morrisseyed

So Google has officially opened up Knol to the public.  FYI, Knol is G’s next attempt to take over the world (or at least its information) by building a community-driven, open-source encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia.

Google gives us all the goods on its Googleblog, so I’ll let you do the reading yourself.  Do note, though, that they are encouraging people to use their real names on this.  Google argues that the authority we find in Knol will be vested in the authors and the author communities.  Whereas Bearcat258, Hellfire23f, or some other alias was once our authority for everything we needed to know from Wikipedia’s entry on X, the end-user will now hopefully be able to cross-reference the names of Knol’s authors against other pieces of information (ostenbsibly on Knol profile pages or by way of a google-search) to determine the article’s own veracity and quality.

Fair enough.  Google is correct in this regard.  Information and authority is all relative anyway.  Both are fairly dependent on identity.  We generally differentiate between truth and rumour when we can (1) verify the content of the statement, and (2) find the source of the knowledge.   I still find Google and Knol’s demands for open identity troubling, though.  I think the likes of Facebook and Google has destroyed anonymity on the internet, and I’m not always certain if that’s a good thing.  Google really does have the goods on us, and I wonder if I want this mega-corp being able to draw a character sketch of my person.  I’m still unsure what the implications would be if I were to merge my internet and IRL personas into one name/user.

Knol will be a success, truly, but I wonder what the wider implications of such ‘non-anonymous’ projects are..

Anyway.

Whenever I feel that I’m not being eco-friendly enough, I ask myself “What would Suzuki do?”, or even just rhyme off the acroynm, “WWSD”.  It works wonders, it really does.  Really now, every Canadian I know wishes he or she could be David Suzuki’s grandchild.  It’s simply in the nature of things.

Unless, of course, you’re eco-friendly in the United States. In the USA, if you want to be anyone’s grandchild nowadays, then its gotta be former Vice Presidents who sometimes invented the internet but always had a concern for the environment.  As the most recent installment of Passive-agressive-notes shows, Al Gore truly has risen within the pantheon of green celebrities:

What would Al Gore do?

After a week of overcast clouds looming over us, the rain has finally come to Hali.  It came on Monday, and its has come today, and it is to come tomorrow.  Lucky for the Pineapples, I’m in one of those “I love the rain!” sorts of moods.  It may stem from a horrible Eurythmics joke I cracked while walking from the grocery store the other day.  The joke was not funny at all, so I apologised for it immediately, but since then there has been, lodged in my memory, an image and sound of me singing “Here comes the rain again.”  Annie Lennox I certainly am not, so I’ve been laughing to myself at the thought of this for the past couple days, and waiting for the rain to bloody well arrive.

Right now I am a little put off with Environment Canada, as well as the Canadian Hurricane Centre.  In the past ten years or so (that might be a stretch, but I want to lend some authority to my words), these offices have been apt to use different terminology for big storms that occur in the North Atlantic.  Whereas all serious weather pattersn were once large storms and gales, if not tempests in their own right, they are now classified as Tropical Storms or Tropical Depressions or Post-Tropical Depressions.  I understand that the wonders of science, satellites and meteorology allow us to track weather patterns in the Caribbean as they move toward us, so it might therefore be appropriate to continue to refer to these storms by the names they had where they originated, but there simply is no fun to be had in “Tropical Storm Cristobal.”  Unless I’m ten miles out in the sea, I’m simply in store for a whole lotta rain.  It’s a big let down.  I want my gales to return.  And my tempests.  Not tropical storms which have run their course.  I’ll take the Hurricanes when they actually make landfall with the force that warrants such a name.  But constantly referring to Tropical Storm Cristobal as a Tropical Storm when it hits Nova Scotia and eventually Newfoundland does nothing but breed fear in the people who are scared witless by these things, and creates a letdown in the likes of people like myself, who demands nature to come on strong so that we know we’re alive.