MORETON BAY, AUSTRALIA — The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.
When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.
“It comes up like little boils,” said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. “At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked.”
You needn’t be a diver, fisherman or other fan of the ocean to feel the pain tis series portends. In many, many ways, the world’s oceans are the beating heart of this planet and we are slowly killing them. Do yourself and the world a favor and read this important series now!
I was at the Hewlett-Packard analyst’s meeting today and a funny Mac-related thing happened. I happened to sit right behind a four people folks from Soleil-Cross Research, three of whom were typing notes on MacBook Pros.
Now if you’ve never been to a meeting full of Wall Street financial analysts, let me tell you this: Seeing a Mac in the room is a rare thing. It’s a PC fest, full of Windows-running Dells and Thinkpads and so on. But as you probably know, MacBook Pros stand out, prominently showing their lit Apple logo right on the lid for all to see.
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Cross and her colleagues were happily running all the applications they needed, including a very slick-looking Java-based Reuters terminal application. From where I sat, I could see all three of these MacBook-carrying analysts were very busy and very productive, sending IM’s checking quotes, staying up to speed on the moves of the market, with not a single Windows application needed.
The winds of change, they are a blowing …