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Beware Io Dust: the cutest moon in the solar system

September 14, 2004 By Uncategorized

There is something in this story that endears me to Io, Jupiter’s spitting moon. I think it’s in the tagline: “Beware: Io Dust. Jupiter’s moon Io is shooting tiny volcanic bullets at passing spacecraft.”

Apparently Io’s volcanos are erupting all the time, shooting streams of dust into the solar system. These streams get picked up by Jupiter’s gravity and accelerate to around 300km/s which is pretty durn fast.

If you happen to be a spaceship passing by, you get pelted by high speed smoke.

It’s an elegant defense for our solar system’s gas giant, even if its not terribly effective.

Tribal Journeys photos

September 13, 2004 By Uncategorized

The Tyee ran a short photo essay from the Tribal Journeys 2004 event this year. This is an annual celebration of the canoe culture of west coast First Nations.   Photographer Elaine Briere captured some of the spirit of the gathering:

They come from places with names like Snoqualmie, Songees, Muckelshoot, Squaxim, Suquamish, Clayquot, Kyouquot, Hesquiaht, Ohiaht, Nit Nat, and Tsawout. Some of the big canoes have crossed the dangerous waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca to get here. They circle the bay before lining up on the shore for the greeting ceremonies. As drumming and chants fill the air, older women sing the greeting song with their hands uplifted, palms forward, in the graceful welcoming gesture of the coastal tribes. I feel tears welling up in my eyes. The beauty of the ceremony strikes a chord of strong emotion in my white heart. I gather my wits and continue photographing.

Check the photo gallery on that page.

Powerful little words

September 13, 2004 By Uncategorized

At a meeting the other day someone was heard to utter the phrase “lead, follow or get out of the way.”

Quietly, the reply came:

“You mean lead, follow AND get out of the way.”

That changed EVERYTHING!

Me and Euan and Robin

September 12, 2004 By Uncategorized

Euan Semple was the first blogger I ever read. The night I discovered Blogger back in 2001, he had just been picked as a “Blog of Note” and so I cruised over to his page and loved what I saw. There was a link to this interview with Brian Arthur which has turned out to be a pertty influential piece to me.

When I declared this blog’s parentage, I represented myself as the grateful child of a same sex union of The Obvious and Wood s Lot.

And now I know the reason why I groove on Euan’s stuff. It turns out that Euan and I are almost related in real life. My wife’s counsin, Robin McMorran was visiting today. This is the first time he’s ever been to Canada. I asked him where he worked and when he said “the BBC” and mentioned that he did some web stuff, I asked if he knew Euan. He does, used to work with him and still contributes to some of the in house forums there. Like Euan, I was gobsmacked but not entirely surprised. There is something about blogging that makes these kinds of connections seems almost expected. They fall nicely into place.

When you really groove on a connection with someone’s work, dig a little deeper and you’ll probably find a lot fewer than six degress of seperation there.

And Euan…when Robin gets back in a couple of weeks, ask him to show you the pictures of Bowen Island. I think you’ll be here sooner than later.

John Dumbrille on protecting ourselves

September 9, 2004 By Uncategorized

He doesn’t blog often, but he often blogs well. From John Dumbrille:

In education and employment insurance and job training, we have to move away from systems of compliance, social conformity, rote learning and regular brain calaesthenics. We need something else. Something bringing real connection to things and to ourselves, something about real value, something about being entrepreneurrial, non co-dependent. If we can assimilate these qualities and pass these on to our children and co-workers we will create wealth, by any defintion. Becoming a farm of cheap labour is not inevetiable for us. But we can avoid it only by learning to build up experiential capital, and then protect it in an appropriate way. We dont need to pull a Disney and assume all value within a copyright, but innovation needs to be rewarded to a limited extent. It can be done. Social democrats need to first discard archiac and unfair notions of our entitled “right” to a better deal than ppeople in other countries . We need to learn how to provide new value. Job welfare and the education system needs to be overhauled in this light, if we want to reform, not destroy, what could be a social welfare system that actually works.

Early in the post he gives props to the importance of doing this especially on a local level. I’ll be interested to see how John extends these thoughts.