I’ve been following Rei, a blogger from Iceland, who is reporting on the Bárðarbunga/Holuhraun volcano as it continues to erupt. It’s way more impressive/scary than I originally thought. It’s huge, with fresh lava covering 37 square km, or about 2/3 the size of Manhattan, and the magma fountains are shooting 300 feet or more in the air.

Her recent posts have shown a lot of information about the volcano’s progress. The one from last Saturday contains the best view so far of the extent of the lava, and absolutely stunning views of the magma sloshing around. The video is second-to-last picture on this page.

See it here: Rei’s post with great volcano video

For a bit more context, you can read her earlier posts. This map shown on this link tells more of the story. The big volcano, called Bárðarbunga, is at the red dot in the big glacier. The magma has pushed about 70 km (45 miles!) beneath the surface to erupt at Holuhraun, labeled with “Eruption” below.

The good news is that the magma remained underground until it got to a flat sandy desolate location, instead of coming up under the ice and melting it (to make flood) or an ash volcano. The other good news is that the (poisonous) sulfur dioxide has mostly been blowing northeast, so it hasn’t seriously affected either Reykjavík or Akureyri.

I recently joined Lessig’s citizen-funded MAYDAY.US campaign, an ambitious experiment to win a Congress committed to ending corruption in 2016, and we did something amazing: We raised $1 million dollars in 12 days. That’s a ton of money, but it’s not enough.

The plan is to raise $12 million in 2014, and use it to make fundamental reform of campaign financing the major issue in five congressional races. Then we’ll apply what we learn from those races to 2016.

We’re raising $5 million more by July 4, and I’m asking my readers if you can help us get the rest of the way there. So my question is: will you help?

Visit Mayday.us

There’s a Whitehouse.gov petition posted about Net Neutrality. It’s a little bit of a rant, but I agree with its punchline: No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.

This relates to a comment from Philip Greenspun’s blog (How many times do we have to pay for the same internet service?) If I’m paying my Internet Service Provider (ISP) to provide bits from the Internet to my home, and content providers pay an ISP for getting their bits into the Internet, what’s the problem? Why do the ISPs ask to be paid more for certain content, say, from Netflix?

The problem is that most ISPs (cable company, DSL/phone company, etc.) seriously underprovision their facilities. If every home subscriber ever attempted to use the service (at 3 megabits/second or 7, or 15, or 100, or whatever) that the ISPs advertise, there would be dramatic slowdowns. The ISPs simply don’t have sufficient capacity in place. The “easy out” for the ISP is to brand Netflix and other content providers as “bandwidth hogs” and using “more than their share” of bandwidth.

Two questions come from this:

1. If, Netflix, say, did pay more, would my ISP promise to provide great service that didn’t slow down? (I wouldn’t bet on it. They don’t like to promise anything…)

2. Why shouldn’t we consumers treat these bandwidth claims as false advertising? ISPs take our money while promoting a service that they know they have no ability or intention of providing. Wouldn’t that be a fun class-action suit? 🙂

In any event, you can read and sign the Whitehouse.gov petition at http://wh.gov/lwhFt They got almost half the signatures they need in a week; they need another 60K signatures by 24 May to get an official response from the White House. The more publicity on this issue, the better.

Why can’t the IRS tell me how much has been reported? Various companies and entities forward the same information to me and to them. If only I could look at the IRS’ notion of what has been reported, I could avoid rummaging around for all those scraps of paper at tax time.

Well, now you can. The IRS Get Transcript site allows you to get a list of all the accounts, forms, etc. that have been filed in your name.

Go to the site, create an account in the obvious way. My confirmation arrived within seconds, the entire signup process took two minutes. Then you can browse your records, both for the current tax year and for previous years (including your past tax returns).

Hat tip to Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Philip Greenspun’s blog

While chatting with people who play hockey just for the pure fun of it, especially those who are no longer whippersnappers, I am amazed that hardly anyone knows about this essay from the New Yorker magazine. Charles McGrath wrote this gem for the Shouts & Murmurs column of the 4 October 1993 issue.

“Rink Rat” from the 4 Oct 1993 issue of New Yorker magazine

Link to the original article

I just ended a call from a telemarketer who was pitching some vacation deal. I just don’t do these things over the phone, so when she paused to take another breath, I said in a kind way, “Thanks for calling, but I’m not interested.”

Of course, they’re (well) trained to answer objections, but I broke in and said, “No, I’m really not interested.” This, of course, led to another question to find out my objection.

So I interrupted and said, “Hang on a minute…” and set the phone down in the other room. About four minutes later, I heard the off-hook tone indicating she had finally hung up.

I’m a nice guy, so I don’t like to swear or slam down the phone. I realize that these callers have a tough job, and I respect that they’re working hard to make a living. But saying, “Hang on a minute…” is actually the worst thing you can do to telemarketers – simply wasting their time when they could be making the next call. If they don’t respect a polite “no”, then I have no qualms about wasting their time.