Month: October 2009

War on this:

1. The earth is a divine creation.
2. The earth is an organism.
3. The earth is machinery.

“Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant….” – John Henry Newman

Imagine a metronome in the brain that ticks quickly throughout the day, then slows its pace at night. The rest of the body hears the ticking and adjusts its daily rhythms, also known as circadian rhythms.

Turns out that’s wrong.

Phil Gyford:

It’s odd to feel excited and inspired by something we can barely imagine. It’s humbling. It’s a reminder that, while it sometimes feels like we’re living in the future, this is someone’s distant past. Yes, the Internet, or your phone, or whatever newer technologies appear over the next few years are pretty impressive. But one day people will think back from whatever planet they’re living on, to people on Earth at the turn of this millennium and see us as primitive and laughable. We’re just a tiny step, part-way along an impossibly long timeline.

Which could be depressing. But it’s a reminder that we’re never at the end. Even our inter-planetary descendants will one day, in turn, be viewed by their descendants as backward and simplistic. We’re permanently on a journey with no certain destination. We should, I guess, simply be trying to make the journeys of those ahead of us as extraordinary and as just as possible.

Cargo shipping pumps out more carbon dioxide annually than the United Kingdom.

The shipping industry is an invisible and nearly unregulated environmental disaster, and if you haven’t heard much about its poor record, you’re not alone.

Most commercial ships are powered by a thick brew of sulfur and sludge called bunker fuel with a deserved reputation as one of the dirtiest energy sources on earth.

“Drinking on a full stomach massively extends the stomach delay, thereby making it much harder to manage one’s blood alcohol level.”

That’s news for too many that drink to get drunk.

While traveling and stumping, Sarah Palin finished her book in four months. LOL

Nigel Horne writing in the UK:

But that isn’t the reason Palin’s book is the talk of New York publishing circles: what’s getting tongues wagging is the ghostwriter, a San Diego-based journalist called Lynn Vincent.

Lynn Vincent is a creationist, strongly anti-abortion, and seeking to criminalize gay relations. It’s pointed out that Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter is a white supremacist.

Michael Wesch:

I often like to think of the quote from Kevin Kelly, who says: “Nobody is as smart as everybody.“

That hangs in my head every time I go into a classroom. I look at the classroom. I look at the students. I start to think about who they are. Throughout the semester, I learn more and more about who they are, and it becomes increasingly evident to me that with all the intelligence and life experiences that they have, they are collectively much smarter than I am alone. Then the goal becomes trying to somehow harness all of that.

And I think I’ve finally found the “secret sauce.” It basically comes down to approaching the students as collaborators, co producers, co researchers, or whatever you want to call them — but not as students. So you take away that hierarchy.

I still maintain that I’m the most experienced in the bunch — the expert learner, the expert researcher. But the students also have skills to bring to the table, and it’s important to recognize those. Doing so facilitates a feeling of empowerment among them. I try to harness that from the very beginning, pointing out to them that whatever we do is going to contribute to the real world.

We’re not just going to be hiding behind the classroom walls and doing our own thing.

We start to brainstorm together: “What does the world need from us? What can we do?”

How we know global warming is still happening:

So the point to remember when considering short term cooling trends in surface temperature records is that the atmosphere is only one small part of a planet which is in energy imbalance. Empirical measurements show the planet continues to accumulate heat. More energy is coming in than is radiating back out to space.

Far from expertly manipulating their firms’ books, many could not understand them.

The Economist:

Perhaps the clearest lesson is that big banks are as close as businesses can get to being unmanageable.

Bank of America’s assets are now ten times those of Exxon Mobil, America’s most valuable firm. A balance-sheet of $2.3 trillion is beyond the ken of mere mortals.

We know nothing about the rich and nothing of their skills.

What we do that wrecks our earth:

Use

• Sahel Syndrome – overcultivation of marginal land.
• Overexploitation Syndrome – overexploitation of natural ecosystems.
• Rural Exodus Syndrome – environmental degradation due to abandonment of traditional agricultural practices.
• Dust Bowl Syndrome – non-sustainable agro-industrial use of soils and water.
• Katanga Syndrome – environmental degradation due to depletion of non-renewable resources.
• Mass Tourism Syndrome – development and destruction of nature for recreational ends.
• Scorched Earth Syndrome – environmental destruction due to war and military action.

Develop

• Aral Sea Syndrome – environmental damage to natural landscapes as a result of large-scale projects.
• Green Revolution Syndrome – environmental degradation due to un-adapted farming methods.
• Asian Tiger Syndrome – disregard for environmental standards in the context of rapid economic growth.
• Favela Syndrome – environmental degradation due to uncontrolled urban growth.
• Urban Sprawl Syndrome – destruction of landscapes due to planned expansion of urban infrastructure.
• Disaster Syndrome – singular anthropogenic environmental disasters with long-term impact.

Sink

• High Stack Syndrome – environmental degradation as a result of large-scale dispersion of emissions.
• Waste Dumping Syndrome – environmental degradation due to controlled and uncontrolled waste disposal.
• Contaminated Land Syndrome – local contamination of the environment at industrial locations.

architect cities around it:

It is by now clear that over the last decade a great number of people on Earth, in the developed and the developing world both – certainly the overwhelming majority of those reading these words – have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life, to such a ferocious extent that it can already be difficult to remember how we ever got through our days without the networked things around us.

I saw that time is love, and time requires
  of everything its full expenditure
  that love might be conserved; and the I saw
  that love is not what we mean by the word.

  For some idea of it, choose a point
  in the middle of a waterfall, and stare
  for as long as you can stand. Now look around
  see how every rock and tree flows upwards?

  So the whole world blooms continually
  within its true and hidden element,
  a sea, a beautiful and lucid sea
  through which it pilots, rising without end.

Bathysphere by Don Paterson
link to Barely Imagined Beings

The Secret Sentry by Matthew M. Aid

New York Review of Books: Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?

On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the information is both infinite and monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood.

At a million square feet [22 acres], the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.”

Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

U.S. banks are reducing their lending at the fastest rate on record, tightening the credit squeeze and threatening to leave many otherwise viable businesses unable to borrow money to expand their businesses, meet their payroll or refinance their maturing debts.

According to weekly figures provided by the Federal Reserve, total loans at commercial banks have fallen at a 19% annual rate over the past three months, while loans to businesses have dropped at a 28% annualized pace.

Republicans see the award as so outrageous that they’re using it to raise campaign money.

Mark Morford:

Republicans scoff at Obama’s Nobel win, say Sarah Palin should’ve won for her work locating Russia on a map.

“Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the president of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize — an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride — unless of course you are the Republican Party.”

“Rush Limbaugh argued that it was an attempt by elites in the world to encourage Obama “to emasculate the United States.””

Machine to machine bits outnumber people to people bits:

Ireland has embarked on the DEPLOY project, a network of sensors that can be placed at strategic points along any river or lake to automatically analyze the water at regular intervals, whatever the weather and beam the results directly back to a laptop on a 24/7 basis… more

That’s customer growth.

Yo, I get pretty tired too, endless slog of it all, things that were easy seem gluey, but I remember the Cree story of a buck so sick and tired of his woman moaning about food for the kids he stomped out of the tent and found himself walking all alone in the endless grass until he started moaning too. He really wasn’t sure which direction to go. It was bloody cold. He’s been walking for days. His soul is pretty darn ragged. He’s sure the spirits have left him. He’s an idiot to go out there. The list of moaning and groaning goes on and on hour after hour day after day until one of the buffalo says to the other “I think I will shut that guy up” and walks across his path.

HA!

Alaska shamed for highest gas prices:

Last fall the State of Alaska initiated an investigation, and in January 2009 they concluded that oligopoly was to blame. No illegal acts were discovered, but the report suggested that with relatively few players involved competitive pressures can be weak and prices above the competitive level can be sustained for some time.

Even and especially for pulpit Republicans, shinnying up for favors seems unavoidable.

Good morning.

Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.

After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday.”

And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up”.

Obama’s transcript:
“Building a World That Gives Life to the Promise of Our Founding Documents”

Some of the work confronting us will not be completed during my presidency. Some, like the elimination of nuclear weapons, may not be completed in my lifetime.

But I know these challenges can be met, so long as it’s recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.

This award is not simply about the efforts of my administration; it’s about the courageous efforts of people around the world.

And that’s why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity; for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard, even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away; and for all those men and women across the world who sacrifice their safety and their freedom and sometime their lives for the cause of peace.

That has always been the cause of America. That’s why the world has always looked to America. And that’s why I believe America will continue to lead.

Thank you very much.

Let’s not rust this medal.

We know how eager we all are for true innovation and fair dealing. We accuse establishment leaders of stasis and new leaders of corruption, but it’s also very true that real change is a bitch.

Larry Beinhart:

People do not go to the facts and reason things out for themselves. They accept what they hear around them. Their thinking follows standard, conventional frames of reference.

This is even more true of congressional representatives, senators, and reporters. The process for success in those fields selects for conventional ideas, the demands of their professions leave little room for thinking, and, for the most part, they are employees of major corporations.

Thinking is the job of other people.

A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by 20 years among adults who experienced six or more particular types of abuse or household dysfunction as kids, while those who suffered fewer types of trauma lost fewer years of life, a large-scale epidemiological study finds.

put a mark on the wall:

“In some of the Maya city-states, mass graves have been found containing groups of skeletons with jade inlays in their teeth – something they reserved for Maya elites – perhaps in this case murdered aristocracy.”

How the Maya disappeared:

No single factor brings a civilization to its knees, but the deforestation that helped bring on drought could easily have exacerbated other problems such as civil unrest, war, starvation and disease.

The economy is so bad that:

• I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
• I ordered a burger and the kid at the counter asked, “Can you afford fries with that?”
• CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.
• If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.
• Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.
• McDonalds is selling the 1/4 ouncer.
• Parents in Beverly Hills have fired their nannies and learned their children’s names.
• A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.
• Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.
• The Mafia is laying off judges.
• Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

And finally, Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal:

• Oh, great!! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!