Just when we were getting absolutely sick of clear blue skies and 85 degree temperatures every day, the hills above Goleta (in Santa Barbara county, where we’re spending July) are burning. Fortunately the winds are negligible this week so the fire isn’t spreading as fast as the killer Painted Cave fire that happened here eighteen years ago. But it is messing up the program, sunset-wise.
Link: He Said, She Said - Which Is It? Facebook Asks
Social network site Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as “they” or “themself.”
The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances.
But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months.
Horse hockey. This has nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with contextual advertising.
Link: Dutch prepare for Maya apocalypse
On December 21 2012, the “Long Count” calendar of the Maya people clicks over to year zero, marking the end of a 5,000-year era.
Belying their country’s rational and laid back image, thousands of Dutch people are convinced the date coincides with a world catastrophe, the Volkskrant newspaper reports.
Petra Faile and her husband have bought a life raft and other survival equipment in preparation for Armageddon.
“In another four years it will all be over,” she said.
“You know maybe it’s really not that bad that the Netherlands will be destroyed. I don’t like it here any more.”
Mrs Faile said she was concerned that immigration was pushing the Netherlands, a low lying country protected by dikes and sea walls, beneath the waves.
“They keep letting people in. And then we have to build more houses, which makes the Netherlands even heavier. The country will sink even lower, which will make the flooding worse,” she said.
This is one of those superstitions that actually make me happy because it causes rubes to take random actions that I can then capitalize upon. I’ve always wanted to own a second home in that part of the world and with thousands of moronic xenophobes now giving up their homes because of a Mayan (aka Mexican! Oh the irony!) prophecy, I’m now looking to beat the U.S. home mortgage crisis by picking up a nice cottage in Amsterdam. Economic Darwinism at work!
I am having fun with the family in Santa Barbara. I’m keeping a normal work schedule (juggling three big projects for clients at the moment) and taking a summer school class. In my spare time, I am teaching my children how to eat sand. Mmm, nutritious sand.
I’m posting photos from our summer trip to Santa Barbara on Flickr. Today we hit the annual Solstice Parade, which is like a combination mobile hippie drum circle, dance-a-thon and doo-dah parade. Very community, weird and non-corporate, just the kind of parade I like.
At a High School for Immigrants, the Prom is a Brave New World
Sweet and touching story of a high school prom at a Brooklyn school comprised of recent immigrants.
Continental Cuts 3,000 Jobs as It Grounds Planes - NYTimes.com
Continental’s move, which equals a 16 percent reduction in its capacity, had been rumored in industry circles on Wednesday. The details came in a message to employees from Continental’s chief executive Lawrence W. Kellner and its president, Jeffrey A. Smisek.
“The airline industry is in a crisis,” the two executives said in the message to employees. “Its business model doesn’t work with the current price of fuel and the existing level of capacity in the marketplace. We need to make changes in response.”
It is about time that these airlines realize that charging for tickets is a horribly outdated business model. I’m looking forward to the airlines switching their business model to a pure CPC advertising model, where you click on a flight attendant when you see an ad you like, or perhaps a freemium model where you board the plane for free and can pay halfway through the flight if you like the service. If you choose not to pay, you must complete the rest of the flight while seated in the lavatory, or perhaps they eject you with a parachute (which is also sold onboard for a nominal additional charge).
Link: Already, Obama and McCain Map Fall Strategies
In a sign of what could be an extremely unusual fall campaign, the two sides said Saturday that they would be open to holding joint forums or unmoderated debates across the country in front of voters through the summer. Mr. Obama, campaigning in Oregon, said that the proposal, floated by Mr. McCain’s advisers, was “a great idea.”
A bit part of the unusual-ness is that this campaign is seeing the final few nails driven into the coffin of corporate television news.
It seems likely that the decision to do unmoderated debates could have also been informed by the three-ring circus that George Stephanopoulos turned the last debate into.
Had a spectacular afternoon at the pool with my son today. The pool was crowded but the weather was perfect. And taking him to the pool is always a joy because this kid loves to swim. He jumps into the pool with no encouragement and he loves to dunk himself under the water (particularly amazing since he’s not quite two years old).
A Speck of Sunlight Is a Town’s Yearly Alarm Clock
“Elke Morgner and Allison Bailey, two graduate students at the research institute here, were hacking through ice six miles outside of Longyearbyen this week to take measurements from the underlying tundra when they saw a sliver of sunlight peek around a mountain. Despite temperatures of 4 below (-40 with wind chill), they put down their tools and stared.
“As they worked, the shaft of light grew to fill a large swath of the valley. On their way home, they made a beeline with their snowmobiles for the light. And there it was, between two mountains: the sun.
“‘Look at it!’ they shouted in unison. ‘Look at it!’ The scientists hugged, did little jigs in the snow, and then stood motionless, awe-struck. Back on campus in town, advance reports about the solar spotting filtered in, and other students headed off on snowmobiles to check it out.”
This NY Times story about a small Norwegian town located 600 miles from the North Pole celebrating the arrival of sunlight after months of darkness is like true-life science fiction.
My Links
