[Currently listening to Lost Eden, by Asura]
What the hell is it?
http://www.celsias.com/2007/03/15/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-where-is-it-heading/
Biggsy would approve. So do I:
http://www.celsias.com/2007/04/13/colony-collapse-disorder-a-moment-for-reflection/
Resources:
http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/ColonyCollapseDisorder.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
Go Army! Virus identification in 10 minutes!
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4219746.html
Narrowing down the culprits:
http://live.psu.edu/story/25747
When motivated self-interest fails. Or, auto-inflicted long-term harm due to shortsightedness (admittedly, this is from a concerned apiarist’s perspective):
http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/CCDPpt/CCDCallstoWashington.html
Lies, damn lies (but such useful ones)!
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp
Upshot is that we’ve got some clues, and can only hope that the solution can be implemented quickly. Celsias’ injunction to restore diversity and natural balances is totally in keeping with general principles of sustainable development. We’ll survive the bees, probably, but let’s hope 50,000 years from now mono-cropping and other over-industrialized problems will be seen as merely object lessons, rather than as epitaphs on our gravestones.
[Currently listening to Ankle Injuries, by Fujiya & Miyagi]
Yeah, a commission crunch and starting a new job swallowed most of my time the past two months.
And now it’s time for another public appeal:
So I’m one of those people who likes the idea of being green. But we all know it’s not easy being green. (Kermit was a childhood hero)
But I don’t do much to actively research the politics of it. A quick Google search for “HR 969 clean energy” seems to indicate that numerous green groups are wanting people to click and sign petitions to support this bill:
http://pol.moveon.org/cleanenergyfuture/o.pl?&id=10885-8451686-fChAQ_&t=3
Blah blah blah clean energy better. This initiative will push to increase renewable energy from 2% of our current grid to 20% by 2020 (creating larger economies of scale and competition, thereby hopefully driving prices down, which we haven’t yet seen in 12 years of deregulation in TX… But that’s a cynical discussion for later). It’ll also supposedly create 185,000 new jobs related to high-tech industries (for wind power). These’re jobs that are specialized, and can’t easily be farmed out overseas. Indirectly, they’ll encourage people to seek education and job training in this (and other directions) that’ll hopefully improve the US job market b/c these jobs have to be filled here instead of e.g. Pakistan (not that coal power plants ship jobs to e.g. Pakistan, but they’re definitely lower-skill and -value jobs).
This is a link from a group I’m signed up with. You can sign up elsewhere if you like, or not. Folks will surely let me know if they know there’s a negative flipside to this bill. In the meantime, give it a quick think.
[Currently listening to Cold Hearted Wind, by Ron Sexsmith]
So this is a bit of a first for me — trying to spread the word about *doing* something that I care about. Generally, I just rant and give the ol’ soapbox a good hand-wavin’, foot-stompin’ workout, and then I move on.
Well, if you like independent music, read on. If you’re happy with what you find on the major radio stations today, then give this a miss.
Here’s the skinny first:
Sign a petition. Send a form letter. Write your own. Call your senator or representative (I did).
http://www.kcrw.com/music/music-royalty-rates has ongoing coverage and links to the current fight to fend off big music (the RIAA and SoundExchange). There are 53 days left until new royalty rate hikes kick in (retroactive to January 2006!) that’ll likely kill off most internet radio stations that *already* pay royalties — 6-12% of revenue, from what I can see. The rate hike represents a 300-1200% increase over current royalties. To cite the Salon article from the page ref’d above, one example station, AccuRadio, made $400k in 2006. When the retroactive rate hike kicks in, they’ll all of a sudden owe $600k in royalties. I have no idea how much of that could have been foreseen — if fully, then we’d have noticed a big increase in advertising and other revenue generation (subscriptions, etc.) on internet radio. As it is, I suspect this came abruptly — a more gradual phase-in would’ve gone over much more smoothly (though with griping about increased costs, all along the way).
And I figure that most of those rate hikes are not going 100% to label artists. So big music profits, internet radio shuts down (even nonprofit public radio!), and indie rockers will fall back into being able to reach only those fans who hear their concerts and get their CDs.
New indie stations like MagnaTune (50-50 split of net profits with the artists) will have to take up the slack. From a Darwinian perspective, if we do nothing, I suppose the advent of the new royalty-free Internet paradigm exemplified by these stations will be hastened. But there will be an ice age die-off in indie music broadcasting, in the short run — there are a *lot* of indie stations that play less mainstream music with royalties attached. If their increased fees bankrupt them, they go off the air. Then they *won’t* play the music and won’t pay any royalties at all. It’s the same problem as the Big 3 automakers are facing with their union workers — if your expenses become larger than your revenue, you go out of business. In the case of indie music, though, this ultimately hurts small artists, the vast majority of whom didn’t ask for these rate hikes. The unions chose to shoot themselves in the foot — I feel a lot more sympathy for the artist who’s gotta tie down a day job or two to pay for his music than for the high school graduate who’s bankrupting his employer in order to be paid $70k a year.
Personally, I’ve grown really fond of a couple online stations like KCRW and www.di.fm . Reason being that a typical evening of listening exposes me to more new, different, and just plain cooler music than I’ll hear in three months’ programming on *all* the local Clear Channel format stations in Houston.
Sure, I like the Shins. Heard ‘em first on KCRW, then I started hearing them everywhere I went. I don’t salivate over them the way some indie reviewers seem to be doing, but they’re pretty cool. Other groups like Beirut, Xerxes, and even Faithless (who’s a pretty big deal) are very cool, but in years of browsing mainstream music, I never caught wind of them. I’d pay money — I *have* paid money — for them. Dashboard Confessional, Slipknot, and Coldplay? Not so much.
I’ll be honest — I used to collect music like an OCD squirrel collects nuts. At last count, I had something like 69 days and 16 hours of continuous play time. And it was that act of collecting and enjoying my music that elicited an innate Kantian sense of morality in me — I started finding music I really liked, and respected enough to want to pay the artist somehow. But I knew that traditional major labels pass on mere pennies to the artists.
Piracy led me to indie internet stations, which have revealed new vistas of music to me. Even before I found internet radio, I’d begun to buy albums for my favorite groups. If I were being rigorously moral, I’d delete all my unpurchased music. I’m not a perfect person — I’ll settle for buying a couple CDs every year from the top bands I’ve listened to for free in the past. I think I’m a pretty good example of someone who spontaneously began to respect the work of the artists to whom he listened.
Still got a long way to go, but in the future, I’ll probably focus on supporting royalty-free music that I enjoy.
[Currently listening to Kind of Peace (w/ Cat Power), by Faithless]
Lots of kneejerk reactions and counter-reactions flying around, with one or two intelligent responses:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/stage_weapons_b.html
…Including one, I believe, from our own Colsith.
Not much use worrying about it. If bans impinge on our ability to check fencing / fighting gear at the ticket counter, there’ll probably be petitions or letters to be signed and sent. And maybe one of us could intelligently martyr ourselves in a bid for PR regarding WMA. ;)
“In a comment today, Mr. WMA expressed his disappointment with the knuckleheads at Homeland Security: ‘This is exactly the sort of fing the bad guys want to happen — for us to run headlong into a fortress mentality wherein Orwell’s posited thoughtcrime becomes punishable by real law. The only defense against threats to our way of life is education, not an infinitude of reactionary commandments about what thou shalt not do. Learning, and learning to enjoy, everything about the world we live in is what it’s about. My fencing equipment and stage props may be banned today, but what will become of us all if cars are banned as potential tools of violence? Will the humble foot follow, since it can kick a man as easily as a soccer ball? We must teach awareness, skill, respect, and proper use of the tools and objects which merely exist.’”
It seems a little bit of maudlin overkill to work in Martin Niemoller’s poem “First They Came…”, but much less unlikely than when I first read it in 7th grade.
Ξ February 9th, 2007 | → Comments Off | ∇ Current Events, SCA |
…Yes, yes they are.
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What does Dawn of War have to do with the rise and fall of empires?
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Random e-mail rant. Skip if you tire of hearing my whinging cries for cosmic justice.
Kinda on an adrenaline high. Just finished a 93-page paper earlier today, got another 4-6 pages to go tonight for a test review, and two presentations to prepare and deliver in the next two days.
Thank goodness my New Products teammates are awesome. Everytime we’ve had something come up this semester, the group has pulled through. Whoever’s been busy, the rest of us pick up the slack and tell him, “Hey, it’s cool. Take care of your business.”
This weekend, it was my turn to fall down, and they picked me up in stride. So I got to finish my paper tonight while they work on the presentation PPT. I’ll review it tomorrow after my first presentation, and deliver it on Tuesday.
I got nothin’ bad and all the world to say of them. :)
Those who can’t get enough of me can go on to read the environment / life / rampant consumerism rant in my extended entry. Go on, shoo. Go do something useful with your evening — like polish your grandma’s tea service set.
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Ξ October 19th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Current Events |
Got back from Dallas. Crashed all the next day. WMAW report forthcoming.
For now, relish the renewed relevancy of Tolkien’s work in current events, as evidenced by the literary allusion made by Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) [warning: this link not for viewing at work or by the easily unamused].
But get your facts straight — it’s not the devil..?
Though it might as well be, in our benighted society. For all our much-vaunted, 21st century notions of progress, a comparison of polls indicates that Americans are more likely to believe that they can speak to the dead than to approve of Congress’ actions.
(Thanks to Leo for keeping me in the swing of things!)
Disclaimer: I’m not particularly political, beyond a basic belief in taking care of what I have and cleaning up my own messes (a fairly conservative attitude, I feel). Any correlations between GOP membership, political activity, and irresponsible meddling in the links above-referenced are purely coincidental, and do not reflect an anti-Conservative bias on my part. :P
We got into a discussion last weekend after class about environmental issues. I had figured that Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, had compromised in some way on its presentation of the situation. Adam said that his research had indicated that CO2 may have little or no actual impact on global warming — water vapor has a much bigger impact. And that undermines the whole point of the movie.
And yet, many of the manmade sources of CO2 (other than people themselves) are responsible for a huge variety of pollutants that we’re not readily aware of. So I figure the movie’s a simplistic way of telling our dumb mass audience that Columbus discovered America, so to speak. Someone’s always known that Amerigo Vespucci figured it out, and that Leif Ericsson set foot on Newfoundland (did I get that right?), and the Amerindians beat everyone to the punch via the Bering Strait by 12,000 years. But it wasn’t taught that way in schools until recently in the 20th century. Hell, apparently, plate tectonics and the formation of mountain ranges weren’t even theoretically conceived until within the past couple decades. Can you imagine a prof telling his class that mountains were created by some unknown force? It happened to Adam in one of his geology classes, and Adam’s my age.
So I think that the American population is aware of the world and its environment in a “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492″ kind of way. I don’t know that the movie is a good way to handle things. People should be responsible enough to clean up their own messes and leave things as they found them or better. But unfortunately, I also don’t see people cleaning their act up just because. A reasoned approach to the environment may be doomed to failure b/c not only can our scientists not agree (even as Gore claims that all our scientists agree) as to what’s wrong and how to fix it, but the population simply doesn’t care.
Me, I’ve been wrong too many times about the big environmental issues. But that’s okay, because the scientists aren’t all clear either. So for me, it just comes down to being conscientious about your own living conditions. If you spill punch on the carpet, you get some stain remover and clean it up. If your bathroom gets dirty, you clean it. You plunge your own toilet. You take out the garbage. If you drop cigarette butts out the window and a cop busts you, you pay a fine. If you don’t get caught littering, well, I guess you got away with it. But the message is still there…
Never mind rationale or reason, we need to expand the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign to encompass all of Earth. Why should we not dump mercury into our groundwater? Why should we not kill all our fish? Why should we use more efficient cars and reduce our A/C usage? Because, you dumb motherfuckers. Just because. Not because someone’s gonna slap a fine on your dumb ass for wasting resources and extravagantly living beyond your means and not caring about messing up someone else’s quality of life because they have to drive past your litter or drink water with your contaminants in it. …As much as we may want to.
Adam said that the environmentalists are overreacting — our planet has done and seen worse things than anything we’ve done so far. How can we really *destroy* the environment? (ref. alt.destroy.the.earth and alt.pave.the.earth) I agree with him. But I also agree with him that we can and have adversely affected our own quality of life. And in our own lifetime. It’s not much consolation or tragedy to me that, perhaps in 50,000 geologically short and cosmically miniscule years, our environment will continue to survive even if our race’s ecological niche has been marginalized due to climatic changes by that point, and that we’ll have been replaced by some humanoid reptilian race that can better thrive in the increased UV and heat conditions of our desertified world. But within my ~80 allotted years? Yeah, that matters.
Bringing it back to me, because that’s what it’s really about, I don’t want to breathe fumes from some big dualie F-250 with a racketing diesel, custom amber trucking cab lights, vinyl chrome flames on the sides, and a decal of a Calvin clone pissing on some corporate logo. I’m sure the guy behind me doesn’t want to breathe fumes from my rickety-ass ten-year old SUV, either.
So my next car’ll be a zippy little wagon or maybe an SCA war wagon (more usually known as a minivan). And in the years it takes me to save up and pay off current debt, I’ll thank society to get a move on, so that my future car will be as efficient and advanced as possible for the price I can afford. And in turn, my own hopefully responsible choice will contribute to car buyers’ choices another 5-10 years down the road after that.
I don’t want to pay $0.16 / kWh so that some natural gas baron at Reliant can laugh at me as he roars off to his private duck hunting retreat. So I’ll minimize my usage in cost-sensible and effective ways, and hope for a better, cheaper future where 10,000 of my closest neighbors have also chosen to live more responsible, considerate lives — energy prices are rising due to demand, so reducing demand will reduce prices (after a short months-long lag while the energy companies catch on and restructure their pricing), until inefficiencies of scale appear (and that’s a loooong way off from our current usage levels).
I want to enjoy sushi without poisoning myself with contaminants accumulated in the meat. I want for there to always be rare seared tuna steak rubbed with salt and pepper. I don’t want to eat vat-grown algae that my bacterial ancestors might have feasted on 2 billion years ago. I want my sky to not have a brown smudge on it.
That’s what I want. And that’s why the environment matters. :P
[Warning: blog contains anger sufficient to upset a Jedi’s digestion.]
So a couple of weeks ago, I was poking around, and spent an afternoon reading news.bbc.co.uk. Today, I found an interesting article about Saudi Arabia’s status quo.
It doesn’t solve our silly beef with Iraq, but it does highlight the overly simplified attitude we as a society tend to take towards the ragheads. It certainly seems that a good deal of the Middle East’s tension would go away if those peoples were shown / taught the means and infrastructure to compete economically, and consequently bring about a higher standard of living and education for their people. A man who has lots isn’t willing to risk it in war or revolution, but the man who has nothing has nothing to lose.
But we don’t collectively seem inclined to take such an enlightened stance. (And some of the enlightened bits of our collective may have a take on stances different from mine…)
Then I thought, “Hrm, what has the average well-informed American read in recent times about the Saudis, anyway?”
So I polled CNN’s world news section. That had nothing on Saudi Arabia, so I did a keyword search on the site. Last mention: 5/18/03, wherein U.S. lawmakers criticized the Saudis for not fully committing to the U.S.’s self-aggrandizing campaign against hapless Middle-Eastern victims of the U.S.’s past policies. And yes, I’m only referring to the Iraqis and their government’s past 2 decades’ involvement with the U.S. I know that we can blame many of the Middle East’s oldest problems on those pesky steppes nomads, the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks. The upstart U.S. can’t claim to have oppressed the Middle East for five centuries, crushing the Arabs’ flowering civilization of sciences and arts. Don’t let anyone tell you that we or the Crusaders were responsible for the current state of the Middle East. :)
We’re certainly not helping matters, though — that’s for sure.
Um, I’ll get off my Ottoman rant now.
So I don’t know if American news actually is on par with the BBC for fair and well-rounded, meaningful reporting. I’ve heard lots of self-proclaimed enlightened people tell me that the U.S. media is a joke, is too sensationalistic, and too fluffy. This is certainly borne out by my random encounters with MSNBC or CNN. But who knows? Maybe the WSJ and NY Times are actually intelligent.
All I know is that I always come away feeling better — better informed and better cheered — after reading the Brits’ take on world news.
American news just makes me feel empty. Look at our president, see how stupid he is! But don’t mind how cleverly he and his political machine have implemented many of the key points on their party agenda, all the while apologizing for his irrelevant pronunciation goofs.
Not that this is really news to me or you. Oh, look at me — my social consciousness has been newly awakened, and I feel motivated to go out and make a difference.
Oh, wait. I’m not gonna overturn any governments or institute reforms. I’m not going to save whales or feed hungry Somalian children.
There’s nothing that makes should into must, despite what our more extreme elements of society say.
I’ve done useful things for society and myself, and I will continue to do so. I may admire and adopt others’ causes, but I won’t let ‘em guilt me into adoption. Anymore, that is. We’ll see.
Can anyone recommend some good news sources? Joseph recommended some good ones a few years back to me, but that was two mail readers and two computers ago. My preference is for nothing extreme (conservative or liberal).
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