Well here we are, back for another mind-provoking installment of Justin’s Ramblings, Questions, and Stupidities.
The first subject I would like to assault is cursive. We all remember sitting through 5th grade learning how to write like grownups. Grownups in the 1800’s, that is. Why in gods name do we still teach kids this? In 15 years we might not even have pencils for God’s sake. Teach them how to type at least, then there would be a person whose hands are small enough to use cell phone key boards. Also how the hell do you grade cursive? It’s more like art. I can not draw to save my life and guess what? My cursive sucks. Coincidence? Not likely. And don’t tell me it’s for signing your name because I have signed mine a billion times and I still don’t use a cursive capitol “J.” I created my own letter and then I scribble behind it for the rest of my name.
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Last year after Katrina and the other hurricanes had finished proving that global warming is a fact, every weatherman/meteorologist/doomsayer/news station got on their soap box and said 2006 was going to be the year Florida and other coastal swamps (pretty much everywhere from Louisiana to Virginia) would be washed away. Well, there have not been any major hurricanes this year. This proves that we really have no idea what we are talking about. Now it has something to do with the dust blowing around the African continent. Can we just agree that there are way too many variables to try and predict these things?
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Playstaion 3, no playstaion 3, playstaion 3, no playstaion 3. This will be one of those life choices that might haunt me until I die. Let’s see 800 bucks (’cause I need the good one), plus 50 bucks or so for games and using my time to play games; or save the $800+ and finish the 5000 projects that are half done around the house. Maybe its more like have kids or play games. Grow up or be a kid. I am not ready to answer that question. Hopefully, by November, I will be.
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In each installment of these ramblings, I would like to try to come up with a public works project that I would do if I became supreme leader of the US. It kills me to have disparity of resources throughout the country — floods in one place, drought in another — so the first thing I would do is create a system of underground pipes, huge pipes, that would connect the rivers that flood the most to areas of the country that have no water. We’re talking Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. How is this not already happening? The romans did this 2500 years ago. This would hopefully keep flooding from destroying river-lined towns, although I am not sure if it would make a dent…but I am talking HUGE pipes here. We could supply water to Texas for agriculture, and Arizona and Nevada because that’s where people are moving to faster then any other place in the country.
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I want to go on record and say I hate Halloween. My costume always looks stupid, everywhere I go is always too crowded, and there is always a build up and I always am let down. Even as a kid, my only memory was running through a yard to get to the next house, hitting an invisible fence, falling, and cutting my head.
18 Comments
On the PS3 thing: Do you realize that you can get an Xbox 360 AND a Nintendo Wii for the price of a PS3?
Forget about it, Justin, it’s just Chinatown… Chinatown!
Water is big business, in maybe a slightly less overt way than has been attempted in Bolivia etc. http://www.commondreams.org/views/071500-101.htm
Hey can you html code in these comment boxes?
this is fun!
I think it would have to be done on the federal level because it would run through a lot of states but in these public works I would like to think big. East texas is in severe drought, run a huge pipe from the Mississippi into these areas. Really what you would have to do would be to have one huge pipe running ten miles from the mississippi into texas then have five or ten smaller ones feed into it. Now wildlife and such would have to be accounted for but this has to happen.
Now for Arizona and Nevada I would have to look at the rivers and see what ones flood but if the growth in those areas are ton increase sokething needs to be done. I say start now, and even if you have to go from the arkansas river in utah just do it.
Other then that we could place a motor in an ice berg then drive it to the middle east and sell the ice for 5 bucks a cup.
I love cursive but it sort of a “special occasion” thing for me. I bust it out when I want to look smart. My cursive is top notch (and yes, Justin, I understand that we are discussing ‘cursive’ not ‘cursing’). But I’ve mostly been writing with all capital letter since the seventh grade.
I work with a guy who tries to tell me the weather. He’s always like, “THAT STORM IS GOING TO BEARLY TOUCH THE NORTHERNMOST POINT OF PROVIDENCE”. An hour later I have a yellow rain coat on and I’m frantically trying to cover an exposed roof with a 40′ tarp that’s blowing in gale force winds before the third floor tenants get dumped on.
The iceberg thing? Isn’t that from “Brewster’s Millions,” with Richard Pryor?
C + S: Yes, you can HTML code in this things.
The public works thing: I’m not sure we want to be messing around with this. We tend to fuck things up worse when we try to control nature. Sure, we may get water to Texas and Arizona and Nevada, but there’s going to be an effect on the places that are getting that water now. Check out John McPhee’s The Control of Nature for what I’m talking about.
I think the only people getting that water is in the gulf of mexico. We will always try to bend nature to make our lives better. We have dammed almost every major river in the US, we have dug canals, filled in marshlands to create room for our cities (hello back bay) tapping into the mighty mississippi to provide water to texas doesn’t seem as bad as some of those. If we could during the flood season help take water from there to distribute other places that do not have any seems like the biggest no brainer in the history of earth.
The biggest concern I have is displacing animals, bacteria and shit like that.
Yeah that was from Brewsters millions, one of my favorite hung over saturday couch movies.
Yeah, we’ve done all that shit, but what have been the consequences of it? Seriously. Check out the McPhee book I mentioned. It’s three case studies of places where we changed something to improve something somewhere else. And now shit’s going down because of it.
I wish I could explain further, but I read the book four years ago, and I don’t remember the details. The upshot, however, is that when we do one thing, other things get fucked up, and mother nature, that cruel bitch, always wins.
So the question becomes: do we try to fool with mother nature and have her do what we want, or do we accept her as she is and try to work around her, which in this case, would mean letting Texas, Arizona, and Nevada go to pot.
Oh, and Justin (or anyone else who wants to comment), let me know what you think of your little logo. Shawn put it together in record time this morning, and I only have so many photos of you to work with. If you want us to change it, just let me know.
I really like Kinneysiologist. Good word.
That was Adam’s idea.
That book sounds like some hippy tree loving shit if you ask me. We will always bend nature and if that means taking water from swollen rivers to put in places that have none then that is what we should do. Let me put it this way, by us living in these areas and using all the water don’t we change the environment there? Shouldn’t we replace the water we are using? Environmental change is the calling card of the human race. It is what we have been doing, are doing and will do until a giant rock from outer space slams into us. The ability to change our environment is what makes us human.
I’m in total agreement with Justin here. I would say the defining trait of humans is an ability to reshape their surroundings into whatever pleases them. It is shown both on the macro levels with plans like Justins to create immense pipes and divert mighty rivers, to the small things that each of us do to make our homes and our offices more in tune with what we desire.
Trees are great no doubt, but they also make lovely houses, desks and books. Where would we be without those?
I’m not saying that people should “return to the earth” or some shit, but what I am saying is that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know the downstream effects of your solution. You don’t know what will happen when you divert a river. Not just the immediate effects, as in a bunch of animals dying because their entire ecosystem has changed, but the effects twenty or thirty years from now, when something natural happens that has always happened, but this time, the river isn’t there to handle whatever that something natural is, and shit goes down.
What I’m saying is global warming type shit. You can say all you want that humans are humans because we utilize technology to “overcome nature,” but if we don’t get our act together, and I mean toot-sweet!, then humans will be humans because we killed the freakin’ planet and created our own extinction.
We have to stop coming up with solutions that depend upon us raping nature. We need to come up with solutions that work with her.
Survival is not always about conquering. Sometimes it is about compromise.
Where on gods name did I say deverting a river? I said taking water from rivers that flood, or rivers with too much water, and bringing them to places that does not have any. Obviously when I am in charge I would have people do studies on the impact of these giant rivers losing probably less the 1% of their water.
THere are no solutions that have us working with nature to prevent global warming it is already past that. We could turn off everything today and there is still enough crap floating around that would keep raising the temp of this planet.
The only hope we have is with technology and wicked smart people finding away to fix what we have broken in the last 5000 years (but mostly in the last 700 or so)
“The only hope is technology and wicked smaht people”
That’s where we differ. The only hope is you and me and everyone we know and everyone they know and everyone they know.
Kyle if we stopped every co2( and that is not happening) producing thing right now it would not be enough to stop the ball rolling. It is in motion and eveyone we know can not stop it.
You want to hear something even more fucked, there is a regulation on what our cars/planes can produce for polution. Thispolution is shit that causes smog and the polution we can see, well as we discontinue with this and the sky becomes clearer the temperture will jump 1 degree. That is huge and the reason is because the crap in the air reflects the sunlight back out to space. As this decreases more sunlight will get through making the planet warmer. So in making our air cleaner we help speed up global warming. I am telling you our only hope is technology.
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Our planet’s air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.
Science is the premier journal of scientific research.
Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.
That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.
The results suggest that a downward trend in the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, which has been observed since measurements began in the late 1950s, is now over.
The researchers argue that this trend, commonly called ‘global dimming’, reversed more than a decade ago, probably following the collapse of communist economies and the consequent decrease in industrial pollutants.
The widespread brightening has remained unnoticed until now simply because there wasn’t enough data for a statistically significant analysis, says Martin Wild, an atmospheric scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and an author on one of the reports.
Sunny days
Wild and his team looked at data on surface sunshine levels from hundreds of devices around the planet. They found that since the 1980s there has been a transition from decreasing to increasing solar radiation nearly everywhere, except in heavily polluted areas such as India and at scattered sites in Australia, Africa, and South America1.
A second study, led by Rachel Pinker from the University of Maryland, College Park, found a similar trend by looking at satellite data, although their research suggests the extent of the brightening is smaller2. Unlike ground stations, satellites can sample the whole planet, including the oceans. However, satellite data are difficult to calibrate, and so are considered less accurate than measurements from the ground.
Surprisingly, Wild’s study shows a brightening trend in China, despite the fact that there is a booming, fossil-fuel-intensive industry in that country. Wild says he can only speculate that the use of clean-air technologies in China might be more widespread and efficient than has been thought.
In contrast, India’s vast brown clouds of smog, which result from wildfires and the use of fossil fuels, have reduced the sunlight reaching the ground.
Just warming up
Researchers will now focus on working out the long-term effects of clearer air. One thing they do know is that black particulate matter in the air has been contributing a cooling effect to the ground. “It is clear that the greenhouse effect has been partly masked in the past by air pollution,” says Andreas Macke, a meteorologist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. [My emphasis . . . ed]
Uncertainties remain part of the game because scientists have only a limited ability to track cloud cover and particulates, says Macke. Increased cooperation in programmes such as the NASA-led International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project should help to close the gaps in our knowledge of how dirty air affects climate, he says.
Wild M., et al. Science, 308. 847 - 850 (2005).
Pinker R. T., et al. Science, 308. 850 - 854 (2005).”
Yeah like I said were fucked
Well, that sucks I guess.