It’s a common theme among conservatives and theists that our planet’s natural resources should be exploited with little regard to either the environment, the finite nature of those resources, or the sustainability of that exploitation. In some cases it is pure greed — the profit motive of grabbing and selling and using everything in sight ASAP is extraordinarily high, with the downside only becoming readily apparent in future generations. In other cases, as with the theists enraptured with the Rapture, those “future generations” aren’t going to be around anyway, because of some repeatedly-hypothesized judgment day that has yet to materialize.
Continue reading “Our planet and its resources”
global warming
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RCimT: Monday is Sunday for one day only
A day late, but here’s your Sunday atheist link roundup. Your Cool Atheist of the Week is Canadian comedian Dave Foley, of Kids in the Hall.
Therese: I think if you believe in the basic tenets of the Catholic faith, you’re Catholic. But abortion — some of these peoples’ teachings are — they’re not part of the core Catholicism.
Dave: But isn’t the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility?
Bill: Yeah.
Therese: I wouldn’t say that that’s the core. No, I think belief in the father, and the son and the holy spirit, the trinity, the communion of saints —
Dave: But is papal infallibility a belief of the Catholic church?
Therese: Yes, it is.
Dave: Do you believe in papal infallibility?
Therese: I believe that the pope speaks with an authority of God. Yeah.
Dave: Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day?
Blog Action Day 2009: Global Warming
Today is Blog Action Day, and the theme for 2009 is Global Warming. Yes, that was last year’s theme too. The environment’s still fucked up, people. The ice caps, while up some from 2007, are melting enough that now Canada, Greenland and Russia (and a number of other interests with no proximity, such as the US) are jockeying for rights over a northern passage, and any natural resources found therein. In the meantime, I’m a mere computer geek with precious little sway in this world — so I’m doing what I can to continue living in the modern era, while expending as little unnecessary energy as possible.
To start off with, when choosing a new computer, I realize that laptops do cost a good deal more carbon-cycle-wise than desktops do, but given how long between upgrades I generally go, and how much I use computers (pretty well every waking moment of every day for both work and recreation), the simple fact that a laptop sips at power where desktops guzzle is a prime motivator for my choice.
I have a work laptop that I use for everything — downloading, movie and TV viewing (as we don’t have cable, our television hardly gets used except for Wii gaming), and especially blogging. The fact that I’m using work’s laptop for personal stuff (though technically against work policies, shh) means I don’t have a second laptop, meaning that much less carbon wasted. If I get an upgrade, I’m one of the few IT managers at my company that would prefer to keep old but functional equipment in service as long as possible, so this laptop would probably become a hand-me-down for someone with a less worthy one, and theirs would go into the spare stock rather than being decommissioned outright. Additionally, I’ve implemented scripts that shut down my network’s computers at night, saving probably hundreds of dollars a month of power wastage.
There’s also stuff we do that non-IT people could benefit from — like using a Brita filter instead of getting bottled water, to take some of the chlorine taste out of the otherwise horrible town tap-water. We turn off the power bars for appliances that sit idle waiting for remote control signals, like our entertainment stand, TV and Wii. We wear sweaters and keep our doors closed in the wintertime, and only heat the house to a bare minimum to keep the pipes from freezing, as well as heating to comfort only those rooms we’re in at the time. We also turn our ceiling fans on reverse, to suck heat upward and circulate the air, warming the room more quickly. Undercoating your car with eco-friendly undercoat, for those of you in climates where road salt is a necessity, is a also good idea, as well, so that you’re not replacing parts every other year and adding these new parts unnecessarily to the carbon load (*ahem*… lesson learned from having to replace our muffler two weeks ago). And another good car care tip, no matter how the Republicans scoffed when Obama suggested it, is to keep your tires adequately filled so you’re not wasting gas on poor mileage that’s easily corrected.
Not only do all these little steps reduce our carbon footprint, they save us a lot of money and we’re not losing out on any of the convenience of modern living. A lot of them are just good sense, and none of them are terribly large sacrifices.
I have no illusions that what we’re doing will singlehandedly stave off global warming — for that, the time is probably already past, and could only have been avoided if heavy polluting industries and the entire petroleum-addiction cycle had been fixed a decade ago. In aggregate, though, if all of us chips in, we can mitigate the destruction we’re wreaking on our own ecosystem — you know, the one we rely on to survive.
That’s not to say I think we’ll all die. Humans are uncanny at adapting to change when change is upon us. They aren’t so great at adapting to change to avoid unnecessary and dangerous discomfort later, especially if it means any measure of discomfort now.
So, what tips do you folks have for living a bit more green?
Random Science Crap in my Tabs
Phil Plait has a cool animated gif of Io passing in front of Ganymede, taken by an amateur astronomer. The title of the post is a Star Trek: Next Generation reference, one that actually made me chuckle. Plus, Phil makes a great defense of science at the end:
In my line of work (y’know, truth promotion) I hear from people who think science is all guesswork. “Yeah, but how do you know?” they ask. The answer is: math. And physics. And chemistry and optics and engineering and Kepler and Newton and Einstein. We know because we test our assumptions, and if they don’t hold up they’re gone. We keep the good stuff, the stuff that’s proven itself. And eventually we get models that are so good they can predict when and where two objects hundreds of millions of kilometers away pass in front of each other.
Greg Laden’s covering this latest batch of tornado activity and ties it in with global warming and the fact that science ignorance is exploitable by the cynical and profit-motivated.
The Baby Boomers are apparently still getting high, though the Obama Administration is not considering legalization of marijuana as a potential revenue source / reduction of justice system overhead. That’s sad. No options should be taken off the table in this economic crisis, not the least of which being one in which an entire class of people become criminals for smoking the wrong leaf. Or having the wrong kind of sex, for that matter.
It’s well known (among people who know me in meatspace anyway) that I have no navigational skills whatsoever. At least I’m not alone. Strangely, I can navigate perfectly well when there’s a mini-map on the screen in video games, but when I’m in real life, even with a GPS Nav system of some sort, I still get a little panicky when I don’t know where I am or where I’m going. My father was always the same way. Vacation car trips were always tense.
And for the geeks out there, here’s a walkthrough on how to build your own Apple 1 replica. My only issue with this is that it uses a pre-printed circuit board and has all the chips and connectors in a kit. That’s not nearly “from scratch” like the article claims. Then again, “to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to first create the universe”, so… yeah.
I think it’s about time I make an official Random Crap in my Tabs category!
Help give Crazy Uncle Pat his curtain call
Greg Laden just published an open letter to MSNBC calling for the retirement of Pat Buchanan, for his latest antiscience screed in the US Daily. PZ Myers demolishes his Hitler-Hearts-Darwin shenanigans, and Ed Brayton articulates just how much about evolution he gets wrong, so Greg doesn’t get much into those aspects of the letter. He talks mostly about how Pat is the last vestige of a bygone era of antiscience; the Nixonian era when if the President did it, it was therefore not illegal. He rightly explains that if MSNBC is to dodge any damage from the backlash against anti-science sentiment that the public seems finally to be fomenting, they would be well advised to shuffle Uncle Pat offstage ASAP.
Now, we are seeing a new shift in political framework. Over the last decade we’ve seen a relentless erosion of the role of quality science in the forum of public policy, and a steady induration of ideological humors into the scientific discourse. Press agencies, even including the relatively intellectual and progressive MSNBC, have not helped as much as they have hurt society, the economy, and as a matter of fact, the truth itself, by insisting that every issue has two valid sides in matters of science (it doesn’t, by the way). If someone says “global warming is real” there MUST be someone out there saying it is not. Find that person and put them on TV. The “balance” of viewpoints “pro” and “con” with respect to this and other important scientific issues has had a chilling, negative effect on science. At this point in time, more people die younger, suffer more, and live less happy lives than they otherwise might because science has been so badly treated by conservative politicians. That is indisputable fact. It will take years to undo the damage that right wing ideological anti-science has done.
Although there is still a great deal of work to do, it is a fact that as we speak the nature of science funding, evaluation, reporting, and implementation is rapidly changing in a post-Bush environment. Suddenly, science can breath[e](sic).
Videos below the fold.
Continue reading “Help give Crazy Uncle Pat his curtain call”
Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot
As you’ll likely recall, I had planned a post about Darwin pareidolia. I have about twenty tabs open in my Firefox right now, most of which having something or other to do with this, but the remainder are actually sort-of related to this, to pareidolia in general, and to the creationism v. evolution debate. To make matters worse for my ability to focus on this topic, the other day, a co-worker and potential lurker messaged me on instant messenger regarding the Large Hadron Collider. The gist of this conversation went something like:
<him> hey, have you heard of the LHC? sounds like a bad idea to me.
<me> *rants for 30 mins about how stupid people are for thinking it’s a bad idea, barely letting him get a word in edgewise*
There’s definitely going to be another blog post in the future about the LHC, especially specifically about the doomsday sayers and the impossibility of their hypothesized scenarios (none of which have any basis in science outside of the fact that the doomsday scenarios themselves have a kernel of scientific truth — like, say, making a black hole, which the LHC is completely incapable of doing outside of micro black holes that evaporate instantly). But for now, I’m going to point out that the funny thing about this is that there’s a common thread in these topics — people’s inability to perform simple feats of critical thinking.
Continue reading “Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot”