Urgent: Tell World Leaders to Fight Climate Change

A letter from Oxfam America:

 

June 16, 2008

Dear Thor,

Oxfam will meet with Japan’s prime minister this week.

As host of the G8 Summit, he can make a major difference on climate change.
Tell him that strong leadership is needed by G8 leaders on climate change!

I have some amazing news. We just received word that Oxfam has been invited to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. 
The meeting will take place on Wednesday, just before the world’s eight richest countries meet at the annual G8 Summit, where Japan will be in a key position to push the issue of climate change.
We want to bring with us a global petition of hundreds of thousands of names to show him the world cares about fighting climate change. We urgently need your help!
Sign our petition telling the prime minister that strong leadership is needed by heads of state at this year’s meeting.
We don’t usually ask you to contact government officials outside of the US. But the prime minister is the host of this year’s meeting, so he’s in a key position to push the issue of climate change. Our meeting is in just two days, so we need you to act immediately!
Climate change is already having devastating effects on poor people in developing countries. The world’s richest countries, which use most of our natural resources, need to help poor communities deal with their changing climates.
The G8 Summit coincides with the famous Japanese Tanabata festival, where people tie written wishes to bamboo trees. We will present the global petition along with the wishes to end global poverty. 
Please add your voice today and then forward this email to five of your friends.
Sign the petition now!
Thank you for supporting poor people around the world.
Sincerely,

Tim Fullerton
Oxfam America

WordPress Tags: oxfam, charities, politics, G8, climate change

Now Playing: John Coltrane – The Best Of John Coltrane – I’ll Get By (As Long As I Have You)

I’ve moved

This blog has moved to a new location.

After much vacillation and angst, I’ve finally registered a couple of domains and moved my blogs away from WordPress.com to a hosted server where I have complete control over, and responsibility for, my blog.

As a blogging platform, I think that WordPress is one of the best (actually, it’s my opinion that WordPress is the best blogging platform, but hey, what do I know?), and the free blog hosting at WordPress.com is the best of the best: consistently being kept up to date; a knowledgeable bunch of users in the forums to provide assistance when needed; and for those that wish more flexibility or features, a number of options that are priced very competitively.  And, best of all, the platform is – what else? – WordPress.  The WordPress software, whether the free service at WordPress.com, or used independently, has a loyal user base that is near-fanatical.  The forums at WordPress.com and at WordPress.org (WordPress.org is where you get the full software package to use on your own servers) are full of knowledgeable, honest and out-spoken users and developers, where everything about the software is discussed – both the good and not-so-good, ideas for development are shared, problems solved, challenges overcome.

I’ve moved my blog, not because I am dissatisfied with WordPress.com – quite the contrary, but because I want more flexibility, and because I want to learn and stretch my knowledge of PHP and web development.  With the free, group hosted service at WordPress.com, one does not have that flexibility, and rightly so.  Who wants to have their blog hosted at a site where the system can be brought down because someone else made a change that didn’t work?

My personal blog “mind? what mind?” has moved:

• From: tfarrow.wordpress.com
• To: mindwhatmind.com or at thor.farrow.cc

My amateur radio blog has moved:

• From: n9ik.wordpress.com
• To: blog.n9ik.com or at n9ik.com/blog

My several web sites are, or will soon be, hosted at the excellent 1&1 Internet Inc.

 

"…science fiction eventually becomes true, doesn’t it?"

So Dr. Steven Wolf of Brooke Army Medical Center is quoted in the CNN news article by Larry Shaughnessy, titled Salamander-inspired therapy may aid injured vets. 

Story Highlights

“Regenerative medicine” pursued by the Pentagon, top U.S. and medical facilities

Key to regeneration is powder nicknamed “pixie dust”

Powder forms a microscopic “scaffold” that helps cells grow into desired tissue

This is very exciting; let’s hope that the trials prove this medical advancement to be every bit as productive as it is hoped it will be.

WordPress Tags: science, technology, medicine, science fiction

Mind caught up in sound

I have difficulty with noisy environments, especially if someone is attempting to talk to me.  In a noisy restaurant, bar or party, it is extremely difficult for me to carry on a conversation; I find it nearly impossible to “filter” any one person’s voice from the background chatter, and my mind gets caught up in an auditory kaleidoscope of voices and words.  I noticed some time ago that, occasionally, if I can quiet my mind I can improve my ability to make sense of what I hear.  It can be very difficult, but sometimes, I can do it.

The Venerable Ajahn Chah⁺ teaches us:

When the ear hears, observe the mind. Does it get caught up and make a story out of the sound? Is it disturbed? You can know this, stay with it, be aware. At times you may want to escape from the sounds, but that is not the way out. You must escape through awareness.
-Ajahn Chah, “Still Forest Pool”

 

 

⁺Venerable Ajahn Chah, a Buddhist monk, teacher and master of the Thai “Forest” tradition, trained both easterners and westerners in the Dhamma (Dharma).

 

WordPress Tags: dharma, buddism, ajahn chah, quotes, journal, mind

…breathe the precious air of liberty.

Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom and dignity. It is not enough, as communist systems have assumed, merely to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. Human nature needs to breathe the precious air of liberty.
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama

WordPress Tags: liberty, freedom, quotes, dalai lama

The (near) future of Personal Computing is here, pt. 2.

I have read several times during this past year that the volume of sales of personal computers in Japan has declined, and that this trend is expected to continue and spread to other markets, the US and Europe included.  One of the (many) reasons for this is the continuing increase in functionality, processing power and speed of cellular phones – especially “smart” phones.

More and more, cellular phones have sufficient processing power and memory to run not just email and web browsing app’s, but also full-fledged word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications, not to mention games, mp3 and video players, and still- and video-cameras, and oh yes, the GPS.  There is still a long way to go before the hand-held device will completely replace the desktop or laptop PC for those home and business users that need more “oomph”, to do photo and video editing, for example.

Having said all of this, it is still obvious that sometimes the small screen real estate and tiny keyboards are just not sufficient.  With this in mind, Celio Technology Company recently developed and released what they are calling the “REDFLY Mobile Companion” that “extends the the Smartphone with the most valuable features of a laptop.  This is a 1″x6″x9″, two-pound device that looks like a small laptop, but does not have a processor, storage, or RAM.  Instead, it is essentially a clam-shell combination of keyboard and video monitor, with a touchpad mouse, a VGA port to plug in an external monitor or projector, Bluetooth, and two USB ports.

 

At roughly $500 per, these are a bit pricey considering that you can buy a full-fledged laptop for less that that.  As far as I can tell, the REDFLY is being marketed directly only to businesses – specifically sales forces, but it’s only a matter of time before something like this is marketed as an inexpensive companion device for consumers.

 

WordPress Tags: cellular, mobility

The (near) future of Personal Computing is here, pt. 1

I bought a Nokia 6620 when it was newly on the market here in the US from Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) and, for the most part, I liked it.  It had a camera, which was relatively new – at least at an affordable price – at the time; had Bluetooth connectivity which was important to me; had good send & receive audio; it’s receiver circuit was sensitive enough, and transmitter strong enough to maintain a good connection to the cellular network when some other phones could not; and it was the first “smart” phone available in the US that supported the new high speed EDGE network.  And also, I’ve been using a Palm PDA for years now, and I didn’t want to combine a PDA and phone into one unit, one point of failure.  Besides, Palm-based cellular “smart” phones just didn’t have an adequate screen size or resolution for my jaded “requirements”, and I’d used a Compaq WindowsCE PDA for a while before I got my first PalmPilot, and felt the Palm OS was superior.  Following the Pilot, I used the Palm III, V, and finally the Palm Tungsten T3, which I’ve had  the past few years and which spoiled me – all that screen real estate!

For the past couple of years now, we’ve all seen the power and functionality of cell phones, especially “smart” phones, evolve.  In the business world, the “Crackberry” was king (sorry Ring, of course I mean Blackberry!).  We’ve also seen some real improvements in Microsoft’s portable operating system, now known as Windows Mobile – enough so that I’ve been considering giving Microsoft another shot. 

And then, a few months ago, I fell in lust!  One day, while browsing the available offerings from AT&T Wireless to upgrade that I might upgrade to, there was this new “cool tool” that seemed to have every feature a tech junky like me could want: a phone; a high resolution camera (3 Megapixels!); a slide-out, full QWERTY keyboard for texting & email; .mp3 player with stereo audio; stereo Bluetooth; 3G high-speed data network support; WiFi; a GPS; full PDA functionality; and a touch screen with full 240×320-pixel display.  This new object of my techno-lust?  The AT&T Tilt, a branded version of the TyTN II manufactured by HTC.

“Mercy Killing”, or Killing to end suffering

This morning Chelsea, my dog, caught a squirrel, broke it’s back, and was tossing it around.  Usually, when I see her or the cats playing with a “critter” – a mouse, rabbit, squirrel or bird – it is already dead.  Not this time.  He was struggling, trying to defend himself, but could not.  When I got outside and convinced Chelsea to leave him be, I found him on his back, front legs up, mouth open, rear legs obviously paralyzed, breathing heavily and watching everything that moved around him.  He screamed and waved his front paws at Chelsea when she came close, but was quiet and didn’t try to struggle when I picked him up.

Now, it is difficult for me to kill anything, even a mosquito, but I could not let this fellow suffer any further.  The quickest death that I could think of at that moment was to break his neck.  So, apologizing for his suffering and his death, that’s what I did.

I am still, several hours later, upset about it, but what choice did I have?  I had no other way to ease his pain, end his suffering.  Even if I could end the pain, he could not have survived outside, and bringing him inside to try to heal him, and into necessarily a life of captivity would be just as cruel.

All that I could think of at the time was the thought that “this being, in a previous live, could have been my father, mother, my son or daughter.  Could I let them suffer like this?”  The only possible answer in the moment was “no”.

Quote for the day – "Tact"

When you see others’ errors and you want to guide them because you think they are wrong and you feel compassion for them, you should employ tact to avoid angering them, and contrive to appear as if you were talking about something else.
- Dogen

Presidential politics

Here’s how I feel about Presidential Politics.  To paraphrase I-don’t-remember-who:

Any person that can be elected to be President, doesn’t deserve to be president.

And:

Any person that can get themselves elected as President should on no account be allowed to hold that office.

And as Lord Acton said:

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.  Every class is unfit to govern.