Max's Blog

CSS troubles: Negative text-indent not hiding your text?

2011-10-02T23:56:00Z

I am so totally thankful for this post I found today by Adam Bard.

If you’re using the tried-and-true negative text-indent for image replacement technique whilst building a website, make sure that the element you’re working with is not aligned to the right.

Simply setting text-align: left will fix this problem.

Thanks, Adam Bard! :) This problem had me stumped for a while.

Rules for Neurotic Environmentalists, or how to consume without feeling guilty about it

2011-01-19T22:19:00Z

Every now and again I find myself doing something awesome, but feeling guilty about it afterwards because of the associated environmental impact. Like when I drive for hours to visit far-away friends. Or like when I eat something delicious that contains meat.

I know I’m not the only one who gets neurotic about this stuff. I mean, I live in San Francisco, a city that seems to be full of crazy environmentalists like me, or at least people who pay lip-service to the idea of environmentalism. And I’ve got a college friend who ABSOLUTELY LOVES TO HIKE. He’s been hitting the trails every weekend. When he gets home he guilt trips for hours about the gas it took him to get to the trailhead.

One afternoon, while he and I were chatting back and forth on Google, bemoaning the fact that we can’t do what we enjoy without killing the environment, I had an epiphany. I want to share it with you.

It starts with a somewhat depressing thought: You are correct: Absolutely everything that we do, as humans, has a destructive environmental impact. No matter how hard we try, it is completely impossible to take ourselves out of nature and let it continue without us. Species are going to become endangered; relative amounts of atmospheric chemicals are going to change. The things that we do tweak the way that the environment around us operates. Shit happens. Sometimes people die.

Fortunately, there’s a corresponding optimistic thought that goes along with the depressing one:

Destruction and creation are, to a certain extent, linked. Change isn’t all bad. Small forest fires decrease the risk of larger, more destructive forest fires. Sure, the dinosaurs went extinct. But if they had stayed around, mammals (including humans)!, wouldn’t be around now, right? Stress yourself less — sometimes things don’t matter as much as we think they do.

That’s not to say, though, that it’s okay for factories to release pesticides into the air and kill tons of people. There is a happy medium for an amount of environmental destruction that I hope we can all agree on:

Three rules for guilt-free environmental destruction

Figure out what all the things are that make you really, truly happy.
Do those things with reckless, wild abandon. If life isn’t about enjoying the things you love, what is it about?
Eliminate all the stuff from your life that doesn’t make you happy. Stop consuming, if the consumption is related to these things.

There. Super simple. We can’t get away from destroying the environment. That’s what life is, really; a process of continued and rampant environmental destruction! Embrace the truth! So. Instead of destroying the environment doing stupid stuff, and then whining about it, let’s have fun while we’re about it?

And while you’re listening, here are some other helpful hints to help you process / assuage your environmentally-induced guilty conscience:

Some hints

When you’ve done something, think about made you as happy as you thought they would. If they didn’t make you happy, don’t do it again.
Know your impact, and make careful choices. Be aware, for example, that the cow you’re eating might have been pumped full of toxic growth hormones and soy-based feed that is linked to deforestation in the Amazon. Own the fact that motherboard in your cellphone was manufactured using chemicals that came from all over the world. Be aware. And know that if having a cell phone or eating a cow is worth it to you, that’s okay.
Experiment with simplicity. For example: turn off your TV for a week. See if you like it more. Or, ride your bike to work instead of taking your car. See if you like that more.
If you’ve figured out how to be happy, be contagious about it! Try and make other people happier too. If everyone in the world was happier, I believe environmental problems would matter a lot less.

Treehuggers are not effective environmentalists

2010-06-20T14:30:00Z

In 2007, someone anonymous wrote a letter to UC Berkeley environmentalists who were protesting cutting down trees by sitting in them. Here is an excerpt:

Consider what you are fighting for. How many trees does UC intend to destroy for its construction project? (Answer: 38). Is the coast live oak an endangered or threatened species? (Answer: No). Will the removal of these individual trees have any significant impact on the health of the overall population of the species? (Answer: No). Consider how many collective man-hours your campaign has devoted to saving these trees. Has it occurred to you that your time may be better spent focusing on (for example) the huge swaths of the Amazon that are cut down by loggers and developers every day? Are you choosing to protect 38 trees because you really think it is a significant, meaningful cause? I hope not— because that would be ignorant. It seems much more likely that you choose this battle because it is relatively convenient and riskless. Honestly—why don’t you sac up and take on a real environmental offender?

I found a link to this letter on I Will Teach You to be Rich, a financial blog. (The blogger’s name is Ramit Sethi. You should read his book. It’s awesome.) The things that Ramit talks about, though, are about more than just money management. He writes:

You�ll find a lot of people doing largely meaningless things and justifying it with these 4 terrible words: �It can�t hurt, right?�

But it can. We�re cognitive misers. We only have limited attention and limited willpower. And with limited time, are you focusing on stuff that will make no difference? Or are you saving your limited attention and cognition for areas that will really make a difference?

Being an environmentalist is stressful. From all sides the world is being bombarded with intense environmental crises (oil in the Gulf, Amazon deforestation, the polar ice caps melting, or the Pacific Trash Vortex, just to name a few). More than half of the human population doesn’t care, and most of the people who do care are too overwhelmed to do anything.

The rest of us? We spend time fighting small battles. Like the Berkeley activists who sat in trees. But it’s not just them, this problem plagues the entire environmental community! For example, when I was the president of my college environmental club, we spent most of our time and energy on campus improvements. We rearranged recycling bins on campus, so that they would be in more convenient locations. We encouraged students to turn off their lights more often.

No wonder environmentalists get the nickname “treehuggers.” We seem inept. Most of us are not acting at our full potential. We’re not making the changes that actually matter.

So here is my appeal to all people who call themselves environmentalists, wherever you live. If you are concerned about the planet, don’t be a treehugger. Think about how you can most effectively change the world.

Imaginary but awesome: Car communication

2010-01-04T09:33:00Z

Note: I found this post when going through my old blog archives from years ago. I still really like this idea. Here’s the old post, pretty much verbatim:

I have a really cool idea that’s got so much potential: We totally need to begin making cars that can wirelessly communicate with each other. It’d be like a modern version of CB radio!

This idea has a lot of pretty interesting correlaries. Imagine the idea of Web 2.0 information sharing being carried over to the highway! It’d improve traffic safety, make road trips take less time, and reduce highway congestion. It would also create a very accurate database of information about traffic patterns, which could be made public domain so that highway departments would have a far easier time improving traffic flow.

Here I’ve listed some of the ways car communication could make driving cleaner, safer, and more enjoyable for everyone:

You’d have to set up a P2P type of network (a flat hierarchy—-every node in the network would be on the same level as every other) for the cars to communicate with each other. Potentially, in cities, at homes, and at interstate rest stops, you could also have cars communicate with wireless computer networks in the area, so that the information could stream online. People could log on to a web site and find the road conditions for Route 66 with a few mouse clicks. :-)
Cars could monitor surrounding traffic patterns by measuring things like average speed per car and car density per mile of highway and broadcast the information to passing cars via a wireless router under the hood, or combined with the radio antenna. Imagine going down a highway and recieving up-to-the-minute traffic updates from cars passing in the other direction!
Sensors on the bottom of your car could pick up information about the condition of the road itself. Likewise, weather could be monitored by sensors on the roof or along the edges of your car.
Since police scanners are illegal most places, this kind of technology would probably be pretty severely regulated. Once the government started realizing that the benefits of this kind of communication far outweigh the drawbacks, they’d probably hop on the P2P-bandwagon too and possibly include roadside fixtures to extend the network (and make it easier for them to synthesize car data as well).

If you have any points to add, I’d be happy to hear your comments. Maybe making this idea possible is one of the first projects I’ll undertake after I graduate from college!

My 2010 New Year resolution: Win at Tetris

2010-01-03T16:58:00Z

Happy New Year ladies and gentlemen! Even though I am only 21, this is technically the beginning of my fourth decade: I’ve been alive in the 80’s, the 90’s, the 00’s, and now the 10’s. I feel very lucky.

This year is going to be pretty big. It is the year that I receive my bachelor’s degree and start a major new phase in my life: one where I am not in college anymore. I am frightened and excited to a degree that I haven’t experienced before.

I am still trying to discover everything that this year means for me. I’m not the type to lay detailed life plans and follow them exactly, but I am also very uncomfortable flying through life by the seat of my pants. At the very least, I need a direction, something that I can justify my decisions by pointing to; something that will give me accountability.

For the past few years, my personality has been manifesting itself in four major directions: I have been a Web programmer, an activist, an academic, and a college kid. I’ve built up a repertoire in all of these directions that amazes me to look back on.

Web programmer me has had the chance to be an engineering intern at IzzitGreen, to hand-code my own blog¹, and to design and develop a fair amount of Web sites for friends, family, and clients. Activist me has MC’d an Environmental Expo in my hometown, has interned at Greenpeace, and has been the president of Clarkson’s Environmental Club for two semesters. Academic me has taken all sorts of classes (from international development to investigative geology to automata theory), has grappled two senior theses (one of which is complete, for the most part²), and has taken an active role in Clarkson’s honors program. College student me has acted in (and directed!) a few plays, has been an officer in community service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, and for some strange reason has been capable of carrying on a satisfying social life.

I have noticed, though, that I am often completely overwhelmed by all of the things on my to-do list, and I’m not sure why. I feel as though I am playing a gigantic game of Tetris, and I’m gradually clearing lines, every once in a while getting a Tetris (four lines in a row, I’m pretty sure that means), but never fully clearing the board — there is always something else.

So that’s what I want to do this year. I want to clear the Tetris board — I want to get rid of all that junk filling up my time, and be 100% happy with how I am spending my time, no matter what I am doing. I am still unsure what this entails for me, because my Tetris board is different each time I look at it.

Here are some of the reasons that I am excited about 2010:

Finishing my honors thesis. If I want to graduate with an honors degree, get that nice fat honors scholarship, and take that fascinating-looking class in food that’s being offered next semester, I have to do this. But also, it’s going to be nice to finish something that has been looming for what seems like since sophomore year of high school…³ I’ve already mentioned that my thesis involves developing a Facebook application. I won’t say much more yet about it, except that I’m trying to figure out how morality and political views transfer between people.
Driving a circuit around the United States with my high school buddies. Matt, Jon and I have been planning this for a bit over a year now… The week after I graduate, we’re going to depart the great state of New York and drive west until we reach Washington. Then we are going to drive south until we reach Southern California. Then we are going to drive east until we reach Florida. Finally, we are going to drive north until we get back to New York. We’re going to accomplish this in about a month and a half, hopefully with about a grand and a half apiece. That, in all of its awesome vagueness, is our plan.
Becoming an uncle. This one’s something I’ve not got much control over, but I’m pretty excited about it nonetheless! My new nephew is going to be living kind of far away from me, but I am definitely going to make every attempt to see him and my brother/sister-in-law once or twice this year.
That empty, open expanse of possibility starting when I get back from the road trip. I’m considering some job opportunities, just freelancing, or taking a wild leap and moving to a strange city to see what happens. Either way, before this open expanse begins I want to make sure my Tetris board is empty.

In the past few days, I have been hacking away at my blog, making lots of improvements in the backend that make it waaay easier for me to write new posts… including adding footnotes like this one! These changes might mean that you will be hearing from me more often. ↩
It’s about a community-based resistance movement against the Wal-Mart in Potsdam, New York, and why that movement failed. It is my goal to polish it more and then formally publish it. ↩
There is a long story here, and I will tell it as soon as I am able. ↩

Imaginary but awesome: Book annotation

2009-12-31T15:22:58Z

The problem

When I�m reading a book, I often have to stop because a particular passage inspires me, annoys me, confuses me, or reminds me of something. I write notes in the margin for later� but when I�m finally in a state of mind to act on what I wrote, I don�t remember that I wrote anything.

Other times, while I�m reading I would be interested to see what other readers thought about a specific passage, or I want to let other people know what I think.

A possible solution

This�d be a pretty sweet application of augmented reality. Strap on your AR goggles and all of a sudden, you�d see something like this:

I�m envisioning something like Google Sidewiki, except for books in real life. We don�t have the tech for this yet, but maybe in a few years?

Use for Google Suggest: Outsource your poetry

2009-11-02T13:34:00Z

Are you an aspiring poet who can’t figure out why you’re not making any money? You probably should have realized that this would happen the moment you bought your first Moleskine. If you want to sell out, however, the power of Google Suggest will ensure that your poems will, at least, resound well with the public.

Just start with a word or two. Type them into your Google search box, pick the most poem-like result, and go on to the next line. Encourage sentence-style results by sprinkling a few “is”s and “are”s in your queries. To stay with a theme, make sure your next few words are related to the first few.

Not only will this get you published and rolling in disposable cash, it’s also fun! Here is an example. The seed words are in [square brackets].

[how long] how long does weed stay in your system
[your system] your system is infected
[your] your baby can read
[read] read books online free
[books] books to read before you die
[you die] you die in the game you die in real life movie
[real life is] real life is overrated
[real life is] real life islamic stories
[is real] is real hair real
[are hair] are hair extensions worth it
[extensions] extensions are not enabled

Now, add punctuation and spacing for something truly professional:

How long does weed stay in your system?
Your system is infected.
Your baby can read, read books online free.
Books to read before you die.
You die in the game, you die in real life.
Movie. Real life is overrated.
Real life Islamic stories: Is Real Hair Real?
Are hair extensions worth it?
Extensions are not enabled.

Such is the awesome power of Google Suggest.

Traversing the DOM with Facebook's JavaScript

2009-07-14T23:15:00Z

This summer, I am developing a Facebook application. It's for my honors thesis; I'm keeping the details a secret for now. I've been messing around with Facebook's API, and for the most part I think it's very developer-friendly and awesome. At least, until you start trying to modify your own DOM elements using FBJS, Facebook's filtered version of JavaScript.

For most of the JavaScript programming I do these days, I make use of jQuery, a library that simplifies the otherwise extremely tedious task of traversing through DOM elements, because the traversal functions JavaScript supplies by default are woefully lacking. Unfortunately, it is impossible to use jQuery (or another JavaScript library like Prototype) with FBJS, because Facebook modifies all the identifiers in my code, prepending them with the Facebook application ID. This means that it's impossible to get to basic JavaScript objects like window or document.

What Facebook gives you

In FBJS, you get six functions that you can call on a DOM element that give you other DOM elements: getParentNode(), getNextSibling(), getPreviousSibling(), getFirstChild(), getLastChild(), and getChildNodes(). They mirror the default JavaScript DOM element calls. FBJS also gives you document.getElementById() and getRootElement() to give you a starting point for DOM traversal. These functions are helpful, but not as helpful as they could or should be, especially when you consider one of the tips in the Facebook Developer's Wiki:

Don't create JavaScript which depends on a sensitive DOM structure. Code like this.getElementByTagName('div')[1].getFirstChild().getLastChild().setStyle('color', 'white') is very fragile and may randomly break if we change the way certain elements are rendered.

What is a hapless developer to do? Using only these functions, the only way I can get to specific DOM elements within a complicated structure is by creating long expressions like the one above. Which is exactly what I was warned against doing. Also, the code is really difficult to read.

The solution: A FBJS library

Well, that's a good ultimate goal. Until someone develops FBJQuery (it really is a good idea!), I'd like to share some FBJS functions with you that might help. children() lets you drill down through the DOM tree and collect all elements that have a specific class name and returns them as an array, and closestParent() lets you drill up through the DOM tree, returning the closest parent with a specific class name. Feel free to use them at your leisure, or modify them at your leisure, under my Creative Commons license:

/*
Mirrors the behavior of document.getElementById(name),
but it's shorter and prettier
*/
function $(name) {
  return document.getElementById(name);
}

/*
returns an array of all descendants of element
that have class "classname"
*/
function children(element, classname) {
  var list = [];
  
  function accumulateChildren(root) {
    var node = root.getFirstChild();
    while(node != null) {
      if(node.hasClassName(classname)) {
        list.push(node);
      }
      accumulateChildren(node);
      node = node.getNextSibling();
    }
  }
  
  accumulateChildren(element);
  return list;
}

/*
gets the closest ancestor of an element
that has class "classname"
*/
function closestParent(element, classname) {
  element = element.getParentNode();
  
  while(element != null) {
    if(element.getClassName() == classname) {
      return element;
    }
    element = element.getParentNode();
  }
  return null;
}

They're not much, but I hope these functions are helpful.

Update: It looks like there's an open source project going to port JQuery to FBJS! I'm so happy! It's called fbjqry, but it hasn't been updated recently.

No more WordPress

2009-07-13T03:31:50Z

Adios, WordPress. While you are gorgeous, and an excellent blogging platform, I don't think you are right for me anymore. Instead, I have moved on to a hand-coded, simple, PHP/MySQL blog. I am still tweaking it, ironing out the fine points, and making it exactly the way that I want it to be. However, I thought I would blog about the process, especially since it's been so long since you've heard from me.

The catalyst: My WordPress installation got hacked

I am not entirely sure how this happened, but my old WordPress installation (I was running 2.7) was compromised in a very strange way. I'm assuming there were vulnerabilities in the source that were probably patched in 2.8, but I searched Mr. Google's Guidebook for similar problems and had no luck. The blog looked and -- for the most part -- acted fine, but whenever I tried to "preview" a post I was writing, I would be redirected to a link-farm style site featuring porn, warez, and sketchiest of all, a disc image file that tried to automatically download. I've not heard much about viruses for macs, but I would not have been surprised if this was one.

Probably because I was inadvertently linking into a link farm, Google stopped including blog.maxedmands.com in its search results. While the lack of "preview" functionality was annoying, having no coverage on Google was completely unacceptable. Accordingly, I started thinking about how I was going to resolve this problem.

The other catalyst: My old layout annoyed me

I am a sucker for minimalism. According to my theory, the less extra fluff a web layout has, the easier it will be for the reader (the user) to find what he or she wants. This is one of the reasons I like Google products so much; they just do what you want and don't bother you with extra information. The pros agree with me: Strunk and White's Elements of Style touts minimalism with an appeal to "omit needless words" in writing. Why should design or code be any different?

My old layout met my minimalist ideal about halfway. It wasn't terrible, but a lot of precious screen real-estate was spent on a sidebar with multiple links to the same content. For example, I was given the option to include a "monthly archive" section, so that users could click on an individual month and see all the things I posted that month. However, I only post on average about once a month, so users would only see one post. I considered deleting these sidebar links, but I had nothing to replace them with, and I didn't want to leave my users with an awkward empty expanse on the right side of the screen. I wanted a new layout, one more similar to, for example, Mark Pilgrim's, which eschews ALL stereotypical "blog" elements: no sidebar, no title, no list of links at the top of the screen, only content.

I had plans to make my own WordPress theme (I've done this before, and it isn't terribly difficult). However, WordPress had many built-in features that I don't necessarily care about. Why include the extra bulk, I thought, when I could make my own blogging platform that included only the features that I wanted? Plus, in theory, I would gain some coding experience and learn a thing or two about technologies that I have never used.

The design

Cool text editors are fun. I design and code on a Mac, and for web stuff I usually use a combination of TextMate (which is beginning to show signs of age), Transmit, and CSSEdit. However, because I had recently gotten a shiny new copy of Espresso I gave it a quick spin.

I just finished taking a class in Typography and Design, and I wanted to try to make use of some of the principles of that class in my new blog design. Since my blog has no purpose, at this point, other than to record my thoughts and feelings occasionally, I thought it would be a good idea to make it look classy, but not too serious. My ideal typeface choice, with this in mind, was Minion, an awesome typeface owned by Adobe. Given that most people do not have this font installed on their computer, I chose Microsoft's Georgia as a backup. It's quite different, but it still has the same classy and slightly informal feel. Unfortunately, I think it's a bit too simple, and it feels very ancient.

I took unusually great care, also, in selecting font faces and styles for headings. The words "Max's Blog" on the top, as well as the navigational icons, are in Museo 700, a beautiful, nuanced, curvacious modern font that's offered for free on the internet. The rest of the headings, more closely associated with the content, are in the same face as the content, but I decided to go with ALL CAPS for comment headings and italics for the rest.

I have never been very good at choosing colors, which is why my color scheme is boring black and grey. At some point, I will explore other options. In fact, I was thinking about making it so that each post would give the bar at the top of the page a different color. This is something I am still thinking on. One of the best things about having a blog that I've entirely coded by hand is that I will always be able to tweak things to exactly how I want them, instead of being forced into some other designer or developer's way of thinking. Not that I am against teamwork, but this is my personal blog, and I want it to exude my personality, not someone else's.

The features (or lack thereof)

I've cut back quite a bit from what WordPress offers. I cannot tag or categorize my posts, there is no semblance of a sidebar, and there is no search feature. In return, this blog has gained speed and character. The important things are still here: I can write posts, people can comment on them, and people can subscribe to this blog in a feed reader. I also broke down and included what seemed like necessities: an "about" page and an "archives" page.

When I put the new blog online, I was surprised to immediately start recieving spam comments. Naively, I had assumed that because I was using homebrew blogging software, I would be free of spam. One of the things I really loved about WordPress was Akismet, which was magically able to prevent spam comments from getting on my blog. So, with some PHP magic, I was able to incorporate Akismet into my new blog, and live free of spam again. Finally, to add some visual interest to the comments section, I implemented Gravatar support.

Eventually, I will be releasing my blogging software as open source. But before then, I should probably be nice and write a backend... at this point I'm just typing up blog entries in a text editor and putting them in my database by hand. This is a workflow that works fine for me right now, so I probably won't be rushing to get an admin section done, but it's in my "future projects" radar.

Photo credits: I made both of these images, but the WordPress gravestone one uses the WordPress logo, licensed under the GNU General Public License, as well as an image taken by AmUnivers on Flickr titled "Sauron's eye," licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Clarkson ECO contest

2009-06-15T06:40:31Z

During the past school year, I was the president of Clarkson's Environmental Conservation Organization (we called ourselves ECO). By far the most awesome club on campus (I'm being facetious) we did cool stuff like organize a contingent to go to Power Shift '09 in DC, submit a formal report to Clarkson administration about the sometimes less-than-ideal placement of recycling bins, carry around our garbage for a week to show how much trash people generate on a daily basis, and organize a huge Potsdam event in support of climate change and green job awareness.

ECO's pretty great. And because ECO's pretty great, someone at Clarkson decided they would enter a contest that could win us obscene amounts of money! Well, not necessarily obscene amounts, but $15,000, which is more money than I've ever held at one time. With $15,000, ECO could do some pretty excellent stuff on campus, such as:

Building something interesting like a composting facility or a community garden
Hosting an excellent regional ECO event (like a mini Power Shift maybe?) with lots of interesting things going on like speakers and musicians and talks
Starting some sort of program to encourage Clarkson students to recycle more
Reaching out to the community of Potsdam, New York in some ECO-related way

It's a photo contest, and Clarkson is one out of 25 finalists. Right now, we're fifth out of 25, and we need to be in the top 10 to be considered for the prize. If you're interested in helping us out, you should vote for the photo at the top of this post. (It's gorgeous, isn't it? That's a secluded corner of Clarkson's campus in the middle of the winter.) Writing reviews and posting links to social media and the like are also, apparently, very helpful in making this photo win. Here's where you go:

http://www.brickfish.com/Pages/PhotosAlbums/PhotoView.aspx?picid=901352_13999872&pid=1636000&scid=456&

How else do you think a school's environmental club might be able to make use of large amounts of money? I invite you to comment on the matter below.

Alice in Wonderland type project

2009-03-30T14:00:56Z

For my Typography and Design class, we had to typographically arrange a passage from Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland in an interesting way. I am somewhat proud of my design; I thought I'd post it to my blog!

The Copernican Principle applied to time

2009-03-28T18:58:14Z

Via Dan Bertolet of hugeasscity:

Humans have a penchant for believing they are living in revolutionary times, on the brink of massive change. Just ask anyone who spent time in San Francisco during the late 1960s (not me ? I was here). It?s a tendency lodged deep in our psyches, no doubt rooted in the same reptilian muck that fuels religious obsession with imminent Armageddon.

But oh yes indeed, there would appear to be some rather serious shit going down these days. So then, are we truly on the verge of revolutionary change? Or are we once again succumbing to the propensity to overestimate the importance of our own era?

The Copernican Principle, in simplest possible terms, states that we are not special. Earth is not at the center of the universe, and human civilization may not be at the high water mark that we think we’re at. Therefore, we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. But then again, the universe we’re in is a powerful place, full of huge amounts of energy, and therefore everything that happens is “serious shit” when compared with the fragility of human life.

So even if we’re not at a crucial pinnacle of everything, we still need to take good care of that tiny blue sphere you see at the top of this post (this is photo taken by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — in other words, how someone from Mars would see Planet Earth). It’s small; we’re even smaller. But we’ve still got a lot of potential, and we need to take really good care of ourselves, even if armageddon is not, in fact, nigh.

By the way, I’ve found that listening to George Carlin rant about people like me is a good cure for taking myself too seriously.

A band I'm excited about: Street Sweeper

2009-03-28T14:23:58Z

Tom Morello, the lead guitarist from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, has formed a new band; a collaboration with rapper Boots Riley (of The Coup). They’re called “Street Sweeper” and they’re coming out with a new album soon. Also, they’re about to go on tour with Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction (major win). Tour dates and sample music are online.

A poster advertising an inconvenient truth

2009-03-09T11:19:38Z

I made this a long time ago for an event at my community college, and I thought it would be interesting to post. I was really proud of it, and then I lost track of it somewhere in my computer only to find it again today.

How to write a last-minute essay

2009-01-16T00:00:00Z

When you’ve been writing essays for as long as I have, you’re bound to learn some of the tricks that are necessary for churning them out like water from a tap. It is not hard at all to write an ‘A’ English paper in less than twelve minutes and thirty seconds. The skill would do well as an extreme sport. I’m here to tell you the “tricks of the trade”: You need preparation, the correct circumstances, and a good method.

Before you can begin your speed-essay, you need to mentally prepare yourself for the challenge. The best way to do this is by reading. Whenever you have a free moment, spend it reading a book. Any book will do, whether its fiction or nonfiction, so long as you enjoy it. The more you read, the more you can subconsciously imitate what you’ve read to make it seem like you’ve actually spent hours meticulously writing everything you’ve only spent two minutes on.

You should also be able to type. Hunting and pecking for keys will take a lot of time. However, if the job is done properly, writing an essay on a computer is insurmountably faster than writing the same essay by hand. A great way to learn to type is to get AOL Instant Messenger, or a comparible online chat program, and attempt to carry on conversations with thirty people at once. Most people learn to type very well in around eighth grade for this reason.

Before you start your essay, it is also important to perfect the circumstances under which you write it. Make sure that you have a deadline. It is, unfortunately, impossible to complete a great essay in less than twelve minutes and thirty seconds without a deadline, preferably within the next half-hour. There always has to be something at stake. Otherwise, your essay will have no focus.

Make yourself a quiet, comfortable, and clean space in front of a computer or at a desk. The entire area should be completely free of distractions. Annoying little brothers should be locked into their rooms; girlfriends should be directed to your voicemail; and computer games, email, and the internet should be firmly closed. No matter how little time you spend distracted from your essay will always have to spend twice as much time finishing it. Feel free to distract yourself when you’re done writing.

Once you’ve completely prepared yourself and perfected your surroundings, you can actually start. But unless you already know exactly what you’re going to say, don’t start writing right away. Think about your essay for at least two and a half minutes. Consider what your teacher (or whoever is going to be reading it) is looking for. Completely pander to whatever you think that the reader will want from your essay. Flatter the reader, subtly, at every opportunity. If it is done correctly, this will dramatically increase your chances of getting a favorable review.

It is amazing how much time speedy essay-writing can save you. You can use this skill at every opportunity to get the most out of the remainder of your day. (Just don’t say that you heard this from me.)

Photo credit: "Homework Sucks [Day 4]," by Flickr user Chaparral [Kendra], under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

My life minus a car, part two

2008-12-20T00:00:00Z

For the past 24 days, I have been avoiding my car like the plague, by not driving as an experiment. I wanted to see if I, and perhaps by extension other car-driving Americans, could live a fulfilling life without driving. Next Friday (the day after Christmas) my experiment will be over, and then I will decide whether I should give up my car for good.

Traveling home from school, my experiment felt counterproductive. I spent the weekend after final exams in Vermont, visiting my roommate (who will be away on co-op next semester) and his family. My experience was excellent, and I am very happy I went. But, on the way home, I really wished that I’d had my car with me: To bring me back to New York, my father drove all the way to pick me up. Round trip, he took his car about 350 miles instead of the 175 it would have been if I had brought my car to school with me. Total negative impact on the environment: 175 miles / about 21 miles per gallon = 8.3 gallons of extra gasoline. The EPA calculates that about 19 pounds of carbon dioxide gets generated for every gallon of fuel burned. (For real! Here’s an explanation.) That means all the extra driving pumped about 160 pounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere more than was necessary, because of my no-car experiment.

Still, I’m not blaming the experiment for all the wasted carbon I’m now responsible for. Instead, I’m blaming my lack of planning and clear thinking: I should have arranged to take a bus or train home from Vermont. It would have made the day easier for my dad, and it would have given me the time to sit back and enjoy a book, write, or just take in the excellent scenery.

Granted, it wouldn’t have been that easy. While writing this, I spent about 2 hours looking for effective public transportation from eastern Vermont to the Hudson Valley. Apparently, buses just don’t go that way, and the best Amtrak route I could find would have taken me 8.5 hours (by way of New York City) and cost me $80. (Correction: I could have taken the Ethan Allen Express from Rutland to Poughkeepsie for 4.5 hours and $46, with about 2 extra hours of driving. That probably would have been the best route.) These figures are extremely impractical. My conclusion: public transportation in the United States is broken. It needs to be fixed. We need viable alternatives to car transportation and we need them now.

In the short term, my transportation dilemma would have been easily solved had I driven home on my own. On the other hand, America’s shocking lack of public transportation is exacerbated by the fact that everyone drives everywhere. Because we all have cars and that’s the easy solution, nobody needs trains to get them places. Put another way, if we want to increase the availability of public transportation, we need to increase demand for it.

So maybe that extra CO₂ I used wasn’t wasted after all.

The more I consider taking my car back, the more stressed and frustrated I get. I don’t want to have to think about fixing my dashboard lights, changing my oil, finding a parking spot, or removing 2-inch-thick layers of Potsdam ice from my windshield. When necessary, I can help other people do these things.

No Impact Man’s blog has really been influencing me lately. His words inspire:

We don’t have time to wait around to see what might help change the world. We simply have to begin stumbling forward and beginning to try to make a difference, rather than sitting around wondering if we can make a difference or not.

If I feel so guilty about my car, then there’s really nothing to consider. I need to let it go. It’ll be my first real stumble toward making a difference, and I hope that I keep making more.

Photo credit: "Northbound Amtrak," by Flickr user jonlewis, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

My life minus a car, part one

2008-12-07T00:00:00Z

I have been without a car for a little bit over a week now, and so far it hasn’t been too much of a problem. Rides to school and home haven’t been a difficult thing to arrange, given that a lot of people from Clarkson seem to live in my area. And while here in Potsdam, I’ve taken my bicycle to go shopping once, and again for a theatre rehearsal at the stage in Old Snell. The first ride was very cold; the second time I learned my lesson and wore a warm hat and gloves.

While at home, things will be a bit more challenging. It seems like the Woodstock and West Hurley areas are built specifically so that people are forced to drive there cars everywhere, even if it’s right around the block to the grocery store. (The WalkScore at my house is 5 out of a possible 100… “car dependent.” And I live just outside of town. Compare this to the WalkScore at Clarkson, a 72 out of 100, or “very walkable.”) I find this really sad. In general, Woodstock is a very progressive community.

In 2003, the Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (a government organization) said that obesity was the #1 health threat in the United States, more prevalent than tobacco, and more dangerous than bioterrorism. What’s more, the correlation between obesity and car use is undeniable: our dependency on cars really is making us fat.

I look forward to the day (and I know it will come) that we build more sidewalks and live closer together.

Photo credit: “They say bikes get in the way of traffic,” by Flickr user richardmasoner, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Getting rid of the car

2008-11-26T00:00:00Z

Happy Thanksgiving! I am home from school this week to commemorate the holiday, and I’m remembering how nice it is to not have to run from class to class and do tons of homework all the time. As usual, I had a very long ride home, and this time as I was traveling I made a resolution worthy of a blog post:

I’m going to stop using my car. I have been considering this for a while… The idea got into my head partially because of the influence of great environmental writers like Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man), who has been car-less for a while, partially from my brother Theo who never had a license and has been doing fine without it, and partially from a lot of my friends at school, who manage without cars.

There are a lot of things that will become far less convenient as a result of this decision. For example, I will have to start worrying about getting rides to and from school. It will become a lot more difficult for me to go shopping for food (I’m probably going to be riding to the Potsdam Co-op on my bike, or even walking there, weekly, even when it snows). It won’t be as easy for me to, on a whim, drive somewhere to do something fun. I will no longer be able to be a nice person and give people rides. I will miss the “side effects” of driving, like the opportunity to sit around and listen to music, which is something I have only really had time to do while driving. And if I have a hot date, it’ll have to be somewhere we can walk to, unless she wants to give me a ride.

Even with all of these inconveniences, I honestly can’t imagine I will miss it much. This means I will no longer have to pay through the nose for gasoline, repairs, and insurance. (Actually, I have been lucky; my parents have been covering my insurance costs, so I’m saving them money!) I will have more free time; Car maintenace sometimes feels like as much of a timesink as, say, TV. I won’t have the chance to get traffic tickets, which are not fun. But I think some of the biggest gains I will get out of this are philosophical ones.

First, I will gain an appreciation for things that are closer to me, things that do not require lots of travel to get to. Similarly, I will be forced to get by with less stuff in general, because it will be more difficult to transport it places. Second, I will see how well I can follow through on something that I have been thinking about for a long time, to (proverbially) see if my “bark” matches my “bite.” I really don’t like cars. The negative impact they have on the planet depresses me. I’ve only been driving them because I saw them as “necessary” to do the things I do from day to day. But are they really? For a lot of people, they aren’t.

I’m going to do this Steve Pavlina style and do a 30-day trial, completely driving-free. This is going to be a challenge, because right now I am visiting my parents for Thanksgiving break. I’ll leave my car here, and get a ride back to school with my friend Nora and her family. More difficult, while I’m at school I will need to bike/walk in the cold to get my groceries, or wait until my roommate wants to go shopping and travel with him. This will force me to plan my day differently, taking longer times, and the availability of others, into account. Then in three weeks, when final exams are over, I will need to find a way to cart myself and whatever belongings I need back to my parents’ house. At home, I am going to find it very difficult to spend time with friends, especially friends who live far away. This whole experience will be difficult, but I am sure I will find it enlightening and enriching.

On December 26th (the day after Christmas!) my 30-day trial will be over. At this point, I will make a decision to either give up and start using my car again, or to get rid of my car by selling it (or even giving it away).

Preamble

2008-11-19T00:00:00Z

Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? If you haven’t, you should. It’s one of my favorite books, because it makes me think, and because it was written with a lot of thought and care.

The book is autobiographical, but only sort of. It’s about a cross-country journey taken by a man and his son (and some other people) on a motorcycle. But mostly, the book is about a mental journey: the man, Robert Pirsig, explores his own past, and tries to figure out what it is that makes humans do what they do.

Mostly, the book is about quality. The word represents an abstract concept, one similar to “excellence” or perhaps “perfection.” It’s not at all a definable concept, but it’s something that he (the author) tries so hard to define that it nearly drives him crazy.

Until very recently I thought I was going to be able to use this blog to hone down my very own definition of “quality.” For a very long time, I have been looking for a way to do that. But I have finally come to the conclusion that quality is not possible to define, and difficult to strive for.

I am knitting a scarf! It’s for the needy. I am going to donate it to a homeless shelter when I am done with it. Even though I’m never going to see it when I am done making it, and even though I know there are probably many more constructive ways to spend my time (especially if I would like to help the needy), I have spent huge amounts of time trying to make it perfect. The yarn is 100% wool. I even bought myself a nice, long-lasting pair of knitting needles to make it. There are 15 stitches in each row, and even though this is my first knitting project, there is not a single missing stitch. In order to achieve this kind of quality, especially when I was knitting the first five or ten rows, I forced myself to start over repeatedly, instead of just creatively dealing with the dropped stitch.

Actually, I lied. That was the case until today, when I dropped a stitch and then decided that I had gone too far to go back. There is a point at which striving for absolute quality means that you will have to spend an infinite amount of time working on something, and then whatever it is that you are working on will never see the light of day.

So, that’s where I’m at as far as quality is concerned. Welcome to my weblog. It has actually been around for a while?two years?but for the past six months, it was broken. (Something bad happened when I attempted to upgrade from a very old version of Wordpress to the newest version.) While it was broken, I occasionally wrote posts for it in my head, and was annoyed when I was not able to translate those thoughts to my computer. Now, if my thoughts are coherent, I again have a place for them to go.

The environmental impact of coal seam fires

2008-08-07T22:00:00Z

The human race has become very proficient at putting out fires, but we have always been far better at starting them. In the United States, for example, 1.6 million fires were started in 2006, resulting in more than three thousand deaths and roughly sixteen thousand injuries. Occasionally, we have the terrible misfortune of starting these fires along coal seams, where the coal catches fire, often exceeding temperatures of 1000°F. These fires burn for thousands of years, are terrible for the environment, and are expensive and dangerous (read: almost impossible) to put out.

While they happen everywhere, most of the world's worst coal seam fires are in countries like China, India, and Indonesia. These countries have a voracious and growing appetite for energy and development, and harvesting their large reserves of coal is a convenient and cheap way to fuel themselves. Unfortunately, they also lack stringent government regulations, and small, private coal-mining operations usually take no precautions against coal fires.

Young coal worker in Linfen (Shanxi, China)

China's coal fires are especially problematic: An estimate in June 2004 by geologist Glenn Stracher determines that Chinese coal fires consume up to 200 million tons of coal per year, ruining the land, air, and water, disrupting animals and affecting human health. And this is just from coal that's being accidentally burned.

With the Beijing Olympics opening today, China's coal fire problem is just one of the many environmental issues the country is wrestling to deal with (or cover up). A recent TIME article discusses China's manipulation of air pollution statistics:

In China's western Xinjiang province, [reporter Steven Q. Andrews] visited a site where authorities had claimed a long-burning [coal] fire had been put out. "I decided go to see how it was extinguished, and flames were visible and the entire thing was still burning," he says. "They said it was put out, and who is to say otherwise?"

Of course, the United States has its share of mine fires also. I was (dubiously) fortunate enough to explore one of them, in Centralia, PA last year. My group was only passing through to visit a coal mine further west, but we stopped to take in the experience.

Abandoned buildings in Centralia, PA.

Located directly above a long seam of anthracite coal, Centralia and its neighboring communities (with names like Ashland, Byrnsville, etc...) were mining towns since the mid-1800's. In the early 1960's, when coal mining became less profitable, most of the area's mining operations went out of business and the entire region sank into an economic depression. Somewhat foolishly, in 1961 the town started to use a close-by abandoned strip mine as a landfill, dumping all sorts of trash into it. Then, as was the town's yearly custom, in May 1962 a group of firefighters set the dump on fire. This time, however, the coal seam caught fire, and has never been extinguished. (Interested in a more detailed story?)

Burned rock

The ground buckles under the abandoned portion of Route 61.

As we drove into Centralia from Ashland (see a map), State Route 61 veered right. To our left, roadblocks barred what turned out to be the original Route 61, abandoned when the coal fire started to make the ground unstable. When coal burns underground, it leaves large, empty caverns. The heat and gas from the burning also weakens the structural integrity of the rock around these caverns, creating fissures that get filled with rainwater and erode the rock even more. Eventually, the ground is unable to hold any weight, and it will sink and buckle. In 1981, a 12-year-old Centralia boy fell into a 150-foot-deep sinkhole that opened underneath him. (Thankfully, he was saved by his older cousin, who "pulled him from the mouth of the hole before he could plunge to his probable death", according to Wikipedia.) In the Shuijingqu Mine in China, burned rock from coal fires has created collapse pits that are more than 275 feet deep.

The soil atop the burned rock is also charred and barren. There were a lot of trees above Centralia's coal seam; now many of them are dead and dying for lack of nutrition. Similar effects can be seen in China's Wuda Coalfield, where the cracked surface of the ground also accellerates erosion, creating deserts where forests used to be.

Air pollution

Walking through Centralia, one of the first things we noticed was a distinct sulfuric smell, like rotten eggs. We encountered piles of charred brush and refuse among plumes of smoke that had been steadily rising for 40 years. This was shocking to me; it completley blows my mind that most of the coal fires in China are worse.

Extreme smog in Beijing.

In areas around the burning Chinese Wuda Coalfield and the Liuhuanggou coal fire, the smoke is so thickly pervasive that is impossible to see more than 20 feet in any directon around you. This smoke is thick with harmful gases (such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide) and coaldust. Winds pick this noxious smoke and send it to cities like Urumqi, in the Xinjiang Region, where the pollution is comparable to the pollution in Beijing.

A solution

Leaving Centralia was a bit of a relief. While the experience was exhilerating, I couldn't shake the feeling that the ground might cave beneath me any moment, or that I was putting myself at risk for lung cancer just by being there.

Thankfully, there are a few efforts underway to try to fight these underground coal fires. From Environment News Service:

One engineering firm, Goodson and Associates, Inc., has developed a heat resistant "grout": a mixture of sand, cement, fly ash, water and foam that can be pumped around burning material. The grout, called Thermocell, helps to cut off the fire's oxygen supply and allow the blaze to cool down.

While traditional coal fire fighting techniques require large equipment used close to the red hot fire, the readily flowing grout can be pumped from a distance away," said Goodson and Associates owner Gary Colaizzi.

… Colaizzi's firm has used its grout on fires in Colorado and Arizona, and discussions are underway about the possibility of using it in China.

Check out some of the photos I posted to flickr of my trip to Centralia:

Photo credits, listed from top to bottom: "Noxium Fumage," by Flickr user eqqman, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. "Young coal worker in Linfen (Shanxi, China)," by Flickr user andi808, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. "DSCN3150.JPG" by Flickr user Lyndi&Jason under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. "Centralia, PA: Abandoned road is pretty much ruined" by me on Flickr, under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license. "Beijing smog" by Flickr user kevindooley under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.