Workaholic’s Key: You repeatedly try to open your house front door with your office key. In extreme cases, you find you either don’t have a key to the house, or that your colivingbuddies have changed the locks or moved.
Playaholic’s Key: You repeatedly try to open your office door with your house key. In extreme cases, you find you either don’t have a key to the office, or that your business has moved or closed. In really extreme cases you find you work in a cube.
A brief respite from global warming to:
More climate change predictions from James Hansen, NASA Goddard, via Scientific American. Scary stuff. Better do something.
In the surpermarket yesterday and, it seems, not particularly on the ball, I swung a gallon of our favourite milk out of the shop fridge and into my bag and soon was on my way home to discover, upon reversing the the swinging process that the milk sitting in our fridge was whole milk, not negligible (i.e. 1) percent milk. This morning I learned that using whole milk for capuccino is not my thing, at least not today, and this evening the milk was condemned to the rubbish bin.
NO! STOP!
You can make rice pudding with whole milk and it is yummy!
I hunted around a while for a suitable recipe. Many contain eggs and my mother’s rice pudding does not contain eggs.
I settled on this rice pudding recipe.
And it was GOOD.
My first experience podcasting was disappointing. After filling out the for giving permission for my talk to be podcasted, I stood up at ISSRE 2006 and spoke for a half an hour about sensitivity analysis of risk reduction strategies, carefully addressing the microphone. At the end of the talk, a techie came to check the recorder and discovered… the microphone had been off. So 30 minutes of silence is what we recorded. I hope they put it up as a podcast anyway, my groundbreaking talk 4′39″.
I tried to upload my slides to the wiki at ISSRE.ORG/LIVE and that failed too. And now I can’t upload this blog entry to Blogger either.
Message received. Over and out.
Apparently a battle is on the horizon between the climate change proponents and climate change sceptics due the the upcoming – February 2007 – release of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It seems, however, that climate change sceptics are using underhand and non-scientific methods to discredit prominent climate change proponents, even trying to ruin their careers. Some energy companies and associations are funding attacks on scientists who publish research supporting climate change. Can these companies or associations do this ethically if they know that climate change probably exists, and probably is a serious threat? Are they opening themselves up to future legal action along the lines of the big tobacco suits?
There is an excellent article at New Scientist about the efforts of some to discredit scientists who publish research or opinions which support the notion of rapid and dangerous climate change.
I just saw a link to an article on shashdot which reminded me that in America the argument that we should reduce our use of oil is getting a hold in the mainstream, not because burning all this carbon is contributing in a major way to global warming, but because we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Although to some extent pulling in the same direction, the latter argument does not say it is bad to use oil from US sources, e.g. Alaska.
It is saddening to think that people will accept an argument based on (probably slight) threats to US security more readily than an argument based on very real threats to quality of life from rising oceans, violent weather, and air pollution.
This argument badly needs some numbers. Which is more likely – a significant drop in living standards due to foreign oil producers putting the squeeze on the US, or a significant drop in living standards due to the consequences of global warming and pollution?
The Retrievr web application lets you search for images on flickr by drawing a sketch. It’s pretty cool. I managed to find a photo of an aeroplane flying through an empty sky by drawing a blue background with a black plane outline on it. Of course it has limitations but it fits in with my thinking that a substantial part of image search has to be visual. Language is not well suited to formulating the spatial aspects of image queries, and those spatial aspects are important.
This site has some amazing footage showing using a bunch of cameras to capture the brushstrokes a designer is making in the air while designing a piece of furniture. These are then fed to a CAD program and thence to a 3D printer which turns the design into a physical artifact out of plastic.
Then coming years will see huge advances coming from the integration of computers and use of computers into the physical world.
