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decline of western Europe

A visualization of the decline of western European empires. Things get interesting around the 1960s.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

college hunting

what were you thinking wearing white?
didn’t you know that you might look like a deer’s throat?
nevermind that you walk upright and study chemistry.

That afternoon, Jason D. Cloutier, 31, a son of country folk with deep roots in the area, set off into the same woods. He donned blaze orange to comply with Virginia hunting laws and packed his .35-caliber, high-powered rifle, equipped with a scope to get a better bead on his target. Deer hunting season had started three days earlier, and because he’d been laid off from his pipefitting job, he had the afternoon free.

Shortly after 4 p.m., a single pull of the trigger propelled a bullet into Goode’s chest from a distance of 100 yards. She was killed instantly. After slicing through her, the bullet continued into the hand of her friend, Regis Boudinot, 20, a Langley High graduate from McLean.

Read the rest at the Washington Post — Fatal shooting of student distresses Va. community known for love of outdoors

Virginia and Franklin County investigators work the scene where two college students were shot Tuesday.
(Eric Brady/ap)

more PowerBook display problems

Last August (meaning 2008),  my PowerBook’s screen started to flicker. It usually did this when the laptop was booting up or when waking up from sleep mode. I associated the flicker with the sudden change in temperature: asleep, the all aluminum body is quite cool to the touch, and it heats up rather quickly once it is on.

So last summer, I installed G4FanControl, a program that manually overrides the temperature settings at which the laptop’s three cooling fans come on. I have been able to set that temperature lower, keeping my laptop cooler for more than a year. And it has been doing fine. Until today.

Any further suggestions?

No digital billboards in Durham

This is it. The billboard industry has submitted their proposal requesting to change Durham’s current billboard ordinance. Most significantly, the proposal would allow up to 25% of existing billboard space to be converted to those annoying, distracting digital billboards.

Fairway Outdoor Advertising (now Fairway Media Magic, per a recent merger) has some gall to propose this change now. It’s obvious that they waited until after the election to bring this up, so as to avoid making billboards an election issue. But more importantly, the Durham Convention and Visitors’ Bureau recently released data from a poll conducted over the summer that demonstrates clearly how Durham residents feel about the prospect of digital billboards: 72% of those polled rejected it.

Read more about their proposal at Bull City Rising and the Herald Sun.

Visit the following website to refresh your memory as to why the billboard ban exists, to see examples of digital billboards in other communities, and to learn the concerns about their energy footprint, safety record, and the aesthetic impact digital billboards could have on Durham.

http://supportdurhambillboardban.com/

Please email links to this posting or to  http://supportdurhambillboardban.com/ to your neighborhood listserv, post it to Facebook, etc. Spread the word; stop the billboards.

The new Contact page on the site has been updated with the following suggestion…