Guest appearance of Jason Marsh playing the octave violin (special strings tuned an octave lower than normal), playing Pat Metheny’s great ambient piece Sea Song.

 

 Sea Song [4:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

There’s a title for a new song, don’t you think?  Jason and I are performing as the “opening act” for the Placer Nature Center’s 4th Friday lecture series this week.

This lecture is on The Environmental Legacy of the Gold Rush and will be presented by Dr. William Murphy Friday Jan 23rd.  Music starts at 7PM, lecture at 7:30.  See you there! 

It’s always interesting to see how much travel one does during the year.  At one point it used to be a source of pride, but now it’s becoming a source of carbon and of family disruption.  Either way, without good data you can’t judge yourself against your goals – I predict lifestyle data collection will be a major theme of the coming year.  Dopplr is a site that helps record your travel and look for opportunities to link up with your travelling friends.

This year, they’ve introduced a personalized annual report.  Mine is here.  A total of 61,252 kilometers last year, emitting around 7700 kg of carbon.  Most enlightening to me is the total of over two months - 73 days - away from home during the year.  And I felt was lighter on travel than in the past!

And I’m not off to a good start for 2009 – away 13 days so far and it’s only the 20th…

[Update 22 Jan: If you think this kind of data analysis is obsessive take a look at how beautiful obsession can be with the Felton Annual Report 2008.]

My favorite story of the week: Hayduke Lives: Tim DeChristopher’s Heroic Act of Creative Civil Disobedience.  In short – a University of Utah student posed as a bidder in one of the BLM’s parting-shots mineral-rights auctions, bid up the parcels by about $500K, and walked away winning $1.8M worth of leases around Arches National Park.  Of course, he had no intention to actually pay, was detained and now faces federal charges.  But until it’s resolved, those leases are protected from exploitation, and the process of the auctions is undergoing greater media scrutiny.

What else is inspiring though, is that he is trying to raise the $45K initial payment in order to keep his bid legitimate until the end of the Bush administration, and then there’s a good chance the new administration will keep them off the books.  In just a few days, he’s attracted $37K – plus a bit from me - and I’m hopeful that he can fill the rest in the remaining two days.

Bush, our turn to prescribe “two of these”!