flamepool

Hubbert's Cliff

You've likely heard of Hubbert's Peak.

Back a few years, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert plotted petroleum discovery and production over time, concluding that we've found most of what's to be found and that soon we will be on the downhill slope, sucking out of the ground what little is left to be sucked up. It looks a bit like this:

Of course, as prices rise, so will incentives to try more ways to get more oil up, etc., etc., but I'm not that interested in that argument, because I see a light at the end of the tunnel, and I think it's a train.

Earth is host to two billion-human countries, India and China, both of which are doing pretty well now, thank you very much. As those two billion citizens begin to buy petrochemical-burning cars, Hubbert's Peak will turn into Hubbert's Cliff.

I'm no geologist, demographer or economist (despite a nominal undergrad degree in the latter). A cursory Google search turns up a few interesting sites on this matter (and a study you can buy, if you like).   

China is the world's fastest growing auto market. According Chinese government statistics, over two million cars were sold in the country in 2003, a nearly 80 percent increase over 2002.... Only three of every thousand Chinese own a car today. But in an economically expanding nation of some 1.3 billion people, it's not hard to envision that China could someday become the world's largest auto market. Foreign automakers have long seen the Asian giant's potential—and spent billions to gain market share in China.

It seems obvious to me that we have to do something about this, now.

Making some caribou unhappy by opening up drilling in the Alaskan wilderness doesn't seem to begin to scratch the problem.

Don't Conservatives think that there's a lot of good capitalism to be had in creating new ways to power things and move people to and fro?

Or is it that the vested interests are so small and powerful -- just a few execs at a few energy companies -- that they get to run the game so well?

Expressive frustrations

A thoughtful question on a friend's mailing list got me to thinking.  Here's where it took me.

I think in links.  I used to draw bubble charts all the time, showing how A was related to B, etc.  In 1996 I had a briefing from TheBrain and have been addicted ever since.  Use it every day and am not only not tired of it, I'll sometimes be in the middle of a conversation and I'll start visualizing where a new idea or book or category that just popped up might fit in my Brain.  (Here's my old tale of how I use TheBrain.  Ignore all claims that you can see it now; you can't, but I haven't been able to update this site.  Sigh.)

I used to be able to publish my Brain data, first to other Brain users (TheBrain hosted the data files, client/server style, for the first couple years), then briefly to anyone with a browser, via TheBrain's java-based enterprise software.  But when Harlan (TheBrain's inventor) went to upgrade the software one day, something broke and it hasn't been back since.  That was maybe two years ago. Deeply frustrating. 

I realized recently that one of the (many) reasons I'm a poor blogger is that I feed my Brain first.  Putting things into a permanent context seems to matter more to me than announcing them to others (if I could only stream out what I'm adding to my Brain...).  TheBrain has seriously changed my life.  It's my memory, my context.  I can locate things in it in five seconds.  I find things in there now I don't remember adding to it.

Just this morning, over brunch with my friend Kenneth, I realized that my frustration with TheBrain is only one of several ways that my ability to express myself the way I think are hamstrung.  These are:

• TheBrain-sharing mess I just mentioned, which influences my...


• Writing.  I have more almost-finished blog posts, essays and bigger stuff on my hard drive than I care to think about.  Maybe it's a lack of hard deadlines or just discipline.  Since I started using wikis, I've come to wish my word processor was a wiki (and am using wikis rather like that, though the lack of offline capabilities is constraining).  Wiki writing is deeply intertwingled, which I love, but which makes finishing things that much more difficult.  I have bits and pieces of wiki writing scattered on many sites and spaces.  I'm also thinking about how wikis and TheBrain ought to work together (see Linkido below).


• Graphics.  I was once a black belt with MacDraw.  Could draw production-quality illustrations for the research I wrote and never had to hand stuff over to graphics artists.  Don't like bitmaps, need vectors; can't invest the time to learn Illustrator or anything that powerful.  Where the Hell did MacDraw go (for PCs)?  I have a Wacom Graphire tablet and bought Xara X, thinking it would be the intuitive drawing app I was looking for, but so far, no dice.


• Video.  Don't have digital video gear, don't have good editing software, don't have the time to do all the video editing.  Would love to know how and do this, but it seems like a long shot. 


• Audio.  I'm closest to making this work.  Got an iPod for my recent birthday and immediately ordered the Griffin iTalk microphone (and speaker); quite elegant.  Got Doppler feeding iTunes, etc.  Am figuring out how to use FeedBurner's SmartCast, but one hitch: need a place to host the audio files where the traffic won't be such a big drain.  Happy to copyleft it and plan to ask Brewster if serving from the Archive works yet.  My buddy Stuart is experimenting with recording Skype calls, which would be a great way to create podcasts.  So close. Almost there. Pretty soon.

Maybe I need a Mac.  I hear iMovie pretty much rocks, and GarageBand plus a few other apps might help, too. TheBrain doesn't run there... and I don't like trackpads.

I also love outlines (old MORE fan) and use a pretty cool outliner that syncs outlines between its PC app and Palm app: Natara Bonsai.  But it doesn't know about web links, and I haven't figured out how to use its more powerful features... argh. So I don't use it as much as I'd like to.

I've put a LazyWeb idea for an open, distributed, federated Brain-like thing on linkido.com, though I haven't gotten word out about it (beyond a strangely received presentation at Foo Camp).  I intended to go back and polish it all up, so I haven't blogged about it yet or really put it on the LazyWeb.  The first presentation on that site is for an Outlook killer.  It's all wishware right now.

I adore paper and only write on square-ruled paper, so I can wander and draw.  Don't really like normal lined paper any more.  Never liked legal pads.  Buy and hoard quadrille pads, and also have a cache of square-ruled paper for my DayRunner, which is always at hand. Never write on scraps of paper.  Love whiteboards and the huge post-it pads in concept, but find I don't use them much when they're handy.  Strange.

PDF - The Protected Document Format

I know, PDF is supposed to mean the Portable Document Format, but Doc's recent wonderful rant against Adobe's PDF reminded me of conversations almost a decade back, when I first saw Carousel, the technology that would become Acrobat/PDF.

Back then, my closest link to Adobe was James King, an Adobe exec who subscribed to Release 1.0 and attended PC Forum, which is how we met.  I remember practically pleading with him to wake Adobe's leadership up to the fact that they were creating a hard veneer, an elegant but protective coating that would make documents impermeable, unlinkable and far less useful.  Adobe had worked hard to become the Switzerland of printer-output languages with PostScript (working hard behind the scenes on hardware acceleration that never got much press).  Why couldn't Adobe tackle the logjam of SGML/OpenDoc/Com, as Tim Berners-Lee so elegantly did? 

PDF's crusty shell is the same reason I don't generally like web stuff built in Macromedia's Flash.  Where am I supposed to link in, besides to the entire work?  Why can't the same thing be done, where the component parts are reusable? 

Years later, PDF does more than it used to, but it's still good mainly for documents whose authors want their readers to see exactly what they created - usefulness be damned.

Stuart in action

In lafayette

Fourscore and seven years ago...

This is a test post, to see what it looks like when text goes on the new template.  It might look great, it might look crappy.  Only testing will tell us.