I > U

The picture above is good representation about how many people in modern America feel about most hunter/gatherer societies.  The video “Guns, Germs, and Steel” talks a great deal about some of these hunter/gatherer societies.  One of the key moments in the movie that deals with issue of superiority is when a New Guinean asks why the white man has more cargo then him.  My immediate reaction was, “because the white man is more advanced.  Why is that? Why are these New Guinean less advanced than us.  

The narrator talks about domestication of animals for purposes of farming.  Of the 148 animals that can be domesticated, only 14 have been domesticated.  None of those animals are natives of New Guinea.  That fact alone plays a large role in why they are “inferior” than us.  Of the animals that can be domesticated, only one has made its ways to New Guinea, the pig.  Due to the lack of domesticated animals, they were at a severe disadvantage when it came to farming.  Diamond argues that industrial america would have been impossible if not for farming, and implies that’s what happened in New Guinea.  The fundamental core of his argument regard the hands that people have been dealt.  He claims that people are not different because of genetics.  According to Diamond we don’t have more more “cargo” then  the people of New Guinea because of a lack of ingenuity by the people of New Guinea, it’s because of geography.  

Laziness at its Finest

The video I recently watch discusses the barriers people face when attempting to be “creative”.  First of all, creativity to me mean the creation of fresh original idea, not using someone else’s ideas and adding to them or tweaking them.  The example in the video regards music.  So when I see people saying these mashups are creative, I really think they’re just a form of plagiarism.  Just because you added one persons work with another persons work doesn’t make you creative, it just means you ripped off two different people.  

The video talks about how a pastor was sued for copyright infringement.  Am I suppose to feel sorry of that person because apparently his kids friends were also using his computers?  If you’re trying to tell me that he didn’t know his son or his sons friends were downloading music illegally then sorry I don’t buy it.  Even if he didn’t know, ignorance isn’t a good excuse.  Music artist make songs to make money.  They make money by selling their songs to the public and companies that want to use them.  Think about it this way, if you come up with a song to make money but realize you’re not making as much money as you should because people are downloading your song instead of buying it how would that make you feel?

Agree to Disagree

Last week we had a guest speaker come to class (Evaggelos Vallianatos) to talk about several things including regulation and organic foods.  First of all I just want to say, no disrespect is meant by anything I say here.  Regarding regulations, I think they are necessary.  Understand one thing, the United States is driven by corporation.  The main object of any corporation is to maximize firm value, one way to do that is by lowering cost.  Another way is by increasing volume of sale, the end result is creating more profit.  Not one publicly traded corporation has an objective of sustainability, unless you’re talking about sustainability of their profits.  Bottom line is this, to prevent harmful waste and contamination by these corporations you have to have regulations.  Without they, they would be free to do as they please to lower their cost in anyway they think benefits THEM the most.  It didn’t seem to me that our guest speaker had any disagreement with me there but when it came to the topic of food and farms, we have a completely different view.  

On the topic of food and farms a few things bothered me about what our speaker said.  One, he stated that you get more yield without the use of pesticides.  That goes against everything I thought I knew about farming (which is very little).  Second and more importantly he was talking about how our preference should be organic food over processed food.  To me that means cutting out all fast food and most of the places I eat at.  That’s just not going to happen.  When deciding where to eat, the only thing that matters to me is taste.  I absolutely refuse to eat something that doesn’t taste absolutely great unless I really don’t have a choice.  I’ve had organic non-processed food from exactly one fast food place, Elevation Burgers in Carlsbad.  Everyone I talked to told me the place was really good.  Little did I know, the place was just well respected by people that ate their because they wanted organic food.  The place was horrible, the best thing I had that meal was my drink.  The burger taste funky and the place had a weird vibe.  In conclusion

In-N-Out > Elevation Burgers.  

Imperfect Regulation

The use of hemp is considered a link to a  “green industrial future” yet it’s banned in the United States and, in the eyes of the law has no distinction with marijuana.  The only logical reason I saw against legalizing the use of industrial hemp was the de facto legalization of marijuana. That being said, there are many more reason the United States should legalize the use of agricultural and industrial hemp.  The potential rewards far outweigh the negative side effects.  With all the available information, the question of whether hemp should be legalized isn’t even a tricky question. 

The fiber of the plant is so strong, in Germany the automaker, Mercedes Benz uses it to make about third of its cars body.  Clearly the ban has to do more than just to prevent the use of marijuana.  If that’s the only reason the DEA can come up with, then they really need to rethink their hiring policies because they’re ridiculous.  The only other explanation has to business related.  Any big company whose bottom line would take a negative hit would logically be apposed to such a move.  So what now?  Does the United States look past the needs of few companies to care for the needs of the many?    

Project Implicit

So this weekend I decided to take a few demo tests on https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html.  The end result being a very confused reaction and a little frustration.  First of all, I didn’t agree with the profile the tests assigned to me.  One because I don’t believe it fits properly, and two, because it felt like the test wasn’t a good way to get those results.  I took the test to see if I have preference of African American, or European faces; and a separate test to see if I have a preference of straight or gay people.  For both tests, the first thing that was shown was word either labeled bad or good.  I had to press either “E”, or “I” to categorize the two.  Then I was shown several pictures that I also had to categorize.  First it would show either gay or straight on side along with either the word “good” or “bad” under it, the other side would show the opposite.  The part that made it increasingly difficult was the fact that I had to answer as fast as I could. 

After the image test, I was asked a series of a few questions testing pretty much the same thing.  According to the tests, I have a strong preference for African Americans and Gay people.  I couldn’t disagree with that more.  First of all before anyone takes any offence, I’m not a racist nor do I hate gay people, but to say I have a “strong preference” is an overstatement.  I’d like to at least think I’m fair in both regards.  If someone were to outright ask me if have a preference for either I would say no.  I don’t have a problem with the gay community but I don’t have preference for them, nor do I have a preference for straight people.  Same thing goes for race.  I try to not judge people based on characteristics like those one.  A person’s race or sexual orientation has almost nothing to do with who they are.  Overall all, I thought the tests were a little interesting and made me really think. 

To Game Or Not To Game, What A Silly Question

“I used to be an adventurer like you then i took an arrow to the knee” – Town Guard  

Gaming allow people to escape the stresses of their daily lives.  It provides a nirvana for people who want to tune the world out.  For some it provides the entertainment to watch grunts being stuck with plasma grenades while they scream something equally as funny as they hopelessly run for their lives.  Some enjoy the occasional “teabagging” of the casual noob online.  Still others do it as a job, training for real life situations.  Personally, my amount of gaming is a little volatile.  On one extreme I spend 0 hours gaming a month.  On the other extreme, I spend 10 hours gaming in a single day.  A lot of people spend in an inordinate amount of time deciding if they should join the imperials or the stormcloaks in the battle for Skyrim.  The point it, a lot of time is spent on gaming everyday by a lot of people.  The prime example of that is actually World of Warcraft.  

Just proposing an idea of playing more games to save humanity seems insane.  To be able to prove that it could work seem exponentially more ridiculous. Jane McGonigal talks about a game that acts out real life crisis where you have the job of getting what you can with limited resources.  The point of putting that in a game perspective actually sounds reasonable because she’s right, people are more optimistic, more engages, and overall more involved in the virtual world then in the real world.   Those habits of frugality should and do transfer over to real life situations as well.  It is worth noting that although gaming can be used as a tool for positive reinforcement, it’s a little sad people are more confident in virtual situations. 

Greed is Good

›Generally people are not rational, they are emotional.  Think about the formation of “bubbles”.  Think about the housing bubble, the internet bubble, the stock market bubble.  The way these bubbles form is by the illogical and irrational behaviors of those involved.  People see prices and profits and rising and they want in.  More and more people begin to join the movement and the prices continue to rise based simply on the overreaction and increased interest in the market.  Eventually prices get to breaking point and people begin to realize they might have overpaid.  Instinct takes over and they start to sell for whatever they can get.  Prices fall, dramatically.  Just as the bubble created wealth in its early stages, it destroys that wealth at an even faster rate.  What do people do when this happens, they blame the CEOs.  Nothing in that entire process is rational, yet people do it all the time. 

›The documentary, The Corporation, attempts to demonize Corporate America by pointing out “flaws” within the system of corporations.  When a corporation is created with a single objective in mind, it can only fail if it fails to meet the standards for completing that objective.  More often than not, for corporations that objective is to make a profit.  Regardless of how consumers feel about the corporate social responsibility of a firm, the bottom line is profit.  Everything the firms do is geared specifically at achieving a minimum target profit.   As one respondent stated in the video, “if you don’t like what corporations are doing, don’t buy from them”.  For the most part, I though the video was wildly off base.  Aside from the monopolization of essential human needs, anything should be sellable.  The whole debate about “bad apples” and their effect on others is hopelessly pointless.  There will always be “bad apples”, removing corporations doesn’t remove greed, the essential cause of dysfunction and corruption.  Under stand this, the whole point of corporations is to satisfy a persons greed.  I understand people will disagree with me and say there need to be something done about corporations and their negative impact, to those people I say, fine go do something about it rather than waste your time reading my obviously pro corporation rant. 

Systematic Organization

So as I was reading a little from Steven Johnson’s book, “Here Comes Everybody!, Introduction from Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ant, Brains, Cities, and Software”, I started thinking about new technologies work and what their goal is. Mainly self-correction and adaption due to changes in environmental conditions. Johnson discusses the example of the slime mold (because its scientific name is long and uninteresting I will only refer it as the slime mold). Johnson talks about how the slime mold can be different depending on temperature or weather. Johnson talks about the how for a long time researchers thought its reaction to weather changes were controlled by a single cell in a managing capacity. That proved to be false, instead there is no “lead” cell that controls the slime mold rather a self correcting system. This is something that was not previously know to past researchers who attempted to develop a model based on incomplete and inaccurate information. One thing that proves it that information can be undated and that can change they way we approach a situation.
Next I looked at a video about Ashok Khosla who talks about primarily about these thing called rucksacks. Ashok talks a great deal about the overuse of materials today. Even the costs associated with moving those materials seems significant. I am personally of the thought where I could care less. The way I see it, the planet isn’t running out of materials in my lifetime so why should I care. My approach is definitely a linear one, but it still doesn’t bother me. I see things like buildings without air conditioning and only think about the discomfort during the winter. Waste is a concept that neither appeals to my way of thinking nor does it bother me knowing how much waste is going on.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

In the book, The Nature of Economics, the idea of Biomimicry was first introduced to me.  My first thought, what is Biomimicry and what does it have to do with sustainability?  The most basic definition I could derive from the first two chapters is that Biomimicry is the observation and study of nature and its elements (including its inhabitants and their systems) and applying those observations to solve our problems in a practical manner with minimal residual effects.  Although the idea is introduced in an effective way, I would like future authors to come up with better names for characters in a story (if those names are real, use fake names).

Janine Benyus also talks a great deal about how Biomimicry can be used to solve problems.  One example from the videos was that of the bullet train, engineers were concerned about the supersonic boom after the train passed through a tunnel.  The engineers turned to nature to help solve that problem; one of the engineers of the project was an avid bird watcher who proposed looking at the Kingfisher.  The Kingfisher has the ability to dive into water without making a splash.  This is just one of several examples presented by Benyus.  The ideas presented by Benyus are interesting to say the least.  The idea almost seems too simple to work.  It makes perfect sense speaking logically though.

Has Technology Become a Problem?

Today, people are driven by the need to improve their lives through technological fixes. People work long hours to be able to buy the newest gadgets in an effort to either satisfy their own curiosity or in hopes of improving their own lives through the perceived efficiency new technology brings. In the video above Michael Huesemann instead talks about the inefficiency of technology. Huesemann uses the example of hybrid cars. According the his research, although hybrid cars such as the Prius are more fuel efficient, owner of hybrid cars seem to drive more miles overall. My stance on technology is simple, it is helpful and it is improving. Although it is unclear whether Huesemann is anti technology or simply trying to send a message to be careful, it seemed to me as if he didn’t think technology has much hope. I don’t think it’s fair to label technology as whole as bad based on a few example of developing technologies. It seemed to be as if Huesemann was trying to ridicule technology by pointing out a few ideas he thought we ridiculous. I think you can only do that if you have a better solution. Huesemann seemed to only point out errors and offered no realistic solutions. I’ve heard people say things like, “people that lived 100 years ago didn’t need things like air conditioning and cars to survive”. Well, those same people also weren’t able to cure polio. They weren’t able to travel across the country in less than a day. They didn’t have the option of communication instantaneously through text messaging and email. Maybe we should get rid of cars all together and just use horses. Bottom line, it’s technology that’s gotten us this far, why drop it now?