Dan Siemon

Thoughts and musings

Climate WarsNovember 16 2008

[Previous post on Climate Wars]

For most people it is hard to get a sense of what climate change may mean to society and the world. So the world gets 2C hotter. The daily temperature fluctuates far more than this amount. What difference will 2C make? The warnings of sea level rise may have a bit more weight with the general population but how many people really have a good sense of the elevation of a particular point on the map?

In his latest book, Climate Wars [Chapters, Amazon], Gwynne Dyer walks through what climate change means to societies throughout the world. This is accomplished through an interesting mix of fact, extrapolation and fiction.

A large portion of Climate Wars is dedicated to real world facts and ideas. This is the kind of information one might expect in a boo

Who owns ideas?November 11 2008

Recently CBC’s excellent Ideas program ran a documentary on copyright entitled Who own’s ideas?. The episode provides a really nice overview of the issues and even includes a bit of history which is too often ignored in this debate.

Both a podcast and a direct MP3 download are available.

A few good booksNovember 8 2008

Here are a few short reviews of some of the more interesting books I have read somewhat recently. Beyond the below I have also recently read Blink: The power of thinking without thinking and Here comes everybody. Both of these books are also worth reading. Hopefully I’ll get around to a couple quick reviews at some point.

Good to Great

Author: Jim Collins

Good to Great is a famous business book which describes a huge amount of research which aimed to find out what makes a company attain and sustain exceptional results. The rigorous research that drives Good to Great makes it stand out. Given the high profile of this book the reader may well recognize certain ideas in their corporate lives. 4 out of 5.

Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolute

Windows AzureNovember 3 2008

Interesting overview of Microsoft’s foray into the cloud computing world.

Windows Azure from a Developer’s Perspective

Climate WarsNovember 2 2008

A couple of years ago I attended a speech at UWO by Gwynne Dyer. As expected it was an interesting talk. One of things he mentioned was (paraphrasing) that he began to take climate change seriously when he realized that various military establishments were starting to plan for the its effects. Most notably mass population migration and starvation. Specifically, the British military was planning how it was going to stop people from migrating to the island when more southerly lands became unable to feed their populations. Interesting stuff.

Today while wondering around Chapters I discovered Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer. This is going to be an interesting read.