I’ve been holding linkage in about 25 tabs in Firefox, time to spill ‘em:
First off, congrats to Joe and Amy who got married last week. Awesome! Pictures, song choice for first dance, Joe?
A few from the New York Times:
Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard Having some slightly dysfunctional tendencies towards perfectionism, Kel and I have been trying to embrace excellence instead and hopefully are passing this on to los duders. More on this idea of excellence over perfection (and where we first came across it) @ Tal Ben-Shahar’s class at Harvard. You can watch the lectures from last year’s Psych 1504 class here.
If you find yourself with the time to enjoy even more lectures, the BBC’s 2007 Reith Lectures (history/background) are now online. This year features Jeffrey Sachs. Listen here.
Carbon-Neutral is Hip, but Is It Green? Great question tackled, at least a little more than cursorily, by the NYTimes.
Charles Komanoff, an energy economist in New York, said the commercial market in climate neutrality could have even more harmful effects.
It could, by suggesting there’s an easy way out, blunt public support for what will really be needed in the long run, he said: a binding limit on emissions or a tax on the fuels that generate greenhouse gases.
“There isn’t a single American household above the poverty line that couldn’t cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures,†he said.
Have Fun, Do Good tackles the question, too, in What Do You Think of Carbon Offsets?
Also on the green kick is a nice listing from frugalist on going green and saving a boatload of money.
I don’t know what originally caused this page on Doing More in Less Time to show up in my browser but in reviewing it, I realize I’m a big fan of writing down ideas and getting back to them later. Giving ideas a while to marinate before you move on them can be a good step towards letting bad ideas die on the vine. From that page:
Amazing ideas aren’t always so amazing after a night’s sleep. If you act on every new idea without finishing the one you’re working on then you’ll never complete anything. Same holds true for programming. Get it working, then refactor.
All Things D is not, unfortunately, a site about the hardest rocking acoustic band in history. Rather, it’s a new site from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. From the About Us page:
AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources.
I don’t understand what that “fusion” sentence means, exactly. Doesn’t that describe just about every site on the web? In any event, I’ve been refreshing the page every day or so and still haven’t read a headline that compelled me to click through to the full story yet.
I had read the NYTimes piece by Friedman a couple of weeks ago titled The Power of Green (it’s now buried behind the Times’ paywall). It left me uneasy but not nearly as uneasy as his Discovery Channel special where he seemed like a genetic experiment gone bad that combined Geraldo and von Hayek. Anyway, Jim Kunstler has this to say:
The showcasing of Friedman’s article may represent an inflection point in the fate of the mainstream media — the moment when it demonstrates most clearly its failure to make current events comprehensible, the moment when its lost legitimacy is finally recognized. That legitimacy has been passing to the Internet, where commentators have no advertisers to pander to and no need to defend any status quo.
