Blog Action Day is an awareness event to promote environmental awareness.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blog Action Day is about MASS participation.

There are many great places to find information on the web about the environment:

• Treehugger - Easily the best environmental blog on the web, Treehugger has a great section called How to Go Green as well as tons of other useful stuff. It's manned by some 40 writers around the world and contains no less than 14,000 posts!
• Wikipedia's list of environmental issues - With enough links to keep you busy for hours, Wikipedia should easily set you off on your environmental web travels.
• Digg's Popular Environment Stories - lists tons of popular posts and articles on all sorts of subjects. Looking forward to seeing some Blog Action Day posts appearing here and on reddit on October 15th!
• Green TV - If you need visual stimulation, Green TV has a lot of videos to get you going, divided up into channels of content, it is eminently watchable.
• We can live green - A lot of things boil down to practicality and We Can Live Green will help you find actual products and consumables that are environmentally friendly.
• IMDB's Highest Rated Environmental Movies and Documentaries - Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth isn't the only environmental DVD to watch, check out IMDB's list of features ordered by user ratings.

Businesspundit has a post on networking for introverts.

So you're really not much good at networking. You keep a drink in one hand and the other in a pocket. You stand against walls. You avoid direct eye contact. You pretty much suck at it and since you suck at it you hate doing it. You're constantly standing around trying to look pretty and hoping that someone you're interested in meeting will come and talk to you. 

Me too.

It's interesting to watch the dynamics at a networking event. I've attended many but there's often a sense of being disassociated from the main conversations. The worst are the hard sellers.

The Hard Sellers: These guys are there to pitch. For the most part they're talking to themselves. Whenever I'm near a hard seller I'm tuning them right out and trying to scrape them off my shoe asap. The Hard Sellers listen little and talk much. They've done this and that and would appreciate it if you validate their existence by doffing your cap. 

I hate that and respond poorly to it as most people probably do.

Poor networking is usually cause by embarrassment and fear of rejection... hey , it's just like dating. (Here's my eminently readable post on Horizontal Networking)

I have a good friend Chia in NY who's a photographer. She's about 4'8" and 73lbs (I'm 6'3" and 260) Chia used to be an actress before she became a photographer and now she's the most sought after actor photographer in Manhattan.

Chia lives down in the Flat Iron district (The triangle shaped building in Spiderman). A boxing gym opened up next to her building and  Chia thought it would be great exercise to take up boxing. (Here's her boxing photography)

Interestingly, the gym owners thought this was kind of cool so Chia hired a trainer and started hitting a heavy bag. It was a scene straight out of Million Dollar Baby except that Chia was much shorter.

Of course Chia never actually wanted to fight. In fact, the gym ordered her a pair of pink boxing gloves which, I have to say, were really cute.

Anyway, Chia hit like a girl. She'd prance around and make 'hitting' noises while she punched at the air.

Chia wanted to be more serious. She wanted to move and hit like a boxer, not like a girl. When she talked to her trainer he looked at her like she was as stupid as a bag of hammers. "Chia", he said, " Just act like a boxer." That was it... Chia knew how to act and she was a boxer after that.

The point being: It's always something you can act through. If you're not a great networker... act as though you were.

Works for me. 

Like everyone else, I've been watching the news about the Virginia Tech Massacre.

I was watching Larry King last night and one of the guests was the owner of the pawn shop where Cho purchased or picked up the weapons he used in the killings.

He talked about a completely normal and legal sale. 

The owner came across as a calm older guy running a business and when he mentioned he'd received nasty calls and emails and that he'd run a background check and nothing came back so there was nothing he could do, my reaction was that he was completely blameless...

Sometimes I read news from other countries. In reading about these killings on the BBC, I came across the following paragraph that caught my attention.

John Markell, the owner of the Roanoke firearms shop really have wanted to sell Cho the 9mm Glock if he had read some of these pages? After all four guns sold from his shop had already been reportedly involved in other homicides.

Evidently John Markell has sold the weapons that have been used in five separate homicide incidents with at least 36 people dead. (32 at VT and four others.) That's quite a record. I wonder how much money his pawn shop has made from the sale of those five weapons?

Sometimes it might be good to question whether you're really contributing to society in a beneficial, not just blameless, way. 

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib 

I just finished watching the Ghosts of Abu Ghraib on HBO. I missed it at the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered.Utah's

the most conservative state in the nation and generally supportive of George Bush and the War on Terror. Personally I'm not a fan. I'm even less of one now. 

The stories of abuse and torture that have come out of Abu Ghraib disgust me as an American. How could they not. While I'm all for killing the right people, I find it deeply troubling that America has allowed itself to be led by people to whom getting caught is what makes a practice wrong. American should watch this film.

And of course there's this: A U.S. soldier was sentenced to 100 years in prison Thursday for the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family last year.

The Geneva Conventions expressly prohibit torture and outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment... But George Bush not only defined prisoners in US custody as not being covered by the Geneva Conventions, but that torture would now become part of US policy.

The photo to the right is one of the previously unreleased images released in February 2006 by SBS in Australia, showing a man covered in excrement forced to pose for the camera. I'm surprised that being forced to stand naked in front of your captors while covered in shit doesn't make the list of torture on the Times article below. This sure looks like an outrage upon personal dignity.

The New York Times, in a report on January 12, 2005,reported testimony suggesting that the following events had taken place at Abu Ghraib:

• Urinating on detainees
• Jumping on detainee's leg (a limb already wounded by gunfire) with such force that it could not thereafter heal properly
• Continuing by pounding detainee's wounded leg with collapsible metal baton
• Pouring phosphoric acid on detainees
• Sodomization of detainees with a baton
• Tying ropes to the detainees' legs or penises and dragging them across the floor.

From a Sundance review: Over and over we're told that "the gloves are off" in the fight against America's enemies. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is an essential declaration of the truth behind that cliché: Taking the gloves off is no guarantee the job will get done; it is a guarantee that you'll get your hands dirty. I can only hope that as many people as possible can see Ghosts of Abu Ghraib before April 15 and tax time roll around: This is what we have paid for with money, this is what American soldiers will pay for in blood, this is what our children will pay for as nations around the world perceive that America has gone from a defender of liberty to a swaggering thug. This is what Ghosts of Abu Ghraib shows us: lost lives, lost honor and fascist brutality in the name of democracy and freedom.

The deforestaton of the Amazon

Third world entrepreneures will be receiving some VC funding this Christmas... in the amount of $100 from the Micro VC Maddy Fund.

 
Kiva.org is a microloan sight that lends money to third world entrepreneures in help their businesses and grow markets and economies.  So...

I've decided to facilitate this process and hopefully my daughter and I will learn from and teach each other something along the way.

My daughter will be receiving a gift certificate for $100 that she can invest in entrepreneurs who need access to capital. My expectation is that these tiny loans will be repaid and that I'll provide Maddy with $100 next year to ad to her Micro VC Maddy Fund. Then we'll sit down and have a talk about expectations and responsibilities. I think of this as a kind of 'Pass It On' project

I'm adding the $100 Micro VC Maddy Fund as a new category but I'm sure Maddy will be posting about on her blog at Pony Tail Club.

During the week between Christmas and New Years  Madison will be responsible for using the Kiva site to find 4 receipients to loan $25 each to. (Kiva uses a technique that allows / encourages this.) She will have to report to me why she chose this individual over all the others.

One of the most important in my mind is that she understands the finality of this act. Loaning money to one person means that you're not loaning money to someone else. Maddys decisions will carry repercussions for individuals that she needs to consider and not take lightly.

My goals in doing this are:

• I believe in Kiva mission and want to support them.
• I believe in my daughter and her sense of justice.
• I want my daughter to realize exacltly how privledged she is and respect those who are less fortunate.
• I want my daughter to feel the joy of successfully helping someone.
• I want my daughter to learn something of decision making and repercussions.

From NYTimes: Billionaires & The rest of us

 
The truth is that one life is not valued the same as another. The human condition is that we place more import on those we define as in our 'tribe' as more important that others.

The fundamental condition of valuing every life as having the same intrinsic value? We're far from reaching the utopia of Star Trek.

As Gates told a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva last year, he and his wife, Melinda, “couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that — in our world today — some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not.” They said to themselves, “This can’t be true.” But they knew it was.

...A famous story is told about Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher, who argued that we all act in our own interests. On seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ had not commanded us to do so. Yes, Hobbes replied, he was in pain to see the miserable condition of the old man, and his gift, by providing the man with some relief from that misery, also eased Hobbes’s pain. That reply reconciles Hobbes’s charity with his egoistic theory of human motivation, but at the cost of emptying egoism of much of its bite. If egoists suffer when they see a stranger in distress, they are capable of being as charitable as any altruist.

...Even when private donations are included, however, countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands give three or four times as much foreign aid, in proportion to the size of their economies, as the U.S. gives — with a much larger percentage going to the poorest nations.

Pony Tail Club

My daughters new blog.

 
I thought this was a good idea for a number of reasons. First, she loves horses and if I'm going to have to continue to pay for shoeing, vet bills, feed and training... We're going to make it a business. (Of course, Dad doesn't get it.)

(After seeing that I received a check from Yahoo last month my daughter also thinks this is a good idea. She has dollar signs prancing in her head already.)

My wife is also involved. She's just got her new advertising site up (Wild Blue Creative) and now we're off on the pony express. Our goals with this new pony site are:

• Give Madison (our daughter) a place to express herself and gain positive feedback. Gramsie & Gramps, Yaya & Papu, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and fellow academy riders can all be counted on to provide this.
• Provide a method that by itself teaches consistency and self motivation. ie. No posts / no quality = no traffic.
• Provides and outlet where she can express her love for riding.
• Offers some experience in building something of value that people want.
  
• Lets her generate income that's a direct result of her own efforts (with parential help and moderation).

 

Interestingly, I just put the site up yesterday and there are already 30 rss subscribers. I find that unusual.

I don't know who said it but someone did: "When science finally makes it up the hill of knowledge, it will find that religion has been sitting there all along."

Of course it could be that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then. But who's the squirrel, and what's the acorn? 

A free for all on Science & Religion

perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

A simple explanation of why people with more money than 99.999% of the rest of earths population still don't have enough.

It seems that a lot of high tech entrepreneurs are learning about the afflictions that venture capitalists have been suffering under for years. Those returns just aren't as big as the other guys.

From the Times: In Web World, Rich Now Envy the Super-Rich

...Envy may be a sin in some books, but it is a powerful driving force in Silicon Valley, where technical achievements are admired but financial payoffs are the ultimate form of recognition. And now that the YouTube purchase has amplified talk of a second dot-com boom, many high-tech entrepreneurs — successful and not so successful — are examining their lives as measured against upstarts who have made it bigger.

Reference points only make matters worse, Mr. de Botton said. He pointed to research that has been done on attractive women who feel ugly when surrounded by images of more beautiful women. “Very often the problem isn’t so much what an individual happens to look like, but the extraordinary comparisons being made,” he said.

So what's behind this mid-life crisis? This study, by academics from Pennsylvania State and Harvard University, finds that richer people tend to be happier than poorer people. But the data revealed that the green-eyed monster jealousy influences how people gauge how happy they are.

"The higher the income of others in one's age group, the lower one's happiness," said Glenn Firebaugh a sociological researcher at Pennsylvania State University, one of the report's co-authors.

The research contains a worrying message for society, as the close observance of others' income, a "keeping up with the Joneses" trend, forces people to continually increase their income, the report said.

"Rather than promoting overall happiness, continued income growth could promote an ongoing consumption race where individuals consume more and more just to maintain a constant level of happiness," said Firebaugh.

The first stage is the suspicion of the threat. In this stage people are insecure and may see signs of disaster where there are none. They tend to feel competitive to those they see as threatening.

In the next stage people begin to assess the threat and they become very protective of their possession. They worry themselves sick wondering what is happening or may happen in their relationships. These feelings of insecurity may lead them to spy on their significant other and/or the perceived rival. They question their partner`s fidelity and their own desirability.

The third stage is called emotional reaction. Here people determine if there is a threat and then react to it. People can react with a wide range of emotions depending on the person and the situation. Their reactions can range from clinging dependency to violent rage at the competitor or their partner. Their reactions may be to criticize themselves, become depressed, or resent their partners.

The next stage is called the coping response. There are two basic responses here. People either do their best to repair the threatened relationship, or they become competitive and look for ways of getting even with their mate and the competitor. Men and women tend to differ in their coping responses. Women are more likely to become depressed and blame themselves, whereas men become more competitive and angry. Research indicates that females are more jealous than males over situations involving the partner spending time on a hobby or with family members, but other situations evoke no sex differences (Hansen, 1985).

The final stage according to Brehm is the outcome stage. People ask themselves how their reactions are effecting their relationship. They determine whether they are helping or harming their threatened relationship with such emotional responses.

According to McIntosh and Tangri (1989), jealous behaviors are divided into two types, direct and indirect. Direct behaviors are more confrontational behaviors such as confronting a partner about a jealousy-evoking event. The indirect type includes behaviors that are less confrontational such as giving a partner the silent treatment.

It would appear that the evidence suggests that jealousy is hardwired into us humans and if we're in certain situations their's little we can do.

Certainly there is much to be said for the benefits of jealousy; it makes you work harder and strive to out compete others. In many business situations this is exactly what you want. But the fact is that it comes at a price. I'm sure if you asked people what they want 'happy' trumps 'rich', although many equate the two. It's obvious that that's not the actual case. 

Perhaps the high tech answer is to trade in the BMW or Ferrari and get a minivan. After all, your kids don't know you're a loser.