For me, Disney’s Electrical Parade was the highlight of our visit there this past spring. It’s a long, trippy parade of illuminated vehicles and floats, some of which are covered with thousands of lights, which starts just about sundown and goes on for maybe 20 minutes. As it rolls slowly by in the dark, this bizarre, baroque, electronic music plays over and over again on the loudspeakers that surround you. The music is cheerful, repetitive, bizarre, and totally overtakes your brain, leaving you feeling spacey, stoned, and a bit out of your head. I loved it.

Today, thanks to BoingBoing, I discovered that the Electrical Parade’s music is a composition by Jean Jacques Perrey called Baroque Hoedown, who has posted an MP3 online. Outstanding!

Perry is having a record release party in SF on Thursday, co-sponsored by RE/Search. I’m sure that will be a strange event.

Sept. 17 is Coastal Cleanup Day. Go catch a spork crab!

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index

A lot: see Don’t dumb me down, the latest installment of the Guardian’s weekly “Bad Science” column.

A guy named Alvaro has posted an amazing series of 197 photos showing New Orleans before, during, and after the hurricane.

A computer scientist looks at the brain:

“You” are just a subroutine, and a recently-added one at that. You’re like a user-mode driver that gets access to certain kernel data, but you only see and control what the kernel lets you. You have no direct access to the kernel’s process space, but you can make calls into it, and you get notifications from it. The bulk of your nature as a human lies entirely outside your process space, outside your ability to directly perceive or control.

The Multiple Self

Unbelievable stories of indifference and brutality on the part of so-called rescuers and emergency personnel:

Hurricane Katrina — Our Experiences (EMS Network, also cited in Daily Kos)
Photojournalists Covering Katrina Fall Victim to Growing Violence, Chaos (National Press Photographers’ Ass’n)

Plus one story of how well things could go when people organize themselves and there’s a sympathetic authority in place: EMS at Hilton New Orleans Riverside (EMS Network)

Witness the awe-inspiring rides of Chunk 666.

Disaster survival tips from Andreas Ramos.

How to Recharge Your Cellphone with Common Batteries

1) Turn off your cellphone. Reserve battery power as much as possible. Turn down screen brightness, turn off vibrate, turn down sound.

2) To recharge a cellphone with ordinary batteries, cut the power supply cord near the charger. Strip the ends of the wire. Start with a 1.5v battery. If this isn’t enough to start the recharging display, add another 1.5v battery. If that’s not enough, add yet another 1.5v battery. If the cellphone requires 3v, two 1.5v batteries will work. If the phone requires 4.8v, three 1.5v batteries will work. Start low and add batteries.

3) If cellphone system is overloaded, use text messaging. Learn how to use text messaging (SMS). Add a friend’s email address to your cellphone’s contact list. Be sure it’s a friend who lives outside of your region.

How to Purify Water

1) If the water is cloudy, strain it. Take a tall plastic water bottle, cut off the bottom, invert to make a funnel, and stuff it tightly with clean cotton cloth, paper towels, etc. Strain the water over and over until it is clear.

2) Disinfect the water. Use regular, unscented Clorox liquid bleach. Four drops of Clorox in one quart of water. Use an eyedropper or a straw. Shake the water. Let it stand for 30 minutes. The water should have a slight chlorine odor. If not, add four more drops and wait another 30 minutes. Do not use crystal chlorine (for pools). This is poisonous.

3) Purify only enough water for 48 hours.

4) If you can boil the water, boil for at least one minute.

This removes bacteria and microorganisms from water. But it won’t remove chemicals. In floods (such as New Orleans), refineries and chemical plants were flooded and many chemicals were released into the water. If the water has a chemical smell (not the chlorine), don’t drink it.

One of the big problems in the New Orleans area right now–perhaps the biggest problem–is figuring out what needs doing, and how to do it. Even with accurate information, relief agencies like FEMA and the Red Cross are clearly having difficulty synthesizing that data, formulating a plan, and following through in an organized way.

One of computing pioneer Doug Engelbart’s causes has been making computers better able to help us deal with complicated situations like this. Here he is, speaking in 2002 about the computers and disaster relief:

One organization that we work with is the Global Disaster Information Network – or “GDIN” – which is, itself, a consortium of regional and local disaster response organizations. Organizations that respond to disasters are tremendous examples of organizations that must learn to adapt and use new information quickly. …

Computers and, in particular, the Internet, clearly play a key role in the efforts to coordinate such disaster response and to improve the ability to improve over the lifecycle of a disaster response effort. But what is striking, as GDIN grapples with these issues, is how difficult it is to harness all the wonderful capability of the systems that we have today in GDIN’s effort to improve its ability to improve disaster response. …

Make no mistake about it, GDIN and its member disaster response organizations find computers to be very useful – but it is even more striking how the capabilities offered by today’s personal productivity and publishing systems are mismatched to the needs of these organizations as they work to coordinate effective response flexibly and quickly.

In the absence of real tools for coordinated action, we fall back on bulletin boards. We can do better than that, people.