another spin on the meaning of 'bunny'
via
gristmill:
Playboy magazine is searching for the sexiest environmentalists in America, women willing to take it all off for their favorite cause. The magazine is planning a pictorial for an upcoming issue featuring women involved in environmental causes or with groups dedicated to saving the planet or protecting wildlife. In addition to a modeling fee for each of the participants, Playboy will make a donation to the favorite causes of the women chosen to appear in the pictorial.
is this like the green version of
"girls of the ivy league"?
i'm divided as to whether this is fabulous or degrading. at least the ladies will look good - there is a *lot* of airbrushing in playboy
modelling:treehuggers
hardware recycling
computers and other hardware contain incredibly toxic compounds like mercury and chromium (yum yum). so you never want to put these things straight into a landfill. nyc had apparently a
one-time-only series of computer recycling events last fall, so the options quickly became limited because the printer i'm trying to get rid of doesn't work (i'm assuming that if i can't fix it, some poor guy trying to sort through donations of computer equipment for useful ends isn't going to get it going either).
an activist website (why not a government site? hmm) brought me to
HP's recycling page which then proceeded to calmly state i would have to pay to get them to take back their product.
so not only do we, the taxpayer, pay for getting rid of the insane packaging in the first place (yum, styrofoam!) we also have to pay a company to get rid of something with toxic components. perhaps if they had to take it back at no cost to the consumer, would we then start to get more environmentally friendly components instead? i still think that companies should be taxed with their ratio of product to packaging - it might also be an effective incentive to have an ultimate disposal tax - based on the lifespan of the actual product.
environment:garbage
blood culture
in tokyo, you can
buy a condom to match your blood type. apparently this stems from the belief that blood type determines character.
[Masao Ohmura, a professor of personality psychology] suggests that because the Japanese are genetically quite a homogeneous people, grouping by blood was a way of achieving diversity -- if only the illusion of diversity. The population breaks down as 39.1 percent A, 29.4 percent O, 21.5 percent B and 10 percent AB. Ohmura also notes that it was believed that the four blood groups corresponded to the classes of feudal Japan: type O (confident and strong-willed) for warriors; type A (mild-mannered and submissive) for farmers; type AB (intelligent and sensitive) for artisans; and type B (cheerful and outgoing) for tradesmen.
from the japan times
bloodism??
if the differences aren't based on skin color, apparently culture will always find a way to create stereotypes and classes...
but why different condoms? do farmers need to have ribbed ones to please their ladies, and the warriors the magnum? are the ones for artisans decorated?
does something horrible happen if you wear the wrong blood type condom? doesn't the other person's blood type matter? that's ten possible combinations, right there.
culture:diversity
jane jacobs and the future of brooklyn
does this mean bloomberg is more powerful than moses? jane jacobs wrote a letter to the mayor defending williamsburg as we know it:
What the intelligently worked out plan devised by the community itself does not do is worth noticing. It does not destroy hundreds of manufacturing jobs, desperately needed by New York citizens and by the city’s stagnating and stunted manufacturing economy. The community’s plan does not cheat the future by neglecting to provide provisions for schools, daycare, recreational outdoor sports, and pleasant facilities for those things. The community’s plan does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing and imaginative and economical new shelter that residents can afford. The community’s plan does not violate the existing scale of the community, nor does it insult the visual and economic advantages of neighborhoods that are precisely of the kind that demonstrably attract artists and other live-work craftsmen, initiating spontaneous and self-organizing renewal.
via the brooklyn rail
i love cities because of their amazing energy and constant evolution - but there can't be any evolution if there is no variation to select from... removing the ability of the system to adapt to change. sound familiar yet?
brooklyn:development
avalanche
so if the u.k. gets cold enough, to say, convert some of the rolling english hills to ski bumps, i just might move there after all.
Climate change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing. They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.
from the times
all those brits that come to the west coast to go ride, can stay home! of course, not if the snow is super wet and sucky. as if you needed any more proof that climate change is
here.
even more awesome, is that we have severely undercut the ability of our ecosystems to adapt - like we didn't know it already. but this time, it's the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment that says so:
Humans have done more damage to the world's stock of biological diversity in the past 50 years than at any other time in history, say the researchers behind the study, titled Ecosystems and Human Well-being: The Biodiversity Synthesis Report. Over the past century, species extinctions have reached about 1,000 times their natural rate, because of human actions.
from nature news
the part that i don't get, is that it's not saving the planet - it's really about saving our ability to continue to live here.
and it's not like humans are doomed planet parasites that are so mindlessly virulent that we would finish ourselves off as a species, either. we
really do some cool stuff to solve a myriad of problems - even create
some pretty cool homes for the homeless. stop trying to
save yourselves through
silly economics.
environment:culture
love him or hate him
most people i know have a somewhat complicated opinion of bloomberg, our current mayor. i'm one of those. he managed to balance a post 9/11 budget without making it painful enough for residents to really notice. he banned smoking in bars. he doubled the fine on parking tickets. he obliterates entire neighborhoods for development (admittedly, a little hard to pin only on the mayor when the entire city council just fucking
rolled over).
but then he goes and commits the city to meeting the requirements of the kyoto protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012 -
along with 131 other mayors across the u.s. climate change:politics
thought, outsourced
hee hee hee hee
wow.
perpetual motion machine
more evidence of corporate inertia - a sophomore can build a car powered by hydrogen
Hinton's car - about the size of a football - runs on distilled water. A solar panel provides energy to begin the reaction that splits hydrogen from water. The car is so efficient it can even motor and create hydrogen at the same time.
from the durango herald via
triple punditcan we have houses powered by a combination of hydrogen and solar? running water from the municipal supply, solar panels on the roof... off the grid.
environment:technology
science ripe for preaching
ooh, i almost can't wait for the pseudo-scientific backlash to this one:
Several years ago, Dr. Savic and colleagues showed that the two chemicals activated the brain in a quite different way from ordinary scents. ... The two chemicals seemed to be leading a double life, playing the role of odor with one sex and of pheromone with another.
Dr. Savic has now repeated the experiment but with the addition of homosexual men as a third group. The gay men responded to the two chemicals in the same way as did women, she reports, as if the hypothalamus's response is determined not by biological sex but by the owner's sexual orientation.
The different pattern of activity that Dr. Savic sees in the brains of gay men could be either a cause or an effect of their sexual orientation. If sexual orientation has a genetic cause, or is influenced by hormones in the womb or at puberty, then the neurons in the hypothalamus could wire themselves up in a way that shaped which sex a person is attracted to. Alternatively, Dr. Savic's finding could be just be a consequence of straight and gay men using their brain in different ways.
from the nytimescould this potentially settle the biology versus culture argument? if biology wins, would attempts to 'reform' gays and repression of those desires go away? nah. maybe it'll get labelled as some type of genetic defect? a whole new direction for aromatherapy? well, correlation is not causation kiddies - which came first, the gay behaviour or the physical reaction to the pheromone?
there'll probably still be some pretty decent mudslinging though.
science:sex politics
things i've been getting disturbed by
one of these things was my shower - visiting friends would be pleased. i donned bleach-splattered clothes and went to work.
having completed all those school requirements - apparently once i have the time, i do care about cleanliness and tidiness. the next battle is to reclaim the surface areas in my apartment.
but in the world at large:
the ridiculous laws against science continueIf the board adopts the new standards, as expected, in June, Kansas would join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in mandating students be taught that there is controversy over evolution. Legislators in Alabama and Georgia have introduced bills this season to allow teachers to challenge Darwin in class, and the battle over evolution is simmering on the local level in 20 states.
who gives a fuck about saving the diversity and integrity of our forests
when they will probably be cut down firstThe Bush administration, in one of its biggest environmental decisions, moved yesterday to open nearly one-third of all remote national forest lands to road building, logging and other commercial ventures.
and
ratzinger smacks down free speechAn American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman Catholic issues resigned yesterday under orders from the Vatican as editor of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United States said.
The order to dismiss the editor, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, was issued by the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - in mid-March when that office was still headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said. Soon after, Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, taking the name Benedict XVI.
i think i'm going to head back into that bathroom and breathe in some more cleaning chemicals.
cleaning:society
