41 The Australian Epony Mouse

Photo by George Shuklin

The Common Epony Mouse -- a minor creature of little note, given to efforts to aggrandise itself through attempts to name things after itself.  Thrives especially in environments recently wrested from their former inhabitants.  See eponymist, empire, conquest, grafitti, manifest destiny, &c.

[Article in draft. --Lena]

40 April Fool

Photo by Lars Andersen.

It has been snowing here all morning, which is absurd.  It's too warm to stick, but still, snowing in April?!

[Note— Google has taken down all their April Fool stuff.  I did save one CADIE screenshot, which is at the end of this article. —GAC]

Google is up to it's usual 1 April shenanigans, this time announcing CADIE a successful AI, which appears to be "getting loose." 

The nice, light-weight Google browser Google Chrome is, this morning, offering a PDF download of 3-D glasses to enhance your Web experience. 

There is, also as usual, an April Fool Gmail hoax (you have to be logged-out to see it), this time an "intelligent" utility that answers all your mail for you. Some pretty funny samples here.

Of course the free service Gmail was itself announced on 1 April (2004), with an "impossible" amount of free storage, and was presumed at the time to be a hoax.  It wasn't.  So...CADIE?  Are you there?... Oooooh.... 

(Those Google folks are pretty "special."  Look fast — it'll all be gone by the end of the day...)

A local radio morning show reported receiving calls that the landmark Seattle P-I Globe had been relocated by April Fool pranksters and was floating in Puget Sound.  A 'witness' even sent in a photo, which they showed on the radio ;-P  The globe weighs over 18 tons.  You can figure it out.

Photo source unknown.

(Having failed to find a buyer, the P-I is soon going the way of so many hard-copy newspapers these days, and that is not a hoax.)

About April Fool's Day: a Wikipedia entry, the top 100 April Fools of all time, and some history.

So, y'all keep an eye on your gullibles today...

By the way, I'm pregnant.  And moving to Australia.

Galena Alyson Canada 1 April 2009 Vashon Island, Washington, USA

39 Thinking About the Tipping Point

My friend Dr. Hugh Spencer (austrop.org.au) says:

"...this [environmental consequences] will be a leit-motiv to everything in the future....the trick is not to lose oneself in despair..."

Hmmm...it might be too late for me...

I was born and partly raised in Berkeley, California (otherwise, in W. Europe) to/by educated, environmentally conscious parents, in an educated, environmentally conscious community. My folks were Sierra Club members and recycling their waste in the 1960s, rehabilitating clear-cut forest land in the 1970s. I never understood "everyone else's" boorish refusal to note the obvious. My subsequent training as a scientist hasn't helped.

In contrast, in adult years, I have lived and worked among loggers clear-cutting, farmers slash-and-burning, and developers a-developing (no miners a-mining as yet, but lived in the California Gold Country and seen the moonscape left by the hydraulic-ing there). In these environments I have struggled to understand the viewpoints of others, and myself live as an example. I have also, myself, sinned.

Today I try (but not too hard) to use as little as possible (e.g. I have a good, low-maintenance car that is 16 years old and gets about 38 MPG, which is about as high as you can get in the States; I maintain it myself; I work from home and drive little). Most of the "stuff" I own was bought, borrowed or given used (exception, computers and my houses, food ;-). The most "unsustainable" aspect of my lifestyle is probably air-travel, which I usually consume several times a year. Not sure what I'm willing to do about that...

So by western standards I have a half-way respectable conservationist pedigree. And I have been forced into being a conservation pessimist. It all seems so pointless to me now.

I think we're already past the tipping-point in so many areas. And even if we aren't, humans are still so ignorant, selfish, and boorish that the ship won't change course soon enough to avoid sailing off the edge of the world. My guess? The politicos will still be arguing market economics as we sail into the abyss.

Sometimes, I actually find myself hoping for a plague.

My only solace the past decade or so has been the knowledge that Earth's biosphere has collapsed several times before and recreated itself in a substantially new form each time. In the future there won't be tigers or mammoths or humans or beluga whales, but there will be other, new things...

I'd love to have my mind changed.


Galena Alyson Canada 19 March 2009 Vashon Island, Washington, USA

38 xkcd is Bloody Brilliant

xkcd.com

Clever in a way I could only dream of being...

(...did you see the alt-text???)

And here it is in real life.

Galena Alyson Canada 17 March 2009 Vashon Island, Washington, USA

37 Alan Becker is Bloody Brilliant

I spend far too much time lollygagging about the Web perusing mediaocrity [sic], but every now and then I trip over something utterly brilliant.  Today that something is Alan Becker.  His art generally is interesting and varied in a still-lifey kind of way (not my thing), but the stand-out piece is (evidently his only) animation piece Animator vs. Animation.

Becker says: 

An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself.  A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.  -- This took three long months.. i think it's worth it.

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

Hey Alan, the melons are pretty, but can we get some more stick figures please?

Galena Alyson Canada 1 March 2009 Vashon Island, Washington, USA

36 Vipassana Birthday

Today is my 51st birthday, and today I start a 10-day gift to myself -- I go to a retreat in southern WA where I will learn vipassana meditation -- a continuation of my life-long effort to learn to be at peace with myself.

It's getting better all the time.

Here, check it out: http://www.dhamma.org

Over at the Two Gringas blogsite...

I am en route by car from the USA to Central America, and I'm blogging the trip over at TheTwoGringas.blogspot.com. I'll be back here writing other things once I get settled into my home in Belize.

Update 5 April: I am now home in Belize, and shall write soon...

'Lena