John Gruber mentioned this on his famous blog. I’ve been waiting for something just like it for years now. It stores an hour of video, connects via USB, Record/Stop. There’s nothing else to it. Oh, except this action mount. I need to go out on the Scituate Reservoir route and record the completely arbitrary bike lane on highway 14 and send it to Slate. One mile long, two painful hills. Not much cost to taxpayers: just put up a sign that says “Bike Route” on one end and another that says “Bike Route Ends” on the other. No road modifications necessary. 

So, is the camera any good? Don’t know. Hasn’t arrived yet. 

My commute. This is before the construction on the Martin St. bridge on the Blackstone Valley Bikeway was completed. When the bike path is covered with ice, as it was all winter, I use this route. Now that spring is kinda here I’ve got an easier ride.

Faeries in European lore were believed to sometimes steal babies from their parents, replacing them with a difficult and unruly old faerie that looked like the baby. The baby/faerie was then placed in the woods by his parents hoping that the real baby would be returned.

People told faerie tales like this to make the unbearable slightly less so. These faerie babies were very likely disabled or very ill children. Did parents believe this tale? I suspect they did. Infant abandonment still occurs of course, but In the cultural, economic, and historical circumstances in which we live rational people don’t generally attribute natural phenomenon to the actions of faeries.

People profess to believe in all sorts of other supernatural creatures, however. The obvious example is the belief in angels. It’s fortunate though that the only people who really act on such beliefs are generally considered nut-jobs. Devout Catholics are more likely to take their daughter to a psychiatrist than an exorcist, for instance.

But, like I said, we live in fortunate circumstances. And that could change. In extreme hardship people take to believing all manner of nonsense. What would societal collapse under the weight of environmental damage and resource depletion bring? Likely increased belief in the supernatural as a determining force in the world and a reversion to superstition. Both are waiting in the wings right now, of course.

I’ve no doubt that the belief in child witches in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. But it’s not hard to guess that privation has a lot to do with it. Religious beliefs are untempered in dire circumstances.

The people at Oil Change International provide some analysis. The current cluster-fuck in Iraq is creating a whole lotta atmospheric carbon. It’s not hard to believe that major combat operations burn a lot of fossil fuels. But 25 million cars worth of GHG? I guess it’s possible. On the bright side, the Iraqis themselves have significantly reduced their electricity consumption since we took over!

Aside from the direct contributions to global warming, the occupation of Iraq is consuming a lot of money that could be better spent, you know, mitigating the climate catastrophe upon us. And it is upon us. Just ask the penguins. Or the polar bears. Or the penguins and the polar bears (yes, there are penguins and polar bears together in the photo on that box).

Via via.

I found this documentary on Fred Frith at Netflix after downloading the soundtrack on Emusic. It’s very good. No narration, no interviews, just imagery, bits of conversation, and a lot of music.

I quite like Fred Frith’s list of birds that he viewed on a single day in 2007 and the list of drummers he’s played with in the past 42 years. It’s easy to believe that he’s performed with (more than) 80 drummers. But 52 bird species in one day? No mention of ornithology at his wikipedia page.