Apollo Group Profiting from Bankruptcy

In an article in Yahoo! Finance I noticed that the Apollo Group is behind 3 of the significant bankruptcies mentioned.

Are they bad at business or do they know what they're doing? I don't know enough about business to say how one might go about sinking a business and profiting from it, but I'm sure it can be done.

They think in images—prose is for them a code

My wanderings around the web which led me to this post, in reverse:

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Meme

The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing are the same act—these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.

WildChildren

"Rebellion to tyrants
is obedience to God."
—Thomas Jefferson

Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Which I got to by way of Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Cyberculture.

Does anyone still use Yahoo's directory search? Does anyone remember when that's basically what Yahoo looked like? Remember when it was just a college project?

Exploring Yahoo's directory provides more opportunities for random finds compared to the more common keyword searches. The directories offer you avenues of exploration you may not have thought of otherwise.

The Internet Today

Today on the Internet I met a young man named Bryan Bishop.  I didn't meet him in the conventional sense.  I first met him on Slashdot when he posted this question, What is the first day in a University Lab Like?  Again, I didn't meet him as in, "Hi, I'm Mitchell.  Nice to meet you."  "Hi, I'm Bryan.  Nice to meet you."  I met him in an Internet sort of way.  His words gave me a bit of an introduction to him.  Intrigued, I clicked his name and wound up on his homepage.  What an interesting fellow.  It's amazing to see someone who's done so much and has so many interesting ideas.  I clicked around on some of his links and followed some threads here and there and generally spent a whole bunch of time reading somewhat random stuff of interest to a high school senior in Texas.  I found some really cool sites, my current favorite being KurzweilAI.net.  If nothing else, check out their trippy search function, The Brain.  Thanks to Bryan for being a cool guy who puts worthwhile things on the Internet.  I wouldn't know the guy if I tripped over him but I feel like I kinda know him a little bit now.

In other thrilling Internet goings-on spotlighted by Slashdot, there's an article at Yahoo! about the ongoing existence of the top level domain for the Soviet Union, Back in the USSR: Soviet internet domain name resists death.  Maybe the old American Confederacy could get its own TLD.  Or the Republic of Texas.  That'd be cool.

Priests of Vulcan say, US has bad breath

Yahoo! recently posted an article about CO2 emissions in the US, Where Global Warming Begins. The following, insanely interesting video is embedded in the article. Created by the Vulcan Project at Purdue University, the animations in the video bring to life the climate-altering mechanical breath of a nation.

For my Gulf Coast readers, check out how much CO2 emissions are coming from around our seemingly pristine beaches. Looks to me like the air and water of the Gulf of Mexico are an international dumping ground. Also notice that the graphic in the Yahoo! article show that the rapidly growing Southeast is increasing its CO2 output as the Northeast decreases. Great. Here in Pensacola we're right in the path of the growing plumes of pollutants coming from Southeast Texas, New Orleans, and Mobile. And it appears we're creating plenty ourselves.

Wouldn't it be nice if our region could grow responsibly, in a sustainable manner?

Oh, that's right...growth, as we know it, is unsustainable.

Is collapse inevitable?

Will we change our ways and be better citizens of Planet Earth? Videos like the one from the Vulcan Project go a long way towards educating people on the consequences of our technologies and reminding us that we are part of a global community.

Open Your Wallet to Open Computing

It's nice to get up early.  I recommend it.  There's something right about it.

Gizmodo informed me that computer manufacturer Acer may start producing an open platform gaming console.  I imagine it's basically going to be a gaming oriented linux based desktop computer.  Good idea.  I hope Acer succeeds.  By the way, the computer above is not the one referenced in the article.  The one above is the bitchin' Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue.  What is up with that stuff beside on the left side of the keyboard?  I think it might be an alien device.

In other "open" news, Verizon is, and this is almost impossible to imagine in today's business landscape, studying ways to improve peer to peer traffic!  Verizon has once again shown that it wants to do business the way an increasing number of consumers who want to use technology the way they want to use it and are simply looking for the fastest, cheapest service provider.  While companies like Cox and Comcast are throttling users who are heavy bandwidth consumers, Verizon is looking to improve such users' experiences.  Coupled with last year's announcement that they would open up their mobile service to "any app, any device", Verizon is showing itself to be a worthwhile, progressive business.

Speaking of open phones, check out this video Google's open phone software, Android.

Doomsday Seed Vault a Cocaine Warehouse?

It seems that there is often troubling news mixed into otherwise promising stories. For example, I just read Biodiversity 'doomsday vault' comes to life in Arctic. It's nice to know that some of our planet's biodiversity is being backed up like we back up our harddrives. It's always good to have a back-up copy, right? I'm not troubled much by the thought that we might actually need such a vault. As a child of the Cold War, I came to terms with mass catastrophe, apocalypse, armageddon, and all that years ago. As someone who lives along the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico, I know first-hand what regional devastation looks and feels like.

What troubled me in this article was this paragraph:

Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the "doomsday vault" collection, but some of the world's biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.

How odd that there were gene vaults in Iraq and Afghanistan, two major places of violent American meddling. I wonder how many countries have gene vaults.

Another troubling bit of info in the article:

...samples sent from Colombia have been closely scrutinised by police to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.

WTF!? I hope to God that petty moralities aren't interfering in an important scientific/historical endeavor. We're talking about the future of life on this planet and some jackasses are worried that the vault's going to become a cocaine distribution warehouse? Seriously?

There are a lot of powerful people on this planet who need to grow up.