ElectroTaps
by ToastyKen



This is an automatic bugle that plays Taps all by itself. Here's the full text of the caption:

The U.S. military has found the perfect way to demonstrate that it's purely the thought that counts. This bugle emulator sits in a real bugle and plays a collection of calls, including "Taps." Due to a shortage of actual bugle players, the Pentagon had already ordered 700 of these to be used at military funerals in 2003.

Is it just me, or does "shortage of actual bugle players" sound like a euphemism for "a surplus" of, well, the need for bugle players? :P Morbid, yes, but, on the other hand, I also find the phrase "shortage of actual bugle players" kinda hilarious, too. It just sounds so ridiculous. :P

(Found via /., where some comments point out that military funerals have been using CD players more and more, so this is an improvement.)

(Whoa! Another /. comment points out that there's actually an organization of volunteer bugle players called Bugles Across America. Now this post is actually linked to the activism theme of this blog. :) )

Off the backboard, through the Internet, across to the UN, over the Atlantic, into Africa, NOTHING BUT NET
by ToastyKen

A Sports Illustrated column titled, Nothing But Nets, is asking people to go donate to the UN Foundation to help buy mosquito nets for Africans to fight malaria. I can't vouch for the UN Foundation's effectiveness or anything, but I love the tie-in aspect of calling it "Nothing but Nets", and I love that it's a in a Sports Illustrated column, of all places. At the very least, the column's novelty factor has helped it to spread the word (This blog post is a case in point!) about just how big a problem it is. (A couple million deaths a year!)

Virtual Iraqis
by ToastyKen



You've probably heard of Massively Multiplayer Online Games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft. There's also a smaller market for MMOGs that don't center around violence. I interviewed at one such company a couple of years ago, called There. (Yes, it led to many "Where?" "There." "Where?" "There." jokes. :P) They don't seem to have done as well as Second Life, possibly because Second Life actually allows users to write their own scripts to introduce new behaviors into the game. (Though I think it's more likely due to the fact that they didn't hire me. ;) j/k )

Anyway, There eventually announced that they got a military contract to adapt their game for military training. This I found really interesting. Eventually, that became the focus of the company, which then changed its name to Forterra Systems. The old There product languished and eventually spun off into its own company. Forterra has a couple of interesting videos on their site: Company Video and Defense Video.

Now, using computer games for military training is nothing new. I think the military's even used modified versions of Quake for training. There are two new things here: (1) many people from all around the world can participate in a single simulation, including off-duty soldiers, and (2) in addition to combat tactics training, their software also has a focus on the non-violent and cultural interaction that are big parts of our deployment in Iraq today.

On that second front, I recently saw this Wired article titled, Troops Learn to Not Offend. A company called Tactical Language Training, spun off from USC research, is writing computer games to teach soldiers nonverbal cues and cultural taboos. From the article:

Ironically, although the game was developed for the military, it contains no weapons or combat situations. It emulates a civil affairs mission and develops like a multipart story in which soldiers must gain the trust of the people they interact with in order to rebuild communities. "I got a kick out of removing the weapons and replacing them with gestures," Vilhjalmsson says.

I'm glad, too, that the military is spending at least some fraction of its research budget on cutting edge technology that actually tries to reduce violence. :)

In somewhat news, I randomly heard on Live 105 a mention of mydeathspace.com. " Only three things are certain in life. MySpace, Taxes, and Death. If you have a MySpace account and you die, this is where you will end up." Disturbing! The directory summarizes reasons for death, and most are because of car accidents, unsurprisingly. The relatedness? There are a few entries where the reason is listed as "Iraq": Sgt. Akers killed by an IED, Lance Cpl. Modeen and Sgt. Stevens killed by an IED, and Sgt. Jakoniuk killed by "Non-Combat Related Injuries". (He was a Blackhawk crewman, so presumably it was some sort of helicopter accident.)

You can click on their pictures to get to their old Myspace profiles. *shudder*

Happy Survival Day, Homeland Mine

100 Years today ago the city I'm in shook and burned, and the region as a whole went through a lot of shock and trauma, but it survived. Here's to survival.

Be prepared, and help your community prepare.

Pigs now fly, planes now don't
by ToastyKen

Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, has written a WaPo article advocating nuclear power.

In related news, some Chicago company is turning Lear Jets into Limos:



That appears to be a CGI mockup. Here's what the real thing looks like so far.

Google Calendar

I'm not sure what I think of the new calendar.google.com. Admittedly by its very nature it's impossible to evaluate in a day--you have to see how it performs over an extended period of time. But the sharing of calendars immediatley strikes me as a bad idea--do I really want to know what friend-so-and-so thinks is a better thing to do than hang out with me? How many times Miss X does laundry? When Buddy Joe Smith is going to his dermatologist? Do I want them to know about my movie watching habits? What a weird concept.

That's So Cool!

I'm still bouncy and grinning because on the way to work this morning I saw the neatest combination of cool, geeky, cute, and good--a Brompton folding bike. This lady just wheeled it over the escalator, went up with me while she told me how it worked, unfolded it, and biked away. Totally worth the trans-Atlantic, trans-continental shipping costs!!

Le Sigh

I'm a bit worn out. I've been firing off black humored emails to my friends with rants and vignettes like this:

Person, tidying up a hospital room, holds up small bottle: Is this bottle something we should take home? What do we do with it?
Saheli: Well, what does the label say?
Person: It says, "All kinds of dangerous."

And calling them up late at night with inane requests for advice because I can't think straight. C'est la vie. Somehow, we have to make sense of it and do the best we can. Ah well, please be patient.

Anyway, you'll note that I have added a blogbadge to the right-hand sidebar:it's a link to a CIVIC/GiveMeaning campaign to raise money for medical care for two Iraqi women, Manal & Aliyah, who are civilian collateral damage from our little adventure there. I'm afraid I can't compose an eloquent appeal beyond asking you to read their stories. The director of the campaign emailed me personally to ask for help, and I cringed when I saw that the day they'd been shot by American troops in a checkpoint misunderstanding had been my birthday.

Anyway, below the fold, find some thoughts on the 62+ comment thread about Petroleum and Breakfast.

Continue Reading Here.



First, to the main point at hand--how can we better engineer our consumption to be more sustainable?

I think a lot of this discussion is being skewed by our not being practiced at holding multiple causes in our heads. In particle physics we would always talk about modes of decay--multiple phenomena could lead to the final event recorded in our detector, and our job in analysis was very often to tease out how much of the signal was due to cause A, how much to cause B, cause C, etc.. If the interactions of the tiniest particles can have so many components, much more complex phenomena, like ecology and behavior, almost certainly do. I don't want to *demonize* anything, but sprawl AND highways AND inefficient vehicles (AND computers AND agricultural subsidies AND. . .etc..) are all to blame in various amounts. My original plaintive request--for a little "engineering"--was essentially a request for some hardheaded tools of analysis for teasing apart these modes of destruction, figuring out where there was leverage and how an individual can figure out how their life interacts with those points of leverage, and how they can best exert the personal energy and resources they have to devote to the cause in the most optimal way. That's what I mean by engineering, not building a better car or better solar cell. Engineering as the systematic, quantitative solving of problems.

Rishi wrote: Echan brings up a great point, which is when you start to question any particular energy expenditure, the cost / benefit value of the use versus the environmental cost (assuming we value the environment very highly) seems to make any activity wasteful. . . My point is not mass suicide, of course, but to point out that when you start to think of any action on a micro level, including your drive to the store, or eating your bowl of cereal in the morning, you are never going to find an environmentally efficient one. It is only on the macro level that these questions even make sense.

This is true, but its truth shows that I did not express my original quest very well. Reductionism is always dangerous if you don't keep the big picture in mind. But reductionism is a tool for holding the big picture in your mind in the first place. It can't be dismissed out of hand. Spherical cows are also absurd, but they can still be useful.

Michael brought up the footprint calculator, which was actually sent to me by Peter during the initial conversation that led to the blogpost. I agree with TK that equal sharing of all resources is a useless and unnecessary thing to strive for--some poeple don't even want to have the what would be their equal share of the whole, and what you work for has to be taken into account somewhere--but I disagree with him that this makes the footprint calculator fallacious. Even if we were the average world consumers, the equality assumption in the calculator would be a good metric of how sustainable our consumption was. As it is, we are almost certainly at the high end of consumption. Our high demand is driving up the price for everyone so that some people can't even surive. Also, as Michael replied, we already have the 6 billion people. Even rapidly declining birthrates isn't going to decrease that number without equally drastic amounts of death and suffering. I'd like to find some other way.

When you actually think about the mechanics of the problem, it mostly has to do with things like habit, convenience, and imperfect information. So I'm actually interested in building practical tools. I'm thinking of actual calculators, software for a cellphone, notebook templates and worksheets for keeping track of purchasing choices, 12-step programs, diets, something--to make for better habits and routines. There's a lot of hyperbole about going on a "shopping diet," but it's actually a powerful analogy if you're willing to get beyond faddish advice. For example, I've lately had to think a lot about how to construct a very specific diet for someone with a lot of health issues. What was before a casual, effortless thing--eat three times a day, what you mostly feel like, trying not to make it too horribly unhealthful--has now turned into a carefully recorded and planned excercise in adding up calories, grams of protein and percentages of potassium, and balancing that against palatability and ease of preparation. When someone is healthy, anything goes. When someone is sick, you have to engineer their diet. Our planet is sick.

Finally, I'm not going to contort myself into philsophical knots trying to defend my desire to make sure the environment isn't irreparably damaged and the planet lasts for a good long while, despite the eventual heat death of the universe. Of course we have to balance that with other concerns--but we're wasiting time in doing that complex balancing act if we're still arguing about the validity of the concern. I just assumet that it is a valid concern. Conversations have to have some basic assumptions and that's mine. :-p

And I'm tired, so I'll talk about more meta-matters of social activism, capitalism, and the like later.

Four Things I Wish To Make Known

1. I really like the discussion going on in the post about petroleum and breakfast, despite its cantakerousness, and I hope it continues.
2. I have a lot of things to say about it.
3. I'm horribly painfully busy and cannot yet organize my thoughts on the subject. So please keep it up without me.
4. This video, courtesy of Apostropher at Unfogged, is simply one of the most wonderful web videos I have ever seen*. (I've linked directly to the video, but Apo's intro's funny too.) If you want snarky commentary and interpretation (gay, hot, sexy, whatever--these things are not my concern) Unfogged can do that much better than I can. All I can say is that I was having a no-good, very bad, quite awful day, and this thing made me laugh--appreciatively!!!--so hard that I dropped the keyboard and almost fell off the chair.

*The closest competitor that comes to mind is Matt is Dancing Around the World. In case you haven't noticed, I have a weak spot for dancing.