World Water Day 2008

I nearly missed it, but according to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, March 22 is World Water Day. A precious thing, like sleep, not to be taken for granted.

© Christine Westerback cc:by-sa

Sleep, perchance

I nearly missed it, but thanks to the internet, I discovered today is the World Day of Sleep. At least it is in China.

© Stephen McKay cc:by-sa

A Call for Silence

Sometimes the idea of living under ground seems useful after all. I don’t mean under ground as in disappearing from society, but actually under the ground, as in wartime bunkers or new age thermo-regulated housing. The little noises a community makes, or for that matter a natural habitat makes, are just part of the normal territory of being with people. But when you mean to try to make voice recordings at home, things take on a different spin. Auto work, construction work, hyped up motors, and barking dogs. No make that screaming, screeching, tortured yowls of dog barks. At all hours. Short of owning a recording studio, or not needing any sleep, these things can take a bite out of one’s momentum with LibriVox recordings. Fortunately, there is a time horizon for some of the noise sources, but how long? and to be replaced by what? My blanket fort is currently insufficient to the task.

© Glyn Baker cc:by-sa

Happy Pi Day!

Yes, even I have been caught up in the exuberance of Pi - the mystical, irrational number that just won’t stop. LibriVoxer Shurtagal of Portland organized a reading of the first fifty digits of Pi for us, and got a wildly enthusiastic response. All 56 versions were cataloged today, Pi Day (3/14) and they could not be more fun.

© Dr Neil Clifton cc:by-sa

Back and Forth, Back and Forth

Changing the “time” back and forth each year is simply ridiculous. If an individual wants to adjust their hours of sleeping or working, let them do it. But to enslave billions of people with dangerous “jet-lag” every year, twice a year makes no sense. It saves nothing. Not energy, not time, and certainly not daylight. It must be stopped. Here’s a similar view at Earth & Sky by Larry Sessions:

But the value of shifting the clock forward and back through the year is debatable at best. If it ameliorates some problems, it exacerbates others. It’s like the situation of someone who deliberately sets their watch ahead by a half hour to avoid being late for appointments. More often than not, the person then adjusts their mental machinery to process this — knowing that the watch is fast — and still pushes things to the last possible moment and ends up late anyway. (Check out this article: “Saving daylight increases energy use.”)

Ben Franklin’s original idea was clever and humorous, not practical. But the institution of setting clocks forward and back by the season in the major economies of the world is not, in my opinion, the result of clear thinking. It is an example of politicians looking for a “quick fix” that should be dealt with in more sober and intelligent fashion.

I’m no Ben Franklin, but I know when to laugh at a joke, not set it as national and international policy.

And reading a summary of its history in the US, see what the Naval Observatory tells us about its shifty, experimental nature:

Although standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads in 1883, it was not established in U.S. law until the Act of March 19, 1918, sometimes called the Standard Time Act. The act also established daylight saving time, a contentious idea then. Daylight saving time was repealed in 1919, but standard time in time zones remained in law. Daylight time became a local matter. It was re-established nationally early in World War II, and was continuously observed from 9 February 1942 to 30 September 1945. After the war its use varied among states and localities. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 provided standardization in the dates of beginning and end of daylight time in the U.S. but allowed for local exemptions from its observance. The act provided that daylight time begin on the last Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October, with the changeover to occur at 2 a.m. local time.

During the “energy crisis” years, Congress enacted earlier starting dates for daylight time. In 1974, daylight time began on 6 January and in 1975 it began on 23 February. After those two years the starting date reverted back to the last Sunday in April. In 1986, a law was passed that shifted the starting date of daylight time to the first Sunday in April, beginning in 1987. The ending date of daylight time was not subject to such changes, and remained the last Sunday in October. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 changed both the starting and ending dates. Beginning in 2007, daylight time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.

And then there’s this one from a website devoted to returning to the good sense of abandoning the experiment altogether, standardtime.com:

One is safety. Some people believe that if we have more daylight at the end of the day, we will have fewer accidents.

In fact, this “benefit” comes only at the cost of less daylight in the morning. When year-round daylight time was tried in 1973, one reason it was repealed was because of an increased number of school bus accidents in the morning. Further, a study of traffic accidents throughout Canada in 1991 and 1992 by Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia before, during, and immediately after the so-called “spring forward” when DST begins in April. Alarmingly, he found an eight percent jump in traffic accidents on the Monday after clocks are moved ahead. He attributes the jump to the lost hour of sleep. In a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, Coren explained, “These data show that small changes in the amount of sleep that people get can have major consequences in everyday activities.” He undertook the study as a follow up to research showing that even an hour’s change can disrupt sleep patterns and “persist for up to five days after each time shift.” Other observers attribute the huge spike in accidents on the first Monday of DST to the sudden change in the amount of light during driving times. Regardless of the reason, there is no denying that changing our clocks has a significant cost in human lives.

While some people claim that they would miss the late evening light, a presumably similar number of people love the morning light. And projects, postponed during the sun filled summer, will be tackled with new vigor when the sun sets an hour earlier each day.

Congress appears to have felt we were not having enough of a difficult time so in 2007 they passed a law starting Daylight Savings time 3 weeks earlier and ending it one week later. This cost US companies billions to reset automated equipment, put us further out of sync with Asia and Africa time-wise, inconvenienced most of the country, all in the name of unproven studies that claim we save energy.

So there you have it. Enough is enough. Let us return to good sense.

© DS Pugh cc:by-sa

Year of the Potato?

Not for me personally, necessarily, but decreed for the entire planet; behold the spud! Over the past couple of months I’ve run into the declaration several times, so I feel compelled to get it out of my system with this post.

According to The Economist:

MENTION potatoes in the United States and most people immediately think of Idaho, where more than a quarter of the country’s crop is produced. In Europe, Ireland and its famine or Poland and its vodkas come to mind. But nowhere is prouder of its potatoes than Peru, where they were domesticated more than 7,000 years ago. The country is home to up to 3,500 different varieties of edible tubers, according to the International Potato Centre, whose headquarters are near Lima.

And the Foreign Policy magazine blog posits:

So, what does the Year of the Potato mean on a practical level? The first step is “increasing awareness” about potatoes and “activities related to the potato.” Over the longer term, the U.N. hopes to boost sustainable potato production in the developing world.

As it happens, a shift of potato production from developed to developing countries is already underway. In 2005, for the first time, the developing world harvested more tons of potatoes than did the developed world. As usual, China and India explain much of the shift: China is now the planet’s top potato producer, and together, China and India harvest about a third of the world’s spuds.

And to quickly explain the pivotal role potatoes had in restructuring the human universe, The Economist offers yet another article, including:

Unlikely though it seems, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the industrial revolution in England in the 19th century. It provided a cheap source of calories and was easy to cultivate, so it liberated workers from the land. Potatoes became popular in the north of England, as people there specialised in livestock farming and domestic industry, while farmers in the south (where the soil was more suitable) concentrated on wheat production. By a happy accident, this concentrated industrial activity in the regions where coal was readily available, and a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its “historically revolutionary role”.

Well, if that doesn’t just beat all. Personally, I like the fancy graphic design of the official site. To your health!

© Pauline Eccles cc:by-sa

Eying the Microphone

It was bound to happen. I’m finally conscious of my Librivox recording procrastination as a sign of adaptation to the “organization”. It has nothing to do with the project in itself, rather it is simply time to review what Librivox is and how I want to fit in, and then go from there.

All sorts of twists on the idea of a morale curve have been packaged out in the internet wilds, and it’s surprisingly hard to find the actual Peace Corps study online. I first heard about the concept listening to some management development training tapes loaned from the employee training office of the State. I remember a sense of relief and enlightenment at first, but then realized that knowing about it doesn’t change it much. In any case, it allows you to understand that it isn’t a character flaw to examine your evolving experience of a new culture or community as the march of time reveals it. What am I talking about? Okay, to correct and adapt a Toastmasters online brochure:

1) the Crisis of Arrival (1-3 months),

2) the Crisis of Engagement (4-9 months),

3) the Crisis of Acceptance (9-12 months), and

4) the Crisis of Re-Entry (beyond 12 months).

The labels and descriptions have been spun, repackaged, reinterpreted, and sold any number of times since then, but essentially apply to the initial high optimism of imaging what the as yet unknown change will entail, then facing the realities of the change based on actual participation in the new circumstance - which is invariably different than the anticipatory imagination of it, then after a time, realizing it is never going to be what you thought it would be, and either going with that flow and accepting what it really is, or deciding to move out/on to a different situation or simply reverse to an old situation. This is the point of either confirming the choice or not. These stages apply to just about any new job, intimate relationship, town, community project, culture, and apparently, Toastmasters membership. And, well, in this case, Librivox activity.

As with most organizations - especially those comprised of volunteers - Librivox is remarkably welcoming and accepting of a great variety of skill and diversity of raw materials. And at first, the hardware/software learning curve is distracting enough, and rewarding enough to finally learn or manage, that the actual product one creates is almost beside the point. But comes a time when you really start noticing that no amount of kit will cause you to read perfectly fluently, or with the musical inflections of the mind’s voice, or pronounce your R’s as you thought you did, or whatever the revelation is. Sure, I “can be understood”, but is that satisfying? Must I endure the snapping of my palatine uvula - let alone subject others to it - simply to support free media?

I’ve certainly discovered that I have very little patience for post-production work. I still don’t know what most of it is, but shaving out clicks and fine tuning pauses is simply tedious. I have never “normalized” or “graphic equalized” anything. I think at the very beginning, I found some settings to use based on patchy information gathered from the LV forum or wiki, or heaven knows where, then saved them, and just forgot about them. At least I figured out how to structure my “blanket and pillow fort” to minimize ambient echoes and the hum of the computer. But that’s as far as it goes. Oh, and I bought a desktop USB microphone. There.

I also find a shift in my choices of material, corresponding to this shift in my place in the process. The spewing of my dreadful renditions of poetry gave way to finding obscure passages buried in collaborative projects that seemed to need help getting done, or seemed obscure enough that my part wouldn’t do the whole too much damage. Then I started claiming a few sections in projects that seemed closer to my heart, but were also more high-profile, like a portion of Psalms in the Old Testament project, or how to make an environmental law, and now, a portion of the biography of Jane Austen. The Psalms and Austen will, I expect, be looked for by many listeners, and I’m amid recording the Austen section that I claimed even now. I’m not happy with how it’s going. Reflecting badly on my character, I’ve even tried to find “worse” readers on popular projects, to try to make myself feel better. I’ve had difficulty finding worse readers. No schadenfreude available for this old frauline.

The upside is that I enjoy finding material to be done, distinct from doing the material myself. So, proposing and coordinating the Bill of Rights project was good. Discovering and coordinating the Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges is even better. A poem I suggested for the “weekly” turned out well for lots of readers. I’ve become quite an avid skimmer of source materials with an eye to coordinating more things once my obligations to the Exchanges are discharged. I’m also just enjoying the discoveries resulting from the explorations. There is so much Californiana that I never knew existed. Charles Nordhoff, the elder, had very intelligent observations of the societies he witnessed in the 1870s, including conditions in Mendocino county. I’m reading far more poetry than I ever have before, and discovering some favorites.

So now I must face my demons. To record the really cool, but lengthy stuff? Or let it go to others? Do I try to Book Coordinate more collaboratives even in the absence of being able to assist beginners with technical problems? It’s a good community, with remarkably positive cultural commitment, so I don’t see myself walking away. But I’m still feeling around for my path within it. Eying the microphone.

© ceridwen cc:by-sa

Thinking of JFK

A work holiday situated on a Monday betwixt the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington, President’s Day invites any number of pop-media trivia lists, and civic flag displaying, and discounts on bedding and bath linens. However, my person of interest this year is John F. Kennedy. With the letters between him and Khrushchev in production at LibriVox, I’ve found myself exploring the JFK Presidential Library, and finding a rich resource. From the Library’s pages on the Cold War:

John Kennedy was the first American president born in the 20th century and his entire political career had taken place in the context of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. His inaugural address stressed the contest between the free world and the communist world and he pledged that the American people would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

And then later in the same document:

In June 1963, JFK spoke at the American University commencement in Washington, D.C. He urged Americans to critically reexamine Cold War stereotypes and myths and called for a strategy of peace which would make the world safe for diversity. In the final months of the Kennedy presidency Cold War tensions seemed to soften as the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was negotiated and signed. In addition, the “Hotline,” a direct line of communication between Washington and Moscow, was established to help reduce the possibility of war by miscalculation.

The source pages are here. On the same pages, as well as others, are many authentic audio and video resources. A great place to look around.

©Richard Rimmer cc:by-sa

GeoVista launched

Well, after considerable time spent thinking about how to do it, then forgetting about it, then thinking again, I finally started a separate blog about the Geograph British Isles Project, called GeoVista. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, Geograph is one of my favorite cyber-environments, and has taught me much about how the internet works, both good and bad. I’ve been wanting a place to capture my musings on the project, where I can just show and tell at will, and feature contributions of interest that might then be found out by folks other than just those in the internal conversation of the project forum. That is, if it is ever seen by anyone not already involved with Geograph - I ‘m not sure how to reach out to people in the wider world to tell them about the remarkable creation that is the Project.

I decided to try it on the Blogger platform, after enjoying the blog of a Geograph-er in absentia, Hugh Venables’ Southern Ocean and Antarctica, presented on Blogger. I have to say that so far, overall I prefer the WordPress facility to Blogger. But Blogger allows for an intermediate sized photo display not available here, and that suits my idea of featuring images from the Project. The bad news is that Blogger doesn’t load each image to the position indicated by the cursor/carat, but instead keeps going to the top. So article planning has to be done in reverse, with the last images in first, and on up to the top. I suppose if I were a code monkey, this would pose no problem, but I am not. I suppose it’s good to try to learn these things simultaneously, and I have learned a few html tricks in the bargain.

The other thing Blogger doesn’t have (that I enjoy at WordPress) is a built-in blog-stat mechanism. With Puffs & Pops, I can go right to it on the dashboard and find out more than I realized there was to know about my blog traffic statistics. Blogger has nothing! There are third-party plug-ins apparently, but how would I know how to install them? Do they show the array of info already integrated into the framework at WordPress? It is certainly a glaring omission. Unless of course, it’s there but can’t be intuitively found by me after the joys here.

In any case, Puffs & Pops will be more of my personal slush wrapped around my LibriVox experiences, and less of Geograph. I still intend to close each post with a Geograph Project image, but I’m not sure I’ll do more here. The title in fact has more to do with homestyle audio recording anyway, and was born out of seeing LibriVoxateers’ other sites. So it goes, I learn from each community.

© Hywel Williams cc:by-sa

Irrational exuberance

Oh happy day! I got up earlier than usual to get myself together and arrive at the Ukiah courthouse on time this morning. Security screening was slow and steady, and the weary, dutiful citizens summoned from distant corners of the county crowded into the large room to turn in their form, and then sit and wait. It looked like close to one hundred people altogether. As we awaited the lottery of being called in to court for the dreaded questioning and selection, an avuncular, well dressed man came in and spoke to us. It was the judge of the case in question, who explained that it was only that morning that the District Attorney had had to drop or delay the prosecution of what would have been charges of murder. (Ugh! I hate being right!) Something to do with the witnesses. Since that was the only jury trial on the docket, we were all free to go. Excellent!

In my euphoria, and with birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, and being in the biggest town in the county, I went shopping. New shoes, new jeans, new bras, new books, new bathtowels. All that and a venti latte and springlike sunshine - well, it was a great belated birthday celebration. Here’s to being a 49er!

© Fractal Angel cc:by-sa