ATZ OK

An old friend emailed me the following quotation, which I found pretty fascinating:
“A vegan driving a Hummer produces less greenhouse gases than an omnivore riding a bicycle.” –Howard Lyman

This is especially interesting to me, because my reasons for being vegan mostly have to do with personal choice, not some sort of political imperative, but I do feel a lot of pressure to conserve fuel whenever possible. It’s interesting to know that the choices I made without even intending to lessen my impact have made a much greater difference than the ones I made with that intent.

Anyways, it got me thinking about the lack off effectiveness behind the EPA’s emissions standards, and fuel-efficient vehicles in general. Yes, I know the Prius is awesome and doing very well, but most people still get worse mileage out of them than they would a Geo Metro 20 years ago. There’s something wrong with that picture.

Considering that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gases than all of the vehicles in the world combined, it makes me wonder why the EPA isn’t setting standards for meat. Think about it, why not a hybrid burger? A little bit of googling actually reveals that I’m not the first person to have thought of this; a company called Solae has even created such a thing.

It makes a lot of sense, really. Sometimes when I go out to lunch with my coworkers, we go to One World Cafe, a local vegetarian restaurant. Being meat eaters, they usually get the meat substitutes and complain about how much they suck. I can’t help but agree with them, honestly, most of them really do. So what is somebody supposed to do, if they’re not vegetarian, but want to lessen the environmental and health impact of meat? I think hybrid meat products could really make a difference there. Just take your Morningstar Farms and Boca Burger products, and add enough real meat to them to get that flavor and texture you’ll never be able to reproduce anyways. Since most of those products aren’t even vegan to begin with, they wouldn’t even lose many shoppers. After all, is it really any different than putting casein and rennet in soy cheese?

Further reading:
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A0701E00.htm
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060413.diet.shtml
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/the-warming-globe-and-us/

It’s a little late, I know, but our BM2006 pictures are now up. You might notice a quality degradation in the second half of the pictures. That because these are from Mandi’s disposable film cameras. I think it’s the focus more than anything else that affects the quality, although possibly because of the scanning as well. I tried out getting a Kodak photo CD for these, and it’s okay, but I’ll need to get a good side-by-side comparison versus the actual prints and see what I think. It obviously still beats scanning in the pictures by hand, though.

I still maintain the superiority of A-series Canon digitals, for the perfect intersection of mediocre quality, cheap and easy batteries and storage media, and cheap price. It’s convenient, takes good enough pictures, and won’t break my heart if it gets destroyed by dust and rain.

The fine folks at RoboSavvy have created an example of exactly how amazing the Nokia 770’s potential is by creating a series of robots using a 770 as the brain and to display facial expressions. This is all made possible because of the open source nature of the platform, combined in a lightweight enclosure with useful features such as the high resolution LCD and bluetooth. Also, the puppy dog is super cute.

Thanks, Engadget!

Santarchy DC was another fantastically drunken success! We started out at the Smithsonian, then walked to the Washington monument and then the White House, before ending up at the bars. There were no strip clubs this year, presumably because we’ve either gotten too big, or we’ve been blacklisted all over town, or likely both.

Highlights include a merry-go-round ride (big thanks to Santa for footing the bill), and a run-in with a rival gang, the “Santa Stumble.” We tried to give them a chance and show them how it’s done, but they were pretty much a bunch of douche bags, so we decided to let them date rape each other in peace. Personally, I was hoping for a West Side Story-esque musical gang fight with christmas carols and candy canes on bike chains.

Pictures here.

Wired News is reporting on an upcoming Firefly MMOG, from Multiverse. While I’m pretty much convinced this can only end up in the vast heap of MMOG failures, there’s a remote chance it could be really really good.

I still hold Elite Plus and TradeWars 2002 as the gold standard of space sims. After playing Everquest for the first time, my immediate thought was how awesome a MMO space sim would be. When EVE Online came out, I figured somebody had finally done it. They came extremely close, but the game just wasn’t that good.

The main thing Elite and TW2002 had that EVE didn’t was the ability to feel important. This is a problem with most MMOs, but World of Warcraft and City of Heroes both handled it extremely well. They basically take the attitude that you can either play in a player-vs-player environment, a cooperative instance, or a parallel single player reality.

Previous games, like Everquest, involved mostly sitting around, waiting for a monster to appear from thin air, then trying to beat the other dozen guys to it. This led to a game that was mostly a boring grind, trying to do your time in the dungeons until you can get up to the higher levels where the game actually becomes fun, mostly because there’s less competition and you have more chance to play.

Instances were a big help to this sort of grind. This means you can enter an area alone or with a group, and you’re the only ones there, as far as you can tell. There are of course others there, but they’re all in their own instances. This gives the experience of a single-player or small cooperative game, but with the added benefit of a massive social environment surrounding it. The PvP content in WoW (granted, it was mostly stolen from Dark Ages of Camelot) added another dimension to this by allowing massive battlefields with gameplay much like a First Person Shooter. All this, while retaining the exploration and loot accumulation of the original MMORPG formula made for a really fun game.

EVE Online doesn’t have this. It has a lot of flying around and mining asteroids. The real fun of the game itself is mostly in the political corporate intrigue and the ships. Unfortunately, these things are actually really awesome and done very well. The problem is that the game itself sucks.

A Firefly MMOG could fix this. Take Firefly’s aesthetics. Dirty rust-buckets, old beat up space stations. Take the focus off how boring space is by giving the player something else to look at. The only way to do this is by moving much of the action inside the ship. Take the tribes approach, and let multiple players cooperate in the same ship: a pilot, a gunner, a mechanic, etc. Firefly was about the crew, not the ship, or even the captain.

Once you have dedicated gunners and pilots, you have the ability to make it a more skill-based game. This would have the added benefit of taking away some of the advantage gained by simply having played longer and built up skills. You could still allow some of this, by letting players build up skills and money to buy their own ship and captain it, but a player with a good twitch could jump right in and become the best gunner or pilot in the game, on somebody else’s ship.

With a decent ranking system like in most online games these days, a casual gunner could jump in and post himself up for hire. A captain looking to go on a mission could then browse a board showing his ranking and price, and hire him for an hour or two.

I can’t think of any other game style that would lend itself to such universal appeal, allowing casual action games and hard-core MMOG grinders entirely separate roles to play together. Of course, this won’t actually happen. We’re talking about a video game based on a TV show with a rabid fan base. They’ll probably just take an Everquest clone, set all the textures to black, and swap out the orcs with reavers.

I’m expecting DC Santarchy to be, dare I say “over the top,” nay “off da hook,” this year. Last year was easily around 100 santas when you take into account late-comers and early-goers. Hell, we even had some furries. I’ve also been hearing tales of chartered and organized santa bar-crawls happening on the same day, apparently we’ve even been mistaken for them by some unsuspecting hosts. This can only end well for us. I can just picture another clueless group showing up the following weekend, only to be immediately assaulted by a bar proprietor whose girlfriend santa stole away.

Either way, I’ll be washing out my listerine bottle tonight in preparation. I can’t decide between rum and tequila this year. I’ve got a ton of extra tequila left over from Burning Man, but rum looks much more convincing in the bottle. Maybe I’ll mix both, how can that possibly end badly?

Amy Youngs media art delights and disgusts with a composting “digestive” indoor table. This is actually a really great idea for city dwellers without the proper outdoor space for a compost heap. It’s basically a table with a big ol’ udder on the bottom full of worms. You drop the food scraps in, and as the insects work it into fertile dirt, it drops into a bowl below for use in your potted plants. Bottom line is less space in the landfill, and more rich oxygen in your home.

(Thanks Engadget)

Engadget seems to have gotten its grubby little mitts on a few more spy shots of Nokia’s 870 Internet Tablet, this time with some actual content.

As far as I can tell, the current benefits over the Nokia 770 are limited to: slightly increased RAM, a camera, an integrated stand, and an additional SD slot. This doesn’t sound revolutionary, but if you used the 770, you’re excited.

My biggest complaints about the 770 were the lack of memory and storage, and difficulties with the desk stand. Other than that, it was a marvelous device. I’d still be using it every day if it hadn’t been stolen.

Hopefully the Nokia 870 can hold the price point, and come out under $500. This will be an even bigger issue than it was just a year ago, as laptop prices have plummeted recently, while UMPC prices really haven’t.

I’ve just hooked up the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin, and it’s pretty cool. Since it’s just now starting to collect data, most of the entries will be based on comments, but the most hardlinked pages should make it to the top pretty fast.

A word of warning if you want to use this plugin though, it doesn’t seem to play well with others. If you used the google search indexer, it apparently breaks it, but I don’t so it doesn’t. What broke it for me is the coppermine integration plugin, which as I went to check for updates I found is no longer maintained. Wonderful, so I guess now I’m in the market for alternate image galleries with decent coppermine migration scripts.

The issue was that for some reason the coppermine plugin is switching over to the coppermine db, so to fix this I had to set the $table_prefix global to manually reference the wp db in the akpc_init function. There’s got to be a more elegant fix, but it worked.

I’ve been looking for something like the JimXfor a while now, ever since the last time I was mugged. After the hassle of canceling my credit cards and replacing my driver’s license, I stopped carrying a wallet. I keep my money loose in my front pocket, and my ID and credit cards in the back. If I get mugged, I can simply hand them the cash, which is mostly what they’re after anyways. Of course, having all that crap loose in my pocket is annoying as hell, so something like this would be great for organization, and there’s even room to stash a flat USB key. There’s a similar swiss product, as well. Thanks, Treehugger.