Pencil Shavings

What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce.

I have been going through the TED talks.  I really like Malcom Gladwell for a lot of reasons.  He is a great writer, and has a great way of telling other people's stories and making them our stories

Planet Songs

Well, here you go.  It's no secret that I am a geek and love this kind of stuff.  I'm coming out of my geek closet to share this with you.

The first link is the sound the earth's magnetic belt makes when solar particles hit it, the second is the sound the rings of Saturn make when meteorites hit them.  I think that they are really cool and beautiful. I wish that the earth could sing so we could hear her, maybe we would respect her more if we could hear her voice.

http://www.space.com/php/video/player.php?video_id=080627-earth-sounds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGeWBiLVn8g&feature=related

What's For Lunch?

We were discussing lunch a few days ago. You know, what to make for ourselves and the kids. We wanted something satisfying on a chilly day.

I opened the pantry and looked at the shelves of food – and the six cans of Albacore tuna that we can't eat. We can't eat the tuna because it has too much mercury for the kids to be eating, and if there is too much for the kids, then really there is too much for the adults too. I can't give it to the food bank, why would I give them something that I think is unsafe to eat?

The recycler in me feels awful about just throwing the cans away. So they are still sitting in my pantry waiting for me to do something. Although they are serving a purpose. And I am doing something, even if it isn't in direct relation to the cans. Their purpose is to remind me of the value of the world and the oceans, and how we as a society express our disdain at that value.

All of the worlds oceans are connected, and dumping mercury into the sea in India, or China or New Jersey effects the water, and the creatures that live in it, all around the planet. Two thirds of our planet is covered in this live giving water, and we are treating it like a toilet.

Mercury is clearly something that isn't used by living bodies. So it gets moved to the fat stores of the those bodies, including the fat that is in the brain. Each little fish that has a little mercury in it's body is consumed by something, most often a bigger fish. That fish eats a lot of little fish and it stores all that mercury from those small fry in it's body, because it can't use it either.

Then that fish is eaten by a bigger fish... and on up the food chain, until the fish that we eat, like tuna, are so contaminated with mercury that we cannot safely eat them.

What does it say about us a species that we have let it get to this point? Where we have poisoned our own source of food, and still we won't stop. Right now somewhere in the world someone is dumping a load of heavy metal, or poison, or chemicals into our water. And it's not just Them, it's Us, pouring cleaners down the drain, dumping birth control pills into the toilet, over fertilizing our lawns and washing the excess into the sewer system.

What are we going to drink when the water is too polluted to consume? Money?

I used to think differently, but now I think that when the human race becomes extinct we will have deserved our fate.

Save This House

“When you have cut down all the trees, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe,……Only then will you discover you cannot eat money”

Cree Prophecy

The Doomsday Clock has been advanced two minutes by the Board of Directors of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” at the University of Chicago.

The Doomsday Clock is an arbitrary measure set by the board based on perceived nuclear threat. The last time it was advanced was just after 9/11. Interestingly this time around the clock isn't being advanced on nuclear threat alone. The board sites nuclear ambitions of many countries, and the wealth of nuclear arms at the fingertips of the trigger happy president* as well as stating that climate change is an imminent threat to life on the planet.

Within the lifetime of a child born today the world will barely resemble the life giving orb that we occupy.

Let me say that again a little more emphatically ... A child born today will likely be one of the last people alive on the planet..... forever!

It's time to stop wringing our hands and hoping that someone comes up with a magic bullet to cure the worlds ills. It is time to stop daydreaming about colonizing Mars – (tip: It's not gonna happen). It's time to clean up our home, not try to move down the block to destroy another one.

It is time to start being accountable for what you do, what you eat, what you drive, where you live, and how you deal with the waste that you produce everyday. It's time to force your government to pull their collective heads out of their asses and do something real to save this house! Because it's the only home we have, and until YOU do something, nothing will get done, and my kids are going to have to pay the price. It's not that far away, and we can't just move. So, go clean up your room!

*my description.

Fearless Predictions

It's that time of year. The time that is a psychic's wet dream. A time to trot out all their prognostication skills and show you that they really do know what the hell they are talking about.

I maintain that there is no great skill to predicting the future, it is simply a matter of understanding human nature and not giving the average person super human abilities (like the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons.)

So... I am about to make a few predictions of my own.

I predict that a major world leader is going to do something monumentally stupid in the next year (hell – I could probably predict this will happen in the next month, week or hour!)

I predict that a lot of people are going to do a lot of bad things for a lot of bad reasons (most notably to make even more money that they can spend on stuff they don't need). I predict that many of them will get caught, a few will be punished and most will not because most of us don't care any more.

I predict that at least one of the year end highlights for the news will involve a celebrity doing something stupid (which includes getting married or divorced).

I predict that the top Google and Yahoo searches for 2007 will be about a celebrity of some calibre, and I'm shuddering thinking that the percentages favour Paris Hilton.

I predict that Bill Gates' uber-generous forays into philanthropy will inspire (or perhaps guilt... I'm good with either) other people into giving more. It would be nice if that generosity was anonymous, but I suspect that it will not be... I can live with that.

I predict that despite all the weird weather we have had this year the mini-van and SUV will still top the growth in vehicle sales in North America, while Europe will continue to be more sensible in their choices.

I predict that someone will bring an automatic or semi-automatic weapon into a public institution at least once this year and begin shooting, and I also predict that the NRA will be on air, on CNN ,within hours defending the right to bear arms, despite the fact that this was never what the founding fathers of the USA had in mind.

I predict that right now a child is being born who will never see a computer, never have a bank account and never own a home. This child will never learn to read, and never have the opportunity to do more than worry about where his next meal will come from, if he survives being born at all.

I predict that right now a child is being born who will have all the things the other child will never have, and I hope that she will know about the first child and do more than donate a dollar a day to change the inequities in the world.

I predict that things will happen this year that none of us could ever predict and I hope it is something wondrous, awe inspiring and that brings us all a little closer to each other and a better world.

It's easy to predict the bad stuff, because human nature is in fact very predictable. I would love to be surprised, and have none of my negative predictions come true. But I predict that I won't be surprised at all.

Daylight Stupid Time

In a few weeks daylight savings time will end and we will be plunged again into darkness. I never used to think much about the start and stop of daylight savings time. My mom used to make a big fuss, but I could never remember if it was spring back, fall forward or vice versa.

When I had kids I suddenly realized that kids don't care if they can sleep an extra hour – because they won't. They don't care if there is an hour less during the night... they will get up when they are ready. Generally it takes a week to get the Wee Wonders adjusted to the time change.

I'm not really sure why daylight savings time was introduced in the first place, my mom told me that it was for the farmers ... which of course doesn't explain why Saskcatchewan refuses to go on the dreaded DST. The breadbasket of Canada says that chickens and cows can't tell time.

Here is the thing. Next spring we will start daylight savings time a month early, and end it a month late. Why? Because the genius in the White House thinks that it is a great way for Americans to save energy. The last time this was done, it was done by Nixon. And you know what? People used even more energy than they did before.

My province and my country (the US's closest trading partner) has to go along with this asinine proposal because it will be too costly not too for our economy. Sadly it will be more costly for our environment.

I think we should rename daylight savings time...