Track Santa on Twitter.
Imagine how you would film Alien vs. Predator Save Christmas (excerpts from the rejected script). And more holiday goodies from McSweeney’s.
Read the Onion’s special holiday edition. (Video and audio included for those who do not read.)
Listen to A Juniper Creek Christmas — a free album for downloading and Christmas greetings from the Prophet himself.
Watch the all-time worst Christmas specials, and get all nostalgic on the Christmas Specials Wiki.
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I have always been fascinated by randomness. I am not alone, as shown by the ancient pastimes of gambling and divination. It is our lot as humans to peer into the chaos of the universe and try to discern patterns there. But perhaps a bigger question is whether our lives have some purpose or whether they are the results of a series of random events. Not a comforting question to consider, unless you posit that without randomness, you cannot have free will.
So instead let’s consider writing a story based on a randomly generated plot or theme or even a single word. Let’s start a website or band around a randomly generated name. Let’s decide who goes first (or last) using a randomly ordered list. Or maybe we’ll just do a little random surfing.
But can we really behave randomly and perhaps beat the lottery? Or is there too much order in the universe after all?
Sources: Wikipedia; On Truth & Reality; Seventh Sanctum; The Speculative Fiction Muse; Creativity Tools; NameThingy.com; Random.org; randomwebsite.com; “Can You Behave Randomly?”; PBS
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Now I finally understand why so many people have toddlers and babies at the same time.
Source: xkcd.com
Here’s what folks are finding interesting to read on my other blogs this month.
My article on Books that Changed Your Life is still very popular. I don’t know if you’ll find anything life-changing in the post, though. I don’t come to any definitive conclusions.
My review of The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer is proving to be of interest to some folks. It’s a young adult novel I read as part of my project to read more science fiction by women.
At my newest blog, which collects my notes on the post-apocalypse, check out Artists’ Conceptions of an Empty Earth. The art is very cool.
At my cooking blog, the usual suspects are at the top. People still want to know how to make lasagna, roasted chicken breasts, sorbet and quick tomato sauce for pasta.
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Step 1: Convince everyone on the planet that human activity in the Industrial Age has resulted in a global warming of the planet that will likely have catastrophic consequences if left unchecked.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Although they are human and thus prone to sometimes doing stupid things, scientists, for the most part, are interested in finding and promoting the truth, or as close as we can get to it. When new facts are uncovered, scientists may be reluctant to change their beliefs — another highly human trait — but they do eventually come to a consensus if the new facts can be systematically proven using the scientific method.
Image via Wikipedia
The scientific data show that the Earth is undergoing a large and rapid warming trend that coincides with the onset of industrial activity, specifically the large-scale burning of fossil fuels. The average surface temperature has increased by 1.2-1.4°F over the past 100 years. If greenhouse gases continue to increase, the surface temperature could rise by 3.2-7.2°F by 2100. Observed changes due to climate change have included rising sea levels, longer growing seasons, earlier melting of ice and snow, shrinking glaciers, and changes in the distribution of plants and animals. The faster temperatures rise, the more these effects will be exacerbated.
Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, denial about the reality of climate change, that it is caused by human activity or that it will have devastating effects is at a high. Fear of the effects of climate change, a resistance to change and the lack of an easy fix contribute to this denial. Again, how human of us.
But what do the world’s leading scientific organizations have to gain by convincing us that climate change is happening and we need to take action?After examining the conspiracy theories, it seems that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Here, the explanation is that this is what the data show, and the scientists are concerned for the future of humanity.
Sources: The Galilean Library; Science and Politics of Global Climate Change; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Information Is Beautiful; New York Times; Wired Science; Union of Concerned Scientists; Wikipedia
Also see: Climate Wire; The Copenhagen Diagnosis; RealClimate; How to talk to a climate skeptic
Previously: What will the Earth be like in 2050 if we do nothing about climate change?
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I’m remodeling a bit for the New Year.
But here they are.
Does it make it even more obnoxiously cute to tell you that he arranged all the stuffed animals very carefully before sitting down among them to pose for the shot?
View from our Thanksgiving vacation cottage in Montreat, North Carolina.
Every Thanksgiving we drive up to the mountains of North Carolina for the long weekend. We stay somewhere around Black Mountain. This year, we were in the tiny town of Montreat, which has a Christian college, summer camps, conference center and not much else. You have to drive through a stone gate to get into Montreat. It is like driving into a dwarves’ village out of The Lord of the Rings.
There is something about this area of the North Carolina mountains where time slows down and priorities align themselves in a more satisfying way. I have no trouble staying off the Internet. Instead, I read, cook and enjoy my family. I have been other places like this (Sedona comes to mind, as does the Oregon coast), but Black Mountain is the only one I visit every year. I wish I could be there more often. I feel when I am not there that I am missing something important.
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If you like to see ultra-cute babies attempt to play the piano, click on over. (And yes, the baby is mine, but he is ultra-cute anyway.)
My last post was a little bit gloomy. But I am still looking ahead to the future! And just to show that, I have started a new little blog… an electronic notebook, really, of helpful, inspiring and (dare I say?) fun post-apocalyptic resources. There’s music, art, ideas, so head on over to emptyearth.wordpress.com and check it out.
This is really a little research project I’m working on that may or may not turn into something more. But some of you crazy kids who stop by here might be interested. Who knows?
The year winding down is always a good time for reflection. And on this Thanksgiving, I have to say that I cannot remember a year like this one. A year that has made me so depressed and dispirited. A year that has pretty much made me lose faith in my fellow humans.
The reactions to President Obama’s election, the recession, the debates on health care and global warming, have all brought out the worst in people. What has been laid bare is a shocking lack of compassion and empathy for the suffering of others. Our selfishness and greed have been exposed, and we revel in a sense of unprecedented entitlement, especially at the expense of others. Bald-faced lying and red-faced screaming have become the basis for debate. Racism, ignorance and unfounded fear of the “other” are trumpeted, as if these are qualities of which to be proud.
The mood that surrounds me has plunged me into depression. I have been battling my loss of hope, that this country — or even this species — will survive our own fear, anger, greed and short-sightedness.
So on this Thanksgiving, I must remind myself that I have to put into the world what I want to get out of it. If I value compassion, I must show compassion in all my actions. If I want to feel respect, I must behave respectfully. And if I want to feel joy, I must give joy to the world first.
Even if we are all doomed, and there is nothing I can do about that, there is still one small thing that I can do. I can do everything I can to make this world a better place. Because that is what I want for myself and for the people I love — for all people, really — a better place to live our short lives.
I hope that if anyone is reading this, the next time you find yourself reacting with anger and outrage and fear, that you will stop, take a moment, breathe. And remember: what you put into this world is what the world gives back to you.
Finally, I am linking to this even though I am sure you have seen it already, simply because it made me happy.
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Image via Wikipedia
Here’s what happens when elected officials overthink things. In the annual holiday parade, held in our state capital of Raleigh, Mrs. Claus has been banned. Why? Because City Council member John Odom thinks that it will be “confusing” to children to have two people in the parade wearing red and white suits.
Because apparently, young children can’t tell the difference between men and women. And they don’t know Santa is married. (They don’t?)
To give the local newspaper credit, they presented a fair and balanced report on the issue, citing that it was unclear whether this confusion would actually occur and what harm, if any, it would cause. A pediatrician is quoted as saying that children as young as 3 can usually distinguish between the genders. I think the N&O has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek for once.
The story has been picked up by national news outlets and garnered “Outrage of the Week” on Free Range Kids, where some commenters have taken the opportunity to denigrate all North Carolinians based on Mr. Odom’s example. I assure you that most of us in the general public do know and respect the esteemed Mrs. Claus, and do not share Mr. Odom’s view that her presence in the Christmas parade is confusing, as can be seen from the comments in support of Mrs. Claus here. I myself will be boycotting the parade in protest (although I wasn’t planning to go, anyway).
P.S. Thanks, Mr. Odom, for making North Carolinians look like ultra-politically correct idiots.
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Buddhists advise us to live in the moment. It seems simple, but it is probably one of the hardest things we can do as human beings. Being aware of time gives us consciousness, and is our curse. As Jonathan Franzen says in The Corrections:
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid the price for the privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
We obsessively live in the past, wishing we could get a “do-over” or just trying to figure out why things happened the way they did, usually an exercise in futility. But we are even more obsessed with the future. Turn on the TV or NPR, surf the blogs, open the newspaper. You will find story after story, one “expert” after another, trying to tell us what will happen. How will the Senate vote on healthcare; what will the 2010 election results be; what will happen to the economy?
Stand back from all this noise and view it as a whole, and it quickly becomes meaningless. What makes these pundits’ predictions any more accurate or trustworthy than the predictions of the ancients reading the future in the entrails of their animal sacrifices, or the old lady trying to find a pattern in her tea leaves?
We look into the future and what we see is the darkness of the abyss. Hardly comforting. So we try to do the impossible: We try to act like we know what is going to happen.
That’s why “live in the moment” is such great advice, even if it is so difficult to achieve. Think of the concept of flow, of being so focused and in tune with what you are doing that time effectively ceases to exist. It may occur when you’re fixing a car or shaping a vase from clay or taking a run or talking with friends. For me, it usually happens when I’m writing, cooking, gardening, organizing or am caught up in a project that has me fully engaged. Regardless, at that time of flow, you are truly in the moment. The past and the future have lost their significance. For many people, including me, it is these times of “flow” when they are happiest.
If we all spent more time in flow (or pursuing those activities that bring about that state) and less time worrying about the future, I think we’d actually achieve that other elusive element of human existence: peace.
More:
- The nine elements of flow (MeaningandHappiness.com)
- How to live in the moment (WikiHow)
- Buddhism basics: Mindfulness (Shambhala)
- Ancient divination and astrology on the web
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- Worth Reading: The Corrections (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)
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Notice: Please do not ask me for a Google Wave invitation. I am not giving away any more.
I see a lot of people have been visiting my blog because of my recent offer of Google Wave invitations, and judging by the search terms, some are confused as to how to give out invitations. I always try to be helpful, so here’s a quick tutorial.
To give out invitations, you must have gotten some from Google. I don’t think everybody got them. If you were invited by Google to be a beta tester, you did. If you were invited by someone else, you probably didn’t. Google will be sending out more invitations as soon as their servers can handle the additional capacity, by the way, so keep checking.
Open up Google Wave. In your Inbox you should see a Wave sent just to you with the subject “Invite others to Google Wave.” Click on it to open it. At the bottom of the Wave, you’ll see the number of invitations you have and a box to enter the email addresses of folks you’d like to invite. Once you enter an email address, scroll down in the Wave a bit (use that teeny scroll bar on the right side of the Wave), and click the “Add to invite list” button to nominate them.
This is important — I don’t think the nominations are automatic. Google wants to control the flow of people coming onto the service, which may explain the delay in someone receiving your invitation. Have patience. I’m fairly positive everyone I nominated eventually got their invitation.
And that’s it. I haven’t actually been using Google Wave, sad to say. Anybody else doing something cool with it?
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- Google Wave invites have gone out (shannonturlington.com)
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Have you played around with Twitter’s new lists feature yet? Well, you should, because lists take Twitter from “pretty cool” to “OMG I can’t live without Twitter!”
The idea behind lists is actually super simple (and staying super simple is part of what makes Twitter so great). Basically, you can group some of your Tweeple (i.e., people you follow on Twitter) into a list.
But here’s why this is so awesome:
- You can group people by any criteria you choose and then go to the list to see a timeline of only their tweets. For example, you may want to check in on just the people you work with or the celebrities you’re stalking.
- If you put someone on a list, you don’t have to follow them. You can still see their tweets by accessing the list. So you can limit your main Twitter timeline to only the people you truly care about. I am now actively following only about 50 people, which is a lot easier to keep up with. Since I keep Twitter open on my iGoogle page, it is extra-nice to get rid of the excess noise.
- You can follow other people’s lists. So you don’t even have to go to all the trouble of making your own. People have made lists for every possible category. Here’s the place to find the best of them.
- If you’re following someone on a Twitter list, why do you have to bother reading their blog anymore? (No, wait, you should still read my blog.)
So I have made a few lists that you may or may not want to follow. They are:
- they-amuse-me – funny folks
- ict4d-nptech – do-gooding techies
- misc-tech — tech news
- news – general news
- book-media-news – book and media news (doy!)
- science-stuff – science news
- misc-celebs – a small selection of interesting famous people
And a few others. Visit my Twitter page to see them all.
Now that Twitter is finally integrating retweets into its web interface, there will be no end to its usefulness. We can just pretty much ignore Facebook and StumbleUpon as no longer relevant.
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Google’s march toward world domination continues apace, and so they continue to make news pretty much every nano-second. Rather than take the time to write an in-depth piece, I’m just going to give a whirlwind tour of all the Google stuff that’s been cluttering up my Delicious bookmarks.
- Just today, Google announced yet another service: Google Dashboard. They say it’s so you can track all your data that Google is keeping for totally benign reasons (and because you asked them to). I say that this is a handy way of accessing all of your Google stuffs from one place.
- Also as part of Google’s “data liberation” efforts, Google Docs now lets you pull out all of your documents in a handy ZIP file and convert them to the file format of your choice. Here’s my friend Dave Mason’s take on the whole data liberation thing.
- Surely you’ve seen that commercial for the new Motorola Droid phone that attack the iPhone head on? If not, go here to watch it. I likes it!
- Google has also come out with a free GPS navigator. Here’s some analysis on why this is going to kick TomTom’s and Garmin’s collective asses from Gizmodo.
- Got Google Voice yet? I just did. The Google Voice blog offers some advice to newbies.
- Still scratching your head over what exactly Google Wave is and how to use it (if you got one of the highly coveted invitations). Here’s a complete guide to Google Wave from Mashable. For extra credit, Lifehacker offers three worthwhile Google Wave searches and Go2Web20 highlights 11 useful Google Wave extensions you may not know about.
- Here is a sampling of some of the 140 mind-bogglingly obtuse interview questions you might get asked if you applied for a job at Google — with answers! I say, if we’re really all going to work for Google some day, they’re going to have to make their application questions a lot easier. For example: What is your name? And do you worship your benevolent Google overlords? (Correct answer: Yes, Supreme Leader.)
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Ok, I usually try to avoid politics on this blog, but this is close to home, so I couldn’t resist writing about it. This guy, George Hutchins, is actually running for Congress in my district. The same district where the very liberal David Price has been our Representative since I learned who our Representative was in grade school. The same district that includes Chapel Hill, a town that our late Senator Jessie Helms suggested be fenced in like a zoo to keep the animals from escaping.
Not only is he running as a gen-u-wine tea-bagging conservative, but he also has the worst website ever. Go on over and take a look. Tell me if that doesn’t make you think GeoCities circa 1994. All that’s missing are the animated GIFs.
I thought this was a parody at first, but apparently this guy is for real. Check out the anti-Obama page, with its pictures of Obama juxtaposed with Fred Sanford from “Sanford & Son.” Or the culture wars page, where he decries the “gay male homosexual,” including James Dean and the dad from “The Brady Bunch.”
I wouldn’t even be aware of this guy if he wasn’t being made fun of all over the Internet. Hey, conservatives, if you want to be taken seriously, here is a case study in exactly how not to do it. This guy gives wingnuts a bad name.
A wise old Native American once said:
Only the government would believe you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom and have a longer blanket.
Good-bye, 5:00 p.m. daylight. I’m going to miss you. Hello, seasonal depression.
By the way, don’t forget to fall back one hour tonight. Unless you are lucky enough to live in Arizona or Hawaii. Or you are feeling particularly rebellious and want to extend summer time indefinitely! Do I sense a grassroots movement starting?
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The traditional licking of the Halloween pumpkin
If you lick the Halloween pumpkin, extra-good Christmas presents will follow. What, you don’t do this at your house?
It seems like something cool comes out of Google (our new overlords, all hail teh Google) every day. This time, it’s a concept called “social search.”
Social search is a big step forward in personalizing search, and thus making it much more relevant to the searcher. With social search enabled, when you search Google, along with the top results, you will see any relevant information from your social network’s public web postings. For instance, I search for “New York City.” Following the New York Google Maps, official homepages, Wikipedia entry on NYC, etc., I might also see my husband’s review of a hotel he recently stayed at in the city or my friend’s New York photos on Picasa or my colleague’s post about a professional conference there. Which is all stuff I’m very likely to be interested in, because it’s coming from people I actually know.
How does Google know? It all goes back to your Google Profile — and you should go set one up immediately, if you haven’t already. Tell Google what your public blogs, Flickr page, YouTube channel, et al are, and Google will mine those sources for search results for your social network. Tell Google what your Twitter and FriendFeed names are, and it will add your followers to your social network for searching, along with your contacts in your Friends, Family and Coworkers groups and the blogs you subscribe to on Google Reader.
Read more about Social Search from Google’s official blog. Join the Google Social Search experiment. Once you join, you can see the Social results by:
- clicking “Show options…” next to Web at the top of the Google Search Results, and
- clicking “Social” in the left nav bar under “All Results”.
You can then burrow down to individual people. Google will show their matches, as well as how you’re connected to them.
Social search is currently in the experimental phase on Google Labs, but it is a really exciting development, with a lot of potential to make Googling even more relevant, personal and timely. And of course, it is yet one more step in Google’s inevitable takeover of the world and future status as the employer/benefactor of all humans. You’ve got to admit, though, it’s still very cool.
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- What Google Social Search Means For Companies (smtusa.com)
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- Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs (readwriteweb.com)
- Google stalks your social circle (theregister.co.uk)
- Optimising for Google Social Search (blogstorm.co.uk)
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shannon.turlington AT gmail.com 
