Facebook has started showing more ads, and it seems like they may be having trouble getting quality advertisers…
It’s funny because I had to actually resist clicking on the link. In the end, I did not.
outside
20
Jun 08
Know Your Food
A recent episode of the excellent tv show, 30 days, put a life-long hunter living with a family of vegan animal rights activists. The episode itself was pretty emotional as it shows some of the truly horrific things that are done to animals as part of the food-making process in our country. To get prices down as low as possible a system of factory farming has developed that completely removes the humanity from the treatment of the animals. They are treated just like machines designed entirely to produce food for humans, with no respect for their rights as living creatures. It’s really terrible and it’s now starting to have dramatic effects on the health of humans consuming the food as well.
I’m not an extremist when it comes to the issues of animal rights. I understand that people have the right to choose what they eat and don’t eat, and I support personal choice in that regard. I do wish that more people actually knew what sort of acts are being committed on a daily basis in the production of their food though, and tv shows like this episode of 30 days will hopefully make a bit of a difference there. I also think it should be illegal to treat farm animals the way they are treated by factory farms.
I also have some personal experience with hunting, and I support the rights of people to do that. I went to highschool in North Dakota and while there I went hunting with my dad and friends. I was (and am) a very bad hunter and I never actually killed anything (it’s hard!) but overall I think the experience was a good one for me. I would not go hunting now, but I don’t feel guilty for having done it. All of the hunters I interacted with back then were very respectful of both the animals and the land. A lot of emphasis was placed on avoiding needless suffering, and we always picked up our spent shells and any other trash. In North Dakota at the time, one hunter could only legally kill one deer per year with a gun, and one additional using a bow. The gun season is also very short (only a couple of weeks) and many hunters are not skilled enough to actually kill a deer in that amount of time. It’s a lot harder than you might think, even with a rifle. They’re quick! The bow season was a few months long and most of our time hunting was spent using a bow. I’m sure other places have different rules.
Overall, I think the key is respect. Animals are, of course, not all human, but humans are animals. We are part of a natural ecosystem and we should remember our place in it. That sounds obvious to me, but somehow it’s not obvious to everyone. If we are respectful of the rights of animals to live a healthy and natural life (I won’t go so far as to say ‘happy’!), we’ll also be producing more healthy and natural food from them and that can only be a good thing for us as humans.
24
Jul 07
Programming Made Easy
I first learned the basics of programming using Logo way back in 5th grade or so, writing simple scripts to make the cute little turtles move around the screen and draw simple pictures. It made basic programming concepts easy to grasp and even fun (for a kid like me) and it wasn’t until later in life that I realized how much I was actually learning from it.
That idea of teaching programming to kids early on has now been brought into the modern age with a new graphical programming system developed by MIT called Scratch. It looks pretty nifty.
13
Jun 07
History of The Oregon Trail
If you attended school in the United States in the 80s or 90s there’s a pretty good chance you played The Oregon Trail video game at some point. The game was simple by today’s standards but it was still much better than class! You had to help a group of settlers through the Oregon Trail hunting, dealing with disease, and dealing with other problems that would come up.
A company called MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) was the original developer of the game. It was started by the state of Minnesota and originally the game was only available to schools there. Eventually they branched out and offered it to schools nation-wide. The history of the company from the early 1970s on is pretty interesting and worth a read (it’s pretty short) if you have any pangs of nostalgia over The Oregon Trail.
31
May 07
Combo Stove/Refrigerator/Generator
This is awesome. It’s a simple device that uses burning wood (or similar) to generate not only heat for cooking, but simultaneously cooling for storing food, and electricity. That’s pretty amazing. It’s aimed at developing countries and is a very specifically targeted device that to me seems like it could actually make a difference. Who needs a $100 laptop when you can’t even feed yourself?
13
May 07
Is this Fame?
I ran across this amusing blog post the other day and it made me chuckle. It involves me as a focal point of the narration, primarily due to my connection with DreamHost. I don’t know either of the two people involved in the story personally and there are several incorrect facts that show that they don’t really know much about me, either.
This is not the first time someone has tried to leverage some knowledge of me to gain something, but I think this is the first time when it’s something that’s completely unconnected to me. Just dropping my name is apparently now a way to persuade someone else to do things for you. It didn’t actually work in this case but who knows if it’s worked other times?
I think from here it can only be a very short walk to being recognized on street corners, right? Yeah…
Anyway, it’d be a funny story even if I wasn’t involved.
11
Apr 07
Art in Context
The Washington Post did an insightful experiment where a world famous concert violinist performed unannounced at a Metro station in Washington DC at rush hour. If you’ve ever been in an urban environment for much time at all you’ve no doubt seen street performers. In my experience the vast majority of them are completely ignorable. I do still try to give them a few seconds of ear as I pass though, just in case. It’s enlightening to see what happened in this real-world experiment!
Now that you’ve read the article… it brings up the idea that it may only be really possible to appreciate art in the proper context and environment. That even totally beautiful and amazing art may be overlooked and unappreciated if viewed from the wrong mindset or perspective. That makes sense to me. It also makes me think of the role of art as a concept and idea in our daily lives. We’re inundated with pseudo-artistic advertising so much that we can become trained to block it all out, especially while on our daily commutes. We’d go crazy otherwise. The difficulty is in knowing when to open up the blinders a little bit when there’s something worth experiencing going on. It seems that all too often that just doesn’t happen.
As a side note, this picture of nose art on the front of a World War II airplane makes me think, too. It probably falls under the pseudo-artistic category due to its relative lack of quality but it also is such an icon of American culture that you just can’t ignore it.
24
Feb 07
Parking Ticket Plans
The city of San Francisco has a corporate parking ticket program that bills companies monthly for their parking ticket fines. It’s intended for companies that do deliveries or on location services. The top three accounts in 2006 by dollar amount were UPS ($673,334), FedEx ($434,046), and Airborne Express ($140,845).
The idea of charging companies monthly for their parking tickets is a bit odd, but I see the logic in it. It’s just not possible for UPS drivers to find legal parking on every one of the 100 stops a day they make. It can sometimes take 45 minutes just to find parking for our Mini Cooper! Parking tickets are just a part of doing business in a major city and shaving off some of the human time needed to process all those tickets (UPS recieved 11,788 in 2006) just makes sense.
The SF Chronicle article has lots more interesting details.
16
Jun 06
Network Neutrality
The issue of network neutrality has been in the news a lot lately. Basically, it’s the concept that network access providers (ISPs, think DSL and cable internet) should be legally required to provide their customers with 100% unbiased access to the entirety of the content available on the Internet. Some of them want to be able to restrict your access to competing service providers. Voice over IP is the catalyst as many of the network providers also offer their own Voice over IP services. There’s a lot of misleading rhetoric being employed on both sides of the issue, but it is an important one for the long-term value of the Internet. The Save The Internet site is one of the main focal points of the ‘good guys’ side. There’s now a free song from a group of musicians called The Broadband aiming to bring people to the website and raise awareness about the issue. Similarly there’s an interesting video highlighting some of the main points involved. It’s worth watching.
(Sorry for the lame picture accompanying this post. The good guys don’t seem to have anything much better available.)
