How will Roger Federer deal with being #2

Image by mandj98 via Flickr

CINCINNATI (Reuters) – Roger Federer’s record 4-1/2 year reign as world number one could end this week after he was beaten 7-6 4-6 7-6 by Croatia’s Ivo Karlovic in the third round of the Cincinnati Masters on Thursday.

Spaniard Rafael Nadal, who beat Federer in this year’s Paris and Wimbledon finals, will take over from the Swiss as the world’s top ranked player if he wins the tournament on Sunday.

(Reporting by Richard Eaton; editing by Ken Ferris)

Massive rock fall

Image by quinet via Flickr

BC Minister of Roads advises that it will take 5 days to clear this blockage. Not a pretty story and not a great harbinger for the 2010 Olympics.

It is impossible to determine which parts of this mountain side highway is going to give away no matter how much is spent on construction of the improved Sea-to-Sky highway from Vancouver to Whistler.

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Trees of Love????????????????

Culture? Go figure!

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Have you been Google-ized too?

Google seems to have iconic features in more ways than one. It is a prominent element in most browsers, the primary web research tool, a top stock, offering a desktop alternative, a brand that is ubiquitous and as recognizable as Apple and the Golden Arches.

Nicholas Carr, who specializes in unconventional insights about computers and computer uses, has contrived a thought provoking question discussed by several “experts” here.

A related question about new forms of reading is discussed in this NY Times piece.

My daily ration of reading is heavily weighted by all that I read on the Internet, the news, blogs, book reviews, history stuff and so on and on. I used to read at least one hard copy newspaper and magazine every day or other day at least.

How has my googleizing and web reading affected me? I know more about the world and about myself in some very specific ways. So I say to Mr. Carr, in the every day sense I have been made unstoopid by Google and its context the web and blog spheres. I spend longer periods almost every day thinking and musing here about a variety of issues, events and visual experiences. It’s a better life IMHO!

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Embedding a Wordle

You can see two wordles on the left hand side of my blog, one with a black background and the other white. I was reading about embedding wordles and realized I had the tools to do it with Skitch (to grab the screen image as a .jpg) and Mars-Edit to receive the .jpg and post it to my blog.

So here is the embed:

If you want to play with Wordles just click to Wordle.com

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Mountains and the peloton on their way to Alpe d”Huez

Another Big Picture photo.

I dumped Telus’ DSL offering about 2 yrs ago

and I haven’t regretted it. Here is confirmation from a post from Silicon Alley Insider!

Is DSL dead? The two biggest U.S. phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, reported tiny broadband net subscriber additions for Q2. Two possibilities: The U.S. broadband market is getting saturated. Or the telcos are getting hammered by cable giants like Comcast. Or both.

Monday morning, Verizon (VZ) said it signed up just 54,000 net new broadband subscribers last quarter, down from 288,000 a year ago. Last week, AT&T (T) said it signed up 46,000 net new broadband subscribers, down from 400,000 in the previous year.

What’s the deal? Part of the problem, no doubt, is that broadband penetration is reaching a saturation point in the U.S., and that broadband growth rates are going down regardless. U.S. broadband penetration grew an average 22% annually from 2004 through 2007, Goldman Sachs estimates; it projects 5% annual growth through 2011. And a crappy housing market doesn’t help new subscriber additions, either.

But a potentially bigger problem is that many telco customers, hungry for more bandwidth than DSL can deliver, are taking their business elsewhere — to cable competitors like Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWC), Cablevision (CVC), etc. Goldman estimates that cable took about 70% of the market’s “flowshare” in Q2, up from 53% in Q1.

Le Tour de France gets to Paris at the end of the 20th stage

Image via Wikipedia

and the winner, Carlos Sastre, enjoys his triumph with l’Arc de Triomphe in the background!

In case you are interested you can view a lot more Tour de F photos at Big Picture!

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A nice ordinary picture vs. its HDRed sibling

Before

and after

For me it’s more about visual effects. Of course I couldn’t get the second image without the first. But for me the second is a more arresting image. It has a higher “grab your eye” factor!

Good and practical news from NY Times Science News

Image via Wikipedia

NY Times is full of all kinds of news. In fact, it claims to “print all the news that is fit to print”.

In its Science section NYT publishes the writings of that once wannabe scientist John Tierney. In his latest (7/29) he offers positive information about 10 things you might worry about, whether on vacation or not.

1. Killer hot dogs.

Given the latest results about the positive results of saturated fat diets “If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.”

2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C.

“After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner.”

3. Forbidden fruits from afar.

“Food from other countries is often produced and shipped much more efficiently than domestic food, particularly if the local producers are hauling their wares around in small trucks. One study showed that apples shipped from New Zealand to Britain had a smaller carbon footprint than apples grown and sold in Britain.”

4. Carcinogenic cellphones.

“As my colleague Tara Parker-Pope has noted, there is no known biological mechanism for the phones’ non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer, and epidemiological studies have failed to find consistent links between cancer and cellphones.”

5. Evil plastic bags.

“Take it from the Environmental Protection Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions — to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.”

If you want to know about the other 5 items click here!

I guess it’s as true as ever that getting better information is a good antidote to panicking about negative reports from wherever, MSM, the Internet, your favorite radio voice . . .

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