Taking Flight

Today we are taking an enormous step forward for The Personal Bee. We are still quite a long way from regularly scheduled service (to stick with the flight metaphor for a moment) -- but we hope to get there in about a month. This is more like the test flight of an experimental aircraft -- click through to experience The Personal Bee. That's experimental, as in, fly with caution! And, just like experimental aircraft, all the features that you'd want aren't finished - just the bare bones.

Even so, I think if you take the time to look around you'll find that we have done some very interesting things. Part of our focus is on how people can use the Bee to discover news, and then share that news with colleagues and friends. So we have built something that we call a "Personal Bee Reading List." As you read articles and see ones that you'd like to recommend you can tag the article, write a comment, and click a radio button and we'll export the article to your blog or website using a short piece of javascript. We call this a widget and there are a couple of them, detailed here:

http://www.personalbee.com/bee_manual_widget.php

In this first version you can create a Bee account and subscribe to a small collection of public bees (created and managed by a volunteer group of beekeepers). The next step will be to add the ability for you as a reader to have your own RSS feeds included... over time we'll keep building on this structure and will eventually allow anyone to create a private or public bee edition. And you'll be able to construct your own personal newspaper...

So remember, when you go and take a look, this is NOT a beta... we are far from being ready for a beta! This is an experimental aircraft that we offer to those of you with a sense of adventure, interested in seeing some new ideas and sharing your thoughts with us.

Take Care of Freedom And Truth Will Take Care of Itself

It was a wonderful treat to hear Richard Rorty on KQED's "Forum" radio program yesterday. Rorty is one of the greatest living philosophers. Yesteday he was speaking about a new book of interviews that has just been published, entitled Take Care of Freedom And Truth Will Take Care of Itself. The basic idea behind this phrase is that in an open society, in which there is true freedom of speech and freedom of the press, there will be a marketplace of ideas in which the ones closest to "truth" will be the most successful. And when those freedoms are abridged, that we tend to see despotism and tyranny emerge, and we move further from "truth."

To illustrate his point, Rorty pointed to the past 200 years of western civilization as being a period of enormous moral progress. The freedom of speech that the US constitution and the French Revolution promoted provided for a series of events unparalleled in human history -- the elimination of slavery, universal male suffrage followed by female suffrage, anti-rascist organizations, pro-equality movements, anti-homophobic movements...

It was interesting to hear Rorty refer to this as a series of objective moral triumphs. While it is a position I feel comfortable agreeing with, it is one that would not resonate with religious fundamentalists - here or abroad.

The day before, I was listening to an NPR report on the Hamas victory in Palestinian elections. A senior Hamas politician was being interviewed and was asked about the need for economic connections to the west. The politician spoke of his ambitions to restore tourism to the Gaza strip but said it would not be the "debased tourism of the west." He spoke of a trip to the US in the early 1990s in which he saw "men and women together on the beaches, which is simply not allowed." And he described what he had witnessed as "the behavior of animals."

It was interesting to hear in this man's words and in his tone of voice the clear sense of cultural superiority that he feels his fundamentalist Muslim views provides him over what he seems to feel is a debased and morally bankrupt West. Of course he is not a product of a free and open society, nor are the conditions of Gaza and the West Bank ones which would foster a helpful and pluralistic attutude toward one's fellow man (toward, for example, the Israeli's).

But this makes it even more confusing when we look at our own brand of religious fundamentalists here in the United States. Presumably the evangelical Christians have grown up in the same environment that I have -- one which has provided for free speech and freedom of the press. And one in which their choices for how and where to live have not brought persection. And yet in many ways, these individuals express the same tone of cultural superiority that Hamas expresses. And the same desire to reform secular society to match their non-secular beliefs.

Rorty was asked in the interview about the rise of fundamentalists in the US and gave an honest answer -- "It is something I don't understand." He said, "sociologists will tell you that the evolution of urbanized human societies in the west ought to proceed in a fairly parallel manner." But in Europe there is no such religious revival, so why do we have it here in America? Rorty continued, "in Europe, since the enlightenment, there has been broad agreement that religious tolerance is a critical part of being able to live together in our urban environment. And a general dispostion to keep religious matters and civil affairs entirely separate."

But here in the US some now openly refer to our country as a "Christian Nation" which immediately suggests a prejudice against other religions. Rorty points out that 30 years ago, this wouldn't have been possible.

In thinking about this, I wonder if an answer can be found in the unintended consequences of the race wars and forced desegregation that our nation's urban centers experienced in the 1960s. The re-segregation of America through white suburbs, ringing the old urban centers, un-did generations of urban evolution. The fact that we have so much open space in our country and our love of the automobile simply made this re-segregation that much easier. And what happens in these suburbs? It is much easier for a group of like minded people to close themselves off from the marketplace of ideas, and live entirely within a world of their own closed ideas and information. Living in the city, riding public transportation, eating and shopping in diverse social environments it becomes impossible to close out competing ideas and information. But in the suburbs, you can isolate yourself (and your children) from differences, and the need to be tolerant of these differences.

So perhaps Rorty and the sociologists are right -- that the evolution of urbanized societies in the west IS parallel. After all, the "blue" states are the ones that are the most urbanized. But the difference in the US is that we continue to have a large non-urbanized population and thus a population that has no need for or interest in the enlightenment and its separation of religious belief from a tolerant secular civil society.

Nick Douglas on Silicon Valley Gossip

According to this morning's SiliconBeat, some guy named "Nick Douglas" is moving to Silicon Valley to become a gossip columnist about the technology industry... but who the heck is Nick Douglas?

Kevin Kelly on the WWW

An old article by Kevin Kelly, re-dredged up by the blog Sentient Development, caught my attention today. Here is the quote in particular:

Ultimately, as the Web becomes more brain-like, it will be a near-literal extension of our own minds. "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know," writes Kelly. "We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy."

To which I reacted - gee, I already do feel like I had a lobotomy when disconnected from the web. I have already given up so many parts of my memory to the idea that "oh, I can just find it again when I need it" that when I can't get online, I feel claustrophobic, irritated, dull-witted... OK, maybe I feel those things at other times too :-) But seriously, the trends that Kelly talks about are already at work...

Here is the Sentient Develoment post

And the original Kevin Kelly article

A risk of total collapse

"We would be foolish to take for granted the permanence of our fragile global civilisation," writes Dylan Evans in a thoughtful and sobering commentary, the full text of which you can read on the Guardian website. Dr. Ralph Metzner, co-president and founder of the Green Earth Foundation goes even further in his reply, posted here on the non-prophet website. He writes:

In one respect, though, I have already left the company of the “intelligent and credible”, since I don’t think civilizational collapse is possible — I say it is happening now. Even as we read each other’s e-mail, and drink to the New Year. That deadly duo of monsters — resource depletion and overpopulation -- are killing off vast areas of biosphere.

Both articles are worth reading...

The Personal Bee

Many of you reading this know that I have been hard at work on a new project, The Personal Bee. While we are far from ready to open our doors for visits, I thought I'd start writing a bit about the ideas that are driving this new business. We have also created a blog specifically about all things Personal Bee-related which you can find at http://personalbee.blogs.com and I have my own work related blog over there at http://personalbee.blogs.com/ted.

So what is the Bee? It is an attempt to rethink the traditional relationship between the people and processes involved in the production and consumption of news and information.

Maybe the best starting point is a little of the history of how I got here...

The Internet has had this amazing capacity to transform the way we think about media. From my earliest interactions with the Internet (in the late 1980's at the University of Chicago) I have been thinking about how this technology is transforming communications and society.

While working for a first wave Internet startup, WhoWhere, in the mid-1990s I had my first opportunity to really participate in this tranformation. The mission of WhoWhere was to build a suite of Internet based tools to allow people to find, connect, and communicate with each other. At the time our "communicate" tool was a personal home pages portal that we acquired (Angelfire). We had a lot of ideas about how we wanted to evolve this technology but (sadly) most of these ideas were never implemented by our acquirer, Lycos.

Some years later, after I had joined the executive team at Borland, I encountered the idea of blogging. I wrote my first Blogger post on August 8, 2000. I called my first blog "My life, as bizarre as that may seem." While I have removed the blog from public access, it still exists in the limbo of the Google/Blogger database. Here is my first post:

This is a first entry in my personal "diary" - I am trying out a new web site called blogger which is supposed to give me the ability to create a running log of comments to my site. We'll see how well that works!

I remember my feeling of excitement as I started to play with the rudimentary blogging tools. I thought to myself, this is the first truly new thing I have seen on the Internet for a long time! It also seemed like an interesting continuation of the kinds of things we had been doing with personal home pages through WhoWhere. Blogging was the next logical step in creating a medium for people to get news and information out into the world without the filter of publishers.

But the strength of blogging is also its weakness in that it only addresses one part of the dynamic -- it fractalized the writing component of the news production process, but did little to update the editorial and publishing sides of the media business. In addition, the ability to comment on blog posts (and more recently, trackback) has started to change the dynamic between readers and writers, but there is still much to be done here as well.

In 2004 I was introduced to a very interesting print publication called "The Week" which summarizes the top news from around the world and, in a thoughtful and useful format, presents this summary in a weekly magazine. This model seemed to me to be applicable to narrower topic domains and as a test of this idea I created a technology blog called IP Inferno in May of 2004. Here is a link to the first month of my posts to this blog.

As an explanation of the site's mission I wrote that IP Inferno would be,

The news, what the pundits said, and selections from bloggers... A complete roundup of news and current events on VoIP, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, mobile telephony and computing, and advanced IP applications.

I originally thought that I would create this type of vertically focused news portal for a number of different topics and I went so far as to create a Typepad account and sites on gadgets and investing. But the work of collecting the news, organizing it for presentation, and commenting on it in interesting ways proved to be too burdensome (if I was also going to have a day job). While I have kept up with IP Inferno off and on over the past two years, it has more often been as a writer contributing new material to the world of VoIP then as a news summarizer a la "The Week."

Nicholas Chim, then an associate with MDV in Menlo Park, started work on what we now call "The Personal Bee" early in 2005. His goal was to create a tool for himself, to help him sort through vast quantities of information that MDV partners wanted him to track on a wide variety of technology topics. He set up an account for me in May of 2005, but I didn't do much with the Bee at that time as I was busy with my job at Orb. But when that came to an end in August of last year, I stopped by to see Nick and chat about his idea.

I immediately saw something quite a bit different in Nick's product from his original vision of a reader's tool for aggregating and sorting through news. While the Bee could serve that need as well, I saw a set of tools that would automate the hardest part of the tasks that I had encountered in creating IP Inferno and a platform that would allow anyone to painlessly publish a vertical news portal on a narrow topic of their choosing. I saw the beginning of an ecosystem between readers, editors, and writers...

This has been a lot of background on how I came to be involved with The Personal Bee. For more on what it is today, and where it is headed, go over to my blog on the Bee site...

Kurzweil Interviews Himself

Read this fascinating "self-interview" of Ray Kurzweil author of "The Singularity is Near." From the interview, what is the Singularity?

"We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity."

Nanobot Knees

I have finished reading, but not digesting, Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The most startling part of the book for me actually comes in the exploration of metaphysical questions, not the issue of our transcending biology.

As a student at the University of Chicago I took a graduate course in Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his least read and least understood books. I remember the course only vaguely but one of the things that stands out is the instructor's consisent counseling to us about how we needed to read this text very differently from Aristotle's other works. While couched in the same kind of what we might now call "scientific" language that Aristotle's other works are known for, the Metaphysics nonetheless has a very different subject matter. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle is trying to explore why the universe is the way we find it to be... one might even call Aristotle's work in this area a kind of religious text because it ultimately must rely on unknowable conjectures.

Similarly Kurzweil goes out on a limb of his own in speculating about where the universe has come from and where it may be headed. While thought provoking, what is strange to me is that Kurzweil would find it necessary to explore these issues in this manner, as the answers to the questions he poses are not essential to the fundamental argument he is making about the coming "singularity."

To illustrate this other point he is making, which is about how humans are evolving now into something radically different, I have invented something I call Nanobot Knees. I thought of this example while running this morning...

Runners know that their knees are one of the fragile links between their bodies capability and their chosen form of exercise. As we grow older, our knees are one of the first parts of our biological system that causes problems. Thus a wide variety of shoes have been developed to help runners improve the likelihood that they will still be running in the future, by reducing the strain on our knees. This is the first step in "transcending our biology" - the use of prosthesis to extend our bodiy's natural capability. We can also see that this is what defines us as tool makers - the ability to extend our natural abilities through tools. Swords extend the reach of our arms, cars extend our feet, phones our voice...

But at some point our knees give out anyway and we have the option of quitting the daily run (and suffering the health consequences of reduced activity). We then have the option of surgical processes which can "repair" the damage done by time and stress. This is a much newer expression of our tool making behavior -- and has snuck up on us so we don't think of it as making us different from our forefathers. Prosthesis was the first phase of humans impacting their own evolution -- this has been going on for 100,000 years (or whenever the first club was lifted from the ground) while this second phase of medical operations have really only been around (in any form) for a few thousand (from the first attempts to remedy injuries through drugs or procedures).

What Kurzweil is proposing is a third phase which accelerates us beyond prosthesis and medicine and into something entirely new. To stick with the knee example, Kurzweil is suggesting that in the next few decades we will have the technical ability to augment our knees using nanotechnology -- manufactured miniature machines - tools - which we use like medicine to correct (and enhance) our bodies. Imagine that the very molecular structure of the knee could be replaced with a material that was stronger and more durable. What runner wouldn't jump at the opportunity to eliminate the possibility of knee injuries?

What sounds entirely reasonable and acceptable when applied to a runner's knee, might sound very different when you apply this same logical progression to the brain. But this is the heart of Kurzweil's surprising prediction -- that we will be augmenting our brains (and our bodies for that matter) in the next few decades. Using nanotechnology on our bodies, people alive today, in their 40s and 50s, will have the ability to extend their lifetimes first, through biotechnology and then through nanotechnology. The key, Kurzweil points out, is to live long enough to take advantage of the technologies currently in development. Using nanotechnology to extend our brains, however, does more than just extend our lifetimes. It fundamentelly shifts what we are as human beings.

Imagine for a moment the "what if?" of everyone simply being capable of enhancing themselves to known human limits -- as smart as Einstein, as creative as Mozart... equivalent to making my knee as good as it could possibly be... That prospect is daunting enough. A world full of Einsteins? But now what happens when we go beyond? And Kurzweil suggests that we will go far beyond -- that this is the natural next evolutionary step as human beings.

Reasonable people can differ with Kurzweil on the rate at which these technologies will be made available at all, if not just to the super-weathly. And the ability to modify our brains certainly seems further out than modifying our bodies. But just the prospect of using technology (even without nanotechnology) to extend our lives brings up an important question for those of us young enough to benefit -- what should we be doing today to remain as healthy as possible, and to amass as much wealth as possible (in case these therapies are still expensive when we need them) in order to radically extend our lifetimes? If you throw out the idea that we will die "of natural causes" at 80-100, and suddenly suggest that there are things that we can do today which will double that lifespan (or more), shouldn't we be doing these things?

Kurzweil goes on to suggest that it is possible to "live long enough" that you can "live forever..." and if you go to that radical extreme and question the entire process of human ageing and death, you really have thrown yourself back into a whole set of metaphysical questions. So perhaps it isn't so strange for Kurzweil to a bit like Aristotle grasping at unknowable conjectures.

Sad but True Department

It appears that social conservatives (who unfortunately seem to be running our country) would rather have our children get cancer than have sex... or maybe they actually think that kids who have sex should get cancer... What the heck am I talking about? The fight in Washington is over whether or not a new vaccine against the virus that is the leading cause of cervical cancer should be broadly available to our children. As father to three children, all girls I WOULD PREFER THEM TO HAVE SEX. It might be a mistake, and they might regret it later, but at least they won't DIE! It isn't enough to just vaccinate my own children, although clearly we will do this. Anyone they might make the mistake of having sex with should be vaccinated as well! We can eliminate the virus if vaccination is mandatory. Polio is a useful case study...

Excerpt from the article:

Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many
conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a
subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage. Several leading
groups that promote abstinence are meeting this week to formulate official
policies on the vaccine.

Debate rages on use of cervical cancer vaccine / While almost 100% effective, some contend use condones teen sex

BofA is Evil

Add to my list of evil corporations Bank of America. For the past several years I have used a very good independent bill payment service called Paytrust (which is now owned by Intuit). One of the features of this service is that it balances my checking account by logging into my online checking accounts and scraping all of the transactions. However BofA has decided to put a stop to this. Supposedly this is an attempt at solving the widespread "phishing" problem. But as this post:

News.com

points out, the BofA solution is no solution (quoted below). So are they really just trying to close out third party bill payment services? I have been asking that question as often and as loudly as I can to any BofA person I can get on email and phone and the VERY suspicious answer that they are all trained to give me is, "would you like to try BofA's bill payment service?"

Note to BofA - you are now going to lose my business.

Here is that explanation for why SiteKey doesn't help solve the phishing problem:

The problem is that the BofA server doesn't know how to distinguish a valid user's PC. A zombie machine that was hacked to be false store-front could easily appear to BofA to be a valid user PC.

So... what if the false store-front brokers the entire transaction to the BofA server? That would appear to be completely valid transaction to the server and it would deliver a session cookie, along with the image, back to the false store-front.

The false store-front simply relays the image and authentication page back to the victim, who is none the wiser. He still believes he's talking to the real server because he's getting all of the proper SiteKey data.

Hanging Fire

How did I get to be almost 40 years old and I have never heard the expression "hanging fire" with respect to bills in congress close to the end of a term... I have to assume that this is a common expression -- not less than 5 times in the last 2 hours have I heard someone on NPR (including Lehrer newshour, Marketplace, and All Things Considered) use the phrase...

I found it rather difficult to get a good definition and history of the phrase searching the web via Google, but came across a number of interesting things along the way. The most succint was Allwords:

Idiom: hang fire

To delay taking action.
Thesaurus: delay, procrastinate, stall, stop, vacillate, wait, hang back; Antonym: press on.

To cease to develop or progress.

Allwords.com Definition of hang

Which does not, unfortunately, provide the etymology. Word for Word started me down the right path however:

Hang fire with the polysyllabicsFANS of plain English are not always fans of thesauruses, because they can prompt novice writers to use needless polysyllabics. But they do have their uses (that's the thesauruses, not the fans of plain English . . . no, hang on, they have their uses too).

Reader Terry Carroll (carrollt@netcom.com) had been having trouble finding a definition of the phrase hang fire: "I'm unable to find it in a dictionary," he writes, "but from context, I gather that it refers to a project that has been postponed through procrastination. But why hang fire?" Smaller (meaning household) dictionaries are likely to miss phrases such as this, but a thesaurus gives a clue. It lists hang fire alongside misfire, flash in the pan and fizzle out - all terms relating to gunnery or musketry. When a soldier lit the fuse in a cannon there could be quite a delay until the charge ignited, and this was known as hanging fire. Similarly a flash in the pan related to a failed attempt to fire a flintlock musket, when the flint produced a spark in the priming pan but did not ignite the charge.

Word for Word

Which led me to this fun excerpt from Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad..."

And the great sash they wear in many a fold around their waists has two or three absurd old horse-pistols in it that are rusty from eternal disuse-- weapons that would hang fire just about long enough for you to walk out of range, and then burst and blow the Arab's head off.

The Innocents Abroad by Twain, Mark

hang fire - definition of hang fire by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

And now back to work!

We are Losing the Robot Race

Almost exactly two years ago I wrote about the first version of Sony's Asimo, here on this Blog in a post entitled "Are We Losing the Robot Race?" With the recent unveiling of Asimo 2.0 one can only conclude that the answer is a loud YES... The movies of Asimo in motion are astonishing:

http://asimo.honda.com/inside_asimo_movies.asp

And Honda is hard at work on Asimo 3.0

I might as well just repeat myself from 2 years ago and then start thinking about what I can do to change the situation...

Many have argued that humanoid shaped robots are not particularly useful by comparison to industrial robots where most US researchers have focused. Solving the complicated problems of making a machine move like a human being doesn't help with any of the heavy industrial problems for which most robots are utilized.

This narrow view of robots ignores the basic premise that Honda and Sony are successfully focused on -- that everything in our world is designed to accomodate a human frame and human hands. If robots are going to play a useful role in an everyday human world, they will have to move and look something like human beings.

Robot manufacturing will be one of the 21st centuries biggest industries. As the world's largest economy we ignore this market at our own peril.

Ted Shelton: Are We Losing the Robot Race?

technorati tags: Asimo, Robot, Honda

Evolving Content Model Online

I was intrigued by the comments on Paid Content regarding the current Digital Magazine conference --

Digital Magazine Forum: 'Compete With Google' class="nav">[by Dorian] [by Dorian Benkoil] Michael Loeb, the CEO of Synapse Group, the largest seller of magazine subscriptions in the US and now owned by Time-Warner, recommended in a Q session of his keynote address that the magazine industry come up "with a competitive response" to Google and keep them from "getting the information for free."

PaidContent.org: December 01, 2005 Archives

Dorian goes on to talk of her interaction in the forum with the speaker, in particular when he denigrated Blogs (like PaidContent, which does a great job by the way).

To me the interesting question that magazines should be asking is how consumers actually want to receive their content and how do they stay relevant in an Internet focused consumption model. These are questions that cannot be answered from the perspective of traditional publishing models, as one needs to rethink the relationship between author, editor, publisher, and reader in order to envision a new ecosystem...

Focusing on Google getting "information for free" entirely misses the boat...

The new plaze to find the technorati

That is technorati like glitterati, not like the blog search engine... Lately I have been playing with Plazes more and more and having fun seeing who is on line and who is nearby... I just discovered this list of top users:

http://beta.plazes.com/topusers/

1.		Tantek	Technorati	add Friend	389/15
2.		harmen	Steele Hacienda	add Friend	159/3
3.		falloutboy	-	add Friend	138/9
4.		Joi	-	add Friend	121/13
5.		cyprien	-	add Friend	119/7

I am not surprised that Tantek and Joi are in the top 5 -- an interesting collection of early adopters... I am going to have to get busy if I want to be in this august company... over 50 combined Plazes discovered and invitations accepted just to make the top 20...

And is that really THE Michael Moore as #20?

No profile online, so its hard to say...

Additional Prius Complaints

Also worth noting that a number of drivers complain that the Prius doesn't perform anything like advertised... Here are some articles at Consumer Affairs...

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/toyota_prius.html

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/hybridwatch01.html

For the record, our VW Golf diesel performs as advertised - over 40 MPG

technorati tags: prius, hybrid, biodiesel

Should you get a Prius?

A friend recently asked me if I thought he should lease a Prius for a few years. I wrote a detailed email back to him and he made the suggestion that I post the answer here on my blog for others to read... so here goes!

It really depends upon your objective -- are you interested in good gas mileage? are you interested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

The Prius really isn't the best at any of these. I think the only thing the Prius DOES have going for it is that it is universally associated with the idea of hybrids and thus, by extension, with environment friendliness...

The basic problem with hybrids today is that it is a closed loop -- the gas engine recharges the batteries. So in general terms total energy efficiency is necessarily lower than if you just burned the gas straight away -- that is, there is necessary energy loss in the storage and reuse... So the entire "efficiency" of hybrids comes at one place - the stoplight. Gas vehicles burn away gas at the stoplight without any gain. Hybrids shut off the motor altogether, thus "saving" the energy otherwise lost at stoplights. So if you do a lot of stop and go city driving, a Hybrid could save gas and reduce pollutants... Now, if Hybrid manufacturers allowed you to plug the car into the grid at night you could avoid using gas to recharge the batteries (at least for short trips)... but for marketing reasons they won't do this -- consumers in their view are fearful of having to plug in their cars...

But if you do a lot of freeway driving, you have better options. Check:

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/

First look at Hybrids from Toyota vs. Honda:

Toyota Prius:
City: 60 Hwy: 51 Tons of greenhouse gases/yr: 3.50

Honda Insight (Manual) Hybrid:
City: 60 Hwy: 66 Tons of greenhouse gases/yr: 3.10
*The insight does better in Hwy driving due to its aerodynamic design. You choose a manual transmission over an automatic because it weighs significantly less...

But then compare to the diesel VW Golf:
City: 38 Hwy: 46 Tons of greenhouse gases/yr: 5.2
The reason that Hwy is better than city here, as with most cars, is that the city driving MPG is hurt by all of that stop and go driving.

One thing that the "greenhouse gas" calculation on the US Gov website does not take into consideration is that diesel produces a different mix of gases than burning gasoline -- but leave that aside for the moment and look at the greenhouse gas number though in the context of using biodiesel instead of gas:

http://www.biodiesel.org/

http://www.epa.gov/otaq/models/biodsl.htm

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/13/BAG0GEMQEJ1.DTL

While Nitrous Oxide increases by about 10% at 100% biodiesel, the key greenhouse gases - CO and HC are reduced by 50% and 70% respectively - far outweighing the increased fuel efficiency of gas-hybrid cars.

What we really need is a biodiesel-hybrid car that you can plug into the grid... OK what we really need is hydrogen cars with personal refueling stations powered by rooftop solar energy...

In the meantime though, your best bet for gas is a manual transmission Honda Insight. Best bet for reducing greenhouse gases (and dependency on the middle east) is a VW Golf Diesel.

Lest you think that finding biodiesel is hard, here is a guide to finding a refueling station in the bay area:

http://biodieselfinder.ning.com/

OK... only three stations right now... but its growing! :-)

Here is a nationwide map:

http://www.biodiesel.org/buyingbiodiesel/retailfuelingsites/default.shtm

You might also be interested in this new book, Biodiesel America: How to Achieve Energy Security, Free America from Middle-East Oil Dependence and Make Money Growing Fuel

http://biodieselamerica.org/biosite/index.php?id=10,283,0,0,1,0

technorati tags: prius, hybrid, biodiesel

"Bulls**t Bingo"

A friend sent the rules this morning -- always handy...

Do you keep falling asleep in meetings and seminars? What about those long and boring conference calls?

Here's a way to change all of that.

1. Before (or during) your next meeting, seminar, or conference call, prepare yourself by drawing a square. (I find that 5" x 5" is a good size.)
2. Divide the card into columns - five across and five down. That will give you 25 one-inch blocks.
3. Write one of the following words/phrases in each block:synergy
   
   • strategic fit
   • core competences
   • best practice
   • bottom line
   • revisit
   • expeditious
   • to tell you the truth (or "the truth is")
   • 24/7
   • out of the loop
   • benchmark
   • value-added
   • pro-active
   • win-win
   • think outside the box
   • fast track
   • result-driven
   • empower (or empowerment)
   • knowledge base
   • at the end of the day
   • touch base
   • mind-set
   • client focus(ed)
   • paradigm
   • game plan
   • leverage
4. Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words/phrases.
5. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout "BULLSHIT!"
   

Testimonials from satisfied "Bullshit Bingo" players:

"I had been in the meeting for only five minutes when I won." - Adam, Atlanta

"My attention span at meetings has improved dramatically." - David, Florida

"What a gas! Meetings will never be the same for me after my first win." -Dan, New York City

"The atmosphere was tense in the last process meeting as 14 of us waited for the fifth box." - Ben, Denver

"The speaker was stunned as eight of us screamed 'BULLSHIT!' for the third time in two hours." - Paul, Cleveland

"When I won and yelled "BULLSHIT!" the woman sleeping next to me slid off her chair!" - Joseph, Los Angeles

and of course there are great web resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo

Generate your own Bingo card:

http://www.bullshitbingo.net/

And in German:

http://www.hirschbeutel.de/bullshit_bingo.html

Fun, fun fun!

technorati tags: boring, meetings, bullshit bingo

Internet Ad Revenue

Analysts have just reported that Internet advertising has hit an all time high of over $3 Billion for the third quarter of 2005. This is the first time that total Internet ad spending has been this high:

Internet advertising hit its last similar milestone -- $2 billion in revenues -- back in the second quarter of 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst.

Internet Ad Revenues Exceed $3B/Quarter

Total ad revenue for 2005 is now projected to top $12 Billion... well ahead of analysts projections. Remember those bad old days in the depths of the bust, say back in 2003:

For the full year, the Internet advertising industry took in $6.0 billion in revenue in 2002, a 16 percent slide from the year before.

Online Ad Rebound Underway

Now to put this in perspective, US newspaper advertising in the third quarter of 2005 was over $11 Billion and U.S. total advertising spending will be $277.5 billion for the year. Check out the table here:

http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/advertising/article.php/5941_2234931#table

So it is safe to say that Internet advertising has a lot of room to grow...

Plazes - Cool or Scary?

Have you seen the new location tracking system called Plazes? I haven't decided if it is cool or scary... Here is the URL for my "public tracking" page -- http://beta.plazes.com/whereis/TedShelton

And yes, for those of you who actually know, that isn't actually where my house is on Claremont Avenue... I deliberately obfuscated my home location... I mean, its a nice idea to see where I am, but let every crazy in the world know? I'm not ready for that...

No Commentary Required

“It is time for the United States to tell the truth about this attack and to take responsibility for its actions, which appear to be [a] gross violation of international humanitarian law,” said Aidan White, general secretary of the IFJ.

FT.com / World / Middle East Africa - Qatar shock at al-Jazeera bombing report