I live by the ocean

Home.

Easing my way back into things as I have a tickle in my throat, but it was worth it. Iceland was amazing, more details to come soon. For today, I offer only the best faux road rage video on YouTube.

Pick your zombie party

More people should listen to CBC radio for its magazine shows. Much like the public library, CBC radio is a wealth of knowledge often under appreciated. Not only do you learn about the world, but CBC reporters regularly win awards around the globe for their radio docuwork. Despite the ever-shrinking budget of the ceebs, it's a Canadian institution I fully believe in, heartily support and will love until my final days.

With that said, the current feature on 'Ideas' with Paul Kennedy is a three-part broadcast titled "Climate Wars".

Here is the synopsis:

About 2 years ago I noticed that the military in various countries, and especially in the Pentagon, were beginning to take climate change seriously. Now, it's the business of the military to find new security threats. It's also in their own self-interest, since they need a constant supply of threats in order to justify their demands on the taxpayers' money, so you should always take the new threats that the soldiers discover with a grain of salt. You know, never ask the barber whether you need a haircut.

But I did start to look into this idea that global warming could lead to wars. It turned into a year-long trek talking to scientists, soldiers and politicians in a dozen different countries. I have come back from that trip seriously worried...

- Gwynne Dyer

This might sound like an audiobook version of an inconvenient truth, but so far it has been much more focused on presenting the latest research and exploring little discussed consequences than it is about brow beating.

Not just "the world is ending" but having respected minds discuss how that might happen politically, culturally and environmentally helps really lay things out with a different perspective. Moreover, it explores both sides, weighing the consequences of ecoengineering, ecoterrorism and how both those evolutions are impacting the world on a political level for both good and in many cases, not so good.

Probably one of the most informative pieces of journalism about our current climate (literally and otherwise) that I've ever enjoyed.

I highly recommend you check it out.

Lessons in netiquette

When you're having a conversation (and I use that term incredibly loosely) on Facebook, at what point does one just stop replying? In my mind, wall-posts are essentially online versions of small talk. Which is why the internet is great. You can stop the small talk without saying anything, and not have to deal with awkward silences or making an excuse to go talk to somebody else.

But the other side of the coin is when you're talking to actual friends, and frankly, I don't particularly like replying to any messages at all. I barely post on other people's walls, and if I do I almost never expect a reply. So to have to then REPLY TO THAT REPLY is just way more effort than I normally would like to invest in Facebook.

Moreover, how much is too much use of these programs? Is there a hard cap on how many Tweets per hour one should submit before it simply becomes asinine? How often you should post on people's Facebook walls? How many photos in an album you should have witty comments for? (Clearly you can't comment on all of them, or that's just sad).

I'm not sure, but I think I just might be virtually-socially awkward. I just don't know the common protocol for these newfangled internet things.

Then again, it could be argued I'm just socially awkward. Period.

But then I'd say you're wrong.

And.... yea. That's it.

Graduating from Asian Avenue

Can you imagine actually hanging out at a physical place called Asian Avenue? I shudder to think.

I've had a few conversations recently about social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter et al. It definitely seems that within the last two months, Twitter has absolutely exploded.

My question might be whether someone's internet promiscuity is actually proportional to that individual's real-life social activity?

Is a social networking butterfly (somebody with, say over 800 friends on Facebook) by definition also a social butterfly in real life? I suppose the more pertinent question however might rather be whether exceptions are possible.

What is the correlation between real personality and one's online presence?

Technological inclination surely has a role, but how is that connected to one's self-awareness and desire to blog, tweet or otherwise make your life more transparent to those around you (or at least, appear more transparent)? Can a personality profile be created for your online persona, and are there concrete connections to reality?

In my most rudimentary of observations, I think that people who embrace social networking openly are, generally, not necessarily more extroverted, but by-and-large more willing to make new connections.

In other words, someone who tweets constantly would probably be easier to become actual friends with than someone who doesn't have a Facebook account because they are think it's cool to be ironic.

Of course, this is even more convoluted because I think there are also plenty of cases where people are extremely promiscuous online because they are socially awkward in real life. So how does one account for that faction? Hmm...

It's all very curious. Academic studies haven't seemed to really start analyzing this relationship yet and how one affects the other, but I can honestly see the future of our communications being completely integrated into social media as "the new medium" of choice... if it isn't already, that is.

It's only a matter of time.