This year is apparently pretty unusual for pollen. Pollen Aplenty Triggers Allergy Explosion - NPR:
In Atlanta, a recent pollen count registered 5,733, the second-highest level ever. The usual bar for high pollen levels is set at 120, so hitting the thousands is pretty much through the roof and to the the moon.
Bumper stickers: I might agree with you, but you’re still annoying.
I just have to write this right now: there’s a guy in the library who comes in here and just sits there and burps to himself. I mean COME ON. This is bunk. He needs some medication, or to NOT EAT before he comes in the library. Luckily, I’ve got Jónsi rocking on the iTunes, so the burps just barely penetrate the heavenly, joyful melodies I’m enjoying. Here, try the song Hengilás.
Mykala and I went on a weekend quest for lawn chairs. But, after watching The Story of Stuff on Friday, (which seeks to illustrate the wasteful, unsustainable, dead-end process generating the crap we buy) — we were less than enthusiastic about purchasing crap. You start to think about the stuff-making process. Oil that can’t be replaced is drilled for plastic. Raw plastic is shipped around the globe in container ships, which spill millions of pounds into the sea. Floating on the water, plastics follow currents and congregate in focal points the size of states. The oceans are trashed, the resources exhausted. Even worse, people are trashed. The latter is a contentious, ongoing issue. In this article about Chinese workers assembling Microsoft products, Chinese factories sound unbearable:
Even if we use just the 80.5 hours of actual work, this means the young workers were required to work 40 1/2 hours of overtime each week, which exceeds China’s legal limit on permissible overtime by 388 percent.
That article was followed by an AP report: some official actions were taken to discipline the factories in question. This is not even a speed bump for the factories — there is still no worker organization and no rights for workers. What’s more, the entire system is rife with bribes and underhanded dealing — the government comes to inspect, and the factories remove the underage workers on busses. American companies come to inspect, and they turn on the air conditioning. Any country transitioning from developing to developed hurts the environment and its population — but as I’ve said before the abuses taking place at this giant, modern scale are astounding. The fastest way to stop them is simple and impossible:
We, Americans, have to stop buying so much damn crap.
Of course, I’m being hypocritical here. We bought two new lawn chairs this weekend. They were made in the US… though that doesn’t make me feel much better about the plastics involved. Here’s the general thought process:
I was promoting the idea that we could take blankets and lay on the concrete patio out in the sun — ultimately, this seemed like a ridiculous and uncomfortable proposition. If all we had were blankets, we were more likely to pack up the car, burn fossil fuels, and go to a beach somewhere. Furthermore, used lawn chairs are impossible to find in good condition. I’d be refurbishing some if I had a space to do so or wasn’t so busy. So, used wasn’t a good option. We bought these plastic ones that will last forever (i.e. more than a few years), were made in the US, and are recyclable.
But here’s the thing: we had to care about this whole process. We had to know that Chinese products are cheap because the entire supply chain pushes down cost in dollars by sacrificing sustainability and human capital. The easiest thing to do would have been to go to 1 store instead of the 5 we visited; to grab the first thing we found, and to do the same thing next year. To preserve what “The Story of Stuff” calls “the Golden Arrow of Consumerism”, stores want you to buy crap that breaks so they can sell you the same thing next year. It takes extra effort to find something that will last a bit longer, but there is a middle ground between buying nothing and trashing the world every season.
It’s just hard to find.
Farmville is even more of a bummer than I’d originally thought. Cultivated Play: Farmville:
The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.
“Barely qualifies as a game” means it qualifies as something else entirely:
The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies.
I can’t even begin to describe how insightful this article was. Check out this amazing bit of tid:
Indeed, when one measures Farmville against Roger Caillois’ six criteria for defining games, Farmville fails to satisfy each and every one. Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from ‘real life,’ uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules, and make-believe.
The point-by-point refutation of Farmville’s classification as a game is worth clicking through to read by itself.
Jonah Lehrer follows up on his recent Wall Street Journal article with some helpful information about how to not screw-up when the quality of your performance is important. For many people, this would be in a competitive sports-type situation. For me, it’s in the area of cutting teeth for a grade. Here’s an excerpt from Lehrer’s article Don’t Choke : The Frontal Cortex:
The second interesting result was that there was a way to ward off choking. When the expert golfers contemplated a holistic cue word, their performance was no longer affected by anxiety. Because the positive adjectives were vague and generic, they didn’t cause the athletes to lose the flow of expert performance or overrule their automatic brain.
So, you can think “smooth” or “precise” or “accurate” — and your body will act in a way that mimics the word being contemplated. It seems like a great strategy for trying to produce your best performance on cue… but of course it only works if you have many practice hours invested, allowing you to call on that “automatic brain”.
Paul Graham, on Taste:
… if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone will discover it.
The good writing just doesn’t stop:
To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one’s sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one’s sense of humor is to be wounded by them. And so the mark— or at least the prerogative— of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings— or Shakespeare, for that matter.
Annnd:
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat.
Today I learned that love is an action, but centric relation is a feeling.
Professors at the dental school are telling me I should get jaw surgery now, because it’s cheaper while I’m in school (anything less than $25,000 is… cheaper). They’re telling me I could lose my teeth. School says I can’t remember enough, that I’m not coordinated enough, not disciplined enough. This is the first time they’ve said I’m not put together correctly.
I’m tired.
Biography of Usain Bolt, Mutant:
When the other men reach their top speed, their limit, Usain Bolt continues to accelerate. By the fifty-meter mark, he has caught up to the leader. By the sixty-meter mark, a noticeable gap has emerged between him and the rest of the pack. By the seventy-meter mark, he is covering more than twelve meters of ground — about forty feet — every second, a pace faster than the speed limit for automobiles in most neighborhoods. Nobody has ever moved this fast before under his own power. Usain Bolt’s top speed is simply significantly higher than anyone else’s, ever.
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