My brother Mica has a new video online in a paper cutout stop-motion animated style.
It’s lighthearted and very ‘Web 2.0.’
Category: Daily updates
Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph
Sectoral solutions
Yes! Magazine has an interesting series of short articles describing climate change efforts that can be undertaken in four major areas:
Breaking down the problem by sector is a useful way of assessing the most important areas for action, as well as those where the most improvement can be made for the least expenditure of resources. In an ideal world, simply internalizing the externalities associated with climate change would create the proper incentives for the market to sort out the problem. In practice, law-making is too slow, inconsistent, and unconcerned with future generations for that approach to work alone.
You are very safe
Glancing through news stands and television reports, a person is likely to see all manner of terrible hazards highlighted: from kidnapping to toxic chemicals leached from Nalgene bottles. It is worth remembering – in the face of this onslaught – that we are about the safest people who have ever lived. Hunger and infectious disease kill hardly any Canadians. Violence kills some, but fewer than in just about any society ever. And yet, too many people live in fear.
Maintaining perspective is vital. Let your children play in the park, even though one or two children in the whole country get kidnapped from there annually. Let them build treehouses, even though some tiny subset of Canada’s population contracts tetanus.
Refusing strengthens the significant possibility that they will live sedate and uninteresting lives.
Tasty eggs
Culinary discovery of the day: sun-dried tomatoes make an excellent addition to scrambled eggs. Scramble the eggs in a bowl, add strips of tomato, a bit of oregano, a bit of sea salt, and crushed garlic.
Then, fry one small onion in olive oil – with a bit more garlic. When it is browning, add the egg mixture. Serve it all with a side of re-heated stir-fry from a previous evening.
No Country for Old Men
Right up until the abrupt conclusion, the new Coen Brothers film is a melange of suspense genres, built around some of the cinematic elements that link the diverse offerings of the talented pair. On the basis of the first viewing, it shares some of the nihilism of Fargo – with chance and greed driving the bloodshed. Like, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, much of the drama derives from over-the-top characters, though the theme seems to reside with the more demure ones who serve as their foils. Saying little of consequence throughout the film, Kelly Macdonald is nonetheless subtly captivating.
The film is imbued with a wonderful sense of place: showing the combined spirit underlying empty prairie and sleek Houston oil high-rises: the swagger and determination of the cowboy genre. It certainly gives a person an appreciation for the vastness of the American Southwest, and the way in which it is an inescapably rifles and pickups kind of place.
While additional viewings would probably improve one’s appreciation for the clever touches, it seems unlikely that anything but one’s first exposure will carry the full force of this film. That’s not because anything terribly surprising happens – this is not 24 – but rather because it is stark enough to stand for itself, appearing as a plain to be appreciated at a glance, rather than a dense wood with many paths to follow.
Manitoba hog farm ban
In recognition of how environmentally destructive industrial hog farming is, Manitoba has banned the establishment of new farms or the expansion of old ones in the Interlake, Winnipeg, and Red River regions. Operations in other parts of the province will be subject to new rules. The changes were made after a report on the sustainability of the industry was released. Unsurprisingly, industry officials have been condemning the decision.
It is a sad reflection of the state of modern farming that concentrated animal feeding lots produce enough toxic waste to justify such measures.
Aesthetic query
What do people think about the big thumbnail images in the last few posts? They do allow for a much better sense of the overall picture, and they don’t sit awkwardly to one side of a white space. At the same time, they seem to diminish the text – especially when you cannot see the beginning of a post without scrolling down.
Should I stick with 450 pixel thumbnails or revert to 320 pixel ones?
On second thought…
In the vein of my previous post about fostering discussion, I have another question for readers: have you ever substantially changed your mind about something on the basis of an argument you read here? If so, which post did it?
Deceit and development
An interesting article in New York Magazine discusses the development of lying in children. While one might superficially expect truthfulness to be the greater virtue, deception is highlighted as the more advanced behaviour:
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
This really isn’t too surprising. It is, after all, the development of strategic thinking that differentiates sophisticated actors from unsophisticated ones, and the ability to avoid revealing strategic vulnerabilities is crucial to effective action in many circumstances.
While parents probably feel as though their children should be willing to trust them with anything, they also need to appreciate the degree to which an ability to mislead is crucial to success in pretty much all significant engagements with strangers, and probably even colleagues and friends. After all, how many dates, weddings, or job interviews is a person liable to get through successfully without a strategic awareness of information and an ability to leverage it through everything from tactful suppression of facts or details to their outright misrepresentation.
The hopelessness of the voluntary
Energy Saving Day in the United Kingdom has produced no measurable results. While this is a blow to the “everyone recycle your used Coke cans and we will be fine” form of environmentalism, it is less surprising to people who have a sense of the scale of the climate issue and an awareness of the (in)effectiveness of past voluntary efforts.
Even if the day had been successful, it would have been more about displacement than reduction. Consider the much touted ‘Buy Nothing Day‘ espoused by certain rejectors of the dominant consumerist culture. Even among those who observe the occasion scrupulously, it is plausible that overall consumption doesn’t fall at all: it just gets displaced to the days before and after. Overall, the idea that serious societal issues can be tackled through 24 hours of voluntary abstinence by a handful of devotees is profoundly flawed.
What is the alternative? Price carbon and de-carbonize infrastructure.