Now that I’ve finished reading Collapse, I’ve moved on to darker and a more dire look at the state of human civilization. I’m currently reading The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. I won’t provide a review of the book yet, but it is bringing together a lot of concepts, which I have learned or wondered about, into one hell of a pessimistic view for the future human civilization. For now I’ll let Kunstler explain why suburban america is more like the american nightmare rather than the american dream. Quote from an interesting panel discussion article at the NY Times. LINK

There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.

Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubble”), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future.

This is a hell of a problem, since it is at once economic, socio-political, and circumstantial.

Here’s what I think will happen: First, we are in great danger of mounting a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable, that is, of defending suburbia at all costs.

In fact, it is already underway. One symptom of this is that the only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else. We don’t get it. The Happy Motoring era is over. No combination of “alt” fuels — solar, wind, nuclear, tar sands, oil-shale, offshore drilling, used French-fry oil — will allow us to keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Marts, and Walt Disney World.

The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not. Further proof of our obdurate cluelessness in these matters is the absence of any public discussion about restoring the passenger railroad system — even as the airline industry is also visibly dying. The campaign to sustain suburbia and all its entitlements will result in a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources and capital.

The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment. Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end. Fortunately, we have many under-activated small towns and small cities in favorable locations near waterways. This will be increasingly important as transport of goods by water regains importance.

We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities. People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future. I believe our big cities will contract substantially — even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead.

One popular current fantasy I hear often is that apartment towers are the “greenest” mode of human habitation. On the contrary, we will discover that the skyscraper is an obsolete building type, and that cities overburdened with them will suffer a huge liability — Manhattan and Chicago being the primary examples. Cities composed mostly of suburban-type fabric — Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, et al — will also depreciate sharply. The process of urban contraction is likely to be complicated by ethnic tensions and social disorder.

As petro-agriculture implodes, we’ll have to raise our food differently, closer to home, and at a finer and smaller scale. This new agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, since farming will require more human attention. The places that are not able to grow enough food locally are not likely to make it. Phoenix and Las Vegas will be shadows of what they are now, if they exist at all.

These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom” in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it. Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.

If you prefer this information in funny video format:

I just finished reading Collapse:How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend it. This quote on pages 515-516 seemed to summarize major theme of the book:

First ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation, or both. The ecologist would answer: “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others.”

Then go ask a First World politician, who knows nothing and cares less about the environment and population problems, to name the world’s worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been overwhelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those problems of their own, are also creating problems for us rich First World countries, which may end up having to provide foreign aid for them, or may face illegal immigrants from them, or may decide to provide them with military assistance to deal with rebellions and terrorists, or may even have to send in our own troops. The politician would answer, “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of political trouble spots should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others.”

…Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.

The thesis of the book seemed to be that the world is fucked if we don’t change how we care for the environment.

Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: ”Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course.” The West, especially, is in peril: ”The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital.” Calamity could come quickly: ”A society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power.”

-from a New York Times review by Gregg Easterbrook

I definitely agree with the Diamond’s main thesis. My reading of this book happened to coincide with the recent WWF’s Living Planet Report.

“The world is currently struggling with the consequences of over-valuing its financial assets, but a more fundamental crisis looms ahead – an ecological credit crunch caused by under-valuing the environmental assets that are the basis of all life and prosperity,” said WWF International Director-General James Leape, in the foreword to the new report. “Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing – and increasingly overdrawing – on the ecological capital of other parts of the world,” Leape said. (Source)

I hope Obama can grasp the importance of environmental sustainability just a BIT more than Bush does (he doesn’t at all).

So it’s been a little while since I’ve written anything here. My excuse is that I hate to look at or think about my computer when I get home from work. This computerphobia has grown out of the makeup of my typical day at work. Essentially, I get to work around 8:30am at which time I sit down and stare at a computer until at least 4:30pm. Of course there are breaks & lunch, but I would say 90% of my work day involves staring at a computer screen while doing graphic intensive work. For those of you who don’t do this type of work, it can actually be very mentally & physically exhausting. I think my roommates wonder why I seem so tired when I come home even though I tell them that all I did is sit at a computer all day.

I’ve had some troubles already with carpal tunnel like symptoms, severe tendinitis in my wrist, and rotator cuff surgery in my dominate shoulder (still not fully healed). The summer following graduation involved me staying away from the computer as much as possible and essentially clearing up the pain & tiredness in my wrist/arm. I definitely didn’t do enough strengthening, but at least cleared up the irritation. 2.5 months into my first career job, I’m starting to experience the pain & tiredness that plagued me for the final two years of my college career. The gel wrist pads I was given just don’t do the job, and thus I’ve embarked on an ergonomic experiment. I’ve finally jumped off the standard mouse ship and into the exotic world of trackballs. I’ve made the switch from this mouse:

& this keyboard:

to this trackball:

& this keyboard

I’ll be reporting my change in pain, comfort, & fatigue here. I’m hopeful that a relatively cheap upgrade in input devices will make a big difference in how I feel & work. I honestly feel much more comfortable already.

]]> http://ununderstand.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/trackball-experiment/feed/ 0 T Money Dell Mouse Dell Keyboard Trackball Keyboard http://ununderstand.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/online-backup/ http://ununderstand.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/online-backup/#comments Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:24:12 +0000 T Money http://ununderstand.wordpress.com/?p=94 ]]> Tristan’s Tidbit #4

After losing ALL of my music and nearly losing all of my pictures & other important files to an external harddrive failure, I decided to look into alternatives to storing/backing up all my data. I thought about buying another external harddrive for about 5 minutes. I then thought about burning 100 DVDs (the amount required to cover my important data) for about 2 minutes. I actually then installed another internal harddrive (they are faster, more reliable, and last longer than external hardrives) thinking I’ll keep a my files saved on both drives; before I realized what a bad idea that was. Backing up all your data in close proximity to your primary data is not a good idea. Floods, tornadoes, lightening, beer spillage, theft, clumsy friends, & HURRICANES could all easily wipe out both copies of your files. If you are someone like me who has most of your hard work in digital format, isn’t losing all your files a scary thought? The thought of it should send shivers down your spine.

I’ve come to the conclusion that online remote storage is the best option for backing up files. Here is a decent article covering this topic:

Why Back Up Online?

Most traditional backup methods copy your computer files onto some kind of media, be it an external hard drive, a CD or DVD, or a USB keychain drive. These methods are convenient and quick, and many (particularly external hard drives and DVDs) offer plenty of inexpensive storage space.

The problem is that most of the time, most people keep the external hard drives and DVDs in the same office or building as the computer they’re backing up. So, should a disaster–hurricane, earthquake, fire–occur, both the computer and the data backup could be destroyed.

There’s also the problem of theft, of course. Just the other day, I was reading the police blotter of my neighborhood’s monthly newspaper, “The Noe Valley Voice.” I live in what’s considered a safe area of San Francisco, so I was surprised to read about all the laptops and peripherals stolen from people’s home offices.

That’s why I’m a firm believer in online backup services, which save your most critical computer files on a secure, off-site server over the Internet. If you’ve backed up regularly online, you may lose your computer in a disaster or to a theft, but at least your key files will survive.

You may be thinking “I never thought of that. He’s right! I guess I’ll just sign up somewhere.” Try googling “online backup“. If you can sort through the 16,800,000 hits/hundreds upon hundreds of companies and successfully select a good one, I’ll give you a cookie. Lucky for you I’ve done all the research for you. Use ElephantDrive.

I have been testing them out for the past month and so far like what I see. Today I had a conversation with an online help person that completely won me over (I waited 10 seconds to get connected to the Chip):

[Chip] Hello, thank you for contacting ElephantDrive, how may I help you?
[Tristan] hey I have a couple questions
[Chip] I can help!
[Tristan] if I create an automated backup…
[Tristan] once it has backed up all the files the first time what happens
[Tristan] does it look for new ones and then automatically add them
[Tristan] or always recopy everything or what?
[Chip] It is the former. After your initial dataset is backed up, ElephantDrive does what’s called a continuous differential.
[Chip] There are a couple of processes involved in this, One watches your filesystem for things that have changed or are added.
[Chip] A second process respects the use of your internet connection and other local resources (such as memory, cpu, etc) and determines the best time and speed to upload your changed and added files to our secure facilities.
[Chip] A long way of saying:
[Chip] Once your first backup completes, your subsequent backups will finish much, much faster,
[Tristan] excellent
[Chip] A matter of seconds or minutes usually.
[Tristan] that is the correct answer:)
[Tristan] second question: “TrunkDrive allows you to mount the remote ElephantDrive data storage server as a local file system, just like a disk drive.
[Chip] Good! I love scoring well on tests.
[Tristan] is that possible?
[Tristan] or is that just the file explorer thing
[Chip] Yes! TrunkDrive installs a little mini web server on your Windows or Mac desktop, and acts just like a network drive.
[Chip] So you can use your native as tools to browse, upload, download, and direct use of your ElephantDrive.
[Chip] We have many small businesses that use TrunkDrive as a file server replacement.
[Chip] Still others who listen to the iTunes libraries or edit their Office documents directly on their online storage.
[Tristan] as a home user can I set that up?
[Chip] You can. Today it requires that you download and install 2 separate pieces of software.
[Chip] You can find them both here:
[Chip] http://www.elephantdrive.com/download/index.aspx
[Chip] I’d encourage you to try the service for free for 15 days and see if it meets your requirements.
[Chip] If not, there is no account to cancel.
[Tristan] Yup I tried it already and liked it as was…but now these features have won me over
[Tristan] plus its 10:30pm on a Tuesday and you are way too helpful
[Chip] Excellent. We’re always happy to have another member of the “Herd”
[Chip] Haha, thank you.
[Tristan] welp im out of questions thanks alot
[chip] Please feel free to reach out again should you require further information or assistance.
[Chip] Thanks again for being an ElephantDrive user!

I’ve since mounted the “trunk drive” to my computer and it is a truly awesome feature. I then had to sign up for the standard home account. At $4.95/month or $49.95/year you can’t go wrong. Most external harddrives cost in the ball park of $150-200 and they have an average lifespan of around 2 years (you do the math). There is a limit of 100gigs uploaded per month…but I would wager that 99% of you would struggle to upload that much data through your connection per month anyways. Ahh peace of mind.

Anyone who knows me would say I’m a technology person. I love electronic gadgets. I love the internet and used to think it was the solution to all our problems. The internet provides endless information on nearly everything.  What more could the human mind require? However, recently I’ve been thinking about how the combined information of television, the internet, newspapers, radio, etc. is actually combining together to create massive disinformation. There is so much clutter, skewed information, flat out lies that no one knows which side is up any more. Thankfully, moving to New York has introduced me to a life outside of cable television. What have I discovered? PBS. I never before thought to turn to PBS for quality, honest and straight to the point news & discussion on important topics.

Today I discovered the weekly Bill Moyers Journal. The show today was scarily on topic with my above thoughts about disinformation. It might have been the best piece of journalism that I’ve ever seen. See for yourself by watching Media Analysis & Rage on the Radio (I’m sure the rest of it is incredibly eye opening too).

I’ll end with two paragraphs from Bill Moyers’ speech at the fourth annual National Conference for Media Reform.

What does it matter? Why a media anyway? I’m going to let an old Cherokee chief answer that. I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before we moved to Texas, of the tribal elder who was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The boy took this in for a few minutes and then said to his father—to his grandfather, “Which wolf won?” The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.” Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And media provides the fodder.

So it is that democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent while enhancing the power of the state and the privileged interests protected by it. Democracy without accountability creates the illusion of popular control while offering ordinary Americans only cheap tickets to the balcony, too far away to see that the public stage has become just a reality TV set. Nothing more characterizes corporate media today, mainstream and partisan, than disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.

So today I decided to finally upgrade my AOL Instant Messanger to the latest version. I had been stubbornly sticking to a much older version of AIM due to an UpdatedSoftwareVersionProblemPhobia. I finally allowed myself to upgrade, hoping that newer features such as video chat might actually work. Well, it turns out they still don’t work because you need to open up a crapload of ports on your router and mess with your firewall, but that’s not the point. While upgrading, I was reminded of an awesome free software product called Aim Ad Hack:

AIM Ad Hack is a free third-party add-on for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) created by Cuban-Aftermath Software. The add-on removes advertisements from the GUI of AIM. AIM Ad Hack can also be used to remove spyware such as Viewpoint Media Player and WildTangent, which are commonly included in AIM installations…If there is any malware or spyware found on the computer from a previous installation of AIM, such as WeatherBug or WildTangent, AIM Ad Hack will remove it as well.

~Wikipedia

If you are using AIM…you absolutely should be using Aim Ad Hack. I insanely highly recommend it. I could have wrote this tidbit with 2 words: Use This. Aim Ad Hack is a no brainer. I’ve been using it for 10+ years without fail. It removes all the junk and leaves you with a cleaner better AIM.

I think I’ve realized over time that I’m not necessarily shy, but I just hate small talk. I never feel compelled to have all those conversations that are expected….expected to be boring. Whenever I do end up having those conversations all I can think about is how superficial and stupid the conversation is and my interest is lost rather quickly. If you don’t have something of substance to say, just keep your mouth shut. I really dislike people who talk just to talk more than anything. I’m about a 1/3rd of the way through Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and so far its been reaffirming alot of the principles I live by & I even came across a quote (Page 101-102) that is right on topic with this thought:

“Mother, do they think it’s exactly in reverse?” she asked.

“What?” asked Mrs. Taggart, bewildered.

“The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic; not the other way around?”

“Darling, what do you mean?”

“There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it,” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.”

“Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.”

“How? By being stupid?”

“I mean, for instance, didn’t you enjoy meeting the young men?”

“What men? There wasn’t a man there I couldn’t squash ten of.”

I guess I take everything too seriously.

I saw this quote on the subway yesterday and thought it was very fitting to use as my first blog post from NYC. I am the third part of New York.

“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter – the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in search of something . . . Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.”

E. B. White from Here is New York

Welcome to the school of Tristan. I’d like to educate you all on the definitions of a few words that nearly everyone I know misuses. Watching TV last night, I witnessed back to back television shows misuse the word cement. I admit that in the past I misunderstood the word cement, but was cured (double meaning since cement is cured ha!) after numerous point deductions in my construction details course.

Cement Definition:

1. any of various calcined mixtures of clay and limestone, usually mixed with water and sand, gravel, etc., to form concrete, that are used as a building material.

2. any of various soft, sticky substances that dry hard or stonelike, used esp. for mending broken objects or for making things adhere.

4. anything that binds or unites

Cement is the stuff the binds other things together such as bricks or stones as it does in CONCRETE. The whole product that sidewalks are made out of is CONCRETE not cement.

Concrete Definition:

1. also called cement by everyone who doesn’t know the word concrete.

6. an artificial, stonelike material used for various structural purposes, made by mixing cement and various aggregates, as sand, pebbles, gravel, or shale, with water and allowing the mixture to harden.

Please note how cement is a component of concrete. End of lesson 1. Now for lesson 2:

What is a windmill?

Windmill definition:

1. any of various machines for grinding, pumping, etc., driven by the force of the wind acting upon a number of vanes or sails.

2. (loosely) a wind generator; wind plant. [I don't get how they can throw the word loosely in there...do they mean slang?]

Historically windmills were giant machines that captured wind energy and put it immediately to some use as in the diagram below:

Most people I know also call the thing in the below picture a windmill:

Wrong! It’s a Wind Turbine! The first paragraph of wind turbine’s wikipedia entry sums it up for me:

A wind turbine is a rotating machine which converts the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used directly by machinery, such as a pump or grinding stones, the machine is usually called a windmill. If the mechanical energy is then converted to electricity, the machine is called a wind generator, wind turbine, wind power unit (WPU) or wind energy converter (WEC).

Class over. Hope you learned something.

So last night was a horrible night of sleep for me. I managed to get up and write this thought down between the crazy thunderstorm and the goofy dreams I vaguely remember having:

Don’t be afraid to be wrong, you will not fully realize what is right until you know what is wrong.

I can’t remember what led me to this piece of wisdom, but I imagine I was trying to make sense out of something in my dreams and instead came up with this. After I wrote down the thought in my mini-thought composition book, Google called for me to search out whether or not someone had said it better before. I’m still not sure whether or not it has been said before, because this link caught my attention:

Do You Recognize These 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking? by Brian Clark

#9 is in line with my thought:

9. Being Wrong is Bad

We hate being wrong, and yet mistakes often teach us the most. Thomas Edison was wrong 1,800 times before getting the light bulb right. Edison’s greatest strength was that he was not afraid to be wrong.

The best thing we do is learn from our mistakes, but we have to free ourselves to make mistakes in the first place. Just try out your ideas and see what happens, take what you learn, and try something else. Ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen if I’m wrong? You’ll often find the benefits of being wrong greatly outweigh the ramifications.