Stop Counting Calories!

It’s amazing!! Did you know salad has almost no calories!?! But a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a coke is nearly a whole day’s calorie budget! You can eat as many carrots as you want! – they’re like free food calorie-wise. But ice creme, whoa! – smaller portions, please. And then, exercise: If I did […]

Loop and chill

One-hour hand-recorded 54MB mp3 of Ocean Beach waves, San Francisco, 2008-05-14. Loop and chill. A gift, via Jessamyn.

Fragile – Handle With Care

Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth. Details.

Copying Makes Evolution Possible

Susan Blackmore in Wired: The whole idea of a meme is that it’s information that is copied with variation and selection. So any idea that is copied from person to person is a meme. But an idea that you think up for yourself and is not expressed is not a meme. The emphasis has to […]

Yo! This is not cool. WTF.

I woke up about 40 minutes after falling asleep, hearing what I thought was a big moth banging against the window screen trying to get in. It went on long enough that I grabbed my flashlight to see what it was. When I turned it on, something whizzed by my head, and I realized the […]

Katie Hutchison Studio

An architect in Salem MA blogs: Inspired by the simplicity of New England vernacular buildings and landscapes, Katie Hutchison Studio composes and promotes meaningful architecture and design. Some great stuff there. Primer: House Garden Primer: A Recipe for Architectural Charm Design snapshot: Vineyard elemental outdoor fireplace Current project: West Tisbury House.

Bacterial Toxin in the Genetically Modified Corn

Hans-Hinrich Kaatz: The bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have ‘altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry. —Spiegel Online via WorldChanging via Hypsographic Gleanings

The Difference Snow Makes

Great photo comparison of the Denver airport with and without 36″ of snow.

The World Standard in Studless Winter Tyres

Glen said, “The ultimate winter weapon is still the Hakk 2’s with studs, but if you don’t want to run the studs with the noise and the rolling resistance and everything, then the RSi is what people are talking about.” Better than the Hakk 2’s? “Without the studs; With the studs, Hakk 2’s are what […]

Autumn Beauty

Saturday was a stunning late-fall New Hampshire day. We went for another 14-mile bike ride on the rail trail. Bridge Over the Water The ride includes several bridges over the Mascoma River, vehicle gates, dark forest, traveling past open green fields, under an Interstate highway, next to the Mascoma Lake for quite a while, through […]

Jellyfish the Size of Small Cars

Pink Tentacle: Jellyfish invasion in full swing Thousands of the giant jellyfish, which can grow up to 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kg (440 lb), become caught in fixed fishing nets each year. Includes an amazing photo that I’m too lazy to steal borrow and post here.

Autumn

Yesterday I stood on the deck and watched the wind blow the leaves off the weak trees. Some of the remaining leaves are turning color, and the nights are crisp and cool. In two weekends my nephew will visit for annual apple picking. The driveway is covered with pine needles. My neighbor mowed the field […]

Detroit, Motor City

Arrived at Detroit airport yesterday and called the hotel. “How do I get to you?” “Okay, you take the south exit of the airport, get onto route blah, go 8.8 miles and take exit blahblah,….” I interrupted: “I’m not renting a car. Is there any public transportation?” “Oh. Well, I think there are cabs somewhere […]

Hot

At 5:10 AM it’s 79 degrees. Wha? Forecast is for 97 degrees and thunderstorms, read: air as thick and close and humid as you can imagine. Welcome to August. This morning’s wake-up fun was to attempt killing a bee’s nest under a deck chair. They say to do this at night or early morning, “when […]

Morning Earwigs

Earwigs are disgusting in many ways, but they’re especially disgusting when, on a Sunday morning, up a bit earlier than you might prefer, and slightly hung-over, you find a pack of them nibbling away happily inside the wrapper of your virtually untouched Scharffen Berger chocolate bar. Besides the waste of fine chocolate, the shock and […]

Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age

An impromptu music video I shot this afternoon…. Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age (YouTube, 4:35) A mood hit and I grabbed the camera and restarted the song. The video compression makes it hard to tell how hard it was raining, and hard to see the ghost. But watch carefully and pay attention, and you […]

E-Prime

From The Sourcebook of Magic, pg 351ff: Alfred Korzybski (1933/1994) warned that the “is” of identity and the “is” of predication present two dangerous linguistic and semantic constructions that map false-to-fact conclusions. The first has to do with identity—how we identify a thing or what we identify with. The second has to do with attribution—how […]

Examples of Categories

Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.) Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation? Culture: On media elitism and the “derivative” myth Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit… Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart

We Must Disenthrall Ourselves

There’s a good interview with Al Gore in the July 13 issue of Rolling Stone. Some quotes: I believe there is a hunger in the country to be part of a larger vision that changes the way we relate to the environment and the economy. Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from […]

One Possible Explanation for Obesity

I woke up this morning wondering why human muscle mass is such an attractive feature in our culture today. That is, why are fit people with defined muscles “more attractive” than couch potatoes. My mind leaped to the idea that this taps into a primitive part of our brain that says, “If times get tough, […]