Author: Brian

Our junk theology of us:

There’s more than enough slop to pay for sick.

Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet will not wash their hands.

My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.

One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For a tribe in India, whenever and wherever the need arises they simply grow their bridges.

Roots are guided over a river until a sturdy, living bridge is produced.

The root bridges, some over a hundred feet long, can support the weight of fifty people.

Several pictures at Atlas Obscura

NASA Tech Brief:

Approximately 57% of electric energy generated in the USA is consumed by industrial electric motors.

What say a rap performed in Beijing?

Let’s look into the future and see the opportunity
Wind turbines will spin with great velocity
Solar panels will provide a clean revolution
To wean us off coal, and get rid of the pollution
Solar wind geo bio all on the table
But they are missing the tech to enable
A paradigm shift, power grid face lift
Better be swift, clean energy’s a gift
That must be delivered in a different way
Distributed and digitized, wouldn’t you say?

New energy is cool and all but I have to beg your pardon
Cause in the end it’s all about the carbon
We have to account for the emissions we made
Gonna be a carbon price under cap and trade
CDM, CER, AAU, EUA,
It’s a new language, parlez vous carbonais?
Supplementarity caps and additionality
Rising emissions are a solemn reality
So many targets that are yet unmet
Psh, have you ever even bought a carbon offset?

Yo but for real we gotta keep our heads straight
There are so many emissions that we must abate
I’m not sure if we can wait
The earth’s warming faster, we can’t be too late
But the world is changing, now Obama’s leading
It’s the sun’s energy off which we’ll be feeding
Financial crisis here, but we won’t back down
Put a smile on your face, I don’t want to see no frown
Clean energy is the future, we all know that
Global warming’s going down, ‘nuf said about that.

William R. Catton Jr., Professor Emeritus, Washington State:

Abundant evidence suggests industrial civilization must be “downsized” to curb damage to the ecosphere by the “technosphere.”

Trends behind this prospect include prodigious population growth, urbanization, cultural dependence upon ravenous use of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, consequent air pollution, and global climate change.

Despite prolonged Cold War distraction and entrenched faith that technology could always enlarge carrying capacity, these trends were well publicized. But there remain eminent writers who persist in denying that human carrying capacity (Earth’s maximum sustainable human load) has now been or ever will be exceeded.

Denials of ecological limits resemble anosognosia (inability of stroke patients to recognize their paralysis).

Some denial literature resembles their confabulations (elaborately unreal stories concocted as rationalizations).

Denial by opponents of human ecology seems to be a way of coping with an insufferable contradiction between past convictions and present circumstances, a defense against intolerable anomalous information.

Please note. Our issues and protests are generally dumb.

Health insurance is an oligopoly at best and in many states a monopoly with one provider having more than 70% market share.

Burning candles made from paraffin wax — the most common kind used to infuse rooms with romantic ambiance, warmth, light, and fragrance — is an unrecognized source of exposure to indoor air pollution.

American Chemical Society:

“An occasional paraffin candle and its emissions will not likely affect you.

“But lighting many paraffin candles every day for years or lighting them frequently in an un-ventilated bathroom around a tub may cause problems.”

Candles made from bee’s wax or soy do not release harmful amounts of indoor air pollutants.

A bespoke design firm in Tokyo is making candles from waste cooking oil.

Filt “waste oil” candles combine recycling with nice packaging to make a product that looks good, smells good, burns well. [story]

If all people could have memories transferred directly into their brain, feudalism could finally end.

There’s 2 billion square feet of Self Storage, 10 miles by 7 miles under roof, but the largest single energy bill in the USA is for 3 billion square feet of offices, research centers, and military bases managed by the U.S. government – heating, cooling and lighting about 10 by 10 miles. That’s enough space for 80 million Christmas trees consumed each year which could absorb 1,200,000 tons of CO2. Since carbon emissions are valued at roughly $50 per ton, that’s about $60 billion per year which could fund the annual uninsured portion of health care if all federal employees stayed home. 🙂

How Health Insurance Premiums Are Eating Up Middle Class Income

Employer-sponsored health insurance on path to $23,842 per family by 2020, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report.

Middle and lower income families could end up priced out of health insurance.

To my surprise soot alarms come and go.

Economic policy we can understand. Not.

“Six unemployed people for each available job”

Stephanie Dhue at PBS

When we know where to go, we walk perfectly straight. When confused, we walk in circles.

Dr. Jan Souman confirms humans really do walk in circles and we shouldn’t trust our senses.

up to 175 lbs per acre:

Methyl iodide – iodine mixed with methanol and red phosphorus – is so reliably carcinogenic that it’s used to cause cancer.

The largest market is California strawberries.

Mystery in the muck:

The organic vs standard ag debate is worthless but not because there is no issue to debate so much as because the debate is uninformed and superficial.

We really would benefit from getting higher quality information widely reported so that growers could respond to sensible market pressures rather than cynically meeting a nonsensical checklist that increases the value of their crops for no logical reason.

It can also be argued that this is an ethical issue of huge proportions since those who suffer the most from organic nonsense are the food insecure people in developing countries, those who can least bear the costs of this nonsense carry the largest burden.

China got greened?

The new economic engine for China shall annually invest 1 trillion yuan into low-carbon technology development – $150 Billion each year until 2050.

“The money would be mainly used to introduce technologies that would raise the energy efficiency of end-users in industry, construction and transportation,” Bai Quan, another panel member, was quoted as saying by The China Daily.

China has signaled that it may be willing to adopt carbon intensity targets relative to economic growth and to make a huge investment in “new energy”, including nuclear, solar and more efficient coal plants.

Performance of officials to be measured not just by how they spur economic growth but also by the environmental soundness of that growth.

Military folks are always telling stories, notice. They seem to know they’re doing it too. Here’s today’s. A creepy story about weapons that target brain function.

Gary Egbert:

We don’t really know how much water there is on Earth.

There is some evidence that there is many times more water below the ocean floor than there is in all the oceans of the world combined.

Wal-Mart Hacienda:

Importing from China four years ago was 22% cheaper on average.

By year-end 2008, however, the average price gap with the U.S. had dropped to a mere 5.5%, which is often not large enough to be worth the hassle of sourcing something from halfway around the world.

The more surprising reversal is the comparison with Mexico. While China was around 5% cheaper on average than Mexico in 2005, China is now 20% more expensive. link to Brian Schwarz

The combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 ranked fifth-warmest since world-wide records began in 1880.

Atlantic hurricane activity is highest in last 1500 years.

The global average temperature jumped 0.41 C from June to July, the largest one-month jump in the 31-year global temperature record and the second hottest July on record. Full Story

The planet’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for July, breaking the previous high mark established in 1998. Full Story

No worry. It’s all triggered by the Earth’s various tilt: Obliquity.

You can visit the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, search by state or zip code, and find out what you were inhaling last year, (although Jeff McMahon noticed the presentation is tough).

“EPA’s job is to ensure an open and transparent flow of information between Americans and their government, and today’s unprecedented step represents the agency’s commitment to doing just that,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, said in a press release.

“While we are still analyzing this information, we hope this raw data will be reviewed and used responsibly by stakeholders and the public to help them make informed decisions.”

There are currently about 1.2 billion humans between the ages of 10 and 19. What do we want to be when we grow up?

There comes a time in almost everyone’s youth when those remarkable human traits, self-awareness and empathy, catch up with potency, when you pause and reflect, when you first look back at the muddy tracks you just left across a floor and conclude that you are the person who needs to mop things up.

Most people go through this transition successfully and become responsible citizens.

Most of us would not leave the scene of an accident.

An eloquent essay while we roll our rocks uphill.

NYTimes:

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva.

They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

I don’t want to think about this.

“We are all responsible for everything and everyone in the face of everybody, and I more than the others.” – Dostoyevski