Google notes that the FCC adopted two of Google's suggested four openness conditions for the upcoming auction of 700MHz spectrum.
[Link]

Just two months ago, the notion that the FCC would take such a big step forward to give consumers meaningful choice through this auction seemed unlikely at best. Today -- thanks in no small part to broad public support for greater competition -- the FCC has embraced important principles of openness, and endorsed the unfettered workings of the free market for software applications and communications devices. Moreover, over the last few weeks several leading wireless carriers have reversed course and for the first time acknowledged our call for more open platforms in wireless networks. By any measure, that's real progress.

I chuckled when I saw this piece by Jamais (about the carbon footprint of his trip to Colorado – to talk about carbon footprints. What's funny is that, because he's so well identified now with the "cheeseburger footprint" concept, he's adopted the cheeseburger standard for ongoing analysis.

Let's do the math. According to Terrapass, my flight out to Denver and back ran about 867 pounds of CO2, total (per passenger). In the course of filming in a variety of locations, we drove two vehicles -- a standard pickup truck and a minivan, carrying a sum of six people and a huge amount of gear -- about 250 miles apiece. According to EPA estimates, pickups and minivans of appropriate size and vintage emit anywhere from 8 to 12 tons of CO2 over the course of driving 15,000 miles; call it 10 tons for easy math. 20,000 pounds of CO2 for 15,000 miles equals 1.3 pounds per mile, so 500 miles equals 666.7 pounds of CO2. That brings us to 1533.7 pounds for transportation alone; add in the incidentals of the day (power to charge the camera batteries, meals, and such), and we can reasonably estimate 1,600 pounds of direct CO2 emissions as the result of the day's activities.

Or, to put that into more familiar terms, that's about 160 cheeseburgers, a bit more than the average American's annual consumption.

This made me think about Popeye's pal Wimpy and his monolithic cheeseburger consumption... somehow we have to replace the SUV with Wimpy as our symbol for excessive carbon spew.

Particularly relevant quote I ran across; something to read and re-read.

The person that desires to have only pleasure and refuses pain expends an enormous amount of energy resisting life--and at the same time misses out enormously. He or she is on a self-defeating mission in any case, for just as we evade certain forms of suffering we inevitably fall victim to others. Underlying our glitzy modern consumer culture there is a deep spiritual under-nourishment and malaise that manifests all kinds of symptoms: nervous disorders, loneliness, alienation, purposelessness . . . So blanking out, running away, burying our heads in the sand or videotape will take us nowhere in the long run. If we really want to solve our problems--and the world's problems, for they stem from the same roots--we must open up and accept the reality of suffering with full awareness, as it strikes us, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in the here-now. Then, strange as it may seem, we reap vast rewards. For suffering has its positive side. From it we derive the experience of depth: of the fullness of our humanity. This puts us fully in touch with other people and the rest of the Universe.

--John Snelling

Pesco's posted his interview with Charles Simonyi, a former Microsoft exec who spent two weeks aboard the International Space Station. "You can almost feel your skin holding you together.... when I came down after 14 days I was so sad, because I had learned skills, like flying, and I wouldn't be able to use those skills again." Simonyi has a web site about his experience.

I ran across a web site about inventor Elmer Gates, who invented " the foam fire extinguisher, an improved electric iron, a climate-controlling air conditioner, and the educational toy “Box and Blocks.” He was productive in the fields of X-ray, alloy casting, electrically operated looms, and magnetic separation devices for mining."

He devised instruments for developing muscular skill; he created indoor replications of weather systems; in the late 1800s he invented an electronic music synthesizer. A 1904 Synopsis of his work listed thirty-five lines of inventive research in which results had been obtained. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Elmer Gates Laboratory in Chevy Chase, MD, was the largest private laboratory in the United States.

Evidently his inventions were just by-products of his focus on mental process. He had a process he called psychotaxis, "the integrated hierarchy of sensory discriminations required to create a valid and complete mental representation of a given part of the physical world."

Gates used psychotaxis to invent. First, he would experience through each of his senses every piece of sensory data that the subject at hand could impart, letting his mind classify each datum naturally according to its perceived likeness to or difference from the other data. Having thus acquired and categorized all the subject’s sensations, he would then, in psycho-taxonomic order, recreate each sensation in his mind—moving through the series over and over until he could execute it at great speed. This might take several weeks. Finally, he would work his way through the psycho-taxonomic hierarchy of sensory associations—which associations gave rise to images, concepts, ideas, and thoughts. Repeated recollection of the psycho-taxonomic hierarchy increased the blood flow to the areas of the brain where its data were enregistered and processed. This “refunctioning” brought into dominance those neurological structures through which subconscious connections were made. The result was new insights into the subject.

Maggie Duval, another "wizard of connection," and I met yesterday and talked about a number of things, especially our evident alignment of intentions and practices and our interest in forms if economic development that benefit creative people who don't happen to wear suits and haven't learned the various secret handshakes. I'm sometimes too busy to think about the big picture, so it was nice to have a free-ranging high-level conversation with someone who is generous, spiritual, and highly creative in her thinking, especially after several days of putting out fires and focusing on specifics. I had incidentally just come from a triumphant Polycot Associates meeting, where we had finalized a document that captures our core thinking about the web presence management practice that we've been developing for the last two-plus months. Next step is to complete development on a new web site. More about that later.

Funny how a show that feels like a bomb to most people will develop a rabid following. I'm often one of the rabid, dedicated to shows that last eight episodes, the disappar – like my current favorite, the surreal "John from Cincinnati." If you like it, too, sign this petition!

I'd hate right now to be one of those scientists who're paid by oil companies to deny that the climate is changing. It's getting harder and harder to maike that case. This morning's news includes a report that there's less Arctic sea ice than ever in recorded history - which is not exactly news to those who've been paying attention; this was a story at Realclimate.org a week ago, and the New York Times also ran a piece. Meanwhile, on the effects-of-climate-change front, powerful Hurricane Dean is on course for Jamaica, and following that, Mexico near the Texas border, with 150mph maximum sustained winds and a terrible attitude.

Wikipedia entry for Sea Ice
New York Times series: "The Big Melt"

My latest Worldchanging column, Understanding blogs, has just been published.

Proponents of professional mainstream media argue the need for authoritative sources; they say that blogs don't fulfill that need because they're created by amateurs. I've discussed this at length with PR professionals and journalists, and I totally get their point. Journalism has a set of standards, practices, and ethics that supposedly ensure the authority of professional news sources. However if you've ever been close to a news story, you know that this is questionable. I've been close to many, and I've never seen a published account by a professional journalist that didn't include factual errors, and too often complete misperceptions. I would never argue against the very real value of and need for professional, tranined journalists, but I would never forget that they are human and inherently prone to error. I would argue that we should forget the myth of the authoritative source and consider the real power in having many voices, many perceptions, many records that are non-authoritative but that contribute to a clearer sense of the news. Our assessment of authority for the "truth" of any account will inevitably derive from the reputations of sources, and a professional journalist may be the more credible source, and the key provider of information and perspective. However bloggers, especially those who are experts in relevant fields, can make a signficant contribution to public perception and understanding of the world du jour.

Interesting development: professional journalists will have a social network called Publish2 where they "will be able to capture information that appeals to their interests and collaborate with other journalists in a private context." (Thanks to Ed Ward for the pointer.) [Link]

Publish2 is looking to expand on much of the groundwork that sites like Digg have created. “Digg was a real trailblazer and proved that this kind of social collaborative networking can work on a large scale and we’re looking to extend the model,” says Karp. “Digg has hit upon a certain amount of limitation with the way their open system is structured and the way it’s been dominated by its audience of young, male tech enthusiasts. What we’re aiming to do is compete with other aggregators and we’re betting that human intelligence still has superior news judgement.”

I wonder how this will compare to Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, a site for open source journalism that brings journalists together with public sources (such as bloggers or "citizen journalists").

The great surfing Doc Paskowitz has delivered fifteen surfboards to Gaza in Palestine. [Link]

His hope is that the new boards will inspire Gaza’s surfers to start manufacturing their own. “From a board comes a group of guys who ride,” he said. “From the group comes a business, then an industry, then a fantastic amount of money. I’m talking about billions, all from one board.”

That seems far-fetched for now. Since the militant group Hamas seized control of Gaza, the main commercial crossing has been closed and many local industries have collapsed.

One of the Palestinian surfers, Muhammad Jayab, described himself in the article Dr. Paskowitz had read as sympathetic to Hamas. That did not put Doc off. “To be able to go to your enemies and give them something that makes them happy is a most fulfilling adventure,” he said.

This is cool! Todd Lappin's posted images and video of vapor cones created by jets approaching Mach 1. In addition to the sonic boom, clouds may also form as this happens. Todd quotes the Astronomy Picture of the Day web site: "A leading theory is that a drop in air pressure at the plane described by the Prandtl-Glauert Singularity occurs so that moist air condenses there to form water droplets." [Link]

(I was going to embed the video, but you should go to the great Telstar Logistics site to see it... and take a look around while you're there.)

eFInance Directory has a good, and disconcerting, article about "The Dangerous Disconnect Between Home Prices and Fundamentals." They predict that home prices will fall to pre-boom levels. [Link]

Although the disconnect between home prices and home sales was not present during the housing boom, it most certainly is now. The public has either lost interest or simply can't afford to buy into the current housing market. Home sales have slowed nationally, and are down significantly in cities within California, Florida, Nevada, Michigan and Ohio.

As a result, supply has now exceeded demand in most areas. It would take several months, and in some cases years, to sell all of the homes that are currently on the market. Yet, home prices are staying level for the most part - for now. If sales do not pick up soon, home prices will most definitely begin to fall.

Weekly World News has lost its place on the rack (though the web site's still around). One of its writers, Stan Sinberg, has written a fond farewell.

As both a writer and a reader, what I loved most about the WWN was that its stories existed in a parallel universe in which literally anything could happen. Spain's most popular matador battled bunny rabbits, not bulls; after 27 futile years a scientist found a "watched pot that boils" when his wife told him he had to put water in the pots; and a judge was scolded for having a "tip jar" on his bench. Who wouldn't want to live in a world where a traffic cop is so honest he gives himself a ticket for DUI, or a minister starts a Church of the Hokey-Pokey because "for every season, there's a left foot in, and a left foot out"?

My former FringeWare partner Paco remembers our work with Bill Barker of Schwa for the cover of FringeWare Review #5, the "Stay Awake!" issue. The inspiration of the piece: an Engadget article about a "xenon-based paralysis inducer." Sez Paco,

Bill's first pitch to me about Schwa was that it was a government conspiracy for alien UFOs to use Xenon-based technology for non-lethal crowd control. In other words mass media brainwashing. Holy shit! Apparently somebody at DARPA was actually listening to us back in the 1990s. Either that, or Bill knew more back then than he could ever say in words. I'd bank on the latter.

[Link]

A Denver Westword blog, "the latest 'word," pulls together several YouTube videos with interpretations of Leo Tanguma's trippy murals at Denver International Airport. The artist himself, a Chicano from Texas, says that in his art he's trying "to be faithful to my original ideal of human dignity for all people." [Link]