Screenshot: A Weblog

I spent a fair bit of time not only reading the content of this weblog post applying Traveling Salesman to the transportation of produce, but also the extensive comments. The idea is that one hears people say that locally grown produce has less of an environmental impact, but when you consider the transportation of food for all people, you probably ought to be minimizing the fuel spent across the entire community, which may not be the same as minimizing the fuel spent to get food to a single individual. Essentially - that distribution centers add fuel efficiency.

I think it is clear, and the comments point this out, that this is not really a condemnation of buying local produce. Fuel expenditures are not the only reason to do so. The distribution center model may be perfectly sustainable on a regional level but become more problematic on a national or international scale. I think the question the post is really wanting people who focus on buying locally, and specifically at farmer's markets, to ask themselves is - are you doing this out of an intuitive sense that local means traveled less far means less environmental impact? And if so, you may want to think about whether you are following the best route to accomplish your goals. I believe that you can come back to saying you want to buy locally and support farmers markets - because you know the food is at least from this region and not the other side of the world, because you can have first hand knowledge of how your food is grown, because you may be able to buy varieties of food that would not ship as well under a distribution model, because it helps keep local farmers in business, etc. But I enjoy seeing this type of analytical approach applied to social behavior because of the deeper conversation that you see cropping up in the comments of the post about why this should or should not be done.

Posted by Amanda at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love the Google logo for the day - not just because it looks great, but because it kept me from missing Tetris's 25th birthday. Like, well, everybody I remember losing hours and hours to playing Tetris.

I remember exactly where I first played it - in the summer of 1990 I was at the PA Governor's School for the Sciences on the CMU campus, and Tetris was installed on the computers at the tiny computer cluster just down the hill from our dorm. It was an odd little computer cluster, shoehorned into a storefront space next to a laundromat across from various food vending trucks that never seemed to actually be open that summer. But we would go down there to work and end up playing "just one game" of Tetris that would turn into two, or three, or four - or as we got better that would go on for almost as long as endurance would allow. You got to develop a style - did you play it safe, laying down solid rows and clearing line at a time along the bottom? Or did you strategically form deeper holes that would let you plonk down the perfect piece and clear four rows at once? I think all of us had the experience of the cluster closing before our game had. At the time I was surprised they let us play on the cluster computers, but looking back I remember the many "No playing Netrek on cluster computers signs and remember that that was the era of schools suffering bandwidth issues because of MMORGs and other online games, and a few kids playing Tetris on localized machines on a summer evening was the least of their cluster abuse concerns. As an aside, I had no idea that Netrek was still up and running - nor at the time did I quite grasp what a technological innovation Netrek was. Modern WoW addicts and other online gamers owe a lot to that game.

Somehow after that summer, I ended up with a copy of Tetris on my Mac at home and I played it constantly. Even when I would grow bored, i could always sit down, weeks or a month later, and play a game and fall right back into the pattern. It was the first game that I would play to the point that I would go to sleep and dream the falling shapes and the patterns of rotation needed to play the perfect game. In college, the year I had to upgrade my computer past compatibility with my copy of Tetris was actually upsetting, and I think it is then that I ended up with a copy of Super Tetris 2, which spawned another "dreaming falling blocks" level addiction with the game.

It is the many, many variations of Tetris that keep coming out that convince me I am not the only one to have had that experience. I would be surprised if there was a platform that it was not ported to. You can access a version of it through emacs. You can play it online in a million places. You can play it in an unrealistically huge format. You can watch a Tetris game as recreated in stop motion by people in colored shirts (and how perverse that even in that format I have to grit my teeth at some of the stupid "moves" being made). You can decorate your house with Tetris furniture.

Excuse me now - I am off to put on my Tetris/Escher tshirt and play some Tetris.

Posted by Amanda at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)