atelier für frottier, hamburg.
p3k.org splits atom and saves rss.
all we need is:
- title
- url
- date
- author
- xmlrpc url
ctbto press release: Northern Sumatra Earthquake and the Subsequent Tsunami on 26 December 2004.
the ctbto is the "preparatory commission for the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty organisation" located in vienna and maintains an International Monitoring System which can detect earthquakes on any place on earth.
a change of practice is due here, too.
threats and promises of wikipedia.
another word on the bryson book.
certainly, there is hardly any but at least cold comfort for the friends and relatives of a natural disaster's victims like those being killed by the tsumani in south-eastern asia two weeks ago.
but for those of us who are left being unsettled and alienated by the fear that media, politicans and even scientists stir up by their sensational videos, popular speeches and emotionless reports it remains to get the following things straight which are laid out so deliberately in one of the last chapters of "a short history of nearly everything".
we, the human race derived from the homo sapiens, wouldn't be here if there were no such natural disasters. and thus, we too live in the ubiquitous danger of becoming extinct. there's nothing we can do about it.
on the other hand this species (just like any other life form today) has survived a whole lot of catastrophic attacks on its bare existence for quite some time: "for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to."
in relation to the age of our planet this is still just a small instance of time. and in relation to each human life as an individual this does not justify death at all.
but in the big picture it only shows a possible way to take a different point of view on our daily life as both individuals as well as society.
it could stop us from increasing the natural threats by the self-made harm human beings give to each other.
it obviously enables us already to use war machines as peaceful means of transport, care and rescue.
yes, the tsunami will be lost in collective repression, soon. but the shift in our attitude will remain. and be it just a tiniest one. let's face it as a small movement for the sake of slipping through the next closing door of evolution.
"life wants to be; life doesn't want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. to this we may add a fourth: life goes on. and often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing."
how great that would be if i could enter a url into my browser's preferences which is used in an xml-rpc call to my weblog everytime i post something to another website. the weblog then is using blogger api to record the url of my posting and thus, i get a nice collection of my own li'l public appearances elsewhere which otherwise get lost in my mind or are pretty hard to track down again.
"in an attempt to haul things into the modern age, in 2001 kevin kelly, co-founder of wired magazine, launched an enterprise called the all species foundation with the aim of finding and recording on a database every living organism. the cost of such an exercise has been estimated at anywhere from £1.3 billion to as much as £30 billion. as of the spring of 2002, the foundation had just £750,000 in funds and four full-time employees." – bill bryson, "a short history of nearly everything", p. 442.
what about actually doing something with the money? get a wiki (or: get the wikimedia wiki) and call for entries. set the four out on quality assurance and let's see how far you'll get.
oops... the wikimedia empire somebody already got the clue: wikispecies.
btw. kelly has a neat collection of cool tools on his site.
brothers on the slide.
do you feel good about yourself? or do you wanna be somebody else? do you really care about your kind? is there really anything on your mind? – the last poets.
we know which way you're going. – cymande.
andrew judd, the painter next to g.'s house.
stephanie powers is one of the beautiful retrocrush babes.
but then again: the 80s make-up massacre.
and even much more in the retrocrush archives.