Tropophilia

I’ve been traveling since early last week (hence the lack of posts), so I’m a bit behind on my reading.  In any case, here are a few things that have caught my eye:

• LifeHacker highlights a program for which, as a 5-13 year-old, I would have happily sacrificed my entire GI Joe collection: Lego Digital Designer, “a virtual Lego kit for your Windows or Mac desktop [...] Once you’ve built the perfect prototype, you can upload the results to the Lego web site to order a custom kit with every brick you’ll need included!”  Just a decade too late…

• I found this story from TreeHugger fascinating: the recent foreclosure crisis has left a number of pools on foreclosed properties in California and elsewhere untended and…well…perfect for mosquitos.  In an effort to combat disease-spreading mosquitos, the state of California is spotting green pools from the air and filling them with tiny fish that have been nicknamed the “foreclosure fish.”  This would seem like a reasonable solution, except…

[T]hese fish (Gambusia species) are native to streams around the Gulf of Mexico. Outside their ancestral waters, they wreak havoc with local wildlife.

[According to one scientist,] “In California they have decimated native species - yet civic authorities will give you a bag of them free if you have a mosquito problem. It may not seem risky putting them in a plastic and concrete pool, but the fish are champion escape artists, and can travel in as little as three millimeters of water.”

Sounds like another cane toad situation…

• Wordle is a cool new tool that creates a visual representation of frequently-repeated words in huge chunks of text.  I decided to try it out using the longest document I could immediately access: my senior thesis, “From Blogs to the Ballot Box: Online Campaigning in 2006 U.S. Senate Races.”  Check it out:

• If you’re a creative type and you’re looking for a little bit (emphasis on little) of money on the side, check out NameThis.  It’s a crowd-sourced platform where people with business ideas, websites, blogs, etc ask for suggestions to name their creation, and winning suggestions get cash money.  Given my awful track record with band names (I kid you not, I was in bands called Poultry in Motion, Jamaican Lemonade, and Icebreaker…these were all my ideas) and the struggle Jarred and I went through to name this site (word to the wise: inventing words is a good strategy), I don’t think this is my cup of tea.  but best of luck!

• The next item has been floating around the web for a while, but if you haven’t checked out this mock-up of what Google News might look like on a day of miraculously good news, it’s a nice reality check.

• I made my own variation on these Southwestern Turkey Burgers tonight and they were del.icio.us.  The internet is the greatest cookbook I know.

That’s all for now.  We really will be posting this week.  I hope.

Holy Moly, it must be Jarred’s birthday.

Be sure to check out the latest entries in our Bomomo contest. We’ve gotten some great submissions; maybe later this week we’ll fire up a poll to determine a winner. How about a few links to start the week off right:

• I’ve started casually following an oceans and fisheries conservation blog called blogfish. Recently, the blogfish bloggers pointed out this fascinating account of the New England Aquarium’s latest collection trip to the Bahamas. I now know how aquariums get their fish, and you can too. Random, but fascinating stuff. Come on, check it out (lots of gorgeous tropical fish!).

• Not to get too political, but being the “change lovers” that we are, I think we’re entitled to post an Obama speech every once in a while. From his Father’s Day remarks at a church in Chicago (via Ezra Klein):

Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more afterschool programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities.

But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one.

• Sam points out an important pending case related to internet privacy. You may remember hearing this tragic and twisted story a few months ago; this is the case where a 14 year old commits suicide after receiving devastating messages from a “boy” on MySpace who turns out to be one of her classmates’ mother. This piece helps emphasizes why, despite the horrible circumstances, precedent in this case could (negatively) impact life on the web:

How many of you have lied about who you are online? How many have fudged the numbers on how old you are? Be honest, your MySpace profile says your 103 years-old, doesn’t it? How about creating fake email addresses so you have a place to direct annoying SPAM emails you’d be otherwise inundated with should you be forced to cough up your genuine email domain? Imagine that each time you lied to a computer, you committed a felony

• I haven’t written about algae in a while (don’t worry, I’m still an algae fanboy), but one company (Solazyme) leading the way on algae biodiesel recently met US standards for auto-ready fuel. Exciting stuff, although a commercial roll-out is still distant.

• Mental Floss features a best-of gallery full of passive aggressive notes. They found a few masterpieces, to be sure.

• I couldn’t figure out what to give Jarred for his birthday (read: I am a lame friend), so I opted for a little somethin’ somethin’ from…The Something Store. I even decided to give it a shot myself. We’ll report back this week with what our respective “somethings” turned out to be (fingers crossed for a Kindle; realistic expectation is a flash drive).

That’s all for now–more stuff later this week, including “50 things Jarred looks forward to doing after the LSAT.”

• Here’s great reporting from the NY Times on a provocative list produced by a group of economists who set out to prioritize pressing needs in the world. The group of 8 economists was asked to “spend” a hypothetical $75 billion in the most effective way. Their full list of solutions is too long to excerpt, but check it out and see if you agree with their priorities.

• Following up on my biking-related post last week, Columbus Ohio announced that it will be implementing a $170 million biking plan. According to TreeHugger:

58 miles of bike lanes will be added, as well as a downtown bike station (complete with bicycle parking and changing areas) [...] ‘one of the biggest goals of the bike plan is to tie the area’s trail system to neighborhoods and streets that will have bike lanes or bike signs.’

• Sensibleunits.com might be my new favorite almost useful–but hilarious–website. Basically, you type in any kind of length, area, or mass measure (say 14 inches, or 300 pounds) and get back more “sensible units” that are easier to visualize or convey. In my examples, 14 inches=36 stacked CD cases OR 1.8 five month old human fetuses end to end [gross...]; 300 pounds=7.6 microwave ovens OR 27 average domestic cats. Good to know. Try it out and leave the funniest examples in the comments.

• For all of you recent grads out there who are about to enter a world of pain the world of work, Brazen Careerist offers 64 Action Items for the Newly Employed. They include things like “Participate in or organize a co-worker happy hour,” “Have only one drink at the happy hour,” and “Thank anyone who helps you with anything.”

• Jarred and I are avid fans of Garfield Minus Garfield, where the fat orange cat is cleverly removed from Garfield comic strips leaving only poor, pathetic, awkward Jon the human. As it turns out, Garfield’s creator thinks the site is pretty neat too [Hat Tip: Matthew Ingram]:

Jim Davis, the cartoonist who created “Garfield,” calls himself an occasional reader of the site, which he calls “fascinating.” He says he is flattered rather than peeved by the imitation. “Some of them really work, and some of them work better,” Mr. Davis said

• If you have Firefox, and a whole lot of free time, you can now access 2,000 original Nintendo games through your browser. Apologies in advance to your boss and any coworkers who might be counting on you. I’ll be sticking with WeeWar, thank you very much.

That’s all for now folks. Have a wonderful Monday.