Paparazzi with cell phones

Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Eric Schmidt reconcile over coffee
[Via AppleInsider]

Portrayed by reports in recent months to be brutal rivals who dislike each other, CEOs Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs were spotted drinking coffee Friday in Palo Alto, Calif.

Photos of Schmidt and Jobs talking were snapped and sent to Gizmodo. Jobs was in his trademark mock turtleneck and jeans at the cafe Calafia in the Town and Country shopping center. The establishment is owned by former Google chef Charlie Ayers.

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I love the idea that they just happened to need a cup of coffee and sat out front where everyone could see them. I also love the thought of what paparazzi following around two of the wealthiest businessmen in the country. How uniquely American!

Easy access to 30,000 books

by ‘Playingwithbrushes’

iBookstore to Have Free Titles from Project Gutenberg?
[Via Mactropolis.com - Your Friendly Global Mac Community]

App Advice is reporting that they have noticed a large number of free books are available in the iBookstore from Project Gutenberg.

If you’re not familiar with the Gutenberg Project, it’s a free online digital library supported by volunteers. This library already includes over 30,000 free eBooks from the public domain; it is an amazing popular resource.

Well, when checking out Apple’s iBookstore, I noticed that Apple has decided to include these directly. I obviously haven’t had the chance to count them, but it appears that the entire catalog is available for free download.

This news shouldn’t come as a total surprise. Apple posted an iBooks feature page earlier this month which confirmed that the iBooks application does in face support the open ePub standard. This same standard is used by Project Gutenberg and other similar open libraries. That means the Project Gutenburg titles are compatible with iPad from the start.

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Because the iBook reader can recognize a common open standard, the iPad will immediately have access to all free books that use this format. So, the 30,000 titles in the Project Gutenberg library will be there from day one.

I expect to be downloading some science fiction titles. Tor provides short stories for free download. ePub Books has a ton of older titles.

It’ll be interesting if the pricing for some back catalogs will make impulse buying much more likely. The possible experimentation with pricing that we may see, sans best seller stuff, could make for interesting times.

Making money with apps

by FeatheredTar

The age of the app: The Apple App Store has emerged as one of the most chaotic marketplaces on Earth, with thousands of independent developers jockeying for smartphone users’ attention. Think it sounds like small stakes? Think again”
[Via MacSurfer's Apple]

As a young programmer just out of grad school in France, Fabien Sanglard dreamed of building a computer graphic that could produce a realistic illusion of a liquid-filled screen. But the hardware required wasn’t yet readily available, and he set the task aside. Sanglard eventually settled in Toronto and took a gig writing code for Rogers Communications. But in 2008, after Apple unleashed the iPhone and the accompanying development software that allows programmers to create applications for the device, he quickly realized the solution to his problem was at hand.

It only took a few weeks for Sanglard to create Fluid, a program that allows a user to make the iPhone screen ripple and glisten with the stroke of a finger. After passing muster with Apple’s vetting teams, Fluid debuted in Apple’s App Store on May 9, 2009. Thirty thousand people downloaded it on day one; within two weeks, the tally had reached one million, making it the No. 1 app worldwide that month.

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I wrote about this type of economy some time ago. Just as musicians and authors have found ways to monetize their works directly to the internet, so too have computer programmers. Fluffy little novelties can make one a good living.

I know everyone from my generation wants to create the next pet rock. Now they can, only online.

Sounders forever [Updated with photo]

[taken with my iPhone last night. The other half of the stadium was just as packed.]

My son and I went to the Sounders opening game last night. We have had season tickets since last year and really enjoy the games. But last night was special.

Not only because the Sounders won, playing some really great soccer. Nor was it being there, standing the entire game, with 36, 421 fans, the largest attendance for any Sounder’s game.

It was doing it in the pouring rain. For the first time at any Sounders game, it was raining throughout the game. And not just a Seattle mist but a hard rain, with real raindrops.

Yet the stands were completely full for the whole game. No empty seats to speak of.

Even in a cold rain, with no cover, the fans stayed the whole game, often making the stadium so loud that I thought it might actually vaporize the rain.

I love soccer.

I will be using iWork on my iPad

by dougbelshaw

Why Apple included iWork on the iPad
[Via Les Posen's Presentation Magic]

Last month at Macworld 2010, I reminded attendees in my Presentation Magic workshop that I had written about Keynote, Apple’s presentation software part of its iWork productivity suite, and how it might function on a tablet device. Here’s the link I illustrated in my talk:

In his January 27 special event, Steve Jobs spoke of approaching the iWork team and asking if it was possible to bring iWork to the iPad.

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I use iWork all the time on my desktop and laptop, particularly Keynote. The ability to work on presentations, as well as actual do the presentation, almost anywhere – simply add a pico projector – is really exciting.

And the price is just about right. It will be interesting to see what other high powered apps make it to the iPad. Microsoft has to be looking, doesn’t it?

The ground may be giving up carbon dioxide faster than expected

<i>by normanack

Stunner: Nature review of 20 years of field studies finds soils emitting more CO2 as planet warms – Biogeochemist: “… perhaps most likely explanation is that increasing temperatures have increased rates of decomposition of soil organic matter, which has increased the flow of CO2. If true, this is an important finding: that a positive feedback to climate change is already occurring at a detectable level in soils.”
[Via Climate Progress]

One of the single greatest concerns of climate scientists is that human-caused warming will cause amplifying feedbacks in the carbon-cycle. Such positive feedbacks, whereby an initial warming releases carbon into the air that causes more warming, would increase both the speed and scale of climate change, greatly complicating both mitigation and adaptation.

The most worrisome amplifying feedback is the defrosting of the tundra (see “Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting). Another major, related feedback now appears to be soil respiration, whereby plants and microbes in the soil give off more carbon dioxide as the planet warms.

As Nature reports (article here, study here, subs. req’d), a review of 439 studies around the world — including 306 performed from 1989 to 2008 — found “soil respiration had increased by about 0.1% per year between 1989 and 2008, the span when soil measurement techniques had become standardized.” Physorg.com interviewed the lead author, who said bluntly:

“There’s a big pulse of carbon dioxide coming off of the surface of the soil everywhere in the world,” said ecologist Ben Bond-Lamberty of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “We weren’t sure if we’d be able to measure it going into this analysis, but we did find a response to temperature.”

The increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils — about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989 — won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time, such as in Arctic tundra. This analysis could not distinguish whether the carbon was coming from old stores or from vegetation growing faster due to a warmer climate. But other lines of evidence suggest warming is unlocking old carbon, said Bond-Lamberty, so it will be important to determine the sources of extra carbon.

Indeed the study itself concludes:

The available data are, however, consistent with an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change.

Moreover, a major study in the February issue of the journal Ecology by Finnish researchers, “Temperature sensitivity of soil carbon fractions in boreal forest soil,” has a similar conclusion. The Finnish Environment Institute, which led the study, explained the results in a release, “Soil contributes to climate warming more than expected – Finnish research shows a flaw in climate models“:

According to the results, the climatic warming will inevitably lead to smaller carbon storage in soil and to higher carbon dioxide emissions from forests. These emissions will further warm up the climate, and as a consequence the emissions will again increase. This interaction between the carbon dioxide emissions from soil and the warming of climate will accelerate the climate change.

The present climate models underestimate the increase of carbon dioxide emissions from soil in a warmer climate. Thereby they also underestimate the accelerating impact of the largest carbon storage in forests on the climate change. This result is also essential with respect to the climate policy measures concerning forests. The carbon storage of forests is, more than previously assumed, sensitive to climatic warming, and the carbon sink capacity of forests is endangered. To maintain the carbon storage, the accumulation of organic material in forests should increase. However, this is not compatible with the present bioenergy goals for forests and with the more and more intensive harvesting of biomass in forests.

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This is one of the worries – that positive feedback loops increase the rate of carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere. If CO2 increases more rapidly then the models may underestimate the effects of climate change.

Much of this increase is coming from the northern or boreal forests. This is also where melting tundra will also release large amounts of methane. The combination release of both greenhouse gases is disturbing and does not bode well for the world’s climate.

It is not like in a bathtub

<i>by nattu

What makes sea level rise uneven
[Via Hot Topic]

An illuminating article by Michael Lemonick just published in Yale Environment, which I summarise here, communicates some of the developing understanding of just how uneven sea level rise is likely to prove. It will vary greatly by region. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that the land is actually rising in some places, including northern Canada and Scandinavia, which are still recovering from the crushing weight of the Ice Age glaciers, albeit from 10,000 years ago. Their sea-level increases are less than the global average would suggest, since their land areas are rising a few millimeters a year.   On the other hand land around the periphery of where the glaciers sat, such as Chesapeake Bay and the south of England, was squeezed upwards by the downward pressure nearby and has been sinking back by a few millimetres a year ever since, so sea level rise is greater than average in these regions. Land is also subsiding in coastal places where massive oil and gas extraction has occurred such as Louisiana.

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This is a really nice discussion examining why sea level does not rise uniformly around the world. Some place may actually see the sea level fall. Understanding why is a useful exercise to help prevent the misleading statements of denialists from being confusing.