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Please Rinse Your Used Planet Before Recycling

Lately I had been taking occasional solace from the fact that our planet seemed to be one of those disposable models. We have been making a royal mess of it, but at least (or so I had thought) in 5 billion years Earth would be incinerated in a thermonuclear explosion, courtesy of our Sun’s transition into a red giant. I thought of Earth as sort of a planetary Huggie, something that gets dirty and smells bad but ultimately gets thrown away, burning into nuclear ash and leaving a cleaner galaxy behind it.

But today, courtesy of the New York Times, I read:

About five billion years from now, astronomers say, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and swell temporarily more than 100 times in diameter into a so-called red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus and dooming life on Earth, but perhaps not Earth itself. Astronomers are announcing that they have discovered a planet that seems to have survived the puffing up of its home star, suggesting there is some hope that Earth could survive the aging and swelling of the Sun.

So it appears that Earth may instead be destined for some kind of galactic curbside recycling bin.

If so, I think it would make sense for us to leave the planet in some kind of reasonable shape after all. You wouldn’t recycle filthy, unwashed food containers out on the street, where they would attract flies. Would you? No, I thought not. Likewise, you shouldn’t leave a nasty, polluted planet lying around the solar system where it might attract… well, I’m not sure what. Anyway, my plea stands: let’s clean this place up so it’s ready for recycling. We can do this any time in the next 5 billion years or so.

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Flex Best Practices Melee at MAX

At MAX North America and MAX Europe this fall, I’m very pleased and excited to be moderating a discussion panel titled “Flex Best Practices”. A bunch of interesting folks will be on the panel, none of them lacking when it comes to having an opinion: Steven Webster (Adobe Consulting), Dave Coletta (Virtual Ubiquity/Buzzword), Dave Wolf (Cynergy), and Anatole Tartakovsky (Farata Systems).

I can promise a few things about this panel:

- No Canned Dog Food. There will be no PowerPoint slides or videos shown in this panel, just unfettered, spontaneous discussion. Some of it could involve you, if you’re in the audience.

- Concrete, Topical Questions. I’m canvassing the Flex developers around me (including readers of this blog) for the issues that are bothering them as they work right now. We’re not going to discuss how many MXML tags can fit on the head of a pin. We’ll probably talk about ways that we’ve seen Flex projects run off the rails and self-destruct, though.

- Contradictory Answers. In discussions of practice, we should cherish contradictions — they are a sign that we’re talking about something that is actually interesting, on which there are multiple points of view. I don’t think we’ll have to worry about everyone on this panel agreeing on everything! And the disagreements may help us all get closer to our own answers.

We’ll certainly be touching on frameworks, coding standards, multidisciplinary workflow, team structure, software modelling. What else? Please post a comment with your ideas, if you have some!

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