Wired and stuff

The most current issue (12.11) of Wired is pretty good for a change. There's an article about a river in Arizona that got contaminated with salt from farming runoff and thereby killing Mexican farmer crops downstream. The US gov. built a quarter of a billion dollar desalination plant that isn't in service yet. While the plant was being built, the salt water runoff was poured out into the Mexican desert. Oddly enough this eco-rich salt water wetland formed and all kinds of endangered animals and plants popped up in the desert. Now the Mexicans want the swamp to stay and nobody wants to fire up the desalination plant. Interesting problem...

There's also a free CD in the magazine with music released under the Creative Commons License (Beastie boys, etc). This is cool in theory because it gives artists and small labels some tools to break the major record company stranglehold on the market. On the music front, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a serious badass that made the big labels pay up $50 million in unpaid royalties to some big name artists in May. He is now starting the wheels rolling to investigate the industry for radio payola. John Peel would be happy.


Speaking of cool, there's a new small affordable Hummer H3 coming out in a year or so.