on a bike ride to sausalito

treepreciation #2

Location: Fort Mason, SF

The Urban Forest Map launches this Wednesday, April 21, 2010. Their mission is to map every tree in San Francisco. The project recalls that omnipresent rose-out-of-concrete trope, but a bit less romantic. I'm working on contacting them for some advice on identifying trees like the leaning troglodyte pictured above. More on that to come...

BYOBW 2010

easter sunday 2010, bring your own big wheel race

el matate!

no pain no gain

the starting line

hills for thrills


thank you sf for my new easter tradition

science goes here

Noisebridge is a hackerspace in the Mission neighborhood of SF that I've been stopping by every once in a while for the past month or so. They define the term "hacker" broadly so as to include everybody who takes something, improves upon it, and then shares it with the community. Its the classic open source production model, or what some have referred to as the growing trend of commons-based production models. They basically liberate production from the constraints of, well... society... a "take your clothes off at the door" sort of approach to innovation.

I was there recently for a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) workshop, sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). More on that later, as I embark on a mission to discover who shot JFK and MLK, and in what California desert the 1969 moon landing actually took place.

Cheers!

Failed International Treaty #1

(Image courtesy of NASA Archives).

One of the scariest and most unsettling notions for legal studies – and for society at large – is the discovery of a new frontier. Prospectors see opportunity in the wide open spaces, but someone else is sitting in a glass house watching their control of the universe dwindle and slip away. Cue the legislative trumpets! History has shown, though, that not even the collective minds of a select team of brilliant international superheroes can agree on the best way to own treacherous new waters.

Thus, we arrive at Failed International Treaty #1 (of a proposed series of 297) – the “Moon Treaty.” To affect some historical context, the agreement was considered and amended by a Legal Subcommittee of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs(I bet that office has a inter-stellar cafeteria) from 1972-1979. Australia was the fifth country to sign the treaty in 1985, and as of 2008 a whopping 13 countries have signed the treaty. Kudos to Pakistan, Morocco, and Uruguay for stepping the fuck up. In principle, the treaty sounds great – the moon will never be used for anything but peaceful purposes, its resources are the property of all mankind rather than any single nation, disruption of the environment through “extra-environmental” means is prohibited, and sex in 0 G’s is not only allowed, but encouraged. Theoretically, weightless mating produces more free-willed offspring. Unfortunately for mankind, those principles are unlikely to make it out of the realm of theory and science fiction utopias.

So how did it fail? Well, no countries with a history of space-exploration have signed on. My guess is the United States thinks it owns the moon, just like it owns New England, Texas, and Iraq. Maybe a few of those exploration-savvy resisters are already in violation. Uh-oh! Thus, it is a failed treaty only in the sense that it has no direct relevance, consensus, or enforcement. I’ll let you know, though, that the day I own my own republic is the same day I sign line #14.

treepreciation

tree, originally uploaded by imightexpl0de.

on the way somewhere... portlandia? point reyes? hoag's object?