Google Snow Day

Well, not really a snow day, since the sun's actually out for a change. But the power went out in my building's block, so we all got sent home.

Of course, I have a work laptop and a home network, so I'm expected to work from home for a bit. But for a while, it felt like one of those days in elementary school when the power went out. Bask in the sun, people tossing frisbees around, etc.

An Inconvenient Truth

A couple of weeks ago, I once again had the privilege of seeing Al Gore speak at Google. He again proved that his personal charisma far exceeds anything he put forth during his campaign for the Presidency.

He visited Google to give us a presentation on global warming, a presentation he claimed to have given over 1000 times. Since my brother is an atmospheric scientist, I didn't really learn anything new from his talk. It's an amazing presentation, however, and if you don't know much about global warming you really must experience it.

How can you see it? The presentation was recently made into a feature film documentary called An Inconvenient Truth by director Davis Guggenheim. It goes into major theater release soon. You can see a trailer for it here:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_classics/aninconvenienttruth/trailer/

Gore himself admitted to us that the trailer over-hypes the presentation. It's designed to sell theater tickets. I'm actually surprised by its quality, because I think it could have been a lot better -- for example it lacks the section of Gore's speech that shows how the Antarctic Larson B ice shelf, a massive block of ice 200 meters thick and the surface area of Rhode Island, disintegrated in less than a month. Wouldn't that get you into the movie?