Adobe had an all-hands meeting today and I was privileged enough to hear Adobe’s founders speak as part of the event. I was very much struck by John Warnock’s closing exhortation to us. Urging us not to be afraid of competition, he said:

“The future is yours. Invent it.”

It’s hard to write about that now, though, when as I type this images of devastation in Haiti are rolling across my TV screen. I’ve been through a couple of earthquakes since moving to California, though nothing as big as a 7.0. I can only dimly imagine the terror of living though one that bad, much less to live through it in a land where there is no real infrastructure nor strong building codes.

We here in the US are very privileged in so many ways. In times like this we need to remember how good we have it and help the ones who are in need. There are a huge number of charities and NGOs collecting funds to help aid Haiti right now. Please pick one (or more) and make a donation if you can possibly do so. We have.

Haiti will need to invent its own future now. We all need to help.

High gas prices are bad, but as the Wall Street Journal reminds us, it could be a lot worse. At least I have a kitchen full of groceries and the ability to keep it that way.

For the world’s poor, the situation is getting worse.

Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country’s capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.

Audio historians have found a set of French “phonautogram” recordings from 1860 that predate Thomas Edison’s recordings by more than 10 years.

On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

What’s even cooler, you can download the clip yourself and listen to it. The quality’s not great, but it’s clearly a woman singing. Very neat.

7 MVPs
31 All-Stars
And yes, even a couple of my much-loved NY Mets. (Lenny! How could you?)

This is a sad, if not-unexpected, day for baseball fans.

Oh, and one other, unrelated, number – tonight Akismet blocked the 1,001st piece of spam since I switched to WordPress.

There will be no more encores for stellar tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

I had the pleasure of hearing Pavarotti live once, years ago, in New York. The world will not soon see his like again.

UPDATE: Yahoo has a nice aggregation of news reports, obituary notices, etc.

And the melamine contamination problem spreads to more parts of the American food chain: More animals got tainted food.

What irks me is that the only thing the politicians seem to be responding to is that “OMG terrorists might put something in our food”. Which is true, but it’s not the immediate threat. How about the fact that potentially lethal industrial-grade chemicals are being dumped into our food supply RIGHT NOW? Shouldn’t that be enough of a reason to take action?

This is a start:

[Congressional] Democrats say they will introduce legislation that would permit the FDA to force mandatory food recalls — a power it now lacks — and increase funding to hire more inspectors.

Hopefully this President will actually sign such legislation.

One thing we did this weekend was to head over to Whole Foods and attempt to do all our weekly grocery shopping there. We’ve gone there before for specialty items, but never tried to do our ‘normal’ grocery shopping. And with the exception of one item (some Aquafina flavored water that Scott really likes) we were able to do so, and we came home with several bags full of organic, non-big-brand food for the house. A few items matched the prices we would pay at a conventional grocery store (like pasta and tomato paste), but most items were a little more. Some few were double the price of their ‘conventional’ alternatives. For example, we skipped buying and meat or chicken — with boneless chicken breasts going for more than $6 a pound in the “sale” bin, the price was too high.

Although we have a bunch of nice, “safe” food in the house, I don’t feel particularly good about our shopping trip. It’s no secret that the food shopping options for poor people are worse than the ones for more well-off ones, but Whole Foods and their higher prices seems to raise the bar even further. As amazing as Whole Foods is, the people who really need the added benefits of a healthy diet are the people least able to afford their prices.

You shouldn’t have to be well-off to be able to have access to safe food. And you shouldn’t have to scare the government with the terrorism bogeyman in order to get them to do something about the safety of the nation’s food supply.

One of the victims at Virginia Tech was Liviu Librescu: A holocaust survivor.

Liviu Librescu, 75, a senior researcher and lecturer in engineering, was a Holocaust survivor. He had immigrated to Israel from Romania with his wife Marlina, also a survivor, in 1978. He was an expert in aeronautics at Tel Aviv University and the Haifa Technion before moving to the United States in 1984.

…

According to media accounts quoting students, Mr. Librescu and the class heard shooting in a nearby room. The students said their professor blocked the door to prevent the gunman from entering while some students took cover underneath desks and others leaped out from windows.

זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה וְשֵׁם רְשָׁעִים יִרְקָֽב׃

That’s either insane … or brilliant.

That cup of coffee just not getting it done anymore? How about a Buzz Donut or a Buzzed Bagel? That’s what Doctor Robert Bohannon, a Durham, North Carolina, molecular scientist, has come up with. Bohannon says he’s developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods, without the bitter taste of caffeine. Each piece of pastry is the equivalent of about two cups of coffee.

Thinking about it, I’m leaning towards insane. But I’ve been wrong before.