What year is this?

Wow. I reset the background color in my browser to something other than white, so that I could check that a GIF that a graphic artist had sent me actually had a transparent background. And now I find that at least two sites on my blogroll, as well as my bookmarking service Connotea, don’t bother to set white as the background color for their pages. Yuck!

Must try harder

Scott Rosenberg points out that Facebook’s categories of friendship are useful if you’re nineteen years old, but not so much if you’re a grownup. Here are the possible answers to “How do you know [this friend]?”

  • Lived together
  • Worked together
  • From an organization or team
  • Took a course together
  • From a summer / study abroad program
  • Went to school together
  • Traveled together
  • In my family
  • Through a friend
  • Through Facebook
  • Met randomly
  • We hooked up
  • We dated
  • I don’t even know this person

He’s absolutely right: a minute or two of doodling on my desk pad, and I came up with the following additional choices:

  • My neighbor
  • Through church/mosque/synagogue/temple/coven/…
  • We are in the same profession [we might be in the same “organization,” and we might not]
  • [This friend] is my lawyer/clergyman/doctor/accountant/child’s teacher/psychotherapist/taxidermist/…
  • I am [this friend’s] customer
  • [This friend] is my customer

And to be really useful, the information has to be even more specific than that. In my PDA Contacts app, I use one of the user-defined fields to keep track of what theater project I know somebody from. So that if I forget that I know Lori K. because she was the producer for Forum in 2001, my organizer won’t.

Bottle it up

Luís Gil explains why cork is a better choice for stoppering wine bottles than its synthetic alternatives. Some of his arguments are not persuasive, and amount to “we’ve always done it this way,” but consider:

6) Cork is a renewable resource and cork oak forests are one of the most sustainable natural systems, providing the habitat of several endangered species and supporting one of the highest levels of biodiversity among European forests. Cork comes from the bark of the cork oak [Quercus suber], and is harvested only once every nine or ten years, without detriment to the tree.

* * *

10) Cork production is based in poor rural areas where it provides much needed jobs. About 150,000 people around the world work with cork, and it is an important part of Southern Europe and North African economies.

* * *

13) Cork sequesters carbon from the atmosphere; a cork stopper sequesters about twice is weight of CO2; all the cork stoppers produced in one year represent the CO2 pollution of about 49,000 automobiles each year.

Granite kissed

in progress WhitmanStone masons are scribing a quotation from Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” into the Q Street N.W. entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro station. The complete stanza reads:

Thus in silence, in dream’s projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hos-
   pitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so
   young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet
   and sad;
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have
   cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Update: Via a DCist comment thread, WMATA’s press release on the project.

Car!

Get your spaldeen and meet me on the stoop: Timothy Williams and Cassi Feldman find a few kids still playing street games.

Last year in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, 58-year-old Delores Hadden Smith organized a street festival at the Gowanus Houses and had adults teach children games with candy-coated names that sounded like the made-up concoctions they were.

There was red devil; box ball; bluebird, bluebird through my window; hot peas and butter; a variation of ring-a-levio called cocolevio; steal the bacon; look who’s here punch-a-nella; knockout; and duck duck goose.

Market signals

Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market. The upshot: offsets are helpful (though there are skeptics when it comes to forestry offsets), but you may not be getting what you pay for.

I returned to Stanford’s Schneider to ask what kinds of offsets he might buy. “It’s legitimate to put windmills in if you displace fossil-fuel power,” he said. “It’s legitimate to put coal emissions underground if you could figure out how to make that permanent. Financing a gas plant in India if they were going to put in coal would also be good.” The key with all of these is they reduce carbon emissions at their source.