Posts tagged with “things that make me go hmm”
Landfill Diaries
I just discovered this fascinating blog, Landfill Diaries. From the about page:
“Landfill Diaries is maintained by Marijke Rijsberman, who accidentally fell in love with landfill in 2001, as she sat and watched the sun rise over San Francisco Bay at Candlestick Point. That put her almost on top of the city’s old garbage dump, right next to the current transfer station, poised to notice that endless stream of garbage trucks trundling by.
Authorities refer to garbage as the waste stream, as if, like a mountain brook, it burbles pleasantly to its final destination with no further encouragement besides gravity. The reality is a little different. Watching the sun rise and counting trucks, I finally got it: our garbage is huge and intractable. An almost invisible but very large industry takes care of it, behind the scenes, in places we rarely visit, don’t worry about, and usually don’t inquire into.
Even though our castoffs weigh on the land, it’s still possible just to drag our garbage to the curb every week and never think about it again. These pages are meant to change that situation at least a tiny bit: they examine and trace and pay respects to our invisible garbage. Landfill is not just real, it’s ours. And it is, upon closer inspection, very interesting.”
And so is this blog. Definitely worth your time to check it out, especially if you’ve ever had an interest in the places your trash goes after the truck picks it up.
Fun with webcams
Back in middle school (or was it early high school?), I read an issue of 2600 that had a letter describing a technique to view a bunch of publicly accessible webcams worldwide. It turns out that this particular brand of webcam had a web-based viewer, and moreover that this web-based viewer had a unique URL string. All you had to do to get a list of these cameras was to do a Google search for “inurl:$THAT_UNIQUE_URL_STRING” and you’d get a bunch of results, all with cameras you could view and some that could even be controlled. Most turned out to be in Japan for some reason, and it was really cool to be able to watch busy city streets and trains from half a world away.
Fast forward a few years. I was recently using a webcam at my university that overlooks a construction site next to the CS building. One of my friends showed it to me over the summer, and it’s been pretty fun to use it to watch the construction progress (as well as watch the workers eating lunch, driving trucks, etc). It hit me that this brand of webcam probably had the same “vulnerability” of a unique URL string that could be found on Google. Sure enough, it did:
http://www.google.com/#q=LvAppl/lvappl.htm
There seems to be a bit more geographic diversity in camera placement for this particular breed. I have found several in Japan, but others that are definitely closer to home (based on timezone). Here are a few interesting ones:
http://209.165.175.132/sample/LvAppl/lvappl.htm (the presets include “Chopper Pad”, “Russian Coast”, and “Bering View”)
http://86.101.179.113/sample/LvAppl/lvappl.htm (pretty sure this is in Hungary, based on the bank across the way)
http://24.123.188.36/sample/LvAppl/lvappl.htm (this one’s in Cary!)
http://194.208.34.74/sample/LvAppl/lvappl.htm (this is in Austria, here to be exact!)
http://91.112.187.155/sample/LvAppl/lvappl.htm (another Austrian camera, this time in the mountains)
http://218.227.159.88/sample/LvAppl/LvAppl-J.htm (another in Japan overlooking a harbor. I think I saw a navy ship sail by)
If you find any more interesting ones, leave a note in comments!
Do the internet and computers fundamentally alter existing socioeconomic power structures or do they merely exacerbate existing divides?
Quotes from a Labor Activist’s Sig
One of my friends is very passionate about worker’s rights. I got an email from her today with a couple quotes that really got me thinking. I’d love to hear reactions to these, as I’m still formulating my opinions on them.
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up in mine, then, come, let us work together.” ~Lilla Watson “Charity consoles but does not question. ‘If I give food to the poor, they call me a saint, but if I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.’ Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations. In the best of cases, there will be justice someday, high in heaven. Here on earth, charity doesn’t worry injustice, it just tries to hide it.” ~Eduardo Galeano