Friday, July 3, 2009

Baby Birds

Discovered a bird's next in a tall evergreen shrub next to the house. Think how many individual items it took to weave that nest! Looks like two have hatched and one to go:

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Thursday, July 2, 2009

You're Riding Along the Road in France . . .

Imagine the scene: You're in France to watch the Tour de France and (for fun) you're riding up one of the biggest mountains that the racers will climb during the race -- when you look up and there's Lance Armstrong coming up alongside. Armstrong was doing his normal thorough reconnaissance work, riding the mountain before the race to get familiar with it. Because he always has a car and video crew following him, he caught the surprised American cyclist on tape: (unfortunately, both videos begin playing automatically, so you'll need to stop one of them and play them separately)

(I later deleted the two videos because, annoyingly, they start playing automatically every time the blog is accessed, and slow the loading time for the blog, etc.)

3:20" Overview of Preventable Disease

I've blogged before about the annual invitation-only TED (originally stood for Technology, Education, Design) conference where the best ideas in education, technology, health, and related topics are presented by some of the world's most creative thinkers and researchers.

One of the speakers in 2006 was the famous Dr. Dean Ornish who was among the first to prove that cardiovascular disease was preventable and reversible by changes in diet (moving to a primarily plant-based diet) and lifestyle. This 3:20" video has an amazing graphic presentation on the rise in obesity in America, plus a ton of other salient facts -- along with a hilarious graphic picturing the ascent and descent of man. If your Internet connection will handle it, look below the video window for a link to a higher-res version of the talk for better viewing.

Reaping What We Sow


I am just now reading Silent Spring, the book by Rachel Carson that warned the world in 1962 about the dangers related to the toxic chemicals that were (and still are) so freely being administered to an oblivious world in her day. I am amazed at how thorough her research was then (she was a trained marine biologist) and how prescient and prophetic it appears now.

There is so much that could be quoted, but one particular section was particularly scary. She discusses the latency factor of carcinogenic chemicals—how effects (e.g., cancers) don't show up in many cases until years after a person has been exposed to carcinogens. She gives many examples from her own era (1950's - early 1960's), and then says this (remember, this book was published in 1962):

"The full maturing of whatever seeds of malignancy have been sown by these chemicals is yet to come."

Jump to 2009 -- I don't have time to look up today's exact predictions, but I have read in recent years that current estimates are that one in three Americans will die of cancer, approaching two in three in the not-to-distant future. Thirty-plus years after she wrote about the "seeds of malignancy" that were being sown in the soil, water, air, and food we consume, the malignant harvest appears to be coming in on schedule.

How anyone today can be casual about the consumption of foods treated with poisonous herbicides and pesticides, using toxic cleaning products, home pest-control poisons, and other toxic resources is easy to understand: we don't have the long view of life. Today's actions may not bear fruit for many years, but they will bear fruit (Galatians 6:7).

Chalkbot

AS I'M SURE EVERYONE KNOWS, the Tour de France begins this Saturday and runs for 23 days (tune in to Versus at 9:30 a.m. Saturday for live coverage of the Prologue in Monaco, preceded by an hour-long special on Lance Armstrong at 8:30).

One of the great traditions of the Tour de France is for the Tour "crazies" to "paint" (with chalk, usually) messages on the roads of France prior to the Tour rolling through: the names of favorite riders, "Viva la Tour!", etc. This year, technology has come to road painting. Lance Armstrong's Livestrong Foundation, in connection with some American software guys who developed an amazing machine, will be spreading messages on the Tour roads in memory of cancer fighters and survivors.

The machine they developed—the Chalkbot—is pulled behind a pickup truck and has the ability to spray a message onto a roadway with perfect lettering. The message is typed into the machine, then software controls the pneumatic pumps that spray the liquid (?) chalk onto the roadway. Sure, it takes a bit of the romance out of the hand-chalked messages of yore, but it allows cancer fighters and survivors from all over the world to text their messages in and have them appear on the roadways of France during the Tour. Leave it to the Americans to integrate technology with tradition!

Check out the Chalkbot in action (short video) here.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Problem (Hopefully) Solved

It appears that the problem at blogger.com has been solved. It apparently had to do with people who use HTML code to create a post template that automatically formats new posts, which I do. But I haven't changed the code since I first set it up so something must have changed on their end -- how they were reading the HTML. Just tweaked a few things and I'm now able to create new posts -- hopefully. :-)

PROBLEMS AT BLOGSPOT

I haven't been able to post anything to this blog for the last 4-5
days. The message boards at Blogger.com are filled with people
complaining about the exact same issue I am having. It seems to be
affecting only a small number of blogs. The tech people at Blogger.com
have responded slowly and say they're "working on it." Someone posted
this work-around, being able to make new posts via email directly to
the blog instead of posting from within the Blogspot system. It works,
but I'm not going to invest time in lengthy posts with pictures via
that method.

Hopefully they'll have this problem fixed soon.