Amazon.com founder to make 10,000 year clock

Amazon.com founder to make 10,000 year clock built into a mountainside. It is meant to run without human intervention and maintain accuracy for 10,000 years.

Why? After all, people are still un or underemployed, people are still losing homes and assets, and it seems likely that the U.S. economy won’t stabilize until wages have dropped to Chinese.

Why is Bezos pursuing this? To encourage humanity to think long-term. A worthy goal. Somehow I don’t see this clock, awesome as it is, changing many people’s habits of thought.

Still, I wish Mr. Bezos well in his backyard sculpture cum Apollo man on the moon project. Maybe he’s right and it will inspire an international race to most effectively inspire long-term thinking within humanity.

Economic Indicators Dashboard – Helping Advisors

A wonderfully useful concise means of viewing US economic indicators. Where are we, where have we been, how are we trending? Courtesy of a talented designer at Russell Investments:

Economic Indicators Dashboard – Helping Advisors.

New Threats to Freedom — Well worth reading no matter where you fall on the political spectrum

New Threats to Freedom, edited by Adam Bellow, is a provocative collection of essays about emerging threats to freedom in contemporary democratic society. Bellow’s thesis is that the vigorous discourse on threats to freedom that took place during the 20th century has mostly died out with the end of the Cold War and the death of the greatest thinkers of the last century. He hopes to contribute to a revival of this discourse and feels that 21st century threats to freedom are subtler and harder to see, and today’s contributors to that discourse less well-known. Thus Bellow offers us the opportunity to peek over the shoulders of some of today’s greatest thinkers in the United States as they explore their observations about freedom, liberty, and happiness. Even if you disagree with most or all the essayists’ views, the book is well worth reading to stimulate reflection about your personal view of the future of freedom in today’s global society.

Jess Bachman of WallStats.com Deserves More Credit

Post a Day suggestion: “Name someone who deserves more credit than they get.”

This suggestion came in the mail a long time back. While there were many deserving people I’d like to write volumes about someday, Jess Bachman was the person that came to mind right away.

Jess Bachman is a brilliant graphic designer best known for WallStats.com and his annual Death and Taxes posters.

So why does Bachman deserve more credit? If it’s true that “money talks”, then the U.S. budget deserves to be in the Guinness Book of records for most public appearances and best traveled public speaker of the year. The budget makes its influence known in every U.S. city, town, and hamlet and in businesses large and small. Plus it’s certainly influencing lives in Iraq, Pakistan, well, in every country all around the world — even in Antarctica!

But how is a regular citizen to learn anything useful about the budget? If budget analysis was a meal, then mainstream news coverage is a bag of Cheetos — addictive, vaguely associated with the concept of food yet indigestible and providing little real nutrition. At another extreme, there’s devoting most of one’s free time and money to subscribe to LexisNexis and research the budget alone, or forming a neighborhood think tank. (Going to chef’s school and opening your own gourmet restaurant.)

Then again you could go to Bachman’s website and view his flash image of the current budget poster, or better yet, order the full-sized version. It will give you an overall understanding of the budget plus specific insights into relationships and priorities that would take you weeks to refine on your own. Then once you know what you care about you can much more quickly search for quality sources of information, activist groups, key committee members or representatives, lobbyists, etc. and decide what if anything you want to do about what matters to you.

I’d hoped to write a lot more about Jess and his posters, but this has sat in draft land far too long. I’ll come back with future installments if all goes well during first quarter 2011.

My Nephew’s Crazy Scratch Games

Today, Post a Day 2011 suggested the topic “What makes me smile.”. For once the answer was immediate and easy to describe without having to run through several drafts:

A bit more than a year ago my seven-year old nephew discovered the Scratch project at MIT. It’s similar to Alice, a framework for teaching kids about Object Oriented Programming. They both present a tangible, fun interface to create simple interactive projects that emphasize characters, animation, color, audio. In short they’re fun and accessible and don’t seem anything like traditional programming.

His first project, created many months back, was a totally hilarious and silly cartoon candy bar. When someone moved the mouse pointer toward it to try to click or drag it, it ran away. Simple and fun and clever. It made me smile.

Fast forward 14 months:

During the New Years holiday he mentioned that he’d started a website for his on-line friends to share their Scratch projects free from the overly politically correct oversight of the MIT Scratch site moderators. (Apparently he’d been banned from participating in the Scratch community a couple of times this year for various infractions big and small.) I may write about that in a future entry; it deserves its own article.

Then, (this was the part that really made me smile,) he somewhat smugly and with a healthy dose of compassion, pointed out that I’d signed up for a Scratch account over a year ago, yet:

“You still have ZERO comments and ZERO friends! What’s up with that Uncle Wirt?”

I hemmed and mumbled and couldn’t really come up with a good answer. So I committed to at least go on and check out his new website and Scratch projects from 2010. I also promised to respond to his invitation to become one of his scratch friends and post a project.

Well, holy $%@$##$! He’s been a busy little programmer and social networker. Since that first little project he’s created hundreds more and made hundreds of friends. His projects are mostly tiny mini games, but also include a bunch of animated greeting cards and cartoons best characterized as a third grade version of xkcd. He’s even become a friend of Taio Cruz.

So now my wee young nephew is one of my heroes. I admire the way he lives his life so full of enthusiasm and zest. He takes care of business without messing around or procrastinating. When ever some activity interests my nephew he lets nothing interfere; he just gets it done. Little Milo (nearly) always makes me smile.

For Vimperator Users Wishing “Press This” Would Open in a New Window

A wee tip for WordPress “Press This” users who also love the vimperator Firefox extension. (Well it’s also handy for other pop ups that want to resize the window, like those “zoom image” links that always seem to show the image at the same @#^&#$# size 😦 anyway).

:set popups=tab,resized
mkvimperatorrc!

If you use both modes consistently, to map the keys “alt-p” to “pop up in new windows” and “alt-P” to “pop up in tabs” use:

:nmap <A-p> :set popups=tab,resized<CR>
:nmap <A-S-p> :set popups=tab<CR>
:mkvimperatorrc!

For details, see

“popup” setting: open resized in new window, but otherwise in new tab.

Also, if you want to use your C-i vimperator external editor on WordPress, disable the visual editor in your dashboard (Users>Personal Settings), then it will work.

It’s Time to Commit to Posting Weekly

Given all the challenges people, communities, and nations are facing these days, I feel compelled to devote some of my time to contributing  to dialog and reflection on challenging issues. Also, I’ve found I don’t often enough get to share face to face the many fun, interesting tidbits I run across while stumbling through life these days. Besides, being in school has forced me to write serious pieces at least weekly, and contrary to my expectations I’ve grown to enjoy it greatly.

So despite the fact that New Years Resolutions never work out, (and it does happen to be 1 January), I’m going to commit to the post a week project. Luckily I’m not doing it alone. There are heaps of people here at WordPress posting daily and weekly, and no matter how many of us wander off the path as the year wears on… WordPress’ Daily Post suggestions and tips will likely keep more of us on track, and offer plenty of opportunities to restart the initiative when needed.

So here’s to all you post a day and post a week 2011 writers publishing what matters to you, and to hoping that this blog about what matters to me is worth reading for you. If it is, please leave encouraging comments and let others that might like it know how to find me. If you don’t like it, enough that it’d be worth your time, please leave a comment about that too before you leave. (Preferably a thoughtful one, 😉 .)

Share this:

Meh, having trouble remembering html and WordPress conventions to post by email with formatting, setting draft vs. publish, delays till published, etc.

I’m impatient to get things started here. It’s irritating me to have started a blog yet posted nothing of substance. A post expanding on my profile, a few words about making the choice reflectionation for the blog url, and some responses to the Post a Day 2011 project are all queued up in my getting things done in haskell todo file.

Ah, awesome! post by email and formatting poetry answers my immediate formatting questions. Post by email should make publishing easy peasy lemon squeezy.