Lasting privacy in the age of Facebook

The NY Times Magazine has a very interesting article up about the interaction between privacy, human memory, judgements on one’s past actions, and the longevity of information in the digital era.  I’m not on Facebook, and the fact that I haven’t updated here since April says something, I’m sure, but I do update my Flickr account on a semi-regular basis, with photos taken every day of my year.  I am, of course, self-editing those photos, and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any drunken photos of me out there (because I don’t recall ever having been that drunk), but the issues raised in the article still give me pause.

Helpful?  Perhaps not.

Turns out that I would much rather dance along in my chair in the computer lab to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” than concentrate on my statistics homework.  Go figure.

Tapping… and stamping… and clapping.

I went to Weston help tap maple trees for syrup this morning.  My fingers and toes felt rather cold while we were out tramping around in the trees.  When I got home, I found out why:

I know it’s not Alaskan weather, but it’s still cold for me!

Goings-on at the beginning of the second semester

It’s 2:45 p.m., and I’m sitting in a sunny “quiet study area” of Tisch Library.  I should be reading law cases for my “Land Use Planning” class, but I feel, instead, the urge to write up some sort of entry for haskinphoto.  Partly it has to do with photos I’ve seen in my contacts’ photostreams on Flickr, where so many of them seem to have friends around for dinner and things like that.  Truth be told – and this is silly – I’m feeling lonely.  It’s silly, because I have at least one very good friend in Boston, with whom I live, Angus is on the other end of email frequently (though less frequently when he’s in Angola, as he is now), Mom and Graham are in frequent text contact, and I have several getting-better friends at Tufts who I see regularly.  But I am missing my Reedie friends.  I haven’t seen many of you in months or, in some cases, years, and all of the sudden it’s feeling like a very long time.  I miss you, all of you, even the ones that I haven’t spoken with since September or before.

Alright, enough moping.  What else am I up to, I hear you cry?  Well, I’m glad you asked!  I’m taking four classes this semester, and have now had each of them at least once.  It’s going to be an interesting semester, I think, and fairly well balanced between the left and right sides of my brain.  For the math\analytical side, I have Introduction to GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and, horror of horrors, statistics (called “Quantitative Reasoning,” for some reason).  GIS is going to be really interesting, and not too taxing for my poor math-shy brain, but I’m terribly afraid that Quant is going to kick my rear.  Ah well – that’s why I went back to school, right?

For the more word-oriented side of my brain, I have the above-mentioned Land Use Planning II: Regulatory Approaches.  It’s taught by a lawyer, and, pleasingly, only has law cases for weekly readings.  I say “pleasingly” because I found last semester that I really enjoy reading cases.  The weirder, me.  This class will test that inclination, however – with six or more cases to read per week, we’ll see if I really do like it as much as I think I do!

Finally, for practical skills, I’m in Field Projects.  This is a required course, where teams of five and six people from the first-year UEP students work with real-live clients (in my group’s case, Groundworks Somerville) on specified projects.  My group is going to be looking into the demand for uber-local produce – i.e. produce from urban\backyard gardeners in Somerville – amongst local businesses, to see if we can’t facilitate the flow of excess produce from those gardeners to the businesses that want them.  I think the project is going to be very interesting, and certainly it’s good practice for me to work in a group, since I tend to prefer to work on my own (I work better that way, usually).

I will also continue to work for the Medford Chamber of Commerce this semester, although for only ten hours per week instead of the fourteen of last week.  That may not seem like a big change, but given that Field Projects, by most second-years’ accounts, takes as much work as one and a half to two classes, and given that I’m already taking a full courseload, even an extra four hours per week will be beneficial.  I like working at the MCC – Cheryl, the director, is a lot of fun to work with, and I have skills to offer that are very necessary, which makes me feel nice and appreciated.

I will also be spending a fair amount of time this semester applying for summer internships – I’ve already been rejected by one – and thinking about ideas for next year’s thesis.  And I’m going to try to get out at least once a week to do something non-brain-oriented, like swing dancing or, as is the case this week, ice skating.  At the end of February, there’s a UEP trip to the Loj, the Tufts cabin in VT (NH?), which I’m looking forward to.  Even if it is just another place to study!  :-)

So, yeah, I should get back to work.  I’ll be thinking of all of my friends in many of my spare moments, and hope to see some of you before too many more months pass by.  Good luck with all of your endeavors!

Wow.  This is going to change things.

Apparently, the Supreme Court, putting aside its tendency of adherence to precedent, has just ruled that corporations may fund political campaigning - apparently to unlimited amounts.  While I will probably go and read the opinion and dissent for myself, to see if I can understand what the hell the majority was thinking, if this be the case, well, let’s just say that I’m disappointed.  Corporations can already sell most of us on just about anything, good or bad.  If they turn their considerable marketing skills to political campaigning (to an even greater extent than they probably already do), how are we supposed to have any sort of informed voting?  I mean, I know that many people don’t vote informedly already, but this can’t help!

I’m a real Northerner now!

I just shoveled the snow off the front walk for the first time ever!  Go me!  (Granted, it was only about two inches deep, and not at all packed down, but still, it was a first!)

This makes me happy…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnT7pT6zCcA&feature=player_embedded

::big grin::

Just finished watching “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” (finally), and am currently listening to the equally-if-not-more-awesome “Commentary - The Musical!”  I have to admit that I suffer from severe “Wanna Be In Joss Whedon’s Circle”-itis.  If only to get the chance to watch Nathan Fillion ham it up while singing his “Barry White lite” solo.  Or the chance to snort water out my nose on a regular basis, when lyrics like “but when it’s time to cast the show, do they want somebody yellow\hell no” sneak up on me, as they just did.

... Or “seeing it through\makes each of you\a huge f**king nerd”...  Ah, that’s why Whedon fans keep coming back for more - the unconditional love and acceptance that unfailingly flow from Whedon productions…

And back to reading economics I go…  ::sigh::  I bet that environmentally-adjusted GDP would sound a lot more interesting if Nathan Fillion were reading it to me…  No takers?  Nate? ... Ah well…

“There’s a world in my cup.”

This essay was in an article I’m reading for my “Developing Sustainable Communities” class.  The article’s citation is: Carley, M and Spapens, P (1998) Sharing the World: Sustainable Living and Global Equity in the 21st Century. London. Earthscan.

The article:
————
My name is Alan and I’m a compulsive drinker.  Coffee is my brew.  I used to drink it daily, sometimes hourly.  I drank it by the pot… cappuccinos, frappacinos, even Folger’s drip.  Now I’m on the wagon, drinking locally grown herbal tea.  You see, this terrible thing happened.  A dream straight out of Scrooge.  I saw where my coffee comes from.

It started one morning in the kitchen.  As I poured the beans into the grinder, I suddenly found myself in a clouded forest on a mountain above the Cauca River in Colombia.  The lush vegetation was disappearing all around me as a coffee plantation grew.  Farm workers were spraying the trees with pesticides made int he valley of the RIver Rhine in Europe.  I began to choke on the poisonous fumes when I was transported… to New Orleans.  Burlap sacks of coffee beans were being unloaded from a freighter burning oil from the Orinoco River Valley of Venezuela.  It was like a spin on the house that Jack built: the freighter was made in Japan out of steel forged in Korea from iron mined in the lands of Australian aborigines.  Workers were pouring the beans into a roaster, which was fuelled with natural gas piped in from Oklahoma.  Out the other end, my beans poured into bags of nylon, polyester, and polyethylene - plastics from New Jersey - and aluminum foil from a smelter in Oregon.  That smelter was powered by electricity from dams that have nearly wiped out wild salmon in the Columbia River.

Suddenly, I was in my kitchen again, but hovering by the ceiling, looking down.  My beans, now disintegrating in the grinder, had come to my home inside a brown paper bag made from pines in the northern Rockies.  On the trip from the supermarket, my car had burned a sixth of a gallon of gasoline, spewing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organics into the air.  The gas had come from Alaska’s North Slope by way of Prince William Sound and a refinery in northern Washington.

Hovering above myself in the kitchen, I watched as I took the first sip of the day.  But from the cup came pesticides, oil, molten steel.  My ecological wake.  And it wasn’t just the coffee.  My T-shirt.  My newspaper.  My radio.  The wake of it all washed over me.  I buckled under its weight.  Then, my bathroom scale appeared, flashing 115 pounds.  My daily consumption of natural resources.  I fell to the floor, crushed and bloated.  I can’t shake this dream.  I’ve gotta get off this consumption kick.  And I’m starting with java.  I don’t know how to do it but I gotta find a way of using less.  Can we make things better?  Figure out better ways of getting around?  Get stuff from closer to home?  I don’t know, but I do know this, my name is Alan, I’m a compulsive coffee drinker, and there’s a world in my cup.

(Alan Durning is Executive Director of Northwest Environment Watch in Seattle.  This commentary was first heard on the radio show ‘Living on Earth’ on KPLU, adapted from Alan’s This Place on Earth (Sasquatch Books).)
————-
Now, I know that there are difficulties with this essay.  But as a conversation- and thought-starter, it’s pretty darn good.  I think so, at least.

Really?

Am I the only one for whom the State Department having a Flickr page is news?

So very tired…

... and yet I can’t seem to fall asleep…  ::sigh::

Stuff of my dreams….

I so want to go hang-gliding.  I’ve been wanting to for years.  It’s literally the stuff of my dreams - I have semi-regular, vivid (to the point of feeling the G-forces) flying dreams - and I always wake up feeling bereft at being stuck on the ground again.

::daydreaming sigh::

Yippee!

Hooray!  I have a job!  I am now the Assistant to the Executive Director of the Medford Chamber of Commerce.  It should be good - I’m going to be doing events planning, community liaison, and all sorts of other interesting things.  Hooray for gainful employment!

Argh.

I’m frustrated and out of sorts.  First off, since classes have started, I’ve noticed that my critical thinking skills have gone to pot.  Not that the classes have made them dive-bomb, but that being required to think even slightly critically has just highlighted how much of a toll the last six years of “civilian” life have taken.  It scares me a little, too - I worked to keep my brain going by reading “non-fluffy” books, and still I find myself in this situation.  Is time spent out of academia necessarily going to atrophy my brain, no matter my attempts to maintain it?

This spills over into non-academic stuff, too.  For whatever reason, I feel like I can’t have the same kinds of “sparkling” conversation that I used to, and that bothers me, too.  I remember how much fun it was at Reed to sit around a table in the Common and banter with my friends, and I don’t really feel like that is much of a part of my life anymore.  I wouldn’t want that to be all the conversation I had (it’s wearing after a while), but to feel like I *can’t* have it anymore is… straitening.

On the social side, I’m also frustrated to notice developing - or, rather, re-developing - within myself the same kinds of self-doubt and desire to be universally liked that plagued - and in some ways ruined - my high school years and first couple of years at Reed.  I thought I had gotten over this!  For instance, it took a real effort (I’m not kidding) to stop myself from going to a party held last Friday by some second-years in my program - and I didn’t even want to go to the party!  I don’t particularly like parties; they aren’t the kind of social setting that I feel comfortable in.  But I was so worried that, if I didn’t go, I would be this social pariah… In the end, it took repeated reminders to myself that people will either like more or not for who I am, and that trying to be someone I’m not, when generally I’m pretty happy with who I am, is both nonsensical and counter-productive, to keep me from going.

All of this - the frustration, the anxiety, the mental molasses -  is producing a huge nostalgia and homesickness in me that I’m finding it hard to assuage.  Sometimes I feel like my life now is so different than it was then as to be irreconcilable, which is a depressing and scary thought. 

What I really want, I think, is to be around some of my close Reedie/PDX friends again.  I miss you, all of you, and I think some time spent in your company would help me… hmm, feel less blurred around the internal edges, perhaps.  And/or I need some time to myself, with no deadlines, external pressures, etc., to ponder myself.  Unfortunately, I am not likely to get much time for either in the short- to medium-term, as a.) those who I would most like to see live, at the closest, in Albany, and at the furthest in Portland, and b.) I’m a full-time grad student and don’t have time for any of that navel-gazing nonsense.  ::sigh::

Geez

Here is, and I quote, a footnote from my Environmental Law textbook:

“In doing so, those courts replicated the oversimplification of an Old English dictum: ‘Le utility del chose excusera le noisomeness del stink,’ roughly, ‘The usefulness of the thing will excuse the foulness of the pollution.’ The legal French appears to be a version of a line from Ranketts case in 1684: ‘Si home fait Candells deins un vill, per que il caufe un noyfom fent al Inhabitants, uncore ceo neft alcun Nusans, car le needfulnefs de eux difpenfera ove le noifomnefs del fmell.’ P. 3 Ja. B.R. Rolle’s Abridgement, Nusans, 139 (1684). As Boomer showed, this may be relevant to the grant or denial of injunctive relief, but it should not affect a finding on the issue of liability.”

Thank goodness I didn’t try to pursue law school.  Any course where the second class involves an “explanatory” footnote that includes a large portion of untranslated Old French/English is not really the kind of course that I want to pursue for three years.