DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

There’s a decent interview with Craig’s List founder Craig Newmark in yesterday’s Chron, telling the history of what is, in my experience, the best community website in the world. (As a recruiting tool, Craig’s List smokes HotJobs, Monster, Dice, etc.)

It’s really just a living proof of Metcalf’s Law. There’s nothing technically wonderful about craigslist.org; it’s a low-tech bulletin-board / classified ads system, with a UI straight out of 1998. The value is in the reach. Post an ad there, and you’re practically guaranteed a response.

The Chron interview didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, but it’s reassuring somehow to see that the personality of the website matches that of its founder, which I’m sure is entirely by design.

I was all set to write about a new book on global warming, a topic about which I believe not enough people are frightened. Al Gore wrote a positive review of the book, Ross Gelbspan’s Boiling Point, in the NYTimes today. In one of the most interesting sections, Gore relates the author’s “devastating analysis” of media duplicity in promoting the big-energy company propaganda, in a sort of Foxification of the global warming crisis:

Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis of how the media have been duped and intimidated by an aggressive and persistent campaign organized and financed by coal and oil companies. He recounts, for example, a conversation with a top television network editor who was reluctant to run stories about global warming because a previous story had “triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition” — a fossil fuel industry lobbying group — “to our top executives at the network.”

He also describes the structural changes in the news media, like increased conglomerate ownership, that have made editors and reporters more vulnerable to this kind of intimidation — and much less aggressive in pursuing inconvenient truths.

But there’s a problem… Gore describes Gelbspan as a “Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the top of his game.” The book jacket states that Gelbspan is the “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” Yet numerous sources around the web claim that Gelbspan actually never won a Pulitzer.

If we can’t believe a simple factual claim about the author’s credentials, how should we treat the claims inside the book?

I think global warming is a crucial, potentially disastrous issue facing our society, but we need some hard science, not inflated fictions. I hate to judge Boiling Point by its cover, but I’m quite sure Gelbspan’s critics and Big Energy will.

It was a day of many errands…

I stopped by the CRC to donate a box of old computer parts for resale and recycling. This batch included a PowerPC 6100 that used to be my answering machine, a CD-ROM burner, a SyQuest drive that used to be my monitor stand (my collection of cartridges went to GreenDisk last year), and a DSL modem that I’d tried to sell on Craig’s List for six months until I finally accepted that the cost of selling it was far higher than the cost of giving it away. Fare you well, tools of my past. You may consume someone else’s garage space now.

Next, I went to Office Depot. I had an old 20'' Apple monitor that had the blues, by which I mean the screen would intermittently turn blue, as if some of the pins on the input cable were not making contact. Normally I would drop this at the CRC, but the CRC cannot guarantee that old monitors don’t end up in landfills in China, whereas HP’s recycling program does.

I was pleasantly surprised to see people taking advantage of the HP/Office Depot computer-recycling promotion… I followed two women with one full computer system apiece into the store. “Oh, you’re back!” said the clerk to the women, and then with a smile, “See you tomorrow!” Office Depot will take only one device per person per day, so if you have an entire office backroom to unload, bring a friend, and visit often. (But remember, it’s only free through Labor Day.)

Finally I went to the Household Toxics Roundup. I didn’t have much to dump this time… some broken CF bulbs, some old paint, and a few assorted bottles of evil chemicals that came with the new house (lurking in dark corners of the garage, where they spawn fresh new unidentifiable chemical offspring over time). Again, I was happy to see the community taking advantage of the service, bringing in old car batteries, hundreds of partial gallons of paint, pesticides, motor oil, lubricants, degreasers, miscellaneous other DNA-kinking nasties.

Then, to reward myself for spending two hours making sure the toxic remnants of my modern American lifestyle don’t further poison the local environment, I went shopping for a plasma television. I figure this is part of the recycling circuit… if I offload a bunch of old plastics and electronic gear, I need to buy some new ones, right? Or else the junk might build up somewhere. That can’t be a good thing.

Thanks to HP and Office Depot, you can unload your junk computers, monitors, televisions, etc., without worrying that they’ll end up poisoning generations of children in rural China:

Free hardware recycling at Office Depot

Note: it’s only free through Labor Day! HP usually charges $20 - $40 for recycling electronics, per item.

Qualifying Products:

• PCs, Mice, Keyboards
• Handhelds/PDAs
• Monitors
• Flat Panel Displays
• Laser & Inkjet Printers
• Scanners
• All-in-Ones
• Digital Cameras
• Fax Machines
• Desktop Copiers
• Cell Phones
• TVs (27'' and smaller only, no consoles)
• TV/VCR combos 27'' and smaller

More terms and conditions are listed at the Office Depot site (link above).

Read more about e-waste.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Besides being an “artistic experiment,” Wordcount is an intriguing interactive word-popularity research tool, guaranteed to shave seconds off your attention to the mundane matters of the day. (intriguing: rank 10104; attention: rank 715; mundane: rank 12164)

Hmm, it’s also very likely to crash your browser if you type in too many words. Fortunately you’d be smart enough to not be composing something like a blog entry in another browser window at the time, because that would force you to rewrite the thing twice. (idiot: rank 9547)

[Thanks to Bim for the link.]