For your listening pleasure, a compilation named A Hardness Of 10. Today is also Women In The Geosciences day, so most of the songs are performed by women. What two songs would you suggest to make this an appropriate 10-track mix?
Attempting the use of Asides again to record short stray thoughts that don’t warrant their own post. Styling this is a pain in the rear. Let’s see how it goes. Update: AsideShop is the best plugin for this – instant, create-your-own templates without the fear of mucking up your overall theme template.
It’s Earth Science Week!
Today in 2010, we have the ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, controversy over hydro-fracturing to extract hydrocarbons, coalmine explosions, poor economies and infrastructure placing our nuclear future at risk, water resources drying up and countless other resource issues that relate immediately to understanding the earth and our interaction with it. It’s quite apropos then that this year’s Earth Science Week theme is Exploring Energy. There are Events In Your Area and resources at the US Geological Survey’s website to help edumacate yourself on this elephant in the room topic. I don’t know if I’d get in a car with Bud Tuminous (Har Har) The Mascot â„¢, though. Apparently the USGS hasn’t heard of the dangers of PedoBear.
Blunt, I mean Bud
Earth Science Week is especially a great opportunity for teachers and parents to talk to young minds about where the gasoline in the car or schoolbus and gas, electric current and drinking water at home come from. To be fair to the kids, most adults think God puts gasoline in the station’s pump and that slabs of meat miraculously appear at the grocery store. The point here is that it’s going to be the next generation who will find the sustainable, renewable and affordable energy sources of the future. Even if you want them to Drill Baby Drill, think about it: there are lots fewer critical-thinking, inter-disciplinary and creative engineers and scientists coming out of our school system that are qualified to work in increasingly challenging oil and gas environments.
You can help. And write it off on your taxes, even. Please support my efforts and those of other awesome earth science blogs in the Science Bloggers for Students challenge. Whatever you give, HP will match up to $50,000. Check out the leaderboard, guys! Highly Allochthonous and Gam just shot past me. Help!
O’Reilly Radar interviews Anil Dash on the enduring power of blogs
… That was the promise we had when we all first discovered the web. Someday it would bring us all together and we’d be able to have these conversations. It’s not perfect. It’s not ideal. But in some small way here’s somebody like me — with no portfolio, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I didn’t have any fancy social connections when I started my blog — and it has opened the door to me having a conversation as a peer, as somebody taken seriously, in realms that I would have never otherwise had access to. That’s the greatest privilege in the world.
Ten or eleven years of blogging and I still don’t have any fancy social connections, just really tight ones, and sure hope no one takes me seriously unless I ask you to, but Anil Dash reminds me why some of us started doing this. Just to talk. And, maybe someone – a kindred spirit or worthy adversary – would hear us. Or not. Whatever.
For the first four years of this blog’s existence, it had no commenters. In the last six, I’ve made excellent friends, individually and in often-intersecting groups, online and in meatspace. (Apparently, the intersection of desi, geology/science and New Orleans is where it’s at. Two turn tables and a rock hammer.)
The blog is what it is. Most days, the posts write themselves. On others, I heave something up there to justify the hosting fees and to prove that I’m not gone. The conversation, the meaningful exchange, the smack talk, even the quiet diary, is always here to be had, though, and that’s what keeps this medium evergreen and attractive.
Communication. Opinion. Access. Exchange. Democracy. This is what blogging symbolizes to me and why Net Neutrality is more important than ever.
Last week, the Canadian branch of Campbell’s Soup announced that they were making the horrific, outrageous decision to create a product that would appeal to tens of thousands of consumers. As you know, nothing gets in the way of capitalism so the right wing would be thrilled about this venture into oh man I almost had you there.
Fifteen percent of Americans are living in poverty, and there’s a call to stop eating soup because the company that makes it is trying to get more people to eat it. I’m worried about the death toll if someone ever declares that oxygen has a liberal bias.
This reminds me of the time back in the mid to late 80s when my mom suddenly couldn’t find her favorite hair color in stores because Clairol’s parent company at the time, Bristol Myers Squibb, made the horrible mistake of naming a Jewish CEO and/or manufacturing some of their products in Israel, so Kuwait halted all imports and outlawed Miss Clairol. America, please let’s get as dumb as the people we despise and see how far that takes us.
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No Halal Soup For You is just as nauseating as this asshole who openly proclaims that he hopes “the flag of Islam will fly over the White House.” And the nation’s loud and proud secularists blog/tweet/scream not a damned thing about it, while the Christian right comes back with, “Nuh uh, it will be our flag.” Before wingnuts of all stripes and their media lapdogs quickly warp this narrative into the Christian vs. Muslim domination of America (and you get on a no-winning-side side of it), let us bring it back to what it ought to be – religious ideology vs. the founding principles and future relevance of this nation – and fight from there. See above paragraphs. I did not leave Kuwait for America only to witness the same ignorant, fundamentalist dick-measuring contest unfold here. So take your home-grown and imported zealotry and shove it. There is no room for it in civilization. Who’s with me?
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Data converging rapidly to show that each time someone writes HERE IN AMERICA WE SPEAK ENGLISH, their next sentence will be grossly misspelled. I kin speek Merkin.
