Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I busted up my knee today and walking was no fun so instead of heading to the park after school, Nefarious and I spent an hour in the pool which was fun as always, although because the problem in my knee was with motion rather than weight I probably could have run around just as easily. Ouch. I’m sure it’ll be better after a night’s rest. At the pool an old lady was getting dubious swimming lessons… There’s a guy that “teaches” at the pool we go to and I don’t think he has any qualifications and his teaching style is lacking to say the least. He basically just yelled half-assed instructions to her as she walked/swam lengths along the shallow pool. There’s no way she learned anything — she’d have been better off learning to swim from a book.

I was a little disturbed to find out that a picture of Ari and my paintings made it into an anti-Islam video (at 2 minutes in) — on one hand it’s a little disturbing and creepy, but on the other hand, such is the power of Google Images… I know I’ve randomly plucked an image many a time. I think the video may also be making fun of my home’s tidiness. Anyway, I’m no friend of Islam, or any religion, so I suppose I don’t care that much… I was more interested in reading about how — as I had said, “best ghost town ever” — Dubai is collapsing and real estate sales have dropped to zero and people are fleeing the country, abandoning their cars at the airport as they go, hoping to avoid debtor’s prison.

Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives.

Speaking of things going bad, 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic by Bruce Sterling is a good read.

Continuing in the Arab world, I saw the video above of a “sand geyser” today after watching some sand storm videos — I liked the quote from the Koran, “and the earth throws up her burdens from within,” that accompanied it. I’ve never heard of this phenomena before… If I had to guess I’d say that it’s actually mud. But I don’t know.

Other than that, I’m teaching myself to write Firefox extensions.

I really haven’t decided what I’m going to do with my cooking blog, but I posted one of my favorite meals to it, a really simple veggies in lime and garlic butter. Caitlin and I also went to T&T yesterday (the big Chinese supermarket down by Cherry Beach) where I picked up this giant bag of peas for $1.94 (it weighs a pound). I ate half of it yesterday and will eat the other half today I imagine.

I was reading an article on the value of Facebook — $3.7 billion right now, which seems completely ridiculous, let alone past values as high as $15 billion in value. How is that possible? To me, it seems like the dollar value of a business should be somehow related to their profit. Facebook has a negative cash flow, and somehow manages to get a valuation that’s in the realm of $500 per user. Good luck banking that kind of money on a site that can’t generate a meaningful click-through rate (and really, no site that’s a valuable destination will ever manage a good click-through rate since the users come for what the site offers, not what their ads offer).

One of the things that I’m proud of on a business level from when I managed BME, is that BME scaled well as a business (ie. it was profitable as a small site, and profitable as a large site), and never operated with a negative cash flow due to its basic business model — ensuring that members paid their way, either by buying a membership, or by adding value to the site through contributions of content. I still think this is the best way to run a large website, and once a more effective and universal system for micropayments is unveiled, I think we’ll see Facebook-type sites move to such a model, and I think we’ll also see content become valuable again… Which is another problem I have with the “free” internet right now.*

On a completely different subject, I read about some new study to guess at how much intelligent life is in the universe, a la the Drake equation, which can produce such a wide range of answers dependent on the probabilities that you feed it that it might as well be useless. My personal take on the probabilities in the Drake equation make me think that intelligent life is rare to the point of uniqueness — all the more reason for us to spread across the galaxy. That said, I am still overcome with the beauty of the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of music that was attatched to the Voyager probes, along with “directions” (using distances from pulsars) back to Earth, in the hope that one day it would be found by another civilization. Carl Sagan, who headed the project, said, “the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

It includes some great pieces of music:

Thus the old SNL skit where the first message from aliens is

“SEND MORE CHUCK BERRY”

An interesting sidenote — Sagan tried to get permission for “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, but even though the Beatles wanted their music to head out into space, EMI blocked their music from being included. What, because they’re concerned that some civilization that collects this music a billion years from now (or at least 40,000 years, which is when it starts to reach other stars) doesn’t want to pay licensing fees on their copyright? Ludicrous. I really do find the whole concept indescribably beautiful though, and have spent too much of my time dreaming about both this message being discovered, and us discovering such a message ourselves… I mean, Blind Willie Johnson as our embassador to the stars…

I am working on prepping the last in the series of paintings for the Kubla Khan book, having finished off the rough of Prophecies of War this afternoon… Working on an interior scene of the Pleasure Dome right now, and when that’s all done, I tackle them all again and retouch them all and then start glazing them.

Well, I’m sure I’ve rambled long enough. Tomorrow is a school holiday so I get to sleep in, and then I’m taking Nefarious to the airport so she can visit her mother for the weekend.

* They used to say “content is king”, which is the other concept that I tried to maintain with BME (and with my other sites) — if you have good and abundant original content, your site has value as a destination of repeat visitors. However, creating this content takes time, effort, and expense, and these days, it’s often blogs and content aggregators rather than producers that generate higher profits. I think that the long-term result of this has been deeply damaging to content producers, many of whom are moving along on inertia as much as current profitability. A micropayment system that paid content producers and well as those who promote that content would do wonders for the Internet.