Al Gore – Didn’t You Notice The Zig Zags?

On his global warming lecture, Al Gore is displaying CO2 levels spanning 650 000 years. On the graph behind him, CO2 levels go up and down and backward and forward in time. In other words, there are occasionally two or more CO2 levels at the same time.

Al Gore, how is it possible? Didn’t you pay any attention to the massive screen behind you?

You can see the full video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxi-OlkmxZ4 [the graph is at 7:30]

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Some background for this post. I watched An Inconvenient Truth movie two years ago, and believed every word of it. After studying the issue more carefully, I was surprised: the movie has been proved to contain material which is misleading, incorrect and false. All in all, it is full of scaremongering without any science to back it up. Almost every segment of it.

Yet, governments are making large decisions based on false theories promoted by non-scientists who can not even produce a simple graph correctly. Yet, even Barack Obama – whom we all regard highly and is currently the man with the most power on this planet - is being misinformed and misled.

Al Gore says the science on man-made global warming is settled; there’s a consensus, scientists stand behind it. That’s an easy argument to validate. Just search the web to see whether it’s true. You will see how the whole house of cards begins to crumble.

Onion Joke That’s Not

Uncannily good prediction from The Onion archives, dated January, 2001.

The Guy Working At The Top of The Tallest Building

Have you heard about the guy working at the top of the tallest building?

On his office wall, he has a map of the world. There’s a knob on top of each country. On the spur of the moment, he turns knobs left and right. Rain pushes into the windows. Lights of the city low around him flicker as he slowly moves his gaze to another knob.

His telephone doesn’t ring.

As he turns the knobs, commands are sent down to the stories below for an army of his minions to execute. This country goes in the red, this into black. Rates of the currencies change. He releases a knob, goes to sit on his chair. Looks outside.

His companies have many names, his products are made from iron and binary digits. You wouldn’t recognize him on the street. An inverse Domino effect gathering all the money from the world, from your pockets, ends to where he stands.

He doesn’t play golf, he plays the world. After the deeds of the day are done, he enters the elevator, goes down, crosses the street, grabs the evening paper and silently goes into a taxi. Arrives to his home where his two kids and wife are already sleeping deep. In the night, his dreams are like the dreams of any other person.

The Book of W: A Book or a Blog or a Blog Book?

As you have probably noticed, I’ve partially moved my act to thebookofw.com.

On that site, I’ll create an experience which takes all the good parts of books and blogging. Furthermore, the site should be readable with mobile devices also.

One of the simple, minor, mundane things that bug me is how the pages are numbered. In blogs, the most recent page is the page number 1, by default. In books, page number 1 is the beginning. In my view, the best solution would be to number the oldest (i.e. first) blog post with the page number 1, and increase from there on. I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this feature with Tumblr technology without relatively heavy scripting, or manual tagging (using tags like “page1″, “page2″). Yeah, I could code it using Tumblr API, but we’ll see.

Anyway, The Book of W is an interesting experiment. You wouldn’t believe how much, how long, how dearly I kept the contents and the subject hidden. Only my wife knew something about the unpublished, unprinted, unagented book. My face blushed and hands started to shake on those rare moments when the discussion reared it. And now, I’m on the other extreme as I publish the chapters to the web for you all to read.

When I was younger, I hided all my creative works (music, writings, …) from others. The rationale – if you can call it that – was that the works felt too personal, they gave out too much of me and made me vulnerable. Now I’ve learned that life’s too short for that. So, if you have something to present, just pour it out. Thanks for the web, it’s easy, fast, inexpensive and leads to an uncharted territory…

Cybertecture Apartment in Dubai

It’s always interesting to follow what they are up to in Dubai. The developments there are just amazing. According to some info, one fifth of world’s cranes are there in gigantic 100 billion dollar construction project.   

One particular building caught my eye: The PAD, also known as iPad. The tower is…

…targeted at switched-on, creative and hip business executives to whom we refer to as “the digital generation” or apple brand lovers who are constantly mobile and connected.

Every apartment will be intelligent and have its own cybertecture to provide a unique experience. Everything from communications, entertainment, health and shopping is covered by the cybertecture of the apartment.

Among the usual household stuff like colour changing tiles are the iFeatures. The iFeatures list contains: iReality (a virtual reality projection wall), iHealth (monitors residents health), iRotation Rooms (rotate your lounge), iArt (project a painting from a server to a wall), etc.

In Dubai, science fiction really becomes a reality. I commend their bold adventures in architectural design and pushing the edge of technology in living spaces. Oil money well spent.

Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water.

Thoughts on OpenSocial API and Social Applications

This week, Google introduced OpenSocial API. It is a set of common interfaces for building social applications. Scobleizer’s blog post led me to more information about the OpenSocial API, here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

I watched the Campfire One video – almost from beginning to end - and browsed through some Developer’s Guide docs. I appreciate Google’s simple and straightforward, hands-on approach. They have not created a “Meta-Reference Application Framework for Interfaces of Social Network Applications” and dozens of new acronyms. Instead, they show working code and the classic “Hello World!”, written with a vanilla text editor.

Why are Google and other companies allocating resources to social media? The way I see it, that is because their main revenue streams come from advertisers. Social applications are filled with data of people’s activities, interests, daily patterns, schedules, locations, networks etc. This data provides juice for building highly targeted marketing systems, which in turn generate happy advertisers.

The more data people put into the system, the better the system will serve the people. It’s a win-win for us all, don’t you think?

Web 2.0 Summit Videos on blip.tv

If you’re interested in anything Web 2.0, you should check the videos of the recent Web 2.0 Summit held in California.

Excellent roster. Excellent discussions. Some of the questions just splat on the faces of the interviewees, politely and with a smile, of course. John Battelle’s way of carrying the conversation is particularly good.

[Update 1.11.2007] Excellent? Nah, not all. What’s the reason for not showing the screens of the presenters? It’s not stimulating to watch a talking guy looking down at his laptop, enthusiastically giving a pitch for something that one can not see even a glimpse of.

Live Search: Good Bird’s Eye Views to Famous Cities – Like Lahti ;)

Have you noticed the amount of detail in the bird’s eye images of Live Search?

There are good bird’s eye views to Munich, Venice, Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, New York… However, I couldn’t find such views to interesting places like Shanghai, Tokyo, Moscow or Paris.  

My home town Lahti is also covered with a massive amount of pixels. Now where was my car at the time the airplane was flying over…

An Inconvenient Truth – Too Important to Miss

Watched the Inconvenient Truth movie. I was surprised by how clearly and softly it carried its massively important message. I was expecting a sensationalistic blast, but got a delicate whisper instead.  

The movie is also a portrait of former Vice President Al Gore. He comes through as a scarred, caring man, learning from mistakes. Future votes will find their way to him. 

During watching the movie, we were heating our sauna. The temperature of our electrically powered stove was around 86 Celsius degrees for over an hour.

I’m still eager to know: what is the role of heat generated by stoves, car engines, factories, central heating systems, computers etc. in changing the global climate? Do they increase the temperature and make the wiggling red lines of the film go up? We took a sauna – did we cause a tiny part of a glacier to melt?

[25.05.2009] Watched The Great Global Warming Swindle and felt totally betrayed.