Earth Day: the savior of California’s coast

Since today is Earth Day I want to honor a special man who recently passed away, Peter Douglas. For more than 34 years he protected the coasts of California with spectacular success.

“A World Bank team that visited California last year rated it as having the best coastal protection in the world and expressed amazement that the commission had never been captured by the industries it regulates.”

The rating is in large part due to Peter Douglas, the man who wrote the law to protect the coast in 1972 (Proposition 20), created the California Coastal Commission, and ran it until his retirement in 2011.

“This coast is still a place people identify as being theirs, it’s a precious treasure, and our job is to protect it for them,” Peter Douglas said before he retired in 2011.

In many ways he is a role model for me and what I want to accomplish. I cannot stop learning from him and how he thought:

A good argument can be made that no one since Father Junipero Serra has had as much impact on coastal development in California as Peter Douglas. Douglas, who died a week ago, wrote and helped pass Proposition 20, the California Coastal Commission initiative, in 1972. He wrote the 1976 Coastal Act, worked for the commission from its early days and was its outspoken executive director…despite often fierce opposition, including a nearly successful attempt by then-Gov. Pete Wilson to get rid of him in 1996.

keep reading – The Savior of California’s Coast

Poking fun at Google CEO, Larry Page – just how often does he say “excited”?

You know that favorite word you like to say 16 times in conversation?

A humorous post from Liz Gannes at All Things D, found the Google CEO’s favorite word.

Larry Page is so excited. And he just can’t hide it…Page does like to talk about how excited he is.

Having noticed the Google CEO’s fondness for using variations of “exciting” and “excited” when discussing his company’s products and businesses, we at AllThingsD had a bit of fun with the transcripts from his recent earnings calls.

Since Page reassumed the CEO role last year, he hit an all-time high of 16 mentions of “excited” on last year’s third-quarter call. His company’s performance made him both “incredibly excited” and “amazingly excited.”

This quarter, Page was a bit more muted: only eight mentions.

Not that we’re claiming to be scientific — at all — but Page does seem to be more effusive when Google beats analysts’ estimates for Google’s earnings per share.

 

The full list of exciting-isms:

 

Hello, Silicon Beach – the burgeoning tech scene in Los Angeles

What could be better than beautiful weather, beaches, and your favorite scrappy start-up?

Two cities in Los Angeles are slowly becoming hubs of technology, Santa Monica and Venice.

In the spread out landscape of Los Angeles these two cities are adjacent close-knit urban areas, with ample office space, coffee shops, restaurants, and apartments. But, not the typical high-rise or pre-fab buildings, these are old school one-story remodeled spaces.

Think fun, diverse, and in some places gritty (i.e. hipster).

Recently, both held town hall meetings with local companies and government officials to strategize growth:

Santa Monica devoted much of its annual State of the City address to promoting the tech community, with Mayor Richard Bloom declaring: “Today we are not just Santa Monica, but Silicon Beach and the Tech Coast.” (In an unofficial vote later, hundreds in attendance overwhelmingly threw their support to the Silicon Beach name.)

“Our technology-qualified workforce, creative workplaces and leading broadband infrastructure will keep our economy well-positioned for future growth,” Bloom said.

After the mayor’s address and a short video touting the rise of tech companies in Santa Monica, Jason Nazar, who is chief executive and co-founder of local start-up Docstoc.com, moderated a panel of people connected to the tech scene.

via LA Times – Technology

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Silicon Beach is spreading to Venice.

The quirky beach-side community drew hundreds of attendees to a packed town hall meeting dubbed The Emergence of Silicon Beach.

Executives from Google, local start-ups Viddy and Mogreet, and accelerator Amplify were on hand for a panel moderated by Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who repeatedly told audience members that they were witnessing a “Venicessance.” Nearly two dozen tech companies set up booths to tout their products and ideas to about 400 attendees.

“Ten years ago, it was very hard,” James Citron said. “You had to fly up to San Francisco and do the Sand Hill Road dance, for those of you who know the venture capital world. Now they’re coming down here looking for great companies, so that’s a big fundamental change.”

via LA Times – Tech Now

 

It also helps that Google Los Angeles has set-up shop in the, Frank Gehry-designed, Binoculars Building in Venice.

For more on the start-ups in the area, including who’s hiring, Los Angeles Times reporter, Andrea Chang, has been doing a great job covering all of the start-ups in Silicon Beach.

Here are a few of them:

Downtown Santa Monica, the 3rd Street Promenade

 

//Photos – majunznk, …love maegan

Inside the forbidden land – environmental photos of Russia from National Geographic

For an American, these photos are truly breathtaking. For most of our lives Russia has been an impenetrable vast region, indeed the largest country in the world, with millions of acres of natural wonders.

My own heritage brings me back to Belarus (the first photo below). Enjoy these photos from National Geographic Russia and their Google+ page.

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I apologize for the captions since they are Google Translations from Russian (I’m also amazed that I can auto-translate a language in a browser with one click).

"Snow-white spring in the Belarusian forest." Photo by: Christine Lebedinskaya.

 

Fog in the mountains near Chemal, Altai. Photo by: Michael Evstratov

 

Moon. River Teriberka, Murmansk region. Photo by: Aleksandr Bergan

Continue reading “Inside the forbidden land – environmental photos of Russia from National Geographic”

Apple, Amazon, & Microsoft build data centers around dirty energy

The current explosion in cloud computing offered by major IT companies is driving significant new demand for dirty energy like coal and nuclear power, according to a new report from Greenpeace International.

The report, “How Clean is Your Cloud?” shows a growing split within the tech industry between companies that are taking steps to power their clouds with clean energy, like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, and companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft who lag behind by choosing to build their growing fleets of data centres to be powered by coal and nuclear energy.

“When people around the world share their music or photos on the cloud, they want to know that the cloud is powered by clean, safe energy,” said Gary Cook, Greenpeace International Senior Policy Analyst. “Yet highly innovative and profitable companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are building data centres powered by coal and acting like their customers won’t know or won’t care.”

The report research found that if the cloud were a country its electricity demand would currently rank 5th in the world, and is expected to triple by 2020.

“While many IT companies have made great strides in efficiency, that’s only half the picture – they need to make sure their energy comes from clean sources,” said Gary Cook, Greenpeace International Senior Policy Analyst.

Companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook are beginning to lead the sector down a clean energy pathway through innovations in energy efficiency, prioritising renewable energy access when siting their data centres, and demanding better energy options from utilities and government decision-makers.

 

keep reading – Apple, Amazon, & Microsoft choose dirty energy

Where’s the coldest surf spot in Orange County?

Surfing in Southern California means you hang out in water normally 55-65 degrees. Pretty cold and worth a wetsuit most of the time. Every once in a while the wind gets going and blows away the entire surface of the ocean, revealing the frigid lower layer. As that current comes up (upwelling) the water drops drastically, like 10 degrees or more.

It happened once last summer, in the middle of August. The water went from 65 to 50 overnight. I couldn’t believe it and, of course, nobody was in the water. Except for me, that is, I put on some booties and enjoyed the least crowded day all summer.

It turns out that these upwellings happen an awful lot in one particular spot.

 

 

So where’s the coldest surf spot in Orange County?

Blackies in Newport seems to be, thanks to the Newport Submarine Canyon trenched just offshore…. which explains why a wind/ water upwelling event like we had yesterday Sunday March 18, 2012, with 25-40 knots winds for a 24 hour period, turned the water from colder to coldest, at around 50 degrees at first light this morning…. But we’re over it. Can’t we just get our normal cold water back?

via Ghetto Juice

 

Bob Marley: A Rastafarian’s Tale (trailer)

Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald presents the first authorized portrait of the icon in an attempt to reveal the man behind the myth. Featuring interviews with family members and close associates, Marley is a cinematic elegy paying tribute to the musician’s philosophical convictions and social idealism.

Macdonald chronicles Marley’s life from an impoverished start in a Jamaican shack through his rise to stardom, subsequent political interventions at the triumphant One Love Peace Concert in 1978, conversion to Rastafarianism and tragic denouement in a snowy Bavarian clinic seeking treatment for the melanoma which was to kill him in 1981 at the young age of 36.

Shot predominantly in the verdant Jamaican hills and set to the soundtrack of much-loved Marley classics, Macdonald’s documentary is imbued with a romance befitting the enduring global appeal and overwhelming cultural value of the reggae colossus.

Bob Marley: A Rastafarian’s Tale is released Today.

via Nowness.com.