November 2009
Monthly Archive
Drawn out
| Posted by Chill on 30 Nov 2009 |
Kid’s drawings re-enacted by a professional photographer.
What I mostly drew as a kid was planes dropping bombs on cities. No, I don’t know why. But that’d be a little harder to re-enact.
I’ve crossed denial
| Posted by Chill on 30 Nov 2009 |
I was realizing today that the person who has never heard of nor thought about global warming and climate change is smarter than the person who has and denies its existence.
That can be true for any evidentially-supported proposition, and is not a new idea in philosophy. But realizing it in this context was a minor “wow” moment in my mind. Ignorance isn’t stupidity, of course.
But some fake facts with some stupidity could effectively make humanity extinct.
Hit me
| Posted by Chill on 30 Nov 2009 |
I knew it wasn’t just anecdotal or in my mind that Florida is the most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians.
A study by the nonprofit Transportation for America in Washington, D.C., lists the most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians, and the worst four just happen to be in the Sunshine State: Orlando, Tampa, Miami and Jacksonville. It may seem like an astonishing find, but it’s not actually all that surprising: 490 pedestrians were killed by cars in Florida last year, the most in any state, and South Florida consistently ranks as one of the worst pockets for hit-and-run fatalities.
Florida is the only place I’ve ever lived where if you cross ahead of some cars, they will routinely deliberately speed up to attempt to hit you. Or where they will do so even if you are walking on the sidewalk.
I need an EMP device.
Park it
| Posted by Chill on 30 Nov 2009 |
Why I’d never live in Boston. Or NYC. Or Chicago.
Ok, one of the dozens of reasons. Or millions, if you count all the people there.
Wage system
| Posted by Chill on 30 Nov 2009 |
This is all fairly correct, historically speaking.
Wage labor has become so common, so “normal” in today’s society, that we have forgotten how marginal – and despised -it was before the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies wages were what farmhands, servants and journeymen got – and for the last category it was considered temporary. All respectable working people were self employed, either owning or renting a land or running a small – or even not so small – businesses. Living on wages was something you did when you had no other choice, and, socially speaking, that put you a mere step above a beggar or a slave. It is particularly revealing that in Latin, the word for wages has the same root as the word for prostitute.
Not that I think there is anything wrong with prostitution or the wage system, but historically people sure have.
But if the oligarchs are allowed to destroy the system and replace it with a return to the era of vassals and lords, which is their aim, society will have regressed a thousand years.
Values change. Romans used slaves instead of machines because using machines for work that slaves could do was seen as weird and immoral (at least by those not slaves!).
Even in the current and ongoing economic apocalypse, the plutocrats are winning handily, erroneous reports of recovery aside. Destroying labor and the wage system is their current goal, and we are allowing them to do so with nary a protest.
Speed
| Posted by Chill on 29 Nov 2009 |
I’ve finally decided on a car.
I still need to drive it, but given the reviews I don’t think I’ll change my mind upon a test drive.
My current car has over 200,000 miles on it and I’ve had it for almost five years now. It’s time to retire it.
But this is what I’ll be getting, in February or early March sometime — the Mazda Mazdaspeed 6, the more sporty and much, much quicker version of the Mazda6.
I really like the space of sedans, but I just hate slow cars. Fortunately, these days you don’t have to choose one or the other, and you don’t have to pay the overly-exorbitant prices for an M3, either. That is, unless you enjoy spending an extra $15,000 for worse reliability and more expensive parts.
The Mazdaspeed 6 actually quite handily beats the Nissan 350Z in the quarter mile, too.
And will haul a hell of a lot more luggage, too.
I’ll tell you how it drives in a few months.
Die
| Posted by Chill on 29 Nov 2009 |
Also, this link my friend sent me about climate-change-induced forest dieback is good.
Part of the problem with people doubting climate change is that most people just don’t realize how fragile ecosystems are, and how large an effect we are having on them.
I mean, a fucking tree! It’s been there for 150 years. What could kill it? Turns out, a tiny beetle that doesn’t die off in winter because it’s gotten slightly warmer.
Humans just aren’t built to understand such large-scale processes and small, infinitesimal changes — I know it took me decades to reconfigure my mind to even partially grasp such things.
Glaciers
| Posted by Chill on 29 Nov 2009 |
My friend sent me this, and it is hilariously spot-on.
GLACIERS in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas have stopped melting after the release of secret emails showing climate change scientists are at it.
Vast ice sheets across the globe gained up to four inches just hours after it emerged experts at the University of East Anglia had been manipulating data in a bid to knock-off early.
Meanwhile in the Antarctic the 200 square mile Donnelly ice shelf changed direction and headed back towards the continent where it then reattached itself to the slightly larger McPartlin ice shelf.
So funny, and so bitingly true.
Climate change is the likely answer to the Fermi Paradox. Or at least one of them.
And it turns out that the so-called smoking gun code from the CRU emails is commented out in the program and not even used.
That’s so fucking funny.
Magic pill
| Posted by Chill on 28 Nov 2009 |
People want some sort of magic pill to make the housing market behave like it did in 2006.
But there is no such pill, and there won’t be any recovery to those lofty heights. Ever. Those days are gone, and they will never come back, at least not in the lifetime of anyone alive right now.
Housing prices are still well above the 100-year median, and it’s almost inevitable that they will return to within 10% of that eventually.
Which means, as everyone who is not an idiot already knows, there is still a bit down to go after these temporary upward blips and ersatz recoveries.
Dawn
| Posted by Chill on 28 Nov 2009 |
I agree: Why Breaking Dawn must be filmed.
Eventually the baby starts to get born and Bella is dying. The baby has telepathy, by the way, so everybody can read its thoughts while it’s in the womb, and it turns out to have an essentially adult mind. Like Alia in Dune; I would accuse Stephenie Meyer of ripping this off, but anyone who thinks that Meyer might have read Frank Herbert has never been within spitting distance of Twilight. The woman is a moron.
My Twilight obsession is getting a bit unhealthy, but it serves to remind me that I need another planet to live on.
Also, this. Quite true.
Anti
| Posted by Chill on 28 Nov 2009 |
It occurred to me today that most American Christians behave as antinomianists, even though 99.99% would not know that word.
Against that framework and history, their actions within their own bailiwick make perfect sense.
Reality and its beat-down stick
| Posted by Chill on 27 Nov 2009 |
One thing I like — for limited senses of that word — is that evolution, gravity and global climate change all will and do happen whether you believe in them or not.
In other words, I find significant schadenfreude in reality fucking people all up.
It’s a character flaw.
Science and its demons
| Posted by Chill on 27 Nov 2009 |
Most people have a lot of misconceptions about how science is conducted, and about how scientists themselves behave. The completely-misinterpreted recent climate change emails really highlight that fact.
Most people — even most rational, non-fundie people — believe scientists are some sort of ascetics, living in monk-like cloisters and behaving like Mr. Spock.
And damn, they could not be more wrong.
I’ve never seen a more vicious rhetorical attack than that of one scientist bombarding another.
No shit, Sherlock. I was a scientist myself for the longest time, and the people I’d gladly drop into a vat of nitric acid start with the Pope and go all the way down to anyone who voted for Stephen Harper’s conservatives.
The apologists have stepped up, pointed out that these were private conversations and we shouldn’t expect them to carry the same veneer of civility that one would expect in a public presentation. “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” remarked one widely-quoted NASA climatologist. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”
No. I don’t think he’s got it right. I don’t think most of these people do.
Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
And yet science arrives at an ever-closer approximation of the truth. The fact that you are reading this on your computer attests to that.
But his conclusion about climate change is dead on:
I rarely mention climate-change issues in the ‘crawl because I like to reserve these pixels for cool stuff, cutting edges that may or may not pan out, findings of interest (and frequently, of contention). Anthropogenic Climate Change hasn’t qualified for years; the science is settled, the effect is real, and the only uncertainty among the folks who actually know their shit is whether we’re in for a bad ride or a downright catastrophic one.
I’m guessing the latter.