[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 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.
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.
(more…)
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
So the question was put to me: Does the notion of Cosmo + Jesus = Revolve disturb you?
MooBob42 suggested that the next Big Thing would be the appearance of e-Vangelism. I can see the spam mail now…
Feeling forsaken? For your spiritual needs, click on www.eVangelism.com now!
God’s just upgraded His connection. Now supplicants need not wait to chat with Him live on matters of personal faith.
And as a special bonus to all you sinners out there (you know who you are!), we’re throwing in a special, limited-time offer of three trial months in purgatory, absolutely free!*
*Restrictions may apply.
And a few months later, Apple will roll out their new product line — the iVangelist™:
Sleek form.
Organic functionality.
Capable of holding a dozen contradictory belief systems simultaneously.
It’s the latest version of the electric monk!
Angel S’s response proved to be more reactionary — she felt that we should never have gone to vernacular in the first place. …Never mind permitting the blasphemy of Top 10 lists, 100 ways to apply your faith, and questionnaires on your Godly Guy.
I mean, really. How on earth are we to understand all the nuances of the teachings if we haven’t read them in Hebrew? Y’know?
Or Greek / etc. for the New Testament, which is in itself a ribald piece of crockery that detracts from the Old Testament. ;)
I love Angel S.. She’s so conservative, she could teach all these American Johnny-come-lately so-called “fundamentalists” a lesson or two.
“If you can’t speak Aramaic, you don’t deserve to call yourself a Christian!!!”
Maybe go throw some pigs’ feet at them, or something.
“…And you eat pork, too, you sick church-splitters!”
But seriously…
As the article itself states, Christianity has always attempted to employ contemporary culture in conveying the Message. Heck, the translations into Greek, Latin, German, and ultimately English were all forays into modern culture (at the time). Sure, it may seem to be conceding too much to sell the New Testament in a Cosmo style, just to appease some teeny-boppers who think the New Testament is “too freaky”. It’s selling out. It’s giving away the farm. You’re losing the respect of your congregation.
…But the Catholic Church felt the same way when it excommunicated Martin Luther for nailing his 95 Theses on the doors of the Wittenberg Church in 1517.
…And that linked article mentions that period hymns and etc. were written to the tune of popular tavern drinking songs. Can you imagine your church choir doing a rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Deity” with organ accompaniment?
Speaking of writings in the vernacular and pop culture… I still have trouble figuring out James Morrow’s Biblical satire writings. I honestly can’t tell if he’s for or against Christianity. But since he’s written so many fiction books and stories, I’m guessing he’s just writing it with a critical eye to promote thinking about issues of faith and belief.
I think Bible Stories for Adults is pretty good. Towing Jehovah is the one that started it all for me, though — what happens to Man’s faith when God’s 2-mile long corpse is found floating in the Atlantic? Is it a cosmic joke? Did God sculpt it from clay of the firmament and deliver the body to test Man’s faith? Or is He really dead?
Not quite the same as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but I think it addresses the same issues more lucidly. And it’s more light-hearted as well.
An impromptu discussion of algorithms and programming came up last night in the gym. Two fellows and I opened with a discussion of Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness. In a parallel thread, we established that heuristic algorithms are not sufficiently rigorous and complex systems for use in number theory; therefore Gödel’s theorem cannot apply to them.
Now the trick to this is tying all this to evolution and Darwinian natural selection. Heuristic algorithms and evolution of the species both share some characteristics — they both rely on sets of very basic rules governing the interaction of basic components. Using these basic rules and components, they both achieve very complex and sophisticated results which sometimes seem to defy logic in that numerous shortcuts and shortcuts for shortcuts have been made. Due to these shortcuts, we sometimes lose sight of the original process which led from initial conditions/components to final results.
Now, evolution only works toward achieving a satisficient condition. i.e. an evolving breed only evolves until it is good enough. Once there, it experiences diminishing returns, where further refinements won’t appreciably increase chances of survival and improved propagation beyond those of existing members.
I think that’s how it works. This all also ends up with the unfortunate (for the paper under discussion) conclusion that Gödel’s theorem cannot be applied to evolution. But it was an interesting journey, though.
In one side conversation, I learned that the evolutionary process can be applied to programming and computer-based solutions to certain problems, like the traveling saleman problem.
And thus, genetic algorithms. They’re even in your spreadsheet.
So this isn’t the Technology Review article that has been cited at me repeatedly (but is never to be found)… But Leo finally found an article which describes the experiment wherein a researcher evolved a chip which could distinguish between two sounds. Eventually, FPGA chips like these could reprogram themselves on the fly — they can learn to rewrite their software and reconfigure their hardware to perform tasks more efficiently! Or they can completely switch tasks…
In another side jaunt down the corridors of the intellectual Elysian fields, I spent my evening and early morning on a fourth-floor terrace enjoying the minty flavor from a shisha — and this is coming from me, a life-time nonsmoker! There, I learned about the distinction between chemical evolution and Darwinian evolution. Chemical evolution is a slap in the face of entropy — no ifs, ands, or buts. But (there’s always a “but”), once a critical mass has been achieved in terms of certain molecules forming (e.g. a lipid bilayer), then you’ve created an enclosed environment (due to the lipid bilayer’s schizophrenic hydrophilic / hydrophobic nature) which frees you to get all sorts of other crazy chemical action going on in the lipid loveshack.
And then, Darwinian evolution takes over.
I don’t care what the atheists or the Christians say about it. I’m satisfied with the notion that, whether God is an amazing architect, a lazy college student whose bowl of month-old soup spawned the universe, or merely a stunningly complex canon of physical laws… it’s all pretty amazing.
..And humans need to spend a little more time being humble in the face of it all. ;)
Next week on Geraldo: an ethical existence and the human condition.
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