A taxing task for taxonomy...

all-species.org The current passion of Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of wired.com, is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth. This project, called the All Species Inventory received its first million dollars in funding and is currently endorsed by most taxonomic groups as an idea whose time has come. It hopes to make a web-based catalog of all species on earth in one generation, or the next 25 years.

History animates map...

historicalatlas.com: "Centennia is a map-based guide to the history of Europe and the Middle East from the beginning of the 11th century to the present. It is a dynamic, animated historical atlas. Watch over 9,000 border changes occur as the map reshapes itself from one date to the next. Ouch! $90. A freeware version covering Napolean is offered."

Exit penniless...

kk.org/cooltools The last check you write should be to your undertaker… and it should bounce.
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Inheritance is a terribly inefficient way to pass wealth to others.
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You need to shift to a more flexible view of work and career, one that abandons the ultimatum of retirement - a false choice between full-time and no time…. Similarly you need to shift to a less rigid approach to earned income. No longer can you look at your earned income as continually increasing up until age sixty-five, at which pint it will stop entirely. From now on you need to approach earned income as you do unearned income. It may grow, it may be stagnant, or it may decrease, all depending on market conditions and your own choices. The best metaphor for today's pursuit of retirement is of a mass of lemmings busily struggling up a steep cliff and then jumping off the cliff into the abyss.

Whatever happened to...?

Tidbits for practical living is one of the goals of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Review. I came across Brand's incessent good advice appearing at Kevin Kelly's site. Here's a recent tidbit of hard-to-find items:

"In case you need Amazon.com's almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won't find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down these numbers for those special moments when only a human will do: 1.800.201.7575 (Toll free, US and Canada), 1.206.346.2992 or 1.206.266.2992 (Outside US and Canada), 1.877.586.3230 (Canada only)"

A camping stove from 2 pop cans...

PCTHiker.com: Pepsi-G Stove Assembly Instructions

Robotic open ocean aquaculture

unh.edu -- The recognition that the dwindling harvest of traditional fish species (cod, haddock, flounders) in New England has resulted in a regional fisheries crisis of unparalleled severity. Stocks are at record low levels, harvesters are having an increasingly difficult time making a living, products are scarce and expensive, and fisherman's cooperatives are finding it difficult to survive financially.

An article in Wired offers an intriguing overview of the latest research into automated, open ocean aquaculture. Robot caretakers would manage giant, floating fish farms that would drift between continents. This approach could eliminate problems of previous attempts at large-scale aquaculture which relied on fixed pens near the shoreline which produced huge amounts of pollution, lowered the values of shorefront real estate, and frequently failed due to overcrowding of the fish.

We all need this...

newscientist.com Unwrapping your shopping to find you have bought mouldy bread, rotten strawberries and sour milk could soon become a thing of the past thanks to a range of emerging "active packaging" technologies. While conventional packaging simply acts as a barrier that protects food, active packaging can do a lot more.

The TTI, made by Temptime of Morris Plains, New Jersey, is a label that tracks the temperature a package has been kept at and for how long. Other indicators are being developed to monitor the gases being given off inside frozen food packages to reveal if fish, meat or vegetables are rotten ­ perhaps because of a freezer breakdown. The National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson, Arkansas, has developed a plastic disc impregnated with a dye that sits inside food packaging and changes colour if telltale gases produced by decay are present. A wrapper called Intelimer changes its permeability as the temperature changes in a way that keeps different products at their optimal O2/CO2 concentrations. Toxin Alert of Mississauga, Ontario, is working on an antibody-coated sandwich wrap that changes colour if the product contains any food-poisoning bugs. And HortResearch in New Zealand is testing a package that indicates when squishy fruit like pears are ripe.

Russia's Economic Future

futurebrief.com "Did Putin come to the presidency with a well-thought out economic vision for Russia? This appears to be extremely unlikely. Ideas about how Russia should proceed most probably were a logical reaction to the economic policies of Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin the primary preoccupation was on privatization in the hope that private enterprise would encourage a reinvented ethos of entrepreneurship and the creation of a free market. It was hoped that this would eventually be an incentive for immediate economic growth. Unfortunately, this initiative did not produce the intended results.

Understanding how Yeltsin’s plan failed to deliver growth and directly led to the creation of the “oligarchs”, the new Putin Kremlin team appears to represent a more interventionist as well as statist interpretation in order to push for the realization of core economic objectives."

The Mind Virus

memecentral.com: "Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection. As memes evolve, they become better and better at distracting and diverting us from whatever we'd really like to be doing with our lives. They are a kind of Drug of the Mind. Confused? Blame it on memes."

Why McDonald's Fries Taste Good

rense.com:
Excerpt From Eric Schlosser's new book 'Fast Food Nation'.

When almond flavor -- benzaldehyde -- is derived from natural sources, such as peach and apricot pits, it contains traces of hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison. Benzaldehyde derived by mixing oil of clove and amyl acetate does not contain any cyanide. Nevertheless, it is legally considered an artificial flavor and sells at a much lower price.

Stalin's Bodyguard

amazon.com: I saw this tape in 1988, or was it 1989, in Los Angeles. It was during the period of perstroika, delivered by hand, and was represented as part of Moscow's demonstration of a new willingness to examine issues and create dialogue in the latter days of the Cold War. The old fellow interviewed on the tape, the bodyguard himself, narrates photo and film archives in a frank and revealing manner, including rare insight into the day to day life of Stalin and various parties in and about the Kremlin. For example, Stalin was so worried about assasination he prepared his own food for many years and had a padlock on his cooking pot!!

The directors and managers in Moscow that made the decision to release this footage in the midst of global tumult should be commended for their brave sense of political innovation.

After locating various production managers, only CBS expressed an interest in purchasing the rights, but backed off. Perhaps the tape is too primitive, but it's an interesting look at the aggression and intrique of the leadership of the era.

Civilization And Its Enemies

It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge. [Lee Harris]

A strong statement...

agnet:
Pesticides too harmful to use in any form, doctors warn
April 24, 2004
The Globe and Mail/National Post/CP
The link between common household pesticides and fetal defects, neurological damage and the most deadly cancers is, according to these stories, strong enough that family doctors in Ontario are urging citizens to avoid the chemicals in any form. The frightening message came yesterday when the Ontario College of Family Physicians released the most comprehensive study ever done in Canada on the chronic effects of pesticide exposure at home, in the garden and at work. The study was quoted as saying that, 'The review found consistent evidence of the health risks to patients with exposure to pesticides,' naming brain cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer and leukemia among many other acute illnesses.

Rangoon

comeuppance.org has some pictures of Rangoon, Burma - the capital of Burma until recently.

I think it was about 1986, the ruling government of Rangoon offered my partnership a building similar to this for the attractive fee of $1.00 if we would convert it into an international business hotel.

I received a call from one of my partners who had been taken on a tour with several leaders who told me they had proposed to provide us with the colonial-era officer's headquarters of the British army..

Rangoon is becoming a tourist success story for Burma even as the country struggles in political nonsense.

Tom Wright, my ol' friend...

appliedmarketanalytics.com: "World Financial Markets Are Nonstationary. This can be viewed in terms of the evolution of the structure underpinning any particular market. Moreover, any parameterization in a market model will have a half-life. That is, the usefulness of the model's parameters will decay over time. Consequently, it is essential that a market model be constructed in such a way that its parameters can adapt as market forces change. A characteristic of this phenomenon is that a model's parameters migrate in parameter space as the model adapts to modest movement in the underlying market structure."

Tom and I carried on a telephone relationship for about a year. I had introduced the leadership of a nation in the newly free USSR. Tom had brought in a fellow that we ultimately learned was fooled by Eurodollar scammers. Although the numbers and the structure of the offers sounded right, it took us some time to learn we were being scammed.

Another great friend...

eyefortransport.com: When I knew her, she was Ruth Lubow, but see what Ruth Baratta is doing now.

Now she's at the 6th North American Technology Forum -- In this double length Q&A session, a panel of top logistics executives will explain what level of technology leadership they look for from their logistics providers and how their specific IT needs are changing. Hear first-hand what technology functions shippers want to outsource to their transportation providers. Find out the technology capabilities that really make a difference when shippers choose their transportation providers. Can you force technology innovation onto your customers? Find out when customers are willing to pay for new technology.

Bill Foltz, Director of Logistics Foster Farms
Sergio Retamal Supply Base Development Manager Sun Microsystems, Inc
John Gilmour VP of Distribution and Logistics Musicland Entertainment Group Inc
Daniel Allison VP of Logistics Gymboree Corp
Earl Johnson VP of Logistics Global Motorsport Group, Inc.
Ruth Baratta -- Export/Import Manager Shaklee Corp
-- my lady of almost 13 years!!