Big Trapeze

I was driving with my daughter today, and we passed a homeless man picking up cigarette butts. She said, “look–that man is picking up litter!”

Do you remember the time you lived without cynicism or prejudice?

I’ve spent the better part of the frustrating day trying to figure out the new YouTube APIs in relation to PHP. I have a project where I need to retrieve thumbnails from various YouTube videos, and I’ve been making it too hard (I’ve tried integrating the Zend Framework with PHP, Javascript, SimplePie RSS–which is a good tool, it turns out, and all sorts of DOM-reading PHP plugins).

It turns out, the easiest way to retrieve the standard thumbnail for a YouTube video is:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/2.jpg

I know there’s a lot of talk about global warming, environmentalism, and conservation. And I believe we, especially U.S. Americans, are doing a lot to make things worse. It’s particularly unsettling to watch chunks of ice the size of buildings melt away into the oceans, but I’ve noticed something that gives me a little hope: Earth is pretty resilient.

Three years ago we built a home on a half-acre in a wooded area. We cleared a few trees, but in those three years since, the forest is exacting its regvenge. We’ve lost several feet of property line along the edge of the forest due to underbrush, saplings, bushes, and general foliage that is regrowing in the same spots we cleared. It’s actually very amazing to see the rapid advancement of the forest as it grows back.

An even bigger example is shown below. For over 20 years, a mall stood on several acres in my hometown. Like a lot of its type, the mall eventually found itself outdated and useless, and was closed about 10 years ago. For years, the building stood vacant–and was finally razed a few years back. During those few years, the piles of rock and rubble have been slowly removed, and as I drove by yesterday I noticed that the place where the drab, ordinary buildings once stood now is becoming verdant patches of bushes and weeds. All this in 3 years, with none of our help in planting or reforestation. In a few more years, this could be a great location for a park.

This first picture is from Microsoft’s Terra Server, taken in 1995. You can make see cars parked outside the buildings. The second (from Google Maps) was taken in the fall of 2006. The twisted rubble of stone and metal have all been removed, only dirt and a few patches of green show. I took the final picture today, from ground level, to show the density of the foliage.

We’re becoming more and more aware of the damage we’re doing to our environment–and hopefully this awareness will help us curtail the destruction. But its good to know that while we’re all figuring out what to do to make things better, Earth just might be taking matters into its own hands.