Author Archives: Michael Tobis

Michael Tobis, editor-in-chief of Planet3.0 and site cofounder, has always been interested in the interface between science and public policy. He holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences where he developed a 3-D ocean model on a custom computing platform. He has been involved in sustainability conversations on the internet since 1992, has been a web software developer since 2000, and has been posting sustainability articles on the web since 2007.

Not Getting It

http://wtfqrcodes.com/post/18730127220/my-throat-hurts-from-sighing-the-hardest-ive-ever#notes

The Electoral Map, or Texas Messes with Itself

Don’t Mess with Texas, cause we’ve got all the trouble we can handle just messin’ with our own selves. http://www.lettersfromtexas.com/2012/02/redistricting-status-in-texas-from.html

How Oligarchy Works

I love the punch line at the very end. In case you couldn’t read between the lines. Nudge nudge, wink wink, know wh’a’a mean?

Wisconsin Itself is a Subversive Idea

Somebody ought to look for the actual flag of the state before making comments like this. Via Crooks and Liars, where an interesting video commentary can be seen.

Phone Companies

Sigh… Transcript from an online chat. So far this has cost us several hours and probably a few customers. Please hold for a Verizon Wireless sales representative to assist you with your order. Thank you for your patience. You are now chatting with ‘Lawrence’ Lawrence: Hello. Thank you for visiting our chat service.  May I help…

Boids

  Friend 1: We’re going to count birds  tomorrow. Me: Where I come from, counting birds is very easy this time of year. Friend 2: Because there are so many of them?    

Kosher, Hallal, and Intolerance

An interesting rant at an unlikely site. For those who follow this sort of thing, there is a slowly building “outcry” by some corners that Butterballs Turkeys are Halal. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it means that they are permissible for consumption by religious Muslims. Some people have found this offensive. The thing is,…

The Burzynski Clinic

Someone acting approximately  lawyer defends someone claiming to have a cancer treatment, who charges enormous amounts of money to people for being in clinical trials. These clinical trials have been going on for decades without any published result. It seems to me that charging people to be part of clinical trials is the sort of…

Vive Quebec

Tweets by location and language. Click image to de-fuzz. Via Eric Fischer on Flickr Some Rights Reserved CC-BY

Nomenclature

Good Attitude

  Saved for future reference. David Shankbone, CC-BY

Motivational Structure

Looks like a slippery slope…

quicquid status quo

I saw a sentence on a leftish site today, Mother Jones iirc, to the effect that “Power is concentrated in the hands of defenders of the status quo” This seems almost a tautology. Moments in history where this is not true are rare – they are the true tipping points. The question is the nature…

Advantages of Global Cooling

If we get the place as cold as, say, Gannymede, we can finally have our levitating cars.

Last Post

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSzK-6wimbc&w=420&h=315] This blog is moving to http://init.planet3.org Please reset your bookmarks and feeds (http://init.planet3.org/feed/). That site and feed are now live. Updates about the shutdown of this site will appear on this article. Approximately a million page views (at least 979,918 as I write, not counting feed subscribers) have been served by this Blogger…

Believe it if you need it or leave it if you dare.

Welcome to the new, uglier Only In It for the Gold. Renovations are in progress. Pardon our dust.

Dennis Ritchie has Died

A less publicly renowned figure in the history of computing than Steve Jobs, but at least equally central in its development, Dennis Ritchie also passed away recently. Dennis was coauthor of the original UNIX operating system and author of the first implementation of the C language. This is to say, the majority of modern computing…

A better Way

This blog will be moving soon, to be a sub-blog under Planet3.0 . Recall that the original purpose here was to examine how scientific communication had failed and what to do about it. Planet3.0 is the result of that thinking. It’s my attempt not only to do something about it, but to encourage others to…

Good News from Texas

It’s still unseasonably warm in Austin, but at least the season has changed. While it remains very dry here, major storms have been quite visible to our north and south of late. So, it seems that October is bringing us a normal summer pattern, and it’s raining a more or less normal amount in Texas….

The Forces of Occupation

Obviously I’ve been wrapped up in Planet3.0 these last couple of weeks. But amazing developments have been afoot. I am ALMOST as far as this: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_P3pxze5w] But it is tempered by something clever somebody said at SXSWEco last week. Something like: We don’t need a movement chasing down the White House to make them…