Geoengineering - Know know know know know

Geoengineering research is necessary. It is essential for scientists to convince themselves how horribly one bunch of meddlers can screw up the planet for the rest of the planet if they start messing with it. The scientists need to be convinced scientifically so they can convince non-scientists with whatever it is that makes those idiots believe anything. I don't know, boobs with a head on top that talks in small words on the right cable news channel. A reality TV show called "AtmosFear" where people try to see how long they can hold their breath.

I got a link to a Guardian article this morning titled "Big names behind US push for geoengineering" and my instinct reaction was "No no no no no no." I realized I was like that cat in the video that went around this week. It was clearly a cat in much distress and it made me very uncomfortable but it made over a million people laugh hysterically. People are sick in the head.

Are these twisted people going to think it's funny when some ill-informed self-centered asshole decides to fertilize the ocean with iron and then billions of fish die from the toxins released by the bloom of a different kind of phytoplankton than the one they MEANT to fertilize? When somebody sprays the sky with crystals and it rains down in another country and makes all their wheat taste like onions?

My opinion about geoengineering is the same as remediation. Consider the impact of how they earned the money that they want to spend on the project. Is it a good way to transfer ill-gotten gains to scientists like me that need jobs taking samples and writing reports? If you like how that math works out, maybe I'm ok with it. But usually I say "Don't pick at it." Waiting for nature to put back something people screwed up might take longer, but for some systems gradual change is best. If somebody drives their superyacht into a coral reef, sure, make the owner pay a marine engineering company to go put a bandage on it and finance monitoring the natural recovery. Hurricanes break coral reefs too. What happens if somebody stops those from happening? (The Guardian story says somebody is working on that.) I think diversity depends on parts of the reef breaking off and growing back. And I think diversity is good. I would like better data to back up my feeling though, and one way to get people with money to pay for research is to let them break stuff then punish them with fines.

My super empathetic reaction to any suggestion to modify natural systems is to put myself in the place of every organism and mineral in that system. I usually feel it is going to be distinctly not better for some creature. It's a food web, water cycle, etc. Interdependencies are immense. We don't know. We don't even have our best people on it. The typical human reference frame where "better" is defined as "better for the humans with the most money and influence" makes me extremely uncomfortable. Like the cat. So stop it. Just stop what you're doing that makes the cat do that. If you're working on finding out what makes the cat do that so you can tell everybody so they never do it to another cat, maybe it's ok. But hurry up. It's not funny, it's mean.

Oh, Siri, you sound familiar.....

I got email from Apple with a link to a video about the new phone. Good video.

About 6 hours ago I saw this Tweet from Bill Amend.

Is the Siri voice in the iPhone 4s the same as the female voice in this? If so, pretty funny coincidence. youtu.be/FL7yD-0pqZg

OK, it is TOTALLY the same voice. That's so awesome!

But you know what?

I don't care.

The New iPhone 4s -- I'll take one

I followed the live tweets of the Apple announcement of the new iPhone. Here's the comparison of all three versions they sell/give away now. The new one has a faster processor to make some of the more demanding software work. They never give specs on the radios in these things but I expect they've tweaked them a bit. I hope so. Not sure it matters on the low-tech tower in Beachton. I think it's only EDGE, not equipped to take advantage of the new high speed packet data stuff.

I'm confused why the new phone battery has 2 hours more talk time but 100 hours less standby time than the old ones. That makes no sense. I really couldn't care less about the talk time. Actually 8 days is plenty of standby time. There's no such thing as a standby day anyway. I run my battery below 1/2 capacity every day by using it for data. If I can't plug my phone in once a day then something extremely exciting is happening and I probably need to talk on the phone instead of just having it idle. Even when I lose power, which happens a lot in the country, I can charge the phone off one of my uninterruptible power supplies and stay continuously connected.

I was planning to go get a new battery in my phone before I moved away from the Apple store. There's not a Apple Genius Bar within 200 miles of Beachton. I guess I might as well just get a new phone instead and sell my iPhone 4. The 4s has better video camera resolution than my Casio EX-FH20. Now I just have to get something to hold the phone on the tripod.

I'm completely unexcited by the iOS5 announcements. Siri the Assistant you can talk to? This is not something a hermit needs. An app that prints and mails a physical greeting card? That's grotesque. Greeting cards are like Jehovah's Witnesses. You have to be polite when they show up at your house, but really I just wish they would cease to exist. I don't like that callous feeling I get when I immediately throw them away.

*Update: MacRumors summary: Oh yeah, I forgot "Find My Friends." Hermit. No friends. Useless. Although I could apply for a grant to duct tape iPhones to the tortoises in my woods and collect some cool data on them for science.

Update: I'm not eligible to upgrade until November 25. I think I'll wait. If I get a 4s now it would be $500 instead of $200. I tried the preorder from the Apple Store app on my iPhone 4 to find this out. It was very easy. "Switch out this phone?" Verify the last 4 digits of your social security number and billing zip code. Pick your messaging plan (these changed. Unlimited $20 and pay per message at the ridiculous rate of $0.20 per text and $0.30 for media messages). And then it showed me $499.00. Check out? Um, no.

I went to twitter and found a macrumors link to a story about preorders and it had a link to check your upgrade eligibility. That link told me Nov 25 is my upgrade eligibility date. I renewed my contract on the first day of iPhone 4 sales so I guess a lot of people have that same renewal date.

Testing new Blogger App

OK! I downloaded Google's new free iPhone app for Blogger. This is me trying it out. DSL is out so I'm trying to see what I can do with a bluetooth keyboard on the iPhone. I had to come upstairs and plug the phone into the Mac Mini to charge it up. It looks pretty funny. Let's try that picture thing again. OK, neat, I can access the photos in my iPhone photo library. I took a picture with my other camera and put it on the Mini and then synced it to the iPhone with iTunes. I can't tell where it's putting the pictures. They're down in a box at the bottom of this window.

It has the same issue as my instant messenger app -- it leaves the space for the iPhone keyboard at the bottom blank because I'm using the external keyboard instead of letting me use that whole space for text. Wish I knew what all this wasted space was for. Now the white space has moved to the bottom. Under the icons. I took a screen shot and added that to the photos section and now it has moved back up. Who tests this stuff? I can't believe I can't get a job when I can find this many feature problems in such a short time.

What's this crosshairs icon do? Oh, it wants to use my current location. No thanks!

I'm going to hit Publish and see what happens.

Update: 8:45 pm local time. Finally had a nice talk to an AT&T Technician in San Francisco. I took a screenshot about 5 minutes before he picked up just because I couldn't believe how long I'd been on hold. I've used 30% of my cell phone minutes talking to AT&T DSL this month. According to the notes on my account a technician came out today and replaced some wires outside and closed the ticket without ever telling me I could stop waiting for him. Also it didn't fix my DSL. The tech on the phone reset my connection from his end, but it didn't work. My DSL is still out and no chance of recovery before Monday. 

So here's the good news. I saw my next door neighbor outside when I was anxiously looking down the street for the AT&T truck and asked him if he was having trouble with his DSL. He said he has Uverse and it's fine. I told him my dilemma and that since I was moving out in two weeks anyway I felt like just canceling my service. Because if that rat that's dead in the walls bit through my phone line inside they're going to charge me $110 just for figuring it out. "I should just cancel it and use your wifi until I move out!" I joked. About 5 minutes later he and his wife rang my doorbell. She said she was sorry to hear I couldn't get a job and have to move. She wanted to know what kind of work I do in case she could think of anything. And he had written their wifi password on a piece of paper for me in case I got fed up with the technician. Isn't that sweet? What a nice gesture. I consider it 100% neighborly and don't think it has anything to do with the fact that he works for AT&T. He doesn't have any more confidence in them than I do. "Watch him call at 7:45," he said. Yeah, how about just not at all. Monday I'm canceling my account. 

Also that Blogger app is kind of nice for adding photos from the iPhone. It just puts them in random order. I moved it by editing in the regular blogger browser interface. But it saves me loading it into iPhoto then exporting it.

Can you blog from an iPhone?

My AT&T DSL is out again. I figured out how to connect my bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone and now I want to see how hard it is to do a blog entry from the web version of blogger. The mobile version is great for reading, but frankly this is pretty not great. Let's see if I can get a picture added.

It appears to not work.

Does anybody know of a app for this? Maybe Safari just isn't the tool for the job. Would sure be nice to be able to use this instead of a laptop!