We’re tight. We talk about Beethoven, the glory of the 17th century novel, slivovitz, and women.
I’m still waiting for George Orwell to confirm details of how we know each other. I wonder if he’s read any of my stuff . . .
While working briefly with some environmental groups, I became convinced that the best way to reach red (or at least non-green) America was through their garages. Real men love their tools and their tinkering. Americans profess to love ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. Environmental solutions are “Popular Mechanics” all over. Ecogeek is a blog that hits some of those notes (while staying just this side of Edward Abbey).
Below is a clever solar collector, which is cheap, cheap, cheap. Rather than having to spend money on creating optimally curved mirrors, Solar Bubbles inflates a bubble where the top is clear (allowing sunlight in) and the bottom is reflective (collecting the rays). The curve is created and maintained by the air inside. Balloons aren’t exactly manly Black & Decker workmate style, but this is so much more appealing than talking about breaking the oil addiction.
Another idea on the blog this week, is a revolving door that transforms the turning of the doors into power.
What I love about this post is its honesty:
Mostly, it’s just a demostration project though. The power generated would likely not be enough to ever pay for the device and many revolving doors are already heavy enough without the added resistance of a generator.
Still, it’s hard not to find the idea pleasant.
It’s a healthy attitude about innovation, recognizing the importance of exlploring dead ends, the iterative nature of invention and design. It’s also a good demonstration of sensibility and intelligence within a community that usually doesn’t get credited for having any.
The NY Review of Books ran a piece by Sarah Boxer about blogs. It’s a decent survey of the numbers and trends around blogs, and hits all the highlights (Washintonienne, etc.). There’s some entertainment value, such as the anthropological, 101 way Boxer explains blogs to effete, well-read, liberal subscribers to NYRB (the bracketed explanations of 
, WTF, and BTW add little smiles to the stream of words coming into the brain). But, what I love about it is that it looks at the style of blogs.
Writing like this might seem easy, but just try it. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford who writes for newspapers and radio and sometimes contributes to the blog Language Log, admitted on NPR back in 2004, “I don’t quite have the hang of the form.” And, he added, many journalists who get called upon by their editors to keep blogs are similarly stumped: “They fashion engaging ledes, they develop their arguments methodically, they give context and background, and tack helpful IDs onto the names they introduce.” Guess what? They read like journalists, not bloggers.
Bloggers are golden when they’re at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn’t the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that’s no way to blog.
Blogging at its freest is like going to a masked ball. …
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.
This month, I have bought three blogbooks — books that have sprung out of a blog that existed first as a blog. (As opposed to the Long Tail blog, which was a public writing of a book). This week it’s BibliOdyssey’s blogbook.
BibliOdyssey is a blog that publishes cool and interesting things from old books. “Cool” stuff includes science and naturalist book illustrations, maps, pre-scientific revolution alchemy, old info-graphics, hermetic descriptions of the world, bookplates,
My other blogbook purchases this month are: Joel on Software (I’ve bought several copies and given them or lent them to friends), and Presentation Zen.