What’s in the patty?

I’m reading a book that is freaking me out. It warns us of a future where countries that have dried up their rivers and aquifers to water the crops we’ll need to sustain some 9 billion people by 2050, will need to import water via an international water market. Water will become a globally traded commodity. I won’t even go into the horrors of reading about how analysis of a hamburger patty revealed the tissues and bits and pieces of 1,000 animals (yep, you read that correctly: 1,000). And forget about swine or avian flu – the three dangerous emergent pathogens we have to worry about are – Salmonella enteritidis, campylobacter and the deadly Escherichia coli O157:H7.

Here are a few snippets from the book:

• “humanity will still need at least 17% more fresh water to meet all of its food needs than is currently available…just to produce the extra grain the world is forecasted to need by 2050 will require us to somehow come up with as much as a trillion tons of additional water – a challenge that may simply exceed our technical, political and physical capacities”.

• “we know that the climate is changing, and we know that oil could very easily be at $250 a barrel tomorrow if the Middle East blows up…So if we are really scientists, we should at least be asking ourselves what kind of agricultural system could produce the food and fiber we need in a world where oil is $250 and where we have twice the severe weather but only half the water that we have now. What kind of agriculture could we come up with? It’s an entirely reasonable question to ask, and yet, no-one wants to touch it, because when you get down to it, no one has a clue”.

• Since 1980….more than 1.1 million square miles of forest – an area larger than India – has been cleared, much of it to make way for pasturelands and croplands, especially soybeans, corn and palm oil plantations.

I reckon that Lester Brown has been spot on with his forecasts. Have a read of his 1995 work, “Who will feed China?” – because a lot of meat-hungry Chinese are now demanding a Western-style diet and this means more corn has to be grown to feed the cattle at increasingly cheaper costs; all the crops necessary to feed our expanding global population leads to soil erosion because of massive use of pesticides and fertilizers; water is getting scarcer; peak oil is fizzling out (and grain relies on cheap oil for transport and so on).  You can read a synopsis of Brown’s work here and the book is here.

Living frugally

 

Don’t hit the unsubscribe button! I have a very busy week, so posts will largely be sending you off to resources and stuff I find interesting. In today’s post, I’m providing a link to a great free e-book on personal finances – basically, ideas for living frugally.

And I have a confession to make. Over the weekend, I actually went into Vinnie’s (St Vincent de Paul). Here in Australia, they have second-hand clothing shops. I saw a crowd rushing into a Vinnie’s shop in Sydney and, intrigued, I decided to follow them. Now, don’t send me emails saying I’m a snob or something but it had never occurred to me to drop into Vinnie’s to shop and as a way of avoiding The Brands. So in I went, expecting to be hit with the overpowering smell of mothballs. But as I glanced around, I started to see some interesting stuff and a whole lot of people up the back of the shop at a No Tag sale (didn’t find out what that was).

Well, I bought a shirt for $9.00 – a Von Troska – so it’s a brand but it’s a recycled brand, so I don’t feel too bad. And in the process, have discovered an underworld of people who shop smartly at Vinnie’s. There’s some good quality stuff there if you look and are willing to fight it out with well-dressed ladies on the hunt for a bargain.

Anyway, I found this free e-book that has some very simple and effective ideas for saving money and living frugally. It’s called “Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on the Back of Five Business Cards“.

The state of the climate

I’m going to be very busy over the next week, so posts will be more about pointing you in the direction of interesting stuff (rather than my usual ranting and raving).

I came across a very interesting debate between four scientists over climate change issues. Here are some snippets to whet your appetite before you trot off and read the full article:

• the Earth is now 0.75 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century and a half ago;
• if we continue with our current trends in burning fossil fuels, the ocean will become more acidic than it has been at any time in the past 65 million years;
• both poles are getting warmer and this is different from the past because both poles did not move together – one pole would lead and the other would follow. Now, ice is melting from both poles at an accelerated rate;
• although the planet warmed in the past, it did so over millions of years and ecosystems could adapt. What we’re seeing now are rates of increase in greenhouse gases and warming that exceed natural rates by a factor of 100;
• we are at a critical point in history – if we don’t stop stuffing up the planet, the scientists believe that geologists in 50 million years (if there are any!) will be able to pinpoint the exact time in history when civilization had developed advanced technology but didn’t develop the wisdom to use it wisely;
• we will have to raise the food supply another two times to feed all of the people that we think will be alive by the latter third of the 21st century;
• to address global warming, we’ll need US$500 billion to get going but ultimately trillions;
• the stratosphere—the upper atmosphere—is cooling while the lower atmosphere and the land surface are warming. This is a sign that greenhouse gases are trapping energy and keeping that energy close to the surface of the earth.

All four scientists have serious academic chops and also address the contrarian view (that climate change is not happening). So if the above hasn’t scared you enough, go here to Discover magazine to read the full article.

And Happy Independence Day to all my US readers!

2050 and beyond

The astronomer royal, Martin Rees, has been looking into the future.  He is offering up predictions for 2050. You know I love a good prediction or two, so really interesting to read about what he thinks might be in store for us. Much of what he says, we already know – by 2050, the planet will be staggering under the weight of a global population of 9 billion and the world will be warmer.  Beyond this, Rees suggests:

• CO₂ concentration levels will reach twice the pre-industrial level by around 2050 if we keep with business as usual
• the entire solar system might have been explored and mapped by tiny robotic craft
• long range space flights to Mars and beyond
• altered human beings – through mind-enhancing drugs (didn’t that happen already in the 1960s?!!); genetics; or cyborg techniques
• the human lifespan could be greatly extended
• widening gulf between what science enables us to do and what applications it’s prudent or ethical to pursue.

I think that last point is spot on. I’m not sure that ethical issues surrounding genetics or gene therapy are keeping pace with science. The modification of an individual’s genotype has great future prospects. Tinkering around with human genes could mean that a person will not have to suffer cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease for example. A fetus with a genetic defect could be treated and cured before it is born. Hereditary disease might become a thing of the past and lifespans extended. All good.

But then there’s the darker side of genetic engineering. We’ve all read about designer babies, genetically engineered so they are aesthetically pleasing to society as a whole, or we can imagine some psycho cloning a whole lot of athletic, blonde men for a private army. I’m no geneticist, but seems to me that the human body is a complex maze of biological pathways and interconnections. So if you tinker with a gene, what are the side effects or long term ramifications elsewhere within the body?

What makes humanity so splendid is diversity, uniqueness, individuality. Every human is different. There’s a wonderful variety of hair and eye colours, statures, physical appearances. Isn’t it this diversity that makes humanity strong and able to evolve and cope with diseases or other onslaughts? If we are all genetically engineered, then I wonder what vulnerability factor is introduced. If an unknown disease came along, would a genetically engineered population be able to withstand it, since it seems to me that biological diversity provides humanity with the means to battle a variety of diseases.

And then there’s transgenics – where scientists tinker around and develop organisms that have a novel trait not normally found within a species. Golden rice is but one example of a transgenic organism. There are three categories of transgenics: animal-human combination; animal-animal combination; plant-animal-human combination. We’ve all read about pig organs, for example, being explored as an alternative for human organ transplants (known as xenotransplantation). But consider the ethical issues – and these are just some that come immediately to mind:

• what might be the health risks? Take golden rice – it is engineered to overproduce beta carotene and retinoids derived from beta carotene may be toxic and cause birth defects.
• would human-animal organisms be viewed as a lower order of being that would not be worthy of full respect or dignified treatment? I can imagine a whole class of “slave chimeras” being created for the purposes of doing low-grade or demeaning work.
• at what point would organisms, which possess a particularly human phenotype or exhibit certain human behaviours, be considered “human”? Indeed, if we start tinkering around, would the whole notion of what it means “to be human” change or will it need to expanded?
• if animal genes are inserted into a human embryo, what possible effects might there be on the individual identity of the future person? At the early stage of life, cells are growing and changing – how might the introduction of animal genes significantly alter a human’s make-up and identity? Genetic instructions are contained within an embryo, so if you introduce foreign material from an animal, are you potentially affecting the development of the human?
• would the animal-human combination need to be given rights and special protections?
• could new diseases emerge due to the close proximity of animal and human tissue?
• might unexpected new deformities and disorders be created in animal-human entities?

I read this article recently and in the paper is an interesting argument:

“The animal and plant kingdoms—the kingdom of genes—contain vast amounts of genetic information of potential value to humanity. Humans have many unique and valuable qualities, like the capacity for high-level moral reasoning. But they also have many limitations, which other animals and plants do not. We age faster than some animals,we do not have sonar, acute sight, hearing, smell, or the capacity to photosynthesize or produce our own essential nutrients. And we are susceptible to diseases other animals are not. These limitations are genetic. By understanding how genes contribute to function we could use these genes, or artificial copies of their sequences, to overcome the limitations of being human.”

I get this. It’s a logical argument. And it comes from a position of acknowledging that the human being does not have moral superiority. But are we opening the proverbial Pandora’s box or will we simply be mining the kingdom of genes to produce a more robust, disease free human?

Environmental stuff

I thought I’d share with you some interesting environmental stuff I’ve come across recently – in no particular order.  First up, the Swedes have just released some guidelines for climate-friendly food in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases. Jointly drafted by the Swedish National Food Administration and their Environmental Protection Agency, the guidelines will be circulated around the EU for comment. There are no surprises to the advice: eat meat less often; eat seasonal, locally-produced fruits and vegetables (remember when we used to do that?); and avoid bottled water (the plastic may contain chemicals such as phthalates and bisphenol A, which seep into the water).

It’s good to see the Swedes taking the lead in Europe and helping consumers think through their food choices. Given that one kilo of beef contributes up to 15-25 kilos of greenhouse gases and that Swedes’ meat consumption has grown by an average ten kilos per person over the past ten years and now totals 65 kilos, it’s a smart move promoting healthy food choice hand-in-hand with helping the environment.  And you only have to read this report (by the Joint Research Centre) to learn that meat and dairy products contribute on average 24% to the environmental impact of total final consumption in the EU 27, while constituting only 6% of the economic value. Click here to read the guidelines in English.

And speaking of things seeping into your water or food, if you want to freak yourself out, go here to find out what pesticides are on your food. I decided to use the site to check out if my favourite poached pears might be suspect. Holy Guacamole as they say! 28 pesticides are found on pears – 6 known or probable carcinogens; 13 suspected hormone disruptors; 8 neurotoxins; and 3 developmental or reproductive toxicants. I’m reading Paul Roberts’ book, The End of Food, and he goes through the history of when we lost the plot and starting growing our crops smothered by chemical fertilizers and pesticides and injecting animals with antibiotics so they’d grow faster. Frightening. I have no doubt that in 100 years (if humanity hasn’t knocked itself off by sheer stupidity), future generations will shake their collective heads and call us the “chemical age”.

Meanwhile, Houston is going to erect a dome over the city. Well, engineers are thinking about it anyway. The idea is that a giant geodesic dome, stretching over 21 million square feet, might protect the city from its grim environmental future of fierce hurricanes and baking heat. You can watch a video on the Discovery Channel and explore the dome. I’ve pinched the photo below from the Discovery Channel.

The dome won’t be made of glass as that would be too heavy. It may be built from a light polymer, called Texlon® ETFE, invented over 25 years ago and called the “climatic envelope”. It’s 99% lighter than glass and can withstand winds of more than 180 miles per hour (more than the strongest category 5 hurricane). Apparently, an army of dirigibles would be used to construct the dome since everyday city life in Houston could not be interrupted.  But what about insects, birds and rain – how would that work inside the dome?

And finally, I was out in the garden the other day muttering about pests that had attacked some flowers. I don’t want to whip out chemicals so I hunted for some homemade recipes to beat them off and found this excellent FAQ sheet from Gardening Australia – a heap of recipes using things like soap flakes, bicarb and molasses to get rid of pests like caterpillars, grasshoppers and mealybugs. I tell you: it’s a war zone out there in the garden!

ChinchillaBluePhotography

Well, I’ve been threatening it for some time – a second blog – but not the one I thought I was going to launch (which was around environmental issues – that’s still on the backburner). My new blog is devoted to what I’m increasingly viewing as my “next career phase”. I’ve found my passion for photography has gone haywire over the last year. Not only digital photography – I’m now working with film and “toy cameras”. You can read about my love of the Diana F+ camera here.

Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was a teenager, I used to take photos with my father (a keen amateur photographer and bird fanatic). Then I got caught up in the corporate world of lawyers; had a spell as a teacher; and for over the last 10 years, have had various roles as a knowledge management practitioner. Never once did I pick up the camera. Until about a year ago. I literally work up one morning and said to myself “I’m going to take up photography again”. No idea what triggered this (probably mid-life crisis; no wait can’t have been, that was 20 years ago!).

So I bought a Nikon D40 and a Sigma 18-200mm lens. My beloved Nikon has travelled with me everywhere I’ve been around the world in the last year or so. And then this year, whilst teaching in Hong Kong, I discovered my new love – the Diana F+ and lomography.

I’ve landed a couple of paying photography gigs too. So I thought I’d set up an “online portfolio” of my photographic work. Eventually, I’ll get a professional site designed (I have two young dudes at work who are going to do this – one 26 year old who will design the site and one 22 year old who will design my logo – gotta embrace Gen Y!).

The Grand Plan is that when we move to Europe (yes, it’s happening – news on this soon), I will give corporate life the finger and take up photography and writing full-time.  I have a number of photography books in mind and am co-writing a novel with two outstanding women (an American who lives in China and a French woman who lives in Texas). It’s amazing how much my life and interests have changed since picking up the camera again and writing fiction.

And so to the name – ChinchillaBluePhotography – well, I’m sure Patrick Lambe will mutter “thank God she didn’t name it PhotographyShift”. He well knows I have a tendency to name anything “Shift”.  After weeks of angst over a name, I decided to go with two words:

• chinchilla – this is my favourite word in the English language and also represents an endangered species. Chinchillas were extremely popular for their fur in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Shy animals, they were relentlessly hunted and killed for their silky, gray fur. Many varieties of wild chinchilla are now on the endangered species list (eg Chilean chinchilla) but despite conservation efforts population numbers are still declining.
• blue – in colour therapy, blue is associated with the throat chakra, which is about communication.

So if I put those two words together, then it represents two things I hold dear – endangered species and the need for more authentic communication in today’s world. The camera allows me to see and intrepret the world around me and communicate this through photographs and a lot of my photography centres around birds and nature.

It’s early days yet for my new blog but it’s a “shift” in direction for me and is the first concrete step towards where I wish to head!  Here’s the link to ChinchillaBluePhotography and there’s also a permanent link to the new blog in the right side bar of ThinkingShift.

Designing for social interaction

Awhile back, I blogged about an experiment I found fascinating. Students of museum studies (at the University of Washington) were given the task of developing an exhibit in public space that would encourage strangers to talk to each other.  With my interests in history and photography, I guess I’d get old postcards with writing on them and old photos and bung them up on walls to trigger discussion. Perhaps have some colourful Post-It notes available for people to write down their reactions or thoughts and place up near the postcard or photo. But I don’t think that would cut it because individuals might just stare silently at the photos and write on a Post-It with no interaction or discussion going on. The question is: how do you encourage unfacilitated interaction through the use of social objects? So the goal is not design based around objects but design based around social interaction. Could be some good lessons for me as a knowledge management practitioner!

It was with some interest that I read the results from the student task of designing exhibits or artifacts that inspire interpersonal dialogue. You can check out the Museum 2.0 blog for full details of the participatory exhibit, including the project wiki. The exhibit was run at the University’s Student Centre. This is what the students came up with:

• they brainstormed ideas and concepts that would guide interactions, rather than discussing what collection to feature. You can read their brainstorming ideas here and here.
• they settled on an exhibit called Advice: give it, get it, flip it, fuck it. Really, I think this is a smart concept – everyone loves to give advice or obtain it. And what does advice usually involve? Usually some aspect of knowledge transfer – “this is how I’ve always done it”, “from my experience, you should try the following” and so on.
• they designed a website that allowed participants to send in advice via Twitter, phone, audio, photos and other media. This was the online component of the exhibit.
• they also had a physical exhibit with advice-giving booths of volunteers sharing their knowledge; a space for people to pose their own burning question; a simulated bathroom stall on which visitors could write or draw advice; pre-selected questions (called Questions of the Ages) which posed age-old problems like “”What should you do for a broken heart?” were popped up on glass walls and people could write responses on Post-It notes and place under the question.
• the advice booth business was smart – children, money managers, tattoo artists and people making buttons or badges were on hand to dispense advice on any topic and compose advice phrases to pop onto badges.

In any facilitation I do (and I have two sessions coming up over the next two weeks), I liberally use colourful Post-It notes, so I was glad to see that the students used them too. In fact, they discovered that stuff written on Post-Its can be content rich.  In response to the question “How do you heal a broken heart?”, participants created a chain of conversation with offshoot questions:

The American Philosophical Society (I found them on Flickr) seems to have done a similar thing with their Dialogues with Darwin exhibit:

So I thought this was a really great way to apply Web 2.0 technologies to museums and I’m going to reflect on what lessons I can take away for my KM work.

Consider that a divorce

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, back when he was but a humble Hollywood actor said to his wife (played by Sharon Stone in Total Recall) “consider that a divorce” and shot her, boom, kaput, dead. Now that he’s the Governor of California, he has affairs of state to consider. And he’s been reflecting recently on textbooks. You know, the sort of things kids use and learn from at school. Arnie is saying “consider that a divorce” to school textbooks and has announced his plan to terminate them.

Now, I have ranted before about the sorry state of education as I see it (and I have some expertise in this area being a Uni Adj Professor and having been a teacher). You can catch up on my rants here and here. But I didn’t realise that Arnie was such an authority on education – did I miss something? – has he been a teacher? For he says this:

“Kids, as you all know, today are very familiar with listening to their music digitally and online and to watch TV online, to watch movies online, to be on Twitter and participate in that and on Facebook. So basically kids are feeling so comfortable today, as a matter of fact, as comfortable with their cell phones and their keyboards as I did when I was your age, when I was a kid, with my pencils and crayons. So this is why I think it is so important that we move on from the textbooks. The textbooks are outdated as far as I’m concerned”.

Anyway, Arnie’s Digital Textbook Initiative, is clearly fueled by his need to slash California’s costs as the State is facing a budget gap of US $24.3 billion. The average textbook costs California around US $100 and in 2008 the State spent $350m on textbooks and can no longer afford it. Schwarzenegger believes initial savings from the plan will be between $300-400 million. In 2010, California high school students studying maths and science will be provided with access to online texts instead of the traditional printed textbook. California is the first US State to introduce such an initiative. But let’s not get carried away by Arnie’s rhetoric that kids have embraced new online technologies and so going digital is now the best way to learn in classrooms. 

I hope he’s thought this through. I’m happy to offer The Governator some free advice:

• make sure you don’t simply convert textbooks to a digital format and leave it at that. Think about how to make the digital learning environment interactive, collaborative, fun. And you might have to train a few teachers whilst you’re at it. I would doubt that every teacher in California tweets or has a Facebook page, so you’ll need to think about how they’ll teach using digital media.
• consider California’s digital divide – around 75% of Californians report having computers and internet access at home, school or work – but just over half (55%) have internet access at home. Those from a Hispanic background report considerably less internet access (48%). Have you read the open letter to you from The Children’s Partnership? – which urges you to consider the School2Home initiative aimed at addressing the Digital Divide by getting computers and high-speed Internet access into the hands and homes of middle school students in underperforming schools throughout the state. An estimated 400,000 students and their parents in 539 underperforming middle schools would benefit from School2Home.
• are you going to provide every kid with a laptop? To get kids to do their homework (at home), you’ll need to provide the technology – how much is that going to cost?
• make sure you read reports on comprehension rates of digital versus traditional book.  Go here Arnie for the New York Times article The Future of Reading Online, RU really reading? Or check out Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic “Is Google Making us Stupid?“. Before you terminate textbooks, reflect on the words of a cognitive neuroscientist – “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode”.
• check out the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus experiment. 27 seventh-graders were asked to look at the site and judge whether the information provided was trustworthy (this would involve critical thinking skills). Nearly  90% of them missed the joke and said the site was a reliable, trustworthy source and that the tree octopus (a fictional creature) exists.

It’s intriguing. I am probably reading more than I have ever read. Text messages, Twitter streams, hundreds of blogs, newspapers online and I design interactive modules for Uni students. But occasionally I wonder if I am merely skimming fragmented bits of information; if I am being given the time to pause, reflect, marinate, digest, interpret, consider and make the connections. Am I just hovering over the surface and not diving deep? I haven’t given up reading books that I can hold in my hands. I don’t think I ever could. I like to dog ear a page or write and draw in the margins. I like the linear, sequenced progression the printed page gives me.

Richard Foreman in an essay entitled “The Pancake People, Or, The Gods are Pounding my Head” made this powerful statement:

“I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West…..But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense culture inheritance – as we all become “pancake people” – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”.

Think about it Arnie. Do you want future generations of Californians to be “pancake people”?

The decline of civility?

I was having coffee the other day with a KM colleague. We are planning a workshop together and somehow the conversation turned into a discussion around the decline of civility in public life. Beware: unstructured rant ahead. I’ve been pondering if I’m just turning into a cranky old goat. Mind you, I rather relish the thought of becoming cranky in my dotage and complaining of “those young people today with no manners”. Anyway, we were talking about what seems to be a lack of empathy in today’s society (a recent blog post topic for me), which has resulted in public embarrassment or humiliation of people on reality show TV for example.

We came to the tentative conclusion that it’s about time.  One hundred years or so ago, people had more time. They could study the Classics at leisure. Go on the Grand Tour of Europe studying art works. Letters took a week or so to get to someone so there was time to reflect on content and compose a measured response. For entertainment, families gathered around the piano and sang together; played cards; or….gasp…talked. Items weren’t manufactured in China for the throw-away society. Artifacts where more often than not hand-crafted and treasured, perhaps handed down through the generations. People weren’t trying to grab the spotlight of fame for 15 minutes, appearing on some reality TV show drivel. Now, we want a movie star life with the movie star salary.

There was less abundance; less choice. My friend was saying his daughter recently spent an hour in a DVD store and re-emerged with nothing. She had been unable to make a decision about which DVD to get as there was too much choice on offer. And so we become paralysed. We don’t value things as much because they are disposable, not as well made as in the past, not guaranteed to last a lifetime to be handed down to the grandchildren. We are bombarded with information. Blackberries shrill. Incoming emails alert us. We feel the need to Twitter or reveal our private lives on Facebook. We feel the pressure of needing to say something witty or smart so we have 1 million followers on Twitter.

The values that we, as a community, used to share – family, country, faith, learning, truth – have disappeared to be replaced by degradation and a lack of kindness or consideration for others. Dressed up as “entertainment” we have shows that encourage people to “look 10 years younger” by subjecting themselves to plastic surgery or talent shows where judges have acerbic tongues ready to lash out and criticise, humiliate and belittle. We live in an anti-political age where collective and community engagement is at an all-time low.

I used to love The Golden Years of Hollywood, hosted by Bill Collins (very knowledgeable Australian film buff). These were innocent films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Singing in the Rain”. Now, we are inured to violence because we see it all the time in Hollywood blockbusters. There is a vulgarity present in our interactions with strangers in public space. Etiquette of course – the formal rules that existed in the 19th Century – was a way of enforcing social class distinctions, but any semblance of manners or consideration has flown the coop because we now seem to accept any form of behaviour because, hey – I’m an individual and entitled to my opinion.

The American philosopher, John Rawls, said “when liberties are left unrestricted, they collide with one another” (in his work, A Theory of Justice). I think that’s what we are seeing. Individuals with unfettered freedom colliding with each other. The rich, the bold, the brash, the powerful jostle to the top on the shoulders of others, whilst the rest of us are confused over what are the rules of social interaction in our society. Do I give up my train seat for that pregnant lady or do I say to myself “nope, I paid for this ticket too, she can stand?” (And BTW: I would stand up, not keep sitting).

And so as a result of the conversation, I ended up pondering the decline (the loss?) of civility in public life. Let’s not confuse civility with old fashioned good manners or etiquette. Civility is about respecting others and showing that respect. Even good old George Washington got this right when he said ‘Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present” (in his book, 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation). Civility governs (or should govern) our public life surely. Our daily interactions place us in contact with strangers. We have no idea of their background, their personalities, their problems or their religious viewpoints. But to treat them as equals, we must surely show them civility. Civility gives them and us the cue as to what the rules of social interaction are. Civility becomes a shared rule we can all understand and it regulates society through harmonious relationships with one another.

But we are in a state of anxiety – over the global financial mess, over whether or not we’ll lose our jobs, over whether or not the very high opinion we have of ourselves and our talent is shared by others. I sense a bubbling undercurrent of violence and unrest in society (I’m talking about Western society). It’s like we are waiting for some time bomb to go off. Civillity has taken a back seat. Even Good Samaritans are killed these days. Or people are deliberately run over and critically injured following a minor traffic incident.

But if we deliberately and doggedly continue to pursue our own self interest and ignore civility in public space, then the question must eventually become – how long before we descend into anarchy? And then, how long before the State has to step in and curtail the freedom of the individual?

Okay end of rant. I will reflect on civility some more and do another post.

How Curious!

I’ve collected a few curious (if not downright bizarre) items for your enjoyment. Let’s start off with what will surely become the next action-packed thriller adventure movie starring Samuel L. Jackson – Bees on a Plane.

No doubt the pilot of a plane at a flight school in Massachusetts wondered if he was appearing in a sequel to Snakes on a Plane, this time starring bees. 10,000 honeybees swarmed the left wing of an airplane at the school (weren’t honeybees said to be inexplicably dying off in the US?). The owner of the flight school called the cops (not sure cops are known for their bee removal abilities). The cops called a bee removal expert who sucked the bees off the wing by using a vacuuming tool and then shipped the bees off to hives (hope they survived the huge vacuum cleaner!).  Experts are saying that the Queen bee most likely was on the left wing and the honeybees swarmed to protect her (that or they all thought they’d hitch a ride). Source: Discover Magazine.

Have dog will travel. If you cannot be parted from your beloved canine even for one minute, no problem. Honda has just unveiled a dog-friendly car, complete with a cushioned dog bed in the boot (trunk), a built-in water bowl and fan and a ramp to assist the senior dog up into the pooch mobile. (Is there a cat version I wonder?). The car also comes with fitted restraints, rubber mats with a toy bone pattern and paw print exterior badging. It will be on sale from Fall 2009 in the US. Americans spend $41 billion a year on their pets so I guess the $20,000+ price for this car will be a breeze for the serious dog owner. Source: Reuters.

One day I have no doubt that we will no longer need to lug mobile phones and laptops around with us. Ultimately, we’ll have electronic devices embedded within the human body and it seems a transitionary step to this is already happening. Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Dresden, Germany have created head-mounted display eyeglasses that use eye movements to control what is shown onscreen. Users can influence the information content presented by moving their eyes or fixing on certain points in the image shown.  A chip is embedded in the eye glasses and projects an image onto the retina. The image appears to be at a distance of about one metre. The eye glasses, however, are apparently heavy and cumbersome at this early stage of development in augmented reality. Source: Science Daily. Image credit: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Your cheese-grater could be radioactive: an investigation into thousands of common items like elevator lift buttons, shovels, metal bits on handbags and the humble kitchen cheese-grater shows that these items might not be made of innocent looking metal but could in fact be slightly radioactive. Did you know that the banana is slightly radioactive because it contains radioactive potassium isotope? Better cut down on my banana intake! Potentially radioactive recycled metals don’t need to be tested or reported so they can be used in chairs, airline parts and even in the construction industry.  Perhaps we could just encase ourselves in lead. Source: Discover Magazine.

Don’t Beam Me up Scotty: If you’re thinking of taking one of those civilian space flights that will happen in the future, you might want to think again. Because it will be no Star Trek adventure. The human body is designed to have two feet firmly planted on the Earth. If there’s no gravity, then this is what can happen to you: motion sickness; puffy face-bird leg syndrome (what the? apparently, during launch, body fluids move toward the torso and head. This causes a distended jugular vein, headaches and persistent nasal congestion – charming); muscle wastage; organs and tissues are assaulted by galactic cosmic rays; your bones shrink; your immune system alters; the spine can be stretched; the circadian rhythms and sleep quality are stuffed; and ionizing radiation can kill cells and damage DNA, which may lead to cancer and an increased risk of cataracts.  Even worse, you could return from space looking not so much like the deletable Chris Pine (the new Capt Kirk of Star Trek) but more like a bloated, bald dude. Humans need gravity to look “normal” and long distance space travel will cause bodily fluids to shift eg from the torso to the head so you end up with a “fat head”.  Astronauts on short flights have complained about exploding headaches that make a migraine feel like a slight ache.

Sources: The Star and Discover Magazine.</p