big WOWO

Mammoth

I never made a tribute to Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, who passed away a few weeks ago.  He was a titan in the publishing industry, and sci fi fans around the world will miss his contributions. 

The NY Times today published an article about the Jurassic Park concept: Regenerating a Mammoth.  Crichton didn’t invent the concept, of course, but he made a good movie out of it.  This is exciting stuff.  I don’t know if they should do it because part of me still remembers the fighting dinosaurs in the movie, but it’s fascinating that they probably can. 

Still, even though this may seem a protection against extinction, we need to do more to protect the species that we already have.  My son has a book about blue whales, and I was reading how they went from a population around 330,000 to an estimated current population of around 5,000.  If we were to lose the blue whale, we’d lose the largest animal in history.  We should fight like crazy to make sure our way of living doesn’t hurt these animals, and we should always realize that we can’t do better than nature–that $10 M price tag on the Mammoth should remind us of this.

Just saw this: Ziff Davis’s PC Magazine Will Be Online Only.  Now I know PC Mag is a computer magazine, and I know most people with computers are hooked up to the web, but I think the general trend from print to web is a problem.  It’s affected quite a few publications:

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a small publication that was established in 1945 and won a National Magazine Award last year, recently announced it would go online-only beginning in January. “We’re trying to deal with the cost pressures,” said Jonas Siegel, the Bulletin’s editor, in an interview.

The Christian Science Monitor announced in October that it would cease printing its paper weekday edition and appear online only; also in October, the Hearst Corporation closed CosmoGirl but kept its Web site.

“If you look at the list of the magazines that have gone to online, almost all of them have been magazines in trouble,” said John Fennell, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “Magazines in general are going to be dependent on print advertising for a long time into the future,” he said.

The Founder of the MMA Club

In today’s NY Times, Mixed Martial Arts Makes Its Way to High School.  The guy pictured above, Mr. In-Goo Kwak, founded an MMA club at his high school in Winchester, Massachusetts, where students practice MMA, the style of fighting which has been popularized in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.  According to Mr. Kwak, ”one of his goals with the program was to offer something to students who were not ‘the jocks who dominate the sports.’”  However, there are refugees from other sports including football and wrestling.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about this.  I think it’s great that kids are getting into shape, but at the same time, I wonder if this could have bad consequences for high school kids, who often still get into fist-fights.  Hardly anyone these days has a problem with kids studying traditional karate or kung-fu, but this one is a little different since practice resembles real fighting. 

I just saw this Washington Post article about how Wikipedia is trying to raise $6 million dollars this year to cover operating costs for its nonprofit website.

I’m reading a book called Wikinomics right now about how there’s a new economy coming out because of massive cross collaboration, but if Wikipedia, the poster child of the book, needs to beg people for money, I don’t see how this new economic model is going to survive.

Just a couple of site announcements:

1. We have a teleconference this week. If you’re interested in participating, we’re interested in you! Larry and W will be there, as will a couple of others. E-mail me or let me know your interest by posting on this blog entry, and we’ll set it up.

Seriously, I look at this as a means of changing things up for Asian American culture. The blog is cool, but there’s no substitute for real time communication. If you’re in, let us all know. This is where we do our activism.

2. I owe you all two entries that I’ve been meaning to write.

First, I promised you a perspective on meeting people of the opposite sex, especially as Better Asian Man has now fallen. I’ll make good on that promise, but it may take me a few weeks, if not more. I’m slammed with other projects right now (and I’m lacking sleep).

I was also hoping to write a piece on internet communication and the problems that come up when communicating typographically. This piece is important to me, but I have a feeling it won’t be out until next year.

With the new birth, I’ve been on paternity leave and haven’t been going out much.  Even before the second baby, we hardly ever went out for dinner, but usually I went out at least a few times a week for lunch, and we usually either went out for breakfast or lunch at least once during the weekend.  However, with the new birth, we’ve been cooking for almost two weeks straight–everything comes from the supermarket.  I’ve been getting all creative in the kitchen (although sometimes not always successfully)!   In these hard economic times, that’s a good thing; eating out adds up, and anything that cuts the bills is a good thing.

So just a few days ago, I was reading an article that said that fewer people were eating at restaurants these days.  The Bush administration’s policies have wiped out entire companies, and because people don’t have jobs and don’t have the same kind of credit cards that were once available, they are scaling back.  I joked with my wife that that must mean certain people in other industries must be doing well.  Supermarkets must be booming like crazy.  After all, a person’s gotta eat, right?

I found the above video of Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada at another blog–Zuky.  Check it out.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Japanese American internment recently.  Not thinking as in forming theories and prescriptions, which is what I usually do, but thinking as in trying to get a mental picture of what happened and what it must have been like for the internees.  I’ve been “reading” the audio book version of Robert Asahina’s Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad.  I usually put audio books into my car stereo and listen whenever I drive.  Because I’ve been at home with the baby and haven’t spent much time in the car, I’ve been a slow “reader” for this particular book.  But so far, it’s very good, with lots of first person accounts and interviews.  I haven’t yet finished it, but I’d recommend checking it out.  Most of the reviews I’ve read have been positive.

My friend Dennis lent me this DVD three months ago, and I just finished watching it.  What took me so long?

This is an excellent and informative movie.  Al Gore is at his best; you can see his passion in addressing what is certainly one of the biggest problems of the current time.  After eight years of George W. Bush and his war against planet Earth, we need to get serious about fighting global warming.

Everyone should see this movie.

The website is here: www.climatecrisis.net.

(Picture from Amazon.com.)

I first read about Michelle Rhee a while ago when she was first being considered for the chancellor position in public schools.  At the time, the brouhaha was over whether or not an Asian woman should be considered for a position that oversees schools that have large African American populations, but because she had ample support, she was able to overcome.

Now, she’s in the news again.  Michelle Rhee is trying to minimize tenure for teachers in her region by offering two new compensation plans which take teachers off the tenure track.  The idea is that tenure makes it hard for administrators to fire bad teachers, and she says that eliminating tenure will make it easier to make room for good teachers.  In exchange, good teachers would get huge bumps in salary, sometimes as much as $40,000 more.

This is huge.  Americans are always complaining how teachers are underpaid in America.  Here is a chance to bump that pay up so that our schools attract the best and brightest.  Check this out:

Maggie Slye, 31, a former teacher in Teach for America who is a literacy coach in a Washington elementary school, said she liked Ms. Rhee’s proposal because her salary would rise to $90,000 from $61,000 under the green plan.

Found this interesting newsbit on AngryAsianMan, who got it from BoingBoing.

The University of California scanned and uploaded “Aquila,” which is the yearbook for Japanese Americans interned at Tule Lake.  See it here: Tule Lake Yearbook.  It’s an interesting bit of history.  You can see more interesting primary source historical documents at the Calisphere, and there’s a specific section dedicated to the Japanese American internment here: JARDA.  I plan to check out the whole site later.