Rambles at starchamber.com

As greenhouse gases go, methane is one of the most ferocious. That’s why it was big news last year when some scientists reported that plants may be generating huge amounts of it. Was our role as polluter of the ecosystem overblown? According to Carl Zimmer’s latest post, this contrarian tidbit was picked up by pundits [...]

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Here’s one from my Mom: a video of two hundred horses escaping from an island in the Netherlands where they had been trapped by rising water.
Now I’m going to tell you exactly what happens in this video. You see seven minutes worth of poorly shot video with some melodramatic music glued onto it in [...]

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I’m headed out of town for a few days, so I’ll leave you with yet another dangerously addictive game: Tower Defense. A friend of mine at work was spirited away by this game for a week. Each morning he would come in to work and explain to us his newest strategies for penetrating ever higher [...]

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If you haven’t seen this one yet, it’s definitely worth watching.

This juxtaposition of old and new makes me think of a recent post by Andrew McAfee on the flip:

One useful flip test consists of mentally switching the order of appearance of a new technology and an existing one… Let’s say the world has only [...]

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Getting the future wrong is easy. Getting the future wrong with style requires some skill.
Paleo-Future is a blog that specializes in digging up ancient visions of the future, particularly those distant futures that we now inhabit (i.e. what will life be like in the year 2000?). It’s an impressive blog, because the author, whose [...]

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I bought my first iPod back in 2003, and it served me well for almost three years before the drive started making ominous clicking sounds. Then it kept popping into “Drive Mode” and wouldn’t come out. I tried all the tricks, read the support sites, and even asked a friend who used to work at [...]

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As a follow-up to a post I made in January about inexpensive backup tools, I thought I would mention that I’m now using Mozy and find it to work really well. Shortly after I posted about Jungle Disk, a couple of people (Rick at work and my cousin Peter) told me about a New York [...]

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One of the reasons I abandoned Movable Type for WordPress was an out-of-control comment spam problem. As I said when I first made the move, solutions for this problem do exist for Movable Type, but they were too much work for me to get them tuned properly. When you spend even a small amount of [...]

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