The Wombat & Extraordinary Moment

Some number of years ago I started getting interested in the connectedness of all things...

I'll even go back even further before I even start.

(And, as an aside and a self-referential point, I can hardly have a linear communication anymore)

Up one level. I was going to point out that after paying off student loans from University undergrad, I backpacked thought Europe and randomly at a hostel picked up and read Edith Hamilton's classic short book on Mythology. I was 22 and that was 26 years ago. After reading the book, I asked myself, "which figure from Mythology do I most relate to?". My answer, "Prometheus", the God (well Titan really) of Foresight. Later I named my Volkswagon van Prometheus. My current car (2004 Mazda sport) is named Grok.

wikis refs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

Another possible aside is how and when Grok popped into my head and captured a lot and it is a boring story and has to do with developing performance metrics that should be groked as one in a multi-dimensional dashboard not individually...

Still another aside is that my current favorite book is Guns, Germs and Steel and it recently beat out Godel, Escher and Bach (which really got me into self-referentiality and almost got me too interested in other things to complete University (in Math and Computer Science) but I did (just barely)). And maybe I just like patterns of 3s because I now like the sound of Portals, Hubs and Clouds (maybe I should write the book!), and my lucky number because I was randomly born on that day of the month is 27.

Main point for this blog is that I just watched a neat video (The Tree of Life at: http://www.wellcometreeoflife.org/) that was suggested to me by a Facebook friend and it reminded me of this very early web "animation" called
The Wombat http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
and Extraordinary Moment http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/ex.shtml

Life is wonderfully complex and connected and there is even stuff between the connections.

Lack of Accountability for Negative Externalities

Heard that title phase at a lunch lecture that I attended on Friday about the Economic Impacts of Information and Communications Technology. This is a good thing to try to understand. Look under the hood and really try to understand or model in some way the pervasive and multiple impacts. "Green IT" is very hot. There are a number of things to consider:

1. First order effects is the energy consumption.
2. Second order is that ICT can help control manufacturing plants etc.
3. Third order is that ICT can be used to do research in medicine or oil& gas exploration

One Green theme being explored is locating data centres at Green, carbon zero sites.

"Follow the sun" compute.

The famous Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith may be relevant here.