Guesses At Nothing

Well, I finally put my money where my mouth is and enrolled in NC GreenPower.  I just found out about it (Thank you to Kelly).   For the nominal fee of $4 per 100 kwh, I can help with the development of alternative energy within the state.  The service is offered through my electricity provider, Progress Energy, and best of all the contributions are tax deductible.

Firstly,  a MIT panel announced that Geo-thermal energy from within the earth's crust could be harnessed to provide the bulk of the United States energy needs.  What a genius idea!  This begs the question, why couldn't this have been thought of sooner, say the time of the industrial revolution when an energy source that didn't pollute the environment could have saved us all a hell of a headache.  What headache you ask?  Check out this sneak preview to a "Smoking Gun" report that is to be released in a few weeks that states that, yes you guessed it, we're pretty much f*ck3d.  

The other night, in my head, I acquiesced to myself that at this point, the argument of whether or not global warming is real, or is attributable to humans, is moot. The planet has gone through catastrophic changes before, and as all the indicators point,  it is about to again.   Maybe we ought to start thinking pragmatically.  The real question is whether or not we can adapt to the planet as it changes.

Huh!!!

Wikipedia has reached the 1 million mark in user donations.  Twenty dollars worth of that can be attributed to me.  While many bash wikipedia as illegitimate source due to the fact that its results can be edited by anyone, the fact remains that it is a good place to find out information on a multitude of subjects.   And the facts might not be so inaccurate. Studies have been done to monitor vandalism on wikipedia, and while the studies may be less than scientific, something should be said for wikipedia's online community. When Stephen Colbert, (the man who coined the term "truthiness"¹) asked his viewing audience to alter the results for elephants to say that the population doubled within the last six months (despite the fact that the gestation period for an elephant is 22 months), the wikipedia community responded by locking the article and blocking out the misinformation.  Perhaps a peer reviewed system may work.  However, other topics of a more political or controversial nature such as the Republican Party, or abortion may be subject to the whim of opinion and misinformation.  But if you are looking for information on quantum mechanics or Bob Vila, wikipedia may be the source for you.

1.) The word truthiness, meaning "truth that comes from the gut, not books", has been named word of the year 2006 by  Merriam-Websters.  Truthiness also won 2005 word of the year honors by the American Dialect Society

Two thousand seven is gearing up to be the warmest year in recorded history.   Whether or not that  comes to be the fact is that the world is getting hotter.  Ice shelves are melting in the Arctic and Antarctic. Glaciers are receding everywhere.  Permafrost is thawing.  Whole communities are dealing firsthand with the effects.  Meanwhile, for whatever reason the debate rages on as to whether or not this phenomenon is being caused by man's activities despite the scientific consensus that the accelerated warming is caused by CO₂ emissions.  We exhale CO₂ and we cut down the trees that breathe it in.  But more importantly the fuels that we burn to power our cars, heat our homes, and light our houses emit CO₂.  Naysayers state that man is too insignificant to have an impact on our environment.  But it shouldn't be that difficult of a concept to grasp.  Man has been manipulating his environment since the beginning of recorded history and now man's mastery over his environment is having negative effects of a catastrophic scale on the environment as a whole.  There is a simple analogy in the production of wine.  The yeast that consumes sugars in the grapes produces alcohol as a byproduct.  The more the yeast consume the more alcohol is excreted until there is so much alcohol that the environment is no longer suitable for the yeast and it dies.  Man is the yeast, oil and coal are the sugars, CO₂ is the alcohol.  And as we all know, too much alcohol will kill you.  

If you are at all into tech news I recommend the digg swarm feature of digg labs.  You get a lot of funny off beat news and also a lot of gaming news, but the visualization alone is worth it. 

It is the 5th of January and we finally, just now, got all the holiday decorations put up and away.  Meghann must be a pro at Tetris, because she managed to fit all of it in our two ft.² closet.  Actually I found out that Meghann is a whiz at the original Super Mario Bros. video game.  I bought it last week and she whipped though it and even remembered where all the one-ups and warp zones were.  You don't know how happy that makes me. 

Not that much else has been going on.  I got a lot of art supplies for Christmas so I think I'll get back into that again.  I'll even post some pictures of the new stuff I make if I get around to it.  Here is one that I did awhile ago...

The bright spot is the flash as I have neither the knowhow or the means to take a quality photo. Meghann framed it for my birthday, one of the nicest gifts I ever received, second only to the Swiss Army knife that I also received.

Art