From my friend Claire:
The Devil's Lake water diversion project is scheduled to open on July 1st. When it opens, water will flow from Devil's Lake in North Dakota, into the Sheyenne River, which joins the Red River and flows through Manitoba into Hudson Bay. [...]
Canada and Manitoba have been asking for review of the project by the International Joint Commission, which administrates the Boundary Waters Treaty, but so far the United States has not agreed.
By going ahead with the Devil's Lake Outlet without proper assessment, North Dakota is endangering not only the downstream environments of North Dakota and Manitoba but also a long-standing, internationally acclaimed environmental agreement.
Claire has created an online petition to push for further review of this project, and is working on a "one stop shop" for Devil's Lake diversion information.
Inform yourself, and sign the petition if this project concerns you.
More information from Friends of the Earth:
You would think the state of North Dakota would give us better birthday present than this.
My sister has joined the blogsphere: JustDazzle.Com - the blog of a 25 year old Canadian girl living and working in Amsterdam.
I based the design of her site off a blogger template, but the backend uses MovableType. If your browser has problems rendering the site, drop me a comment including your browser name and version.
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Friday Diversions:
We are borg, and we love it. Seriously, when do we get NetMindLinks?
Ask.Metafilter.Com:
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Hijab (in various levels of 'modesty') influences the dress of many women in our neighborhood. HeadScarves are worn by a majority of the check-out girls at the SupperMarket across the street. You wouldn't know it living in my 'hood, but tension is rising between the Dutch and their immigrant Muslim population.
Activists within the Amsterdam gay community have begun to blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples. Others see Islam as a threat to so-called 'Dutch Tolerance'.
Meanwhile, many Dutch are being less than tolerant towards Islam.
The Dutch-Muslim Culture WarSeven months ago, Hirsi Ali's implacable campaign against what she views as Islam's oppression of women prompted a Muslim fanatic to ritually slaughter Theo van Gogh, her Dutch collaborator on the film Submission. The murderer used his knife to affix a five-page letter to the corpse promising the same treatment for Hirsi Ali and another Dutch politician who has criticized Islam. The murder sent Dutch society into paroxysms of rage and fear, sparking dozens of attacks on mosques and schools.
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Related:
StructuredThought, has been restructured as a WikiWikiWeb.
Unlike blogs, which are linear expression mediums (posts are displayed in chronological order, time/date stamped, and sorted by day/month/year), a WikiWikiWeb will allow me to grow the site not only in content, but in complexity.
I'll be exploiting JeremyRuston's TiddlyWiki to solidify and explore thought, through pattern, language, and connections:
A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially[...] I think that TiddlyWiki represents a novel medium for writing, and will promote it's own distinctive WritingStyle.
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WikiFact: Wiki software originated in the design pattern community as a way of writing and discussing
PatternLanguages.
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meta!
There is no point to this project beyond the indexing of fanciful ideas.
KnowBug: Certain versions of IE won't render images in TiddlyWiki. So GetWithTheProgram. ;)
The Harvest
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
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Change This
We're on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds.
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Algorithmic Composition
Here, the algorithmic process is used in a creative context so that users can convert sequences of numbers into sounds.
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Goalsetting 101
Goal setting is the laying out on paper of the experiences you wish to have, the possessions you wish to own, the places you wish to go to and the people you wish to meet. The emphasis is on the experiences.
[link - Ignore the horrid background image.]
A New Way of Walking
Artist-explorers called psychogeographers are changing the way we experience the city.
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But Not On You
It is raining inside the room, except where you're standing.
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The Ten-Percent Myth
It's the old myth heard time and again about how people use only ten percent of their brains.
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Tabbed Mario
Play Super Mario like a guitar tab.
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Alive and well in sunny Amsterdam. (Sunny Amsterdam -> Oxymoron?)
I'm working on a new look-and-feel for structured thought, my poetry and prose blog, and I have some Proce55ing sketches in the works. Also under development: blogs for my sister and mother.
Shannon bought herself a Minolta Maxxum 50. As far as low-cost auto-focusing SLRs go, it's dope.
We have some friends in town. Why don't you plan a visit too? :)
