I am not particularly educated about it, but I care about it. I confess that I leave most concerns to other people who are dedicated to the science of preserving it. Because I’m not particularly skilled or knowledgeable, I figure it’s not my business to spend too much time thinking about it. But I do spend time worrying about it.

I’m convinced that climate change is real, and it scares the bejeezus out of me. Many of you agree with me, so I’m not talking to you right now. I’m talking to those of you who don’t agree, or who are on the fence. Those of you who believe it’s an overreaction, or that it’s a deep liberal conspiracy. Who am I to tell you you’re wrong? After all, I just admitted I don’t know all that much about the environment. But still … what if you are wrong?

Say you live in a village that just happens to be situated under a large dam. If the dam breaks, the village dies. If the dam stays, the village lives. Half the village is convinced the damn needs renovation. There are small cracks and a tiny amount of water is leaking through. Some experts say the small cracks are indicative of a larger problem, and eventually they will turn to large cracks, before giving way completely and flooding the town. Others say it’s poppycock, and the dam is strong as ever.

So the village is left with two choices. Fix the dam, perhaps at unwarranted expense, or leave the cracks and hope for the best. When it comes to consequences like wiping out the village, I believe giving the benefit of the doubt to the worried half is worth your consideration.

What motivates the deniers of climate change? For some I’m sure it’s a momentum thing. They know a lot of people who are against it for possibly politically allied reasons, and so they go along with it. Truthfully, momentum and trust are large parts of the reason for my being convinced to believe it. For others I suspect a deeper psychological reason: they’re afraid like I am, but it’s easier to rationalize the problem away.

What makes me particularly comfortable with the idea of “doing something” about the alleged problem of climate change is that the prescription for the cure has positive benefits in any case. Reduce air pollution? We can benefit from that even if there isn’t a causal relation to climate change. So let’s use this potentially catastrophic situation as an excuse to clean up the air. We’ll have happier lives and if we’re lucky we might just save the world while we’re at it.

Update:I shut off comments because, as could probably be predicted, it is turning into a debate between pro and con readers. It’s not that I don’t think you all have a right to your opinions, but more and more the comments were debating the finer points of other readers’ opinions, not mine. Well, it’s my blog and I take seriously what you all have said in response to my thoughts. I think the comments that have come in so far do a good job of representing two sides of the issue, so there probably isn’t a lot more that needs to be presented here.

Imagine how honored I was when they invited me to be interviewed on video for the blog? I think it came out pretty well, all things considered. You’ll get a sense for my speaking voice, and also hear my words drowned out by downtown San Francisco traffic!

Ars at WWDC: Video Interview with Daniel Jalkut

I’m catching up on photos and such, which our friends were awesome enough to take and which I didn’t have time to review while away. My girlfriend wife has been giving me a hard time for two weeks because I apparently latched onto the English-ism “and such” in a big way. It just melded into my brain like it had been there forever, and I can’t think of myself using any other construct to express the idea of “and stuff, and so on, and whatzeyhoozey, etc., etc.”

Some of the photos our friends snapped were brilliant, especially one by our friend Wendy, which captures me in an excited state the night before the wedding. We had just finished an awesome dinner at Les Zygomates in Boston, which my parents were generous enough to host for us, and had gone out for a brief meeting with out-of-town friends at a nerd-compatible bar in Cambridge (near MIT) called The Miracle of Science. The presence of distant friends (many from SF, DC, and elsewhere) and the fact that the menu is organized in a table of elements format got me pretty excited (not to mention getting married to the most beautiful, thoughtful, intelligent woman on earth!), so I thought it was a good opportunity to express my thoughts in lolspeak:

The phrase “The Honeymoon Is Over” seems to have negative connotations in common language, but it’s a happy time for me. We just had a killer (if exhausting!) holiday in England, and now we get to settle back into our normal lives, except as a happily married couple. I’m reclaiming “The Honeymoon Is Over” as an enunciation of joy! Let’s get on with this rad life. Summer is nearly here, and we’ve got tons of work and play to do.

PS It’s raining in Oxford, UK.

• Make sure newly added custom tags items show up in popup menu
• Follow HTTP redirects when autodetecting
• Improve reliability of category syncing by limiting concurrent server requests
• Improve unicode blog support by defaulting to “Don’t Encode HTML Entities”
• Improved keyboard navigation of posts and blogs lists
• Add “extended” content to default preview template
• LiveJournal specific:
  • Add auto-detection for LiveJournal.com blog addresess
• Blogger specific:
  • Enable support for new enclosure support
• Drupal Specific
  • Fix to properly support MovableType-style categories
• Metaweblog specific (e.g. SquareSpace)
  • Fix category list retrieval

Check out my blog at Cocoa Duel for more details and a link to the download. Then, whether you like my project or not, vote for it by donating cash to the American Cancer Society via the Cocoa Duel voting page. Or, vote for one of the other participants by donating to their worthy cause, instead!

I think the site itself is a pretty amazing act of instant development. Congrats and thanks to Jason Harris for putting it together. I think we can grant him a little lenience on the time limit, since he’s been busy hacking Ruby instead of Cocoa.

But I just discovered something about ash that’s truly magical. Think “Remote Script Editor”! I’m in a hotel when I realize I need to access some information from an Address Book entry back home. So I ssh into my home computer, and start slogging through the Address Book data folder. Ugh! If only I could easily ask for the scripted information I need. Of course, there’s osascript, which is where I started heading. But ash makes this process so much easier, because of its interactive and forgiving interface:

iBook> ./ash
Welcome to ash (AppleScript Shell) version 0.60
Type: -help for help, type -exit to exit
ash> tell application "Address Book"
tell application "Address Book"
ash tell> set myPerson to first person whose name is "John Doe"
tell application "Address Book"
    set myPerson to first person whose name is "John Doe"
ash tell> value of phones of myPerson
tell application "Address Book"
    set myPerson to first person whose name is "John Doe"
    value of phones of myPerson
ash tell> end
tell application "Address Book"
    set myPerson to first person whose name is "John Doe"
    value of phones of myPerson
end tell
{"(415) 555-1384", "(415) 555-4424"}
ash>

See how ash takes one line at a time, and then when I end the “tell” block, it shows me the results of my query. Now I can call my friend even though I’m nowhere near my Mac.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or I could run VNC, or ya know, put phone numbers on my iPod. But this is just one example of a scenario where interactive scripting could be handy through a remote ssh connection.

AppleScript Shell, check it out!

Red Sweater is participating, and all you have to do to score the big discount is use the MACSANTA coupon code.

Because my online store is not very sophisticated, I am unfortunately only able to offer the deal to customers who purchase through the my Kagi Web Store. Enjoy!

It’s easy for me to empathize with James and his family, because he was “a lot like me” in some superficial but emotionally connective ways. He worked in the tech industry. In San Francisco. In a building across the street from where I used to work. With a lot of people who I know directly or indirectly. It was easy to envision myself driving along that mountain road and somehow letting one thing lead to another until the situation was dire. And that’s just too sad for words.

I was really hoping for a miracle.

It makes me appreciate the fragility of life, renews my respect for the wilderness, and encourages me to stop taking my own life for granted. And I want those near to me to keep living. Please.

More than that, James helps remind me how important everybody’s life is. Here’s a man I did not know, but whose story compelled me to hope beyond hope that he’d be found alive. All because the news stories and circumstances of his life made it easy for me to relate to him. Really easy. So I add my own condolences to the waves of concern for the Kim family, and hope in vain that nobody else dies before their time, at least for a while.

I love this charity idea because it gives small developers a chance to unite for a good cause, and because that cause is pretty universal and apolitical. Who doesn’t want sick kids to be as happy as possible?

I’m putting my products into the pool, so if you had any intention of buying them, do it tomorrow, December 7th, 2006. I appreciate that picking a 24 hour period and calling it “a day” can be tough to clarify internationally. So I’m interpreting it a little loosely and starting the “sale” right now. My online store includes a note explaining that the charity sales are in place, and I’ll take that notice down sometime after midnight tomorrow. While that notice is in effect you are guaranteed that 100% of your payments will go to the charity (i’m donating the difference in any PayPal or Kagi fees, so the total contribution will be exactly the cost of the product).

There are lots of other great companies participating, so if you’ve been considering any of the products on the list, tomorrow would be a great time to make the purchase!