My friend David Hilfiker just let me know that he's publishing his writings on the web. He writes a lot of interesting, insightful material about the state of our country and our planet, and approaches his subjects of justice, religion, health, and poverty from a humble but perceptive place.

He's a Christian (which i am not), and one of a too-rare species of Christian who seems to take the best parts of those teachings and really dedicate himself to them in a way that tries to make the world better. One of the articles on his site is his Letter to Lefties, which addresses the relationship between the secular and religious sections of the progressive movement.

There was an interesting piece on the Brian Lehrer Show this morning about No Impact Man, a guy and his family ("10 legs and a tail") who live in Manhattan and are trying to live the next year with no net impact. There is also an interesting piece in the New York Times about him. There's a bit of the "Super Size Me" self-promotional aspect to the whole thing, but it's obviously a worthwhile message.

A few examples of difficult it is:

electricity (my computers!): bad
biking: good
fruit from South America: bad
locally-grown food: good
trash (take out containers): bad
shitting in a bucket: good
etc.

I'm most interested in it as a guide to some useful ways I can reduce my own impact. Particularly, in buying locally grown food. I've been pushing a lot in my house recently to reduce the amount of trash that we generate, which I think is way too much as it is. I'm willing to allow myself some luxuries, if I can manage to reduce my consumption considerably.

Anyway, it's a interesting read, with lots of good food for thought.

American Scientist presents an interesting proposal in its Macroscope column this month. The authors want to explicitly redefine Avogadro's number (~6.022 × 10²³, as you may remember from physics) to be a specific integer.

I remember learning that this number represented a mole, the number of molecules of water in a gram. It turns out, of course, that this depends on the definition of a gram. At the moment, the gram is defined by a specific chunk of metal held in a vault somewhere in France. This chunk of metal (Le Gran K, according to the article) is changing over time (due to handling, cleaning, etc), so the actual definition of a gram is changing, as is (consequently) Avogadro's number. Redefining Avogadro's number to be a constant would remove the Système International's dependence on this physical artifact.

Some folks at Princeton's CS department have done a good analysis of a Diebold voting system, the kind used in many elections across the country. They've done a good job of presenting their findings in several different forms, for various audiences ("executive summary", a video, an in-depth technical whitepaper). There's ways for anyone with web access to really grasp the content of their research, which i find pretty admirable.

Folks who know me know my personal preference is for the technical whitepaper, which was actually a great read. It's very clearly explained, sober and direct, and points out the wide range of potential vulnerabilities that the machines share with most commercial PCs, in addition to a series of vulnerabilities specific to the Diebold-proprietary software. If you have any interest in computer security, do yourself a favor and read it. They're thinking about these things the right way.

I've been following this story in New Orleans of a doctor and some nurses accussed of "murdering" patients in the chaos following Katrine.

It seems pretty clear to me, at least from the NYTimes article, that she was doing her best to act responsibly and as morally as possible under incredibly extreme circumstances. Yet the attorney general of Louisiana is bent on prosecuting her for murder. Nevermind that all of the patients would have died anyway, just more painfully and slowly, as the US government essentially left them there to die in a sweltering sesspool.

This is happening at the same time as Bush's veto of a bill to fund stem cell research (note: this in the first veto in Bush's entire career, the longest a president has gone without a veto since Thomas Jefferson in 1801). In a speech Bush gave yesterday, surrounded by dozens of white babies, Bush said that the bill, which would "kill" things that aren't actually alive, violates his "principles on the sanctity of human life". Meanwhile, we wage war in Iraq killing thousands of Iraq's, and fully support Isreal's slaughter of Lebanese.

"Culture of life" my ass.

I just read interesting article by George Monbiot after being spurred to check out his web site from an article my dad sent me.

The linked piece talks about his perception of the relationship between car-driving and libertarianism in the UK, and some of the inherent contradictions and conflicts that come from them.

While i'm not really a big fan of the speed cameras that Monbiot seems to support, i do recognize them as some kind of counterbalance to some of the uglier forms of road rage and other socially-destructive habits encouraged by the private automobile. My biggest qualms with speed cameras and the like are related to situations where the society has basically forced driving on nearly everyone (e.g. roads and low population density, but no public transport, like many places in the US), and then uses the fact that you are in a private vehicle as a tool for selective (read: discriminatory) law enforcement.

In doing research for a museum exhibition on the First Nations of Canada, I've been reading the treaties signed between them and European settlers over the centuries. The legacy of treachery and disregard is terrible, as we know. I wanted to share the following text, which I found heartbreaking. Wish we had even an OUNCE of the same spirit today.

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According to Iroquois oral tradition, a belt consisting of two rows of coloured wampum recorded a treaty between the Mohawk and Dutch colonists in 1613, as well as subsequent agreements concluded with the French and the British. A description of the Two Row Wampum, symbolizing peace and friendship, appeared in Indian Self-Government in Canada, the report of a special parliamentary committee. It read, in part:

Some of you may remember a couple of years back, when Massachusettes was the first state to attempt to legalize gay marriage, there was a big rally in Cambridge where the first marriage licenses where being given out at midnight. There was also a bunch of insane protestors from Kansas. Well, I guess they're still at it, only this time they are protesting at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. I guess they claim that god hates and is punishing the US (by killing soldiers, among others) because the US condones homosexuality. This time, however, politicians are getting outraged, saying it's disrespectful and trying to ban protests at funerals.

Granted these people are batshit insane, but it seems funny to me that it's not so disrespectful when they're just going around the country publicly preaching death to gays, but when it's at a funeral, of a soldier no less, then it's crossed a line. Maybe we should start by making it a priority to respect the living, then worry about respecting the dead.

A friend of mine posted on her blog an interesting link that I'd like to pass on. It's to an orginazation called Buy Blue that is trying to compile a list of the political donations of corporations. It's very interesting to peruse through and see where that money your spending is really going. Some notables (for me, at least):

the good: apple, costco, ebay, google, jetblue, netflix, sun, tom's of maine...

the bad: amazon, home depot, intel, ibm, MICROSOFT, UPS, usaa...