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Moday, June 4, 2007
Feed for thought 
Global rewarming
| | Fourteen thousand years ago — that's 12,000 BC — Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were one continent. You could walk from England to France, and from Florida to the Bahamas, which were not yet islands. The Hudson River entered the Atlantic a hundred miles beyond what is now Raritan Bay. Sumatra, Java, Borneo and other parts of Indonesia were connected to the Asian mainland, which was also connected to the Americas across what is now the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska, allowing the human diaspora to fill the Americas with the natives Columbus found there almost a dozen millenia later. That diaspora began in Africa only about 60,000 years ago. |
| | Around 8,300 BC, the Wisconsin Ice Sheet began to melt back, leaving the vast puddles we call Great Lakes, Lake Winnepeg, Hudson Bay, and Minnesota's 10,000 others. It and earlier glaciers left Long Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod. It left Bunker Hill and other major Boston features, which are called "drumlins" by geologists. |
| | So, while there is little doubt among scientist that our species — perhaps the most pestilential the planet has ever known — contributes to global warming, nature has already been doing the job for thousands of years. |
| | And nature, we can guess with some confidence, will re-cap the poles and the lands at latitudes below with vast sheets of ice, repeatedly, until our current period of episodic glaciation ends. It is perhaps the fourth in Earth's known history. The Huronian started 2.4 billion years ago, and lasted about 200 million years. The Cryogenian started 850 million years ago, lasted 220 million years and may have included times when Earth was frozen from pole to pole. The Andean-Saharan started 420 million years ago and lasted 30 million years. The current era of periodic glaciation began with the icing over of Antarctica about 40 million years ago. During the Quaternary (the fourth of the majot geologic periods, and the one we're in now) there have been about 20 major divisions in the current cycle of glaciation, which began about 3 million years ago. Each division is about 100,000 years. |
| | What we call the Pleistocene epoch is defined largely by these glacial cycles. Our current epoch, the Holocene, is defined by glacial retreat. In other words, global warming. The mother has been around since 9600 BC, technically. |
| | There is certainly a lot we can do to stop contributing to what nature will do anyway, and all of it comes down to behaving in less pestilential ways. |
Happy Birthday CatB
| | That was on 22 May. Sorry I missed it. Still, congrats are in order. Eric has done more than anybody to evangelize open source as both a concept and a development methodology. |
| | Eric's influence on my own knowledge and thinking has been large from the start, and I'm grateful and appreciative of that. |
| | By the way, lots of good comments follow Nick's post. Read down for those, including one from ESR himself. |
VRM day at Berkman
| | ProjectVRM is gathering at the Berkman Center today. In the morning we'll be talking about the project (and VRM) in general, and in the afternoon we'll be talking about our immodest ongoing effort to double the contribution rate to public media — by providing listeners and viewers with tools that not only make it easy to pay for the goods, but which will work with (and across) the thousands of separate membership systems at the many public radio, TV and online stations across the U.S. Some exciting new ideas have come up around How To Do This. One, I think, may overlap (perhaps nicely) with Dave Winer's podcast device. (Not coincidentally, Dave is also a Berkman veteran.) |
| | Here's where we are. If you're driving, parking will be a problem, since Harvard garages are either full or closed this week, and steet parking is both rare and short-term. Better to park near a "T" stop and take the Red Line to Harvard Square then walk from there. For more, write me at dsearls AT cyber.law.harvard.edu. |
| | Oh, and if you can't make it, call in to our teleconference number. For that just write me at the address above. |
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