Author: Chris Barrus

Want to know who’s polluting your neighborhood? Let Scorecard tell you

Punch in your zip code and Scorecard will tell you just how polluted your neighborhood is and who’s doing the dumping.

Of course I had to run it on home…

Based on EPA’s most current data, this county ranked among the dirtiest/worst 10% of all counties in the US in terms of the number of people living in areas where cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants exceeds 1 in 10,000.

2,805,785 people in ORANGE County face a cancer risk more than 100 times the goal set by the Clean Air Act.

89% of the air cancer risk is from mobile sources
10% of the air cancer risk is from area sources
0.46% of the air cancer risk is from point sources

In 1999, this county ranked among the dirtier 40% of all counties in the U.S. in terms of pm-10 24-hour average concentration.

In 1999, this county ranked among the dirtiest/worst 10% of all counties in the U.S. in terms of noncancer risk score (air and water releases)

2 Superfund sites in ORANGE County caused contamination of drinking water sources

16% of surface waters in ORANGE County have beneficial uses which are impaired or threatened. (Reports may be incomplete)

Some Rivers, Streams and Creeks are impaired by Pathogens and Nutrients
Some Lakes, Reservoirs and Ponds are impaired by Nutrients and Metals
Some Estuaries, Bays and Coasts are impaired by Pathogens and Metals

The leading sources of water quality problems are Nonpoint Sources, Construction, and Urban Runoff/Storm Sewers

Now that’s a government logo! DARPA’s Information Awareness Office

darpa-logototal information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.” needs a giant eye-in-the-pyramid.

Either they have a wicked sense of humor, or they’re totally serious. Scarily, I think they’re serious…

[via Boing Boing]

From the current Arcata Eye police log

From the current Arcata Eye police log:

Friday, June 28 9:17 p.m. A space/time wormhole opened up near the storage units by the freeway, disgorging three “hippies,” their ample tresses defying gender identification. An officer conferred with the flower children, who like, kept on going on.

Monday, July 1 5:52 p.m. A caller requested police patrol his trailer park ‘hood on a hunch that his neighbors were about to call the cops on him because he and his gleaming mullet hairdo had just walked up the street.

Apple keynote post-morteum

Just got into work after watching the keynote address at the Newport Beach Apple Store. As I expected it was pretty much focused solely on Jaguar with the only hardware news being the new 20GB iPod and 17″ iMac. Curiously, there was no mention of the Xserve. I would have figured that Jobs would have at least mentioned what the early sales numbers are like (or even an acknowledgment that they’re shipping).

I suspect that the big gripe is going to be over the iTools-to-.Mac rebranding and the $99 yearly charge. I’ve already seen a couple of “bait-and-switch” comments over in the Slashdot comments, which I can vaguely understand. But folks, it’s (well, was) a free service. Would you rather that Apple dropped iTools completely? Apple probably could have eased the pain a little bit by charging $49/year outright.

Speaking only for myself, it’s totally worth the $49/year grandfather price for triple the imap mail storage and the ability to publish my calendar and address book across several computers. Your mileage, as they all say, may vary.

As for the rest of the keynote, uh, yeah yeah go Steve. Though for the first time ever, the one object of technolust demoed at a Macworld keynote wasn’t an Apple product… It was that awesome GPRS phone Steve was showing off. I want one. I really don’t want to switch away from AT&T in order to use one though.

Now if only I could get that iDVD 2.1 updater to download.

The Moldovan Ministry of Defense throws a UFO artists convention

Bruce Sterling’s Moldovan is a whole lot better than mine, so I’ll use his description:

Imagine that you were artists from the well-nigh forgotten ex-Soviet Republic of Moldova. And imagine that you somehow got your hands on some funding from the Moldovan Ministry of Defense.

And imagine that your response was to throw an international UFO artists convention.

[via Bruce Sterling]

And the winner of the 2002 Bulwer-Lytton is…

EEURGH…

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

Though I like this one from the science fiction category:

The controls looked normal–the beeping thing was beeping, the humming thing was humming, the blue number display was displaying blue numbers, the yellow number display was displaying yellow numbers, everything seemed OK, but the redundancy of this interplanetary trip left Col. Mountain feeling troubled, troubled like a beeping thing not beeping, or a humming thing not humming, or a blue number display not displaying blue numbers, or a yellow number display not displaying yellow numbers; nothing felt right.

[via MetaFilter]