Gulf Oil Spill DIY Web Clip

Not to assign any kind of higher, cosmic meaning to the Gulf oil spill (cause who believes in that shit?), but the time of the free-flowing gusher neatly coincided with the duration of my brother's unemployment. He was laid-off in late April, just as the Deepwater Horizon oil platform burst into incandescent plumes of gas and literally took a new job this past Monday, just after Top Hat Number 10 (a Flange Transition Spool and  a 3 Ram Stack) corked most of the leak. 

As significant events in both the macro and micro experiences of our lives, the two events will serve as markers for one another and ensure the duration and dates of these chaotic storylines stay clear in memory. Strange how that works. Everyone around at the time remembers where they were when Kennedy died. We'll always have Deepwater Horizon.

Anyway, if you're morbidly fascinated with this disaster as I am, you will find the New York Times excellent interactive oil spill tracker a compelling and sobering little tool. In the Internets abiding spirit of plagiarism and copyright infringement, I  paired it with another of my favorite tools, SnagIt!, to create the clumsy 9MB animation above and call it my own content. 

Facebook Makes Your Privacy Difficult to Understand

There's a genius working at the New York Times graphics design center who produced the comprehensive visual (from which I happily pimped the above) of Facebook's 'bewildering tangle' of a privacy policy.

I'm generally trusting of all things Internets, including Google's all-seeing eye (well acquainted with the collective id), but it's not a bad thing to be a little standoffish in knowing that the privacy rules governing the web are largely unwritten, or rather, being written by the companies you use everyday on the Web (Google, Facebook, etc.). Your guardedness should arise from the fact that they are attempting to create a market-driven, self-interest supporting code of conduct that balances their business interest against the whip of torts. As with any pioneering enterprise, the law isn't yet advanced enough to cover this ground with prescriptive rules simply because the list of contingencies is branching and broadening everyday with no signs of slowing down or normalizing. So the shake-out of privacy protection will probably happen by dint of these companies being called-out in court for bad behavior, aka violations of your privacy. All I'm saying is be careful how much you share since Facebook is working mostly to capitalize on your personal information as their marketable data. This should bother you only so much as you have ignorantly shared compromising information. The upside is relevant advertising, the downside is martyrdom in the courts. As always, the ancient writ of caveat emptor applies.

In these instances, I like to fall back on the rhetorical utility of my run-in with the naive young coed Boobs McGee, whom I interviewed several years ago at a campus recruiting visit to an elite college in the Northeastern United States. Before the interview, I received a dossier on Ms. McGee (actual name forgotten to protect her identity, which, on second thought, why should I work harder to protect her identity than she does?) with her resume and cover letter.

Naturally, I Googled her and found her Facebook page entirely too-open to the public featuring a profile picture of her busting out of a slinky black dress with some frat-guy chomped down on the upper-middle camber of her cleavage. Whatever her name was, 'Boobs McGee' she instantly became and the jettison of respect only quickened when her self-reported 'interests' included 'My Tits' and 'Cocaine.'

After the interview, I consulted with the career services folks and let them know that Ms. McGee wasn't quite right for us but might be better-suited for one of the open (and far more lucrative) Tiger Woods' mistress roles. Additionally, her professional faux pas might be cited as a parable to all undergraduate job-seekers as to the dangers of over-sharing via Facebook.

The New York Times Immigration Explorer Just Blew My Mind!

I love maps and I love data and the spread of humanity across this great molten pot of a country of ours is a fascinating history to explore with Web2.0 capability. Naturally, then, I wasted a good afternoon playing with the NYTime's Immigration Explorer tool, which seems to have been designed with derailing my productivity in mind.

The Best Way to Recycle a Newspaper

Above is the pile of used and enjoyed Sunday, March 1st New York Times I left on a seat in the Virgin America Terminal at LAX earlier this month. I had actually seen Moby walk by and he always gets me thinking about good, green earthy stuff like vegetarian eating, exploitation-free fair-trade rubber shoes, and recycling.

To me the jury's still out on recycling writ large. There isn't a whole lot of visibility into the process once you've outsourced your recyclable debris. A little research reveals that recycling systems vary by organization, system and complexity, which to me suggests nobody's closed the definitive book on best practices.

As an example, is it better to recycle glass bottles the way they do in Mexico, the Caribbean and many third-world countries? Simply washing them and returning them to the bottler? This 'stress induced' recycling, as Andrew Zolli would put it, is clearly the more transparent of the two pre-dominating systems and is readily borne witness by the wear scars on the necks of beer and coke bottles in Cabo.

Or are we better off with the feel good, hocus pocus of 'post-materialist' recycling as seen in Western Europe and increasingly the United States, where your recyclables are carted off, melted down and supposedly repackaged into new products?

I'm sure people can verify that this actually happens, that the Patagonia fleece I'm wearing is elementally identical to plastic Gatorade bottles, and that the Starbucks cup is in fact 10% old tax returns. But, can you prove that all of this is more cost-effective and resourceful than merely giving the glass bottle a good washing and returning to sender?

Neither can I. So in the spirit of thinking globally, acting locally, and verifying that my recycling is impactful in the sense of measurably doing the most with the resources we have, I passed the recycling bin over for an empty seat in the Terminal 6 waiting area.

And here's my evidence that it's worked: