DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The (unofficial) Google weblog published the full text of the Playboy interview that has kinked Google’s IPO. Apparently the entire interview has been appended to the SEC documentation and is therefore public domain.

See also the photos (and some lusty banner ads) in the Playboy site’s free preview of the article.

Check out this ominous pull quote from the homepage of LATimes.com (do copy editors get bonuses for this sort of thing?):

In the summer furnace of the Grand Canyon, hikers and runners try to avoid lugging a heavy piece of equipment: water. But those who skimp on it pay with their lives.

The headline (as seen on the front page) is equally menacing: Drink or die.

The story is disheartening: two healthy adults began a 27-mile trail run along an unmaintained path in the Grand Canyon, carrying about 1/6 as much water as they needed. 24 hours later, one of the two people, having spent an afternoon curled up in the shade and a night alone on the trail, stumbled into a USGS employee who was able to provide water. His trail-running companion was dead.

When I climbed Pike’s Peak last year, I carried 3 liters of water. I was climbing into cooler weather, and I knew I could refill at the 5- and 12.5-mile points — and I carried more than twice as much water as the woman whose body was airlifted out of the Grand Canyon. But then I wasn’t trying to run up the trail; my goal was to simply finish. The time was irrelevant.

I saw trail runners on the Barr Trail. Gangly ectomorphs wearing skimpy shorts, they’d fly by at a sprint, with a small bottle of water in one hand (weight-balanced by the stopwatch strapped to the opposite wrist). I’d like to think they’d carry more water were they descending 5000 feet into a 120° F river valley. To do anything else, especially at the Grand Canyon, doesn’t seem sane.

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.