and Mary McGrath