JWhiting.com

The future is now.

The New York Times has an excellent piece up about:

[the world’s] first secure, deep-frozen repository for backup supplies of seeds from hundreds of thousands of plant varieties that underpin agriculture

I know I’m a sucker for apocalyptic end-times talk but you’ve got to admire human ingenuity when we’re doing stuff like this.

The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact).

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s official site is here.

I was in Denmark recently and fell head-over-heels in love with the tiny country of 5 million people that seem to be living in the future in almost every way possible.

One of the things you notice as you drive around the Danish countryside is the awesome amount of wind turbines everywhere. I learned that because Denmark took Kyoto seriously, they became a world leader in this type of technology and that more than 20% of their electrical grid is now supplied by wind power (from turbines that are largely owned by small groups, that reap the monetary rewards that come from limitless “free” energy).

The turbines are programmed to keep rotating in low wind (to prevent lock-up) and to lock-down during big windstorms. Here’s what happens when the locking mechanism fails:

Jeanne and I recently became proud owners of a 100% electric Vespa-like thrill ride fun ride called the EVT-168. And if we ever hit the big-time, we hope that the electric vehicle upgrade path leads towards the ready-for-purchase beast above.

I recently wrote about the Tesla Roadster for Lycos and I don’t think they’ll mind if I reproduce the text here where no one will ever notice it (links embedded in the text)…

Tesla Roadster

If the future of transportation looks like this, let’s hit the fast-forward button pronto.

Even though the Tesla Roadster is working through some prototype issues (like trying to find a transmission that can withstand the kick-assedness of an over-powerful engine that supplies continuous torque) the stats on this vehicle are pick-your-jaw-off-the-floor incredible:

0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds in a 220 mile range, zero-emission, 2¢/mile thrill-ride.

It’s electronic, guilt-free automotive sexiness.

Tesla is planning to offer more modestly priced versions of their cars in the future (the Roadster retails at about $100,000) and is also going to sell fun add-ons like solar panels that can be installed on the roof of your garage that give enough juice to power you through about 50 miles per day. That’s 100% off-the-grid sweetness. George Clooney already has one, shouldn’t you?

(Don’t have the scratch for that kind of electric ride? Why not look into one of the many, ever-improving, electric motorcycles and scooters that are coming down the pipe?)

Why is the Internet so great? Because it tears down barriers to information and communication enabling the dream of creating truly free and democratic societies? OK, yes, there’s that, but the Internet also shows naked celebrities and often makes you laugh…

I saw Brandon Hardesty on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, tried to find this video online, couldn’t, tracked Brandon down through the Tubes and he quickly got back to me with the link below. Are the Internets awesome or what?

As you’ll see in this video Brandon is a grocery store clerk from Baltimore who re-creates scenes from movies in his parents’ basement. He does everything, the shooting, lighting, editing and acting. As in all the acting, every part.

Brandon is currently tackling Oscar-nominated films for Jimmy Kimmel and this is the first of the series, Brandon’s take on There Will Be Blood.

If loving this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I usually hate it when Web sites go out of their way to throw up IP filters that let them to change their portal’s content depending on where you’re surfing in from. This sort of “region detection” could be used for good but most often only serves to block content (esp. video) to people visiting from other countries. (What’s even worse is when those same sites won’t serve you the video you want, but will still run the ad that preceeds it, a dirty underhanded bait-and-switch eyeball-slavery move that should be outlawed.) This blocking phenomenon especially pisses me off when the content I’m looking for (i.e. Stephen Colbert, Daily Show and today a Jimmy Kimmel clip) is legally available on the cable airwaves in this country, exactly the same as it is stateside.

There’s no reason why something that’s on the Internet in Kansas shouldn’t be available in Kingston, Khartoum or Kuala Lumpur. It’s not the ‘AmericaWeb’ or the ‘IranNet’ or the ‘ChinaTubes’. It’s the Internet. The whole point is that it should be available everywhere all the time. If you start to parse the Internet out according to any arbitrary set of rules, you rob it of its value, its very reason for being.

That said, imagine how much my ass was chapped this afternoon by this total dick move from Yahoo:

Mere minutes ago, I surf over to ‘my.yahoo.com’ where a specially placed Yahoo banner ad catches my eye. The ad is apparently promoting new skins/themes for the ‘My Yahoo’ page.

The first banner ad I saw said:

“The new backgrounds and layouts are awesome!” - S.

(Click the ad below to see the full-size image:)

Now while I’ll admit that I’m not completely satisfied with my current ‘My Yahoo’ background and layout, it generally takes more than one recommendation by a person who can’t even be bothered to include more than their first initial to convince me to click on a banner ad. I mean who does this ‘S.’ man/woman/dog think they are anyhow?

And that’s when I was hit by the follow up pitch:

“Blows the old one out of the water!” - N.

(Again, click the banner below to see the full-size image:)

I momentarily stumble over the “old one” comment. (I thought we were just talking about backgrounds and layouts… Weren’t there several, albeit mediocre, old ones?) But then I see that this is an entirely new recommendation. Holy shit. Both S. and N. have weighed in on this issue with full-bore exclamation-mark-laden enthusiasm.

What the hell, I decide. If it’s good enough for two of the most common letters in the English language, then it must be good enough for me…

Trembling with anticipatory glee, I click on the exciting yellow ‘Show Me’ button.

Here’s the full-page message that follows:

We appreciate your interest in the new My Yahoo! Beta. Unfortunately it is only open to My Yahoo! users in specific countries.

Um, then why…? But…? Really…? [Sighs, pushes back from computer. Goes to read a book.]

Leave it to the superior state-side political blogs to take up this issue with such focused clarity…

I learned quite a few things by reading this post and hope you do to. It’s all about debunking some common American (and frankly, Canadian) myths about the Canadian health care system.

1. Canada’s health care system is “socialized medicine.”
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.

The proper term for this is “single-payer insurance.” In talking to Americans about it, the better phrase is “Medicare for all.”

There’s also a part II to this post here.

Heath care is shaping up to be a major knock-down drag-’em-out issue in the upcoming U.S. federal elections. Exciting times ahead.

News out of Denmark today about a foiled plot to murder the 73-year-old cartoonist who penned this image here.

See if you can track the logic of this: Man depicts image of a prophet as an instrument of death, followers of prophet take offense and decide to become, uh, instruments of death…

Wtf?

From the Yahoo piece here:

A Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians were arrested in Denmark on Tuesday over a plot to murder one of 12 cartoonists whose drawings of the Prophet Mohammad caused worldwide uproar in 2006.

The Security and Intelligence Service (PET) said the arrests near Aarhus in western Denmark were made after lengthy surveillance to prevent a “terror-related killing” that was in an early stage of planning.

I was in Aarhus in November. It’s a sleepy gorgeous tolerant little town. I can’t believe the shit that people get up to in the name of religion.

This whole incident did make me think though: What image could someone draw that would be so offensive to me that it would make me want to kill them? I tried and tried, but couldn’t come up with one.

Why is my capacity to hate so severely limited I thought to myself? It is because I don’t work myself up into the a froth over ideas that come from ancient texts writen by men who thought that the sun revolved around the earth and who treated women only slightly better than cattle? Could be my friends, could be…

Well that didn’t take long…

Canada’s Department of National Defence has suddenly backed down and released their ’secret’ files on the amount of ammo used in the Afghan mission. (Guess it wasn’t such a big secret after all.)

But even though this particular issue wasn’t really an important secret, Canada’s top brass want you to know that you Canadians shouldn’t expect to know too much about what’s going on over there. Check out this best paragraph and mental image from the Canwest article:

[…] a top general warns that Taliban insurgents based in the mountains around Kandahar are reading articles in the [Ottawa] Citizen on a regular basis and the military has to be careful about what details it can release.

This would be hilarious if Harper’s government wasn’t so deadly serious about it.

The Canwest News Service is reporting that the Canadian military is refusing to tell Canadians how many bullets it fired in Afghanistan in 2007 because it considers the information to be a military secret. Uh… OK… Why is it secret? Well, apparently, that’s also secret.

From the Canwest piece (found on the Ottawa Citizen’s site here):

The Canadian Forces has deemed the number of bullets it fired in Afghanistan over the past year a military secret.

But in an explanation worthy of a scene from Joseph Heller’s classic satirical novel Catch-22, defence officials are claiming the reasons for that secrecy are secret.

The Brits and Americans always release this type of information. I wonder what’s so special about Canadian bullets?

Yet again, more proof that Stephen Harper’s minority government is doing the exact opposite of what it said it would do. Their “We came to clean up government” mantra is rapidly turning into, “We came to clean up”…

From today’s Montreal Gazette , page A9 (not linkable online because CanWest still doesn’t understand the Internets):

Robert Marleau, the information commissioner of Canada, says that contrary to Harper’s election pledge to make transparency a hallmark of his administration, a “fog over information” has crept across the government’s activities.

Marleau said complaints to the commissioner’s office about lack of access to government information have doubled in the past year.

Brutal. I can’t wait for that springtime election…

OMG, NY Giants win! What an awesome game.

And now onto serious things: If Microsoft succeeds in buying Yahoo, it will mean bad things for the Internets.

If Microsoft buys Yahoo, I plan on leaving my long-time beloved Yahoo account and I hope if you’re a Yahoo user, you’ll consider doing the same.

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft recently announced that it wants to eat Yahoo. This is so Microsoft: Bet heavily on the wrong horse, beat that horse until it’s well-past the point of death, look up sheepishly minutes before the race is over and then shell out a ton of bucks to buy the number-two-horse in hopes of pulling off a last-minute win.

Microsoft is, of course, the anti-Internet company. Remember in the 1990s how they bet big on expensive CD-ROMs as the way of the future? How, when they realised they’d seriously missed the mark, they decided to kill Netscape by stitching Internet Explorer into the heart of Windows so that they could try and claim in anti-trust suits that the two were inseparable? Brutal.

My beef with Microsoft and the Internet started in the early 2000s with a couple of asshole moves related to Hotmail.

In typical Microsoft fashion, Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft in 1997 after the software behemoth realized that it had missed the free e-mail boat. With an agressive advertising campaign, it lured a ton more users into its big new free e-mail service and then started to remove features.

In 2002 (found here):

Users of Hotmail’s free service can no longer set up an unlimited number of filters for unwanted email messages, according to Internet magazine.

The publication said users who want to set up more than 10 filters now receive a notice indicating they must switch to one of Hotmail’s premium services.

Users receive this message: “You have reached your filter limit. You must delete an existing one, or sign up for MSN Extra Storage to increase your filter limit.”

And then, in 2004, Microsoft shut down free POP mail service: (found here):

Microsoft Corp. on Monday will start charging for a Hotmail feature that allows users of the Web-based e-mail service to access their e-mail using the Outlook e-mail client.

Think Microsoft is going to play nice once they take over the number two Internet search engine company? I don’t think so. They’ll do what they always do: try to crush the competition at all costs and once they’re the king of the castle, ratchet up the fees and shut down innovation. (Their vision reads something like this: “Hotmail Plus […] offers 2GB [!] of e-mail space and an account that doesn’t expire, for $19.95 per year…” Bad things.)

If you’re a Yahoo user, please consider telling them that you will leave them if they’re bought by Microsoft. You can leave them feedback for Yahoo here.

The Microsoft feedback link is hard to find (are you surprised?). Go here to let Microsoft know that you will leave Yahoo if they take over.

What’s that smell? Oh, it must be George-W.-Bush-style repression wafting out of Stephen Harper’s cabinet meetings…

A page 14 story in today’s Montreal Gazette reports that:

Environment Canada has “muzzled” its scientists, ordering them to refer all media queries to Ottawa where communications officers will help them respond with “approved lines.”

‘Cause shutting up our scientists will solve the planet’s global warming crisis right? <sound of me gagging> More:

Climatologist Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria, works closely with several Environment Canada scientists. He says the policy points to the Conservative government’s fixation with “micromanagement” and message control.

“They’ve been muzzled,” says Weaver of the federal researchers. “The concept of free speech is non-existent at Environment Canada. They are manufacturing the message of science.”

The Gazette buries the story across from a full-page car ad (see below) but at least they’re reporting it.

There are rumblings of an upcoming federal election in Canada. Let’s send those stone-age Tories a lesson by stripping them back to post-Kim Campbell strength. This shit has got to stop. Science is not the enemy of Canada.