Faster Cars and Smellier Air

I’m finally caught up on sleep from the Desktop Matters conference and subsequent hiking trip to Zion last weekend. Both were great!

Some thoughts:

• With the new Apps Framework, progress on the Binding JSR, and some great RAD tools, desktop Java has become a serious contender. If they can nail the deployment problem, look out!
• The real night sky makes the city sky seem like one viewed from some other planet.
• When clinging for dear life to a chain along a steep, narrow ridge, gloves are helpful.

There is an article in this month’s AAA World about environmentally-conscious tourism.

AAA World, for all of you living in countries where the predominant form of transportation is hansom cab or catenary, is the “official publication of the Metro Washington and Virginia Regions” of the American Automobile Association. It periodically enlightens us with profound pieces like AAA’s Best-Kept Secret: We Sell Insurance and West Virginia: They’ve Paid Us to Tell You to Visit. We throw out the magazine upon receiving it.

Ordinarily, I would let this go. I’m sure the author had good intentions. I have on occasion offered energy-saving tips on my own website. But Shani assures me that targeted diatribes are exactly the kind of thing people want to read in the blogs, so here goes.

The article begins

TREE-HUGGERS aren’t the only ones trying to tread lightly on the environment while traveling these days.

Impressively, the author has already alienated her entire target audience. She goes on to suggest

Choose an environmentally conscious airline (ask about policies)

Hello? Transcontinental Monopoly Airlines? Does your company have environmentally conscious policies? They do? Great!

Don’t buy souvenirs made from endangered species

Thank you for heroicly exposing the heretofore unknown, hidden environmental cost of souvenirs made from endangered species.

Here are some of my own Earth-friendly travel tips for my fellow auto club members:

1. Don’t travel in the first place, or if you must:
2. Stop driving everywhere and try walking for a change.

Shani and I are back from a great trip to Utah! We visited her dad at Bryce Canyon and have many, many pictures to organize.

At Zion we saw this funny sign.

The apparent instruction here is “Don’t feed the miniature deer”, or perhaps more specificly “Don’t feed the miniature deer Oreos”.

The “current” issue of Scientific American has a terrific series of articles on the future of our planet and the challenges our population faces.

(I anticipate that most of it will be available free online here during September. Despite the reversal of a nutty price hike, unfiltered electronic access to the magazine remains more expensive than print susbcriptions.)

The editors, following the lead of their friends at the National Geographic Society, and no doubt acquiesing to the repeated pleas for “less speculative cosmology” that I scrawl on my subscription renewal cards, have put together some very interesting and at times surprisingly upbeat analyses. Many of the pieces question the conventional wisdom that the interests of business and ecology inherently conflict.

1.1 billion people get by (or fail to get by) on less than one dollar a day. In an recap of his recent book, Jeffrey Sachs asserts that an additional $80 billion annular investment could ultimately eliminate that level of extreme poverty. Certainly this is audacious, and has generated rancorous argument (if you like that sort of thing, see the Washington Post Book World’s nasty review, a review of that review in a blog I follow, and the author’s response.)

What’s clear to me is that we have to do more, because the magnitude of this human suffering is outrageous and unacceptable. I hope we can avoid globalizing the traditional Left/Right arguments. We need to find areas of consensus and act, quickly. As governments and as individuals.

Like any endeavor, some things we try won’t work. But others will. Asia has already begun to turn things around.