DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

According to charitablerecycling.com:

Old cell phones should not be disposed of in landfills since they contain many toxic materials that are harmful to our environment. By the year 2005, there will be 500 million stockpiled used cell phones weighing over 250,000 tons that could potentially enter our waste stream.

There are numerous centers that recycle cellphones, but I’d rather have someone still use my old phone. Sure, it’s a dinosaur, but it works. I hope it’s still worth something to somebody.

• oldcellphone.com pays cash for recent phones, and pays shipping too.
• wirelessfoundation.org’s Call To Protect program refurbishes and sells used phones; proceeds support agencies that fight domestic violence. Their site provides a list of local (nationwide) drop-off centers. CTP provides tax receipts for donations.
• collectivegood.com “attempts to recycle donated phones back into reuse in the developing world (usually Latin America or the Caribbean), where they serve useful, longer lives and offer affordable communications, in many cases offering families their first modern communications.” Their refurb center updates and replaces phone software, removing your call history and address book in the process, thereby reducing privacy concerns.
• phones4charity.org attempts to put functioning phones back into service. Tax receipts are available.

Recycling, legislation are among efforts to reduce phones dumped in landfills:

Californians Against Waste, an environmental group, estimates state residents throw away an average of nearly 45,000 cell phones every day.

The cell companies could do a much better job of closing this loop — if they promoted recycling with half as much vigor as they promote upgrades, that discard statistic would drop to zero.

Want to become a millionaire? Just solve one of the Millenium Problems, and the Clay Mathematics Institute will set you up: $1M US, plus a free propeller beanie. Here are the seven million-dollar-prize problems:

1. Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the official problem definition for which states, in part,
   L(C, s) = c(s-1)^r + higher order terms
   which incidentally that is the name of the next movie by Arntz, Chasse, and Vicente
2. Hodge Conjecture
3. Navier-Stokes Equations
4. P vs NP Problem
5. Poincaré Conjecture, which has to do with the “multidimensional topology of space in three dimensions,” for example donuts.
6. Riemann Hypothesis, which has to do with the distribution, and ultimately, perhaps, predictability of prime numbers.
7. Yang-Mills and Mass Gap

If you want to compete in #s Q or T, where Q=5 and T=6, you’d better hurry because it looks like Louis de Branges and Grigori Perelman might have beat you to them. Oh, and by the way, de Branges’ work might “bring the whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight.”

“Hey Joey, do you sell digital cameras too?”

Over the past 24 hours, I endured:

• a derogatory joke about John Kerry, implying that he married Teresa Heinz for her money
• a defense of Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction
• an accusation that Michael Moore fabricated most of Fahrenheit 9/11
• a recap of the comedic highlights of Schwarzenegger’s speech at the Republican Convention
• an inquiry whether I can get Fox News on my cable feed
• the suggestion that bloggers were to blame for Trent Lott’s late-2002 resignation as Senate majority leader

Sigh. The air is so thick with distortions I may not survive until the election.

At 10 mph my commute should take me 8 hours, at which point I could just turn around and drive back home. But I’m not going even that fast: at my current velocity, my commute time approaches infinity. And even though I left home just an hour ago, the time it would take me to get back is infinite too.

I guess I could do like all the professional commuters around me and use my time sitting on the highway to check my voice mail. This would enable me to hear messages from people who couldn’t reach me on the phone because I was stuck in traffic.

Or I could use a dashboard-mounted notepad to jot down time-saving ideas, which could allow me to recover, over a week’s time, five or 10 of the 360 minutes I would be spending in the car today.

My rental car checklist got one item longer today. Used to be, so long as the car had a tank of gas, I thought I would be OK. Then I realized I actually had to request upholstered seats and interiors that didn’t reek of wet dogs or body odor.

This week’s car had a film on the inside of the windshield. I don’t mean “optical film,” like a UV filter or sun shade. I mean film in the more organic, pudding sense of the word. Driving into the sunrise caused the windshield to light up like the cap of the Luxor — yes, at that moment, my car’s windshield could have been seen from space.

Enterprise does a good job, generally speaking, of cleaning out the interiors of their fleet of cars. This meant I had no spare scrap of paper or tissue with which to wipe down the inside of the windshield. I ended up pulling over and using my sock.