David Acevedo's Blog

Dear Apple, Why should you reconsider your green registry pull out . I know that innovation and the “wants of the customers” are business pressures that are hard to ignore. They want it faster, lighter, cheaper. And you so want to satisfy all that. The designers want it sleeker, cooler, svelte.  Now is not the time to pick short term over long term. While it may seem that having products that aren’t easy to repair, recycle and take apart is what people want, like Henry Ford said: “If I’d asked people what they wanted. They would have asked for faster horses.” It’s easy to forget the big picture. Apple had its start catering to that tinkering vision and recently providing a mesh of engineering and design unparalleled in the world. It’s not design alone. It’s not engineering alone. It’s that alchemical combination that when it’s right it’s magical. The computer, the tool, melts away and the crafters of words, images, music, presentations, code, see only their cr...

I've been researching to write a book on Truth after I finish my novel. It's slow research, one can't rush philosophy or theology. So tonight on a restless night I was reading about a person that ran into trouble with his neighbor on his tiny house. I got upset. I got sad. I went through teeth-grinding frustration reading his blog post. Only words yet they got me so upset. I've been noticing this more and more lately and paying attention to them and recording them to see why they make me so upset. Like for example one of the people in my Agile Management Class, writes in such a way that I get upset, angry and furious about it and become rather arrogant with him. I'm not sure why it pisses me off so much the way he writes but I'm beginning to think I strikes me as him "being better than me" and I just want to show him his not better than me. I should say that in his writing he doesn't say he's better than me but that's how it strikes me, pre...

I'm starting a Non-Profit in Puerto Rico in 2012 that will revolutionize entrepreneurship on the island through the use of mentors in the broad Puerto Rican diaspora and the Hispanic community. I don't know how to do this, and I'm doing it anyway. There is a Buddhist story about a man that is poor and living on a hut. Underneath the hut is a large cache of gold but the man starves for lack of money; not knowing the wealth he possessed. This is so true, for there is no worse poverty than the poverty of the mind , not seeing the options that could be taken is far worse than having no options . And this is what I want to see impacted directly by my Non-profit. Entrepreneurship is a state of mind . It's how one approaches life, failure and risk. It's not about making money, the same way the human body is not about eating, shitting and sleeping. Money, profits are necessary like food is to the body, but the Olympic marathon runner doesn't run to eat ...

Agriculture in humans arose around 11,000 years ago give or take a few thousand years with the domestication of grasses across the world. Wheat, Rice, Maize, and others were the domestic crops upon which agriculture was based. Before that Hunter gather groups did grow plants but not in an organized social way like they do in agriculture. Ants evolve something like generalized agriculture 50 million years ago. Around 15 million years after the Dinosaurs kicked the bucket. This is co-evolution of species (the ants harvest fungi) not merely breaking up of the ground that ants normally do that's beneficial to plants. I'd never given that much thought to ants, they're not as easy to study as bees which have a fascinating dance language and an industry appeal right of the bat. But Ants have been recently on my mind due to the connection to flowering plants that I hadn't considered. Ants don't pollinate plants, so their contribution went unnoticed by me, but they are es...

I was listening to NPR the other day and there was a guy talking about the importance of ants. It had never occurred to me how important they are (and how little known they are). One point stuck in my head as evolutionary important in the rise of flowering plants. Ants break down animals, plants and insect matter very quickly into smaller bits. Bits that are full of the nutrition trees need to grow. Additionally their colonies break up the earth, in a way terra-forming the land. I don't know if you're ever looked at the ground on a pine forest and a rain forest like I have, but they are very different. Pines, which shoot more or less straight up, do not much alter the surface of the ground around them, while flowering trees will litter the ground with soft flower matter, fruits and likely leaves too (there are some ever green flower trees but most are deciduous, that is they loose their leaves). Here think the difference between pine growth and tropical tree growth is i...

I did my thesis on Dinosaurs around the K/T boundary (Cretaceous-Tertiary) around the time when they went extinct. I looked a dinosaur eggs and looked for a correlation to see if their diet changed. Unsurprisingly it did. Right before their extinctions these dinosaurs I studied from Ancient France had their diet completely changed, and that I think is the key to understanding their extinction. People like to blame the asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula, but the asteroid alone doesn't explain the extinction. (Here is where the helmets come in.) Dinosaurs weren't killed off or rather go extinct (which is a genetic death rather than a physical one) because a huge rock impacted the Earth. It's the effects of that impact that likely killed off the Dinosaurs. The media likes the asteroid story because it's flashy but the reality is that aside for the Dinosaurs in its path, the real trouble is the effect the asteroid had. And that's where we get into murk...

Have you ever dreamed what you'd say if you won an Oscar? Here is a first draft of mine. I would like to thank all the people that made it possible for me to be here. It is through your effort that we share this award. I promised myself I would not miss the chance to reach such a broad audience and simply express my gratitude to the wonderful people I will name backstage. People whose own accomplishments speak to their greatness and need no one, not me to validate them on this stage. They are wonderful people in their own right. We have a pressing moral issue at hand that has been ignored for much too long. The Earth, our Environment, is being ignored. For too long the environmental issue has been portrayed as a fight between ecology and economy, between trees and jobs. This is not true. The moral issue is theft and whether you are okay with it. I don't have children or children of children and I am pissed off at the wholesale theft of th...

One of the points I make on my essay on the truth , is that Scientist and Law-makers use different definitions of truth and doubt. But there is a even more obvious disconnect in America between what Scientist talk about and what the average Joe, and average law-maker understands. Today I heard a story about a paper coming out from a scientist here in Cal-tech about an extinction event 420 million years ago that may be tied to climate change. In the tropical seas of the time a 5 degree change seems to have triggered this extinction that wiped out 3/4 of all species on the planet. Now I listened very carefully and heard it very clearly, he said 5 degree Celsius. But how many people really listen to that? Every other degree temperature said on the radio including the one on the recent snow storm in Dallas that shut down the airport for the first time since 9-11 was on Fahrenheit. It's a nice and pleasant 54 degrees Fahrenheit in North Hollywood today. But a freezing 12 degrees Celsius...

De chiquito yo veía la verdura de Puerto Rico como un bosque que crecía donde quiera. Después de las lluvia toda la grama rápidamente crecía, aun cuando había construcciones en las carreteras rápidamente volvía la verdura con las enredaderas y arboles pequeños. Entonces aprendí lo que eran ecosistemas. En un ecosistema no es de que color se ve, sino como esta compuesto el grupo de especies que vive en le hábitat. Por ejemplo, En le bosque del Yunque uno puede ver una densidad de especies bien grande, osea que un árbol, grama, varios arbustos, y hasta plantas parasíticas todas viven en un tipo de balance y armonía. Al lado de dos pinos hay esta area que esta colonizada por acacias. Mirandolo por encima parace que es parte de un bosque, pero a los ojos de un biologo parece mas un desierto, aunque verde. Las acacias no son realmente arboles, son arbustos que crecen rapido y altos. Al crecer rapidamente, pues estan acostumbrados a una escaces de agua, colonizan el area y ponen el resto del...

The Hollywood studios created a small storm in a glass of water with this, but by moving the way they did the storm became huge, and has already swallowed up Blockbuster. The decline in DVD that saw me get laid off from my previous job in the DVD post-production chain is due to many factors but all of the factors were foreseen. None were a surprise and none could have been for-stalled. But in a good example of a communal pool where nobody has the incentive to help everybody, (that sounds rather reminiscent of Green Market's theory of the communal fishing pond) the individual incentives ended up hurting everybody. In Green Market's example a pond's fish stock is failing. It would be advantageous to all the boats in the area to reduce their catch for a few years and let the stock rebound less the fish stock could collapse. But lacking rather enlightened fisherman or regulation you don't get that. What you get is that as the individual's boat's catch reduces they m...

Recently worries about asteroids hitting the Earth are weirdly distracting. Why invest time or money on protecting ourselves from space-borne threats when we have an ailing and emergent environmental crisis? The boiling frog and the lottery. Yeah someone wins the lottery, but a frog in boiling water is the bigger problem.