What does this blog title mean?

In 1974, Ted Nelson wrote a very odd book entitled "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". It was a series of cartoonish drawings and rantings written by a guy who was ahead of his time. In a time where computers were large boxes that needed special rooms to house them, he envisioned a computer system where words in a document would link to other documents automatically, and that the system was chaotic, and the organization was definitely not hierarchical. At the time, people thought of him as a little eccentric.

He came up with this before the graphical UI was really out of the lab at Xerox, and before most people had even heard of the concept of a "personal computer".

His vision is pretty much now realized in a simplified form in the medium that you are viewing right now: the web. The concept he came up with was coined "hypertext" and "ht" in the "http" stands for "hypertext". (The other part is "transfer protocol".)

As part of his vision, he realized that when documents were related to each other, they were related in a myriad of complicated and uncategorizable ways. He wrote: "Everything is deeply intertwingled" to describe this idea, and with this coined the phrase "intertwingled".

Though Ted was talking mostly about documents and ideas in a computer system, his ideas could apply equally well to the natural environment of the earth.

Everything you see and touch and feel is connected to other things in ways that we can see and sometimes in ways that we don't see. (yet). This means that everything you do in the natural world has an effect on something else.

Burn fossil fuels and you change the climate.

Burn wood, and you are carbon neutral, but yet you still put nitrous oxides, complex carbohydrates and soot into the air, which are pollutants and have been linked with asthma.

Even if you are trying to be good and you manufacture a solar cell, you will possibly expose dangerous rare earth metals to the environment during the manufacturing process.

My friend Rich always says, "There's no 'get' without a 'give'."

The question is, which of these consequences is the least troublesome to the environment. Obviously, a solar cell only uses a very, very small amount of rare earth metals, and an even smaller amount is leaked accidentally by solar cell manufacturers. It probably has a very small affect on things, compared with the pollution caused by the mining of the coal you would need to burn to generate that electricity in the current, more traditional way.

So the idea here is not to eliminate your affect on the environment, but to eliminate as much of the bad affects you have on the environment as you can.