Published on
August 30, 2005 in
Peak oil.
Yesterday I saw a TV report on hydrogen cars. What they did not say (again) and what many people don’t get: it will not solve the peak oil issue. Hydrogen is not an energy source – it is a way to store energy like a battery. The fossil fuel will be consumed in the energy production plants instead of inside the motors. The only energy source available to date that could replace fossil fuel is nuclear power – if production would be ramped up radically (and then we still need oil for all the raw materials, right?).
It’s just another example of the fact, that media did not fully understand the peak oil issue or think it may be a too complex issue to bother consumers with. I can’t remember to have seen or heard a documentary about the peak oil issue in German TV to date.
Published on
August 30, 2005 in
Ecology.
Google Maps offers an unprecedented view on the deforestation of the Brasilian rain forest. I wonder what on the mind of the Brasilian government to allow this amount exploitation.
Published on
August 30, 2005 in
Business.
Since it’s start in 2002 Flickr has seen an enormous success. Flickr’s design is clean, lean and simple – giving room for the stars of the show: the photos and photographers.
Something fundamental about the Internet: stuff like Flickr is not hip because of their interface design. They are hip because of their independence, their spirit and their smartness.
Flickr was a playground not only for everyone taking pictures, but also for professional photographers. It didn’t play a role that hobbyists were populating the ground, because Flickr was pure and focussed on photos. No ads and no “other services you might buy in” nags were polluting the space.
In March 2005 Flickr was bought by Yahoo and now users are required to get a Yahoo account if they want to use the Flickr service in future. But users don’t want to be forced into the family of services Yahoo wants to sneak in.
Now Flickr users are protesting (see Wired article). It seems they feel like Yahoo stole their photos to enhance the other crap they want to offer (especially because most frequent users have paid for Flickr). People feel like being the ones that made Flickr: without their photos Flickr would be a waste of CPU time.
Yahoo once took over intellectual property of Geocities users (or at least intended to “secure” itself for new Geocities accounts). There are just not enough reasons to trust Yahoo.
Published on
August 25, 2005 in
Business.
A lot of rumors about Googles new instant messaging application last week: today Google Talk was released. It’s possible to log into Google Talk with any Jabber-compatible Instant Messenger (because it uses the XMPP protocol). But while they use Jabber as technology it does not connect to the existing Jabber servers around. That is really a bad decision.
Google Talk comes with a lean interface and doesn’t do anything but chat and voice-over-ip. I am stil sceptical about VOIP that doesn’t interoperate: Can I call a Google Talk user with a SIP phone? There is a section about »service choice« on the developer pages:
We plan to partner with other willing service providers to enable federation of our services. This means that a user on one service can communicate with users on another service without needing to sign up for, or sign in with, each service.
[...]
We do not have details at this time on when federation will be enabled. But we are working closely with Earthlink and Sipphone to federate EarthLink’s Vling service and Sipphone’s Gizmo Project with the Google Talk service as quickly as possible, while offering the best possible user experience.
There is a interoperability discussion group for Google Talk. There is already a review published by Ars Technica. So if Goolge is interested in interoperation, why don’t they just allow Google Talk users chat with existing Jabber users?
Paul Neave shows how to integrate Google Maps with Flash. Amazing! This example shows the power of Web APIs combined with a cutting edge interactive tool like Flash (you even can rotate the maps via the compass wheel). Now he just needs to find a way to allow people to seamlessly replace the DHTML application provided by Google with his Flash client.
Paul has also some other very nice experiments in his Flash lab.
The Stanford HCI Group is working on car dashboards that discourage drivers from speedig. They’ve put some of their early brainstorming results online.
Published on
August 20, 2005 in
Blogroll.
I found these guys being kind of fun to watch. I got this from DTV, but they’re publishing their videos through different feeds. Basically they’re just reading & commenting on stories users have rated high on digg.com – but they’re really into this. If they keep on doing that the next 50 years they probably will become the new Statler & Waldorf in a daily tech talkshow.
Published on
August 20, 2005 in
Politics.
»Crossing the Rubicon« claims to be the second largest selling book about the attacks on September 11th after the official Kean Commission report. Michael C. Ruppert (who is running the website fromthewilderness.com) summarizes the claims he is making in this book:
In my book I make several key points:
1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room;
2. I establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills — some involving hijack simulations — taking place on that day.
3. I demonstrate that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney’s role in the above.
4. I also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York City levels, including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother – who worked at the WTC – warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
5. I also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks.
Actually I was very interested to read through the 122 reader reviews on amazon.com. As expected the book polarizes: ratings are extreme on both ends of the scale – but the high ratings outnumber the critics by far.
I am amazed, that this book has not yet caused a huge turmoil. Why could Bill Clinton be impeached for a lousy sexual affair while the claims of this book are not even a matter of a serious investigation? The Kean Commission obviously did not – otherwise it would already have settled all the questions raised.
There is something fishy about all this… Strange!
Published on
August 20, 2005 in
Peak oil.
Everybody needs to understand peak oil. Chevron started a campain called “Will you join us”:
Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of easy oli is over. What we do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond. So we incite you to join us for a series of discussions on some very important issues.
Financial Times reports Saudi officials saying that within the next 10 or 15 years OPEC will not be able to compensate rising demands anymore. Many people don’t have the slightest idea what that means.
Matt Savinar has provided a useful metaphor to explain what having less than demanded means:
… the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn’t need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.
In a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn’t need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.
Here is a audio presentation (MP3) of Matt Savinar at globalpublicmedia.com.
Also:
Matthew Simmons is a reputated speaker on peak oil issues who provides a number of superb PDF presentations on the issue as well.
Molly Holzschlag has an interesting report of her visit at Technorati. She has some technological insights and especially some words about tagging blog posts for Technorati. There is an animation (20MB) showing the growth rate of tag usage in blogs.
Published on
August 20, 2005 in
Media.
If you are from Germany and you’re considering creating a podcast one day then maybe you should look out for Monday, 29th of August: there will be a podcast day about the german re-election in september.
I just learned that some people have founded a Association of German Podcasters…
If you liked The Office you might want to see Extras – a new comedy show by/with Ricky Gervais. The main idea: it swaps the roles of stars and extras so that the extras are the stars of the show and the stars are the extras (kind of). But anyway without the stars appearing as extras the show might not be interesting at all (and I wouldn’t even have blogged it).
YES! My DSL connection was just upgraded to 6MBit/s downstream. It’s amazing that these speeds are available for consumers for affordable flat rates.
I remember a comment made by Derrick De Kerckhove in the final panel of a 4th doors of perception conference about »Speed« in 1996:
No body is complaining about the television being too slow. But everbody is complaining about the Internet being too slow. And why is that?? Because the Internet definitely is too slow!
Good old days!
Actually I wanted to join the 2nd DenkWerkzeug meeting in Karlsruhe (organized by Heiko Haller) tomorrow but I can’t make it. I would have been glad to discuss strategies for knowledge tools and possible approaches for a PKM introductory course. Better luck next time…
Published on
August 18, 2005 in
Design.
Andrew Dillon in December 2004 joined the group of thinkers that question simplistic approaches to effiiciency of communication that ask for speed instead of pace:
Is there a temporal aspect to interaction that we should acknowledge? Surely there is a pace that leads to the best fit for each of us between tool and task, between goal and accomplishment, between resource and purpose. Sometimes making it faster just works against making it better, and I am not sure where this insight finds resonance in information architecture or systems design. The rhythm of interaction is partly set by the underlying design choices and that makes it matter of IA for me. Pace, timing and rhythm; there’s a whole world of information architecture yet to be done.
Published on
August 17, 2005 in
Ecology.
Scientists warn about a depot of 70 billion tons of methane ready to be released into the atmosphere as the permafrost in Siberia melts due to global warming. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change.
Published on
August 16, 2005 in
Design.
The KDE project has issued a short list of things the’re aiming for in a future release of Linux desktop. Interestingly the first item on their list is »breathtaking beauty«:
Breathtaking Beauty
- putting an emphasis on the form and style of software in addition to the function of it
- creating visually impactful interfaces that support usability
To me it seems the KDE project is not only trying to improve the look & feel of KDE – they want to include design in their strategy. Finally they need to help Linux to get a competitive user experience.
It is a good sign. But we should never forget the spirit of the early 1970ies where user interface design was about inventing interaction patterns – and not so much about selecting preferable color schemes. There have been very few inventions recently (but a lot of tiny ones to be fair).
This morning I was thinking about people trying to hack MacOS X to run on ordinary PC hardware and what Apple might do about it. What would I do if I’d be Steve Jobs? What could be arguments against OS X non-Apple hardware?
Suddenly I was thinking of a list (I love lists) of things Apple has introduced as industry firsts throughout their history of products. It would be a very long list. Apples brand value number on has always been to be ahead of time. Having control over hardware and software has always made it possible to design their products from A to Z. I think Apple has good reason to keep their OS exclusive.
Anyway: This design quality Apple has been able to establish and keep up over the years is a real challenge for other standard user interfaces like KDE or Windows. KDE also needs to come up with an answer to the Next generation Windows (codenamed Vista).
Published on
August 16, 2005 in
Business.
German e-Zine Telepolis writes about the Bretton Woods II theory that tries to explain the current world economy. Complex stuff if you’re not into world economics. The theory is around for quite some time now. Read about the Bretton Woods System.
Published on
August 16, 2005 in
Tools.
We have Google Maps, MSN Virtual Earth – now we get Amazon Maps. The fancy feature of the day at Amazon are Block View Images: you can walk the streets of a number of major US cities…
Published on
August 14, 2005 in
Tools.
Wikipedia Animate aggregates all changes of a wikipedia page and shows an animation of it. It uses Greasemonkey (which allows some kind of client side web application created with JavaScript).