Via Bruce Sterling: One page from the The Failed States Index for 2007
It says, basically, that economic prosperity is tied to environmental sustainability. Failed states are the least sustainable in terms of environment, and in terms of economy.
Imagine half the world as being less prepared for economics of climate change than New Orleans was for hurricane Katrina, and you get the picture.
What I learned today:
/etc/fstab
You can use /etc/fstab to tell the system to not automount an external drive. I set up the iMac to ignore the backup drive until it’s explicitly mounted.
And that happens at backup time, through a shell command like this:
diskutil mountDrive disk1
…which is part of an Automator workflow that mounts the volume, runs SuperDuper! through AppleScript, and then unmounts it again.
…Which gets called weekly as a launchd item, created with relative ease thanks to Peter Borg.
My parents wanted to get some new computer stuff. Dad’s computer was a Quadra 605 running System 7.5. Mom’s iMac was making strange noises and if you listened carefully you could hear satan.
Dad says get a desktop machine, and he’ll share a laptop with mom, mom gives off the impression that she’d rather not share, I offer a sort of middle ground solution, but it’s not my decision.
We ended up with a new iMac for mom and a MacBook Pro for her to share with dad… She needs both, actually, for various and sundry reasons I won’t go into here.
So here’s the scene: The Apple store, where we spend what seems like (and may well have actually been) five hours dithering back and forth on what to get, waiting for the stock to come to the checkout line, getting the car from the other side of the mall, waiting around some more, flirting with the cashiers who suddenly decide I’m a ‘student,’ and thus deserve a multitude of discounts and special offers…
Dad came home in shock. I spent the next day and a half setting it all up for them. Airport Extreme base stations are neeto; straight out of the box, the iMac could print to the 15-year-old LaserWriter NTR over wi-fi[1]. I wrote an Automator script that will automatically import stuff you scan into iPhoto (something iPhoto should do already, but doesn’t). Taught my mom about Spotlight and ‘smart folders,’ because she’s always telling me that she spends too much time finding stuff…
And today we set up the backups and sync stuff. W00t.
[1] Extra nerdy goodness: The iMac is connected to the LaserWriter thusly: iMac -> 802.11n -> Airport Extreme base station -> CAT-5 -> LocalTalk bridge -> LocalTalk cable -> printer. Works like a charm. 
A while back, I wrote here about a mutual dream in which there was a luxury resort hotel built out of the side of a cliff. My Google-fu is no good; I couldn’t find the old post.
But here it is: The hotel exactly as dreamed. Some folks in Shanghai are building it. Maybe I’ll get to go sometime.
This kind of thing always makes a strong case for intuition. Here’s another image.
Yes, the 14-minute version that was on the rarer of the two soundtrack releases.
And today’s vocabulary word: Apophenia, seeing meaning in random data, or ‘the specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.’
Via digby: I love this story.
President Bush met with some high school seniors, who he was using as political props in support of reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. They handed him a letter urging him to quit ‘violating human rights,’ in the form of torture.
Oh, those kids… One day they’ll grow up and realize you have to violate the human rights of others in order to be free…
(Video.)
OK, so there’s this thing called geocaching. And it’s where people hide stuff, and then you go find it. The ‘cache’ part of ‘geocache’ is the part that’s hidden, usually in the form of an old ammo box, but sometimes in the form of a tiny container that only holds a log for you to sign (bring your own pen!).
Some people decided to start putting stuff in these caches that you can take out with the purpose of putting it into another cache. These are ‘travel bugs.’ They can be just about anything, as long as it’ll fit in the ammo box. Some of these travel bugs have specific goals, like going around the world, or maybe all around a certain state.
Today I went to visit my sister up in Conroe, TX, and she asked, half-sarcastically, “Is there anything you want to do here in town?” And I said, “Well, before I came up here, I saw that there are some geocaches nearby….”
And that’s how I came into possession of a travel bug that’s traveled 98,000 miles. No, really. It’s been to Antarctica.
Mile 23, US highway 12 in Montana, east of Lolo Pass, Lolo peak visible. Note also the checkerboard clearcut pattern visible on the side of the mountains.
In this part of the world, there are really only two cities: New Orleans and Astoria.
Stand on a mountain pass. Piss one direction, and put that much more strain on the new levee in the Bayou City. Piss the other direction, and risk diminishing the salmon run with your personal toxic waste.
It’s these weighty decisions that delight me.
I pulled into a driveway to take this picture. The driveway had a huge gate, with posts made of foot-wide steel tubing. I was going to take a picture, but the owner was leaving just as I got back into the van.
My dad says, “I always drag you out birdwatching when you come visit, so what would you like to do?”
We went geocaching. Note that spoilers follow for this geocache, so avert your eyes if you hope to one day find it.
We ended up at a thresher, dubbed ‘Enron’s Paper Shredder.’ Here dad explains how a thresher works, knowledge acquired during his days on the farm:
Another view. The trees are growing up through the machinery. My mom took this picture. I’m in there, hidden like the cache:
We never did find the cache, even with the hint. Which was kind of a let-down, but we still had fun. Dad says, “So where’s the next one?” Har. We headed back home to look up another one, and it started pouring down rain. Just total drench, with thunder and lightning and everything. I dutifully looked up another one, one that I knew from looking at the map would be at a park that’s under a highway overpass, at least partially sheltered from the rain.
We set out with the plan to get the cache, then do grocery shopping. We got a block away from the house, and decided to turn back. An hour later, the rain stopped and they went grocery shopping.
Dick Cheney believes he runs a shadow government, and that the office of the Vice President is not a part of the Executive Branch of government.
Cheney has a lot of power. He has claimed it for himself, and now claims that his office is extra-legal (in that he doesn’t have to abide by the law), extra-Constitutional (in that his office is not part of the executive branch), and identical to that of the Presidency.
Our government is run by insane people.
But all frivolity aside… (har har har! that wacky Cheney and his undermining of everything this country stands for!)… What if he decides to start a war?
