Politics
Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to [...]
I was asked recently what I had learned from my informal survey of the local BC cleantech sector. This was my response and I was encouraged to share it more widely. I’d love your own thoughts on the following. Dear (Friend): You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time [...]
Jamie Oliver pleads with us to stop killing our kids with crappy food: www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html Blaise Aguera y Arcas will blow your mind with the next generation of augmented reality mapping tools. Makes Google Maps look like crayons and paper. www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html Running more effective board meetings. Not rocket science but good basic article. www.cloudave.com/link/running-more-effective-board-meetings-at-startups It turns [...]
Check out the newly launched Climate Action Plan Indicators tool from the City of Berkeley that is based on Vancouver’s own Visible Strategies‘ “See-It” application. It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals. Congrats VS team and City of [...]
WebGuild posted an excellent article today on the effect that all of the world’s live video streams had on the Internet yesterday during Obama’s inauguration. I was hoping that somebody would have the metrics for that. It appears that it was the good people over at Keynote. Predictably the total number of pages viewed was [...]
Like millions of other people, I am watching Obama’s inauguration on CNN.com and Facebook. It’s interesting to watch all of the prior Presidents come in and listen to the music playing. It feels oddly imperial and royal. It’s the first time I have had a sense of real unity in America.. We don’t often have [...]
Wow. I went to see MILK tonight at the Castro Theatre on Castro Street in San Francisco tonight. What an incredibly well done and powerful movie. It tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States. It was incredible to be at ground zero for this story, in [...]
THIS is the reason you don’t allow overly broad stupid legislation like the Patriot Acts I and II and the most recent Military Commission Act to pass. They are always unintended uses that far exceed the original intent of the law. In this case, a couple in their mid-forties were being overtly sexual on a [...]
Ben Franklin said it best: “Those who would trade liberty for a bit of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This is appalling. I urge everybody to watch this:
I would like to offer up a business idea to an enterprising young engineering student. Develop something that operates a bit like a speeding ticket camera but that is for sound level instead. Build it so that it can sit in intersections and detect noise levels of Harley Davidsons and other bikes with modified exhausts [...]
I think I have found the magic number. Every fifth article from Mark Morford is so brilliant, insightful, and articulate that I need to post most, if not all, of it here for my readers. Today is the day for another. In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of [...]
Another brilliant rant from Mark Morford. See the full article here. Excerpts below: Look, see those tire marks? That ungainly footprint? Feel that breath of humid doom upon your skin? Yes, the president was just here. Up in Napa Valley, riding his official Trek Mountain Bike One over the rocks and down the trails and [...]
(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.) I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city. One key component of the [...]
Some friends and I decided that we want to write a Web 2.0 manifesto over at ChangeThis. We submitted our proposal to the ChangeThis team and they accepted! So now we need you to go over and vote for us on this page! Here is the summary of the proposal: There is a change occurring [...]
Back in 2003, I attended a pivotal event at the Vancouver Enterprise Forum. Normally, these events generally follow a predictable pattern. People fill in the room, buy a drink and wander aimlessly. The venture capitalists avoid the nervous entrepreneurs with the bad pitches and the keen students stand nervously in the corner, not sure who [...]
Only Mark Morford can put all of this into one article and tie it all together so well. Excerpts below. The link to the left takes you to the full article at SF Gate. …James Dobson, the cute little founder of the cute little ultraconservative rabidly Christian happily neo-homophobic Focus on the Family, actually stood [...]
A Cornell university study has found that 44% of Amerikans favoured “some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.” But remember George Bush, “this is not a war of Christian against Muslim or Westerners against Easterners, it is a war on terror.” Umm, yeah, right. Shockingly, those who were most inclined to vote this [...]
Read it and weep, my Amerikan friends. And support the EFF. QUOTE December 10, 2004 A Taste of the System 02:07 AM | Current Affairs/ Drugs/ Politics Since the election, as you’ve doubtless noticed, I haven’t had much to say here. Having lost that crusade – and I do think we lost, election skullduggery notwithstanding [...]
Many of you know that one of my favourite columnists is Mark Morford, who writes for the San Francisco Gate news. This is this weeks rant on Canada’s policies versus those of his own government. It’s a fantastic read and nice to see that at least one American is aware of what is going on [...]
Book-burning and more importantly, book-re-writing has been used throughout the rein of man to erase the collective knowledge and to curb dangerous thoughts and direct society. This infamous technique for hiding knowledge continues unabated today in Texas. Dubya and the ideologues (sounds like a great rock band title), continue to push their ideological and theological [...]
I’m doing my part to join the enblogment exercise started by Larry Lessig. Everybody should link back (trackback) to their candidate of choice. The trackbacks will be analyzed against the election results to see if there is any correlation at all. Here is my vote for Kerry.
The transcript from Al-Jazeera is here. Some interesting comments. In short, OBL blames American/Israeli bombing of Lebanon for being the root cause of his revenge. Another interesting point is that he says four years have passed and the roots of the problem (Israeli/Palestinian relations) still have not changed. He makes no comment on Saudi Arabia [...]
Here they are: The Economist: The Incompetent or the Incoherent? Lawrence Lessig: Enblogment: For KerryThe New Yorker: The Choice is Kerry John Perry Barlow: How to Overthow the Government Mark Morford: Get Out and Vote and Scream
Well, it’s a tough Senatorial race in Kentucky so they’re pulling out all the stops and playing the gay card. One of Senator Jim Bunnings supporters, State Senate president David Williams, tried to sway voters away from Senate hopeful Dan Mongiardo by deriding him as a “limp wrist”. Not to be outdone, State Senator Elizabeth [...]
Thanks to Scott Rosenberg at Salon for the links to this amazing set of articles at the New York Times covering Bush’s catastrophic failures in Iraq on the military front as well as on the legal front. I took the three long military articles from the New York Times and converted them to a PDF [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET News, covers the next degree of heat in the boiling frog pot otherwise known as the American government’s plan to track every American citizen’s communications, travel, finances, relationships, and lives from cradle to grave. This time, One section of the new proposed legislation: “…anticipates storing the ‘lifetime travel [...]
More election humour from the U.S. (Thanks Dan Gillmor for the tip.)
Check out Global Vote 2004, a (purportedly) non-partisan, (purportedly) non-spamming simple voting site designed to allow the rest of the world to vote on the US election, since we’re all going to be affected by it anyway. They are planning on releasing the vote count to the media 48 hours before the election. UPDATE Nov. [...]
