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 Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:15 am Post subject: |
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The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Trilogy in Four Parts
Hardcover
By Douglas Adams
| Quote: | The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government's research team on Damogran.
This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice cup of hot tea) was of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this - partly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea...and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a ranpaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass. (From the first of the series, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 10, pgs. 69-70) |
| Quote: | The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
DVD
A classic!
An adaptation so effective, it's hard to tell where the books leave off and the movie begins. |
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| Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 12:56 pm Post subject: |
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Mining Ventures: Raising Money
Materials prepared for the Continuing Legal Education seminar, Raising Money for Mining Ventures, held in Vancouver, B.C. on May 2, 1997.
Course Coordinator: Graham H. Scott, Scott, Bissett, Vancouver
| Quote: | Summary
Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks
-- Herodotus (485-425 B.C.)
This paper highlights some of the issues relating to successfully financing the small ("junior or junior mining") company engaged in mineral exploration. To this end, a discussion is provided of the unique nature of mineral exploration and the environment within which this activity is conducted. The context within which financing of mineral exploration occurs is established by a review of equity market activity, investor behavior, and factors contributing to the recent high demand for mineral exploration stocks. Recent trends in financing of mineral exploration are illustrated with Vancouver Stock Exchange equity financing statistics. A brief discussion of the present environment for financing precedes an examination of some key company-related characteristics, which will likely be considered by industry corporate finance personnel, investors, and regulatory staff, when reviewing financing proposals. These key characteristics should be considered by those contemplating, or actively seeking, public financiang of mineral exploration ventures. |
| Quote: | | ... For the general case, the probability that an exploration project will result in the development of a mine is estimated to be one in one thousand (Wanless, 1983). The cost of mineral exploration has been estimated to be 4 to 5% of the value of expected production (Carrington). However, when exploration costs are adjusted for the cost of capital, they are estimated to range from 12-30% of mine derived revenue. (Mackenzie, 1995) (From Criteria to Consider When Seeking Public Financing by Ken Karchmar, P. Geo, of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, II The Mineral Exploration Environment, p. 4.1.02) |
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| Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Canadian Geographic
Magazine Subscription
No reservations
The Landmark Treaty of British Columbia's Tsawwassen First
Nation will abolish its reserve, add to its land base and end the tax exemption that has long defined Indian identity in Canada. Opposition
is fierce, but the province's chief negotiator argues that the agreement will give Tsawwassen what they seek most - control of their destiny.
By Kiwi treaty negotiating champ, Katherine Gordon
April, 2008
| Quote: | The federal government exerts its control over qualifying aboriginal people in Canada with a 132-year-old statute known as the Indian Act. The legislation provides a tax exemption for Indians living and working on reserves and annual program funding delivered by INAC. But the Indian Act also has significant drawbacks. INAC's $5.5 billion budget for the services it provides to Indian reserves is split among more than 1,200 organizations across the country, including 640 Indian bands, or First Nations. INAC funding is never adequate to meet community needs, and it is difficult for bands to raise their own revenue. Nobody on a reserve owns land outright, either individually or collectively, making it next to impossible to borrow money from a bank to build or buy a house or start a business on a reserve. Band governments, in the form of elected chiefs and councils, have limited bylaw-making powers and are shackled by a heavy-handed federal bureaucracy that sets priorities for how government funding is spent on reserves. Bands must troop, hat in hand, to Ottawa for permission to undertake major initiatives. ...
(Chief Kim) Baird's vision for the treaty included three principal elements: land for housing, community and economic ventures; self-government; and finally, cash. ...
Baird proposed, for example, that the treaty include 1,172 hectares of crown land - representing less than one per cent of the territory to which the Tsawwassen claimed aboriginal title - far in excess of what the two governments had in mind. The same was true of cash. The governments offered $10 million, a quarter of what Baird and her financial advisers had asked for. As for governance, the Tsawwassen wanted to ensure their powers would have constitutional protection: an abhorrent idea to the provincial government in power at that time.
In the end - nearly five years later - the Tsawwassen came down on land, the governments went up on cash and the province caved on constitutional protection of self-government. At the signing of the treaty in December, 2006, Jim Prentice, then Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, acknowledged in front of the Tsawwassen community that the sun had finally set on his role in their lives: "This treaty will provide you with the tools and authority to take control of your own future." ...
... Farmers in Delta are fiercely protective of the municipality's dwindling agricultural lands and want to prevent possible development on the property the Tsawwwassen will assume as part of the treaty, much of which falls on prime vegetable and berry farmland. Farming associations criticized the transfer, as did most Vancouver area municipal governments and several members of the provincial legislature. ... In 2004, the municipality (Delta) launched legal action against the provincial government in an unsuccessful attempt to stop it from signing the treaty. (For more on the encroachment of valuable agricultural land, see p. 44 of the treaty).
Opposition to the agreement from other First Nations has been equally emphatic. Numerous groups have asserted that the Tsawwassen's treaty lands lie withinin their own traditional territories and should not be transferred until their own rights to those lands have been addressed. The Semiahamoo First Nation in nearby White Rock and an alliance of Vancouver Island First Nations launched legal proceedings in June 2007 in an attempt to halt further progress on the treaty. Their case was rejected in the B.S. Supreme Court in November, 2007.
Closer to home, at Canoe Pass on the Fraser River, where the Tsawwassen will have ownership of several parcels of land, Raymond Wilson is at the forefront of a drive by the Hwlitsum First Nation to gain its own land. Fearful that there will be none left for his people, Wilson has fought the Tsawwassen every step of the way during the past 14 years. He, too, has so far been unsuccessful.
Nor is the opposition just local. First Nations from the Fraser Valley that have begun their own treaty negotiations have banded together with those on Vancouver Island in an attempt to force governments to change what have, until now, been non-negotiable mandates, such as the policy on removing the tax exemption. A unified front, they say, is essential to success; in agreeing to accept such policies, the Tsawwassen First Nation has let them down.
Others outside the process are just as adamant. ...
In addition to the external resistance, 30 Tsawwassen residents actively opposed the deal. ...
Some feared losing their government overseers, on whom they have come to depend. "We'll be losing INAC's responsibility for us," says Bertha Williams. ... "Who will we turn to then?"
... She considers the tax exemption to be part of her identity. "It's who we are now. There's no other place in the world where people have a special status like this." (-- pgs. 54-60) |
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| Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 11:20 am Post subject: |
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COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
REVIEW BOOKS
A Voyage Round John Mortimer:
The Authorized Biography
By Valerie Grove
Nov. 1/07
| Quote: | Quietly, and without any of us really noticing it, John Mortimer has been transformed from an Old Harrovian barrister, writer and raconteur into one of the most dearly loved figures of our age. This new biography will only add to this metamorphosis. ...
I first met Mortimer at a Spectator lunch in 1985, when we were in the smelt of Thatcherism and he was about to embark on a misguided voyage called 'Champagne Socialism'. But, even then, his advancement of ideas and knowledge was done with a kindness that marks his winning ways.
Our different journeys crossed again, however, in our shared defence of foxhunting. Anyone who has, as I have done, sat down with him and discussed the philosophical importance of Kierkegaard to the sport, will not doubt his conviction.
Mortimer's life has been a tornado of libertarian tendencies. His unsuccessful defence of Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, who had printed a poem with the absurd and blasphemous notion that Christ was the object of homosexual desires, simply added lustre to his name.
Ever with the diarist's eye, Grove recounts, with sensitivity, the discovery in 2004 that he had a previously unknown son from a relationship with the actress Wendy Craig. Even this has not dented the affection for him, not least from his heroic second wife, Penny. Rory Knight Bruce (-- p. 107) |
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| Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 8:53 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
One of the Best but Still Hardly
Worth the Amazon Subscription Price
The Communicators
We asked them to speak their minds in our language.
By Charles Siebert
Dec. 30/07
| Quote: | There is, in the end, no telling what tales they had to tell, the two greatest nonhuman linguists of our day: Washoe, the sign-language-wielding chimpanzee with an intense footwear fetish; and Alex, the wildly outspoken parrot, an African gray known to regularly order about his human researchers and to purposely give them the wrong answers to their questions just to alleviate his boredom. After all, we only every gave our own words to work with.
... By the time of her death from natural causes in October at age 42, she managed to pass along much of what she had learned to her adoptive chimp son, Loulis. It was the first recorded instance of an animal-to-animal transference of a human language.
Alex, for his part, was picked up in a Chicago pet store in 1977 by a newly minted Harvard chemistry Ph. D. named Irene Pepperberg. She had become fascinated with the stories of Washoe, along with other studies being done at that time on highly communicative species like dolphins, humpback whales and songbirds. Alex (an acronym for Avian Learning EXperiment) would learn more than 100 words in the course of his 30-year partnership with Pepperberg. Healso learned to identify 50 different objects; to recognize their different colors, shapes and makeup; and to distinguish and pronounce phonemes (the root sounds of words). By the time of his sudden death from a heart contidition in September at the age of 31, he also mastered many compound words.
... The moment with Washoe that still resonates most is one that occurred outside the laboratory, when she happened to notice a swan adrift on a nearby lake. She turned to her caretakers and signed "water," then "bird": perhaps the first doumented incident of another creature freely assigning our words to an observed phenomenon. It was, the Harvard psychologist Roger Brown noted at the time, "like getting an SOS from outer space."
... Alex's cognitive abilities tested as high as those of a 4-5-year-old child. He understood concepts like presence and absence, making him very adept at the shell game. He frequently cajoled and coached the other parrots in Pepperberg's lab. And he never hesitated to express his frustrations and affections. When Pepperberg returned to the lab after a three-week absence, Alex turned his back on her and commanded, "Come here!" As she put Alex back in his cage the night he died, he signed off with: "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you." (-- p. 42) |
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| Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 9:48 am Post subject: |
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Harper's Bazaar
British Edition
Alive and flipping
When you volunteer to help on a research project,
you'll get closer than ever to some of the world's most
endangered species - as Stanley Johnson discovered,
walking Costa Rica's beaches to help protect a new
generation of leatherback turtles
April, 2007
| Quote: | The harsh truth is that, in the Pacific Ocean at least, the leatherback turtle is critically endangered. Its nesting beaches, all around the Pacific Rim, have been turned into seaside resorts. If a female leatherback does manage to reach the shore to lay her eggs, she may be hacked to pieces by waiting gangs, or her eggs, once laid, may be ruthlessly plundered. Industrial fishing, particularly long-lining, has further contributed to the tragic decline in leatherback numbers.
Playa Grande offers the last best hope of saving the species from extinction in the Pacific. Miraculously, the big-time developers have not yet got their claws into this part of the Costa Rican coastline. The bright lights from hotels and housing developments, so off-putting to the nesting turtle, do not shine here. Not yet, anyway. The local authorities have now declared Playa Grande and two neighboring beaches a marine National Park, called Las Baulas.
The Earthwatch team at Playa Grande research station doesn't just protect the turtles and their nests; it runs a hatchery, too. If, during the course of their beach patrols, the volunteers find a leatherback laying eggs below the high-tide mark, they will carefully collect them and move them to the hatchery for safety. A leatherback at Las Baulas lays 65 eggs per clutch and seven clutches a season, and nests every three to four years. Every egg protected, every hatchling saved, increases the chances of a turtle surviving to maturity,' project leader Bibi Santidrian tells me.
A quarter of a century ago, there were around 90,000 mating female leatherbacks to be found in the Pacific. Today, there are fewer than 5,000. ... (-- p. 265) |
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| Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
Are you ready for climate change?
Camilla Akers-Douglas tackles the enormity of
climate change - the facts, the figures and, most
importantly, how you can personally make a
difference
April 19/07
| Quote: | Includes an excellent 13-page spread on how to calculate carbon footprints and access many of the excellent new energy-saving technologies!
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| Quote: | The Government wants to reduce UK carbon emissions by 60% by 2050, and plans to make all new homes carbon-zero within 10 years. Now, David Cameron and Gordon Brown, the two pretenders to the Prime Ministerial office, are engaged in a battle to woo the Green vote. Mr Brown's desire to make all homes energy efficient in the next 10 years includes a pledge to phase out old-fashioned lightbulbs by 2011. Mr Cameron has called for a 'Green air-miles allowance', giving people one short-haul flight a year at the standard rate of tax before higher rates kick in.
The EU has also recently agreed an ambitious deal for tackling climate change, committing its members to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% by 2020 and to producing a fifth of their energy via renewable sources. It also wants 10% of the fuel used for transport to be from biofuels, and to ensure that 20% of its power comes from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and hydroelectricity.
The bigger picture may be daunting, but the best advice is to follow the old adage that it is easiest to pick low-hanging fruit, and start by making small changes that will bring immediate gains - such as not leaving electrical appliances on standby. (-- p. 109) |
| Quote: | | Town dwellers have an advantage. Terraced houses are more thermally efficient than free-standing ones - although for maximum effect, the drafty sash * windows should be sealed up (an act that people used to rattling sashes will regard as close to sacrilege; still, needs must). But country people are more likely to have a bit of ground around their houses, and this opens more opportunities to them. The windmill on David Cameron's North Kensington home looks more like a statement of intent, or even lifestyle accessory. If you have a field, you can erect a big enough windmill to make a useful contribution to your energy consumption. Geothermal heating, whereby pipes are buried underground so that water arrives in the house at a constant temperature and requires less energy to make it hot, can be installed in even quite small gardens. Mr. Cameron is digging up his at the moment. Country houses have more space for photovoltic cells, whereas the roof area of most London houses is too small to nmake a significant contribution. replacing conventional boilers with heat and power systems, which use the waste energy from heating the water to generate electricity may be attractive in houses with big fuel bills. ... (From Doing our bit for the planet, p. 93) |
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| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:35 am Post subject: |
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Harvard Business Review
Magazine Subscription
How Resilience Works
Confronted with life's hardships, some
people snap, and others snap back
By Diane L. Coutu
Sept. 1/02
| Quote: | Prior to Setpember 11, 2001, Morgan Stanley, the famous investment bank, was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. The company had some 2,700 employees working in the south tower on 22 floors between the 43rd and the 74th. On that horrible day, the first plane hit the north tower at 8:46 a.m., and Morgan Stanley started evacuating just one minute later, at 8:47 a.m. When the second plane crashed into the south tower 15 minutes after that, Morgan Stanley's offices were largely empty. All told, the company lost only seven employees despite receiving an almost direct hit.
Of course, the organization was just plain lucky to be in the second tower. Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were hit in the first attack, couldn't have done anything to save its employees. Still, it was Morgan Stanley's hard-nosed realism that enabled the company to benefit from its luck. Soon after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, senior management recognized that working in such a symbolic center of U.S. commercial power made the company vulnerable to attention from terrorists and possible attack.
With this grim realization, Morgan Stanley launched a program of preparedness at the micro level. Few companies take their fire drills seriously. Not so Morgan Stanley, whose VP of security for the Individual Investor Group, Rick Rescorla, brought a military discipline to the job. Rescorla, himself a highly resilient, decorated Vietnam vet, made sure that people were fully drilled about what to do in a catastrophe. When disaster struck on September 11, Rescorla was on a buyllhorn telling Morgan Stanley employees to stay calm and follow their well-practised drill, even though some building supervisors were telling occupants that all was well. Sadly Rescorla himself, whose life story has been widely covered in recent months, was one of the seven who didn't make it out. (-- pgs. 49-50) |
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| Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 1:12 pm Post subject: |
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The War Symphonies
Shostakovich Against Stalin
First-rate multinational collaboration
Directed by Harvey Weinstein
Featuring the excellent Netherlands Radio Philarmonic
conducted by Valery Gergiev
DVD
| Quote: | 7th Symphony - 1941
Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович Dmitri Shostakovich, the people's composer: My 7th Symphony was inspired by the tragic events of 1941. To our struggle against Fascism, to our future victory over the enemy and to native city of Leningrad, I dedicate this piece.
Ksenia Matus (oboeist): I grabbed my instrument and when I opened the case it also turned out to have dystrophy. All the pads had turned green. The oboe wouldn't play but I took it as it was. And when I got to the hall, I became frightened. Those I had known before the war were so emaciated. Some were covered in soot, their faces blackened with smoke. They were hungry, and all dressed in I don't know what. But they came. Eliasberg stood up at the podium. He lifted his hands and they were trembling and to my imagination, he was a wounded bird, whose wings are hurt, and is about to fall. But he didn't fall.
Tatiana Vasilyeva (Leningrad Siege survivor): I came for the 7th Symphony, and I had this same seat. When I entered the hall, tears came to my eyes because there were many people, all elated. We listened with such emotion because we had lived for this moment, to come and hear this music. This was a real symphony which we lived. This was our symphony, Leningrad's.
Dmitri Tolstoy (composer): They performed in the Philarmonic, and outside bombs and shells were exploding. It was incredible! This proved that the spirit prevails over matter. The spirit is more important than matter.
Tatiana: It was so meaningful for all of us. We realized that the concert might be the last thing we'd do in our lives.
Ksenia: Music was everything. Never mind the kasha, or that we were hungry. No one could feed us, but music inspired us and brought us back to life. In this way, this day was our feast. |
Perhaps even more incredible, Shostakovich survived Stalin's purges. He died of lung cancer in 1975.
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| Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 8:37 am Post subject: |
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Lexus
Lexus Owners' Magazine Bling
You've got ale
Bike riders and other eco-friendlies in
Colorado beer country
By Thomas Bedell
Quarter One, 2008
| Quote: | ... The bicycle is both a corporate metaphor and a real-life symbol of New Belgium's beginnings. While biking in Belgium in 1986, Lebesch, an electrical engineer, had an epiphany about the glories and idiosyncratic flavors of Belgian beers, which led to his home brewing efforts to replicate Belgian styles. He and Jordan, a social worker, married in 1990. As she recounts it, once they decided to go professional they formulated a four-part strategy: "To have fun, to make world-class beers, to proceed on a sound environmental basis, and to promote good beer culture." ...
The brewery promotes biking in a variety of ways, like its Tour de Fat, a funky 12-city roving music-and-bike festival that raises funds for local cycling groups. On Thursday evenings in summer, New Belgium has been known to arrange bike-in cinema nights where locals peddle on over to sip beers and watch films outdoors on an inflatable screen. And at the company, it is the bicycle that is the first of several career milestone markers: every NBB employee receives a bike after a year. (The tour of Belgium comes after five, and a fruit tree planted in the brewery orchard after ten.) ...
Many breweries have long recycled spent grains to local farmers for use as feed. Others, such as Sierra Nevada Brewing in Chico, Calif., and Great Lakes Brewing of Cleveland, are also making innovative waste reduction efforts. But few can boast of a sustainability director, like New Belgium's Jennifer Orgolini. She began on the company bottling line in 1993, but has moved through a variety of positions, including chief operating officer. ...
NBB's laundry list of efforts to reduce its energy footprint can fill pages, but includes more efficient brewing vessels, lighting from fluorescent bulbs and passive solar tubes, desks fashioned from recycled paper and cardboard, a brewhouse constructed from reclaimed timber, and even tasting room seats made from old bicycle rims.
In general, one of the heaviest footprints in brewing comes from the wastewater used largely in cleaning bottles, barrels, and production tanks. Brewing efficiencies vary, but an industry standard is to expend about five barrels of water in brewing one barrel of beer. "We have that down to a 3.9-to-1 ratio," said Brandon Weaver, New Belgium's lead process water technician. "Our goal is to reduce it to 3.5-to-1." The on-site water treatment facility moves wastewater through a series of anaerobic and aerobic ponds, where bateria munch away on the organic wastes, cleaning the wastwater and simultaneously producing methane - which in turn can proudce about 15 percent of the brewery's power needs.
Transforming waste into a commodity is a good thing, although to the discriminating beer drinker, it's what is in the glass that counts. If the brews concocted by NBB were mere bellywash, there wouldn't be much hullabaloo. But its regular and seasonal lineups of beers are among the best in craft brewing, and the line often lets its hari down with imaginative ingredients - kaffir lime leaves, crushed coriander, gogi berries. (-- pgs. 27-28) |
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| Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 9:56 am Post subject: |
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Reason for Hope
A Spiritual Journey
Hardcover
By Jane Goodall with
Phillip Berman
| Quote: | ... All this would seem to suggest a hope-less millennium ahead. Indeed, environmentalists have produced terrifying statistics that "prove" that life on pleanet earth is doomed, statistics computed from the rate at which the rain forests are being destroyed, the greenhouse gases building up, the human population growing, and so on. It is as though we were on a large ship. The lookout in the bow suddenly sees rocks ahead and alerts the crew. Yet it takes time for a big vessel to change course, so all attempts to avert disaster will fail. Of course, it will take time for the ship to disintegrate in the waves. Our world will end "not with a bang but a whimper." It is easy to imagine that such a fate awaits life, as we know it, on Spaceship Earth. Yet despite this, I do have hope for the future - for our future. But only if changes are made in the way we live - and made quickly. We do not, I think, have much time. And these changes must be made by us, you and me. If we go on leaving it to others, shipwreck is inevitable.
My reasons for hope are fourfold: (1) the human brain; (2) the resilience of nature; (3) the energy and enthusiasm that is found or can be kindled among young people worldwide; and (4) the indomitable human spirit. ...
The hope lies in the fact that, finally, we have begun to understand and face up to these problems. ...
... More people are concerned than ever before. Even in China, the government, which has for so long denied that it has any environmental problems, has been jolted into concern by the terrible floods of 1998. Today environmental concerns are freely discussed in the Chinese media. ... After all, humans have accomplished "impossible" tasks before. Would anyone have believed you a hundred years ago if you had predicted there would soon be a man on the moon? a fax machine? a jumbo jet? ...
And there is more good news. Many companies have begun "greening" their operations. ... No African government will sit on "black gold,: so it is important that the exploring, drilling, and pumping be done by the most responsible and ethical companies. And unless you and I support those companies, by purchasing their products, they will never survive in the competitive marketplace.
There are hundreds of similar examples of corporate encironmental responsibility. And there are sighns everywhere that illustrate a changing attitude. ...
My second reason for hope lies in the amazing resilience of nature if we give her a chance - and, if necessary, a helping hand. There are many success stories. The lower reaches of the River Thames in London were once so poisoned that almost all life was dead; today, after a massive cleanup operation, fish are swimming, and many birds have returned to breed. ...
... For a hundred years the toxic emissions from a nickel mine (in Sudbury, Ont.) had polluted the environment for miles around. ... citizens finally realizing that their health as well as their environment were at risk, had decided to do something about it. The mine had reduced its emissions by 98 percent in about fifteen years. As a symbol of hope, they gave me a feather from one of the peregrine falcons that once again nested there - after being locally extinct for more than forty years. ...
There are, in fact, success stories everywhere. ...
It can be argued that changes of this sort will lead to major social injustices. Meat farmers, for example, would need alternative livelihoods. The same is true for trappers and miners and those in the animal laboratory industry, and so forth. I am not, for a single moment, denying the complexity, the interrelatedness, the social and political implications of these issues. But we cannot condone forever the pursuit of unethical, cruel and destructive behaviors simply because to end them will create problems: would anyone advocate the continuation of concentration camps in order to ensure the jobs of those in charge? ... (emphasis added)
I truly believe that more and more people are seeing the appeal in the eyes around them, feeling it in their hearts, and throwing themselves into the battle. Herein lies the real hope for our future; we are moving toward the ultimate destiny of our species - a state of compassion and love. ... (From Chapter 15, Hope, pgs. 232-251) |
| Quote: | Reason for Hope
Audio CD
Narrated by audiobook force majeure Anna Fields
An especially soothing treatise by one of the world's best loved and most committed scientists, the first to show the world animal emotions and their selection, use and refinement of tools[. Beautifully and simply written and narrated. Highly recommended for stressed ESL students weary of academic harangue. |
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| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 9:38 am Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
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The Uneven Playing Field
Everyone wants girls to have as many
opportunities in sports as boys. But can we live
with the greater rate of injuries they suffer?
By Michael Sokolove
May 11/08
| Quote: | Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Gorls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls' ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility - a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls ten to run differently than boys - in a less-flexed, more upright posture - which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed - yet another suspected risk factor.
This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes. And we ask this of boys and girls equally - unmindful of physical differences. The pressure to concentrate on a "best" sport before even entering middle school - and to play it year-round - is bad for all kids. They wear down the same muscle groups day after day. They have no time to rejuvenate, let alone get stronger. By playing constantly, they multiply their risks and simply give themselves too many opportunities to get hurt.
...
An A.C.L. does not tear so much as it explodes, often during routine athletic maneuvers - landings from jumps, decelerations from sprints - that look innocuous until the athlete crumples to the ground. After the A.C.L. pulls off the femur, it turns into a viscous liquid. The ligament cannot be repaired; it has to be replaced with a graft, which the surgeon usually forms by taking a slice of the patellar tendon below the kneecap or from a hamstring tendon. One reason for the long rehabilitation is that the procedure is really two operations - one at the site of the injury and the other at the donor site, where the tendon is cut.
...
If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules - soccer, basketball, volleyball - female athletes rupture their A.C.L.s at rates as high as five times that of males. (-- pgs. 54-59) |
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Last edited by editor on Tue Jun 10, 2008 8:32 am; edited 3 times in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 7:47 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
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Practicing Patients
PatientsLikeMe, an Internet start-up, creates information-rich
communities for the chronically ill. Is it the next step forward
in medical science - or just a MySpace for the afflicted?
By Thomas Goetz
March 23/08
| Quote: | ... Creating a PatientsLikeMe mental-health community — or as they call it, a “mood community” — requires a new strategy for measuring mental health. The challenge is in part semantic. Where the argot around A.L.S. or M.S. is largely clinical, the vernacular around mental health is more subjective. The official diagnostic criteria for major depression, for example, include “feelings of worthlessness” and “indecisiveness.” So PatientsLikeMe faces an input problem: how to convert the ambiguities of mental illness into metrics? Whatever its ultimate worth, the site’s answer is elegantly straightforward. Members can update their mood status every hour on a scale of 1 to 4, from very bad to very good. How they feel may be subjective, but the resulting data can be mapped across time. The site treats sessions of therapy as if they were a dose of Prozac; the type of therapy (say, group or individual) stands as the treatment, and the length of a session (say, 50 minutes a week) as the dosage.
Such efforts at precise measurement and comparison are not the norm in evaluating mental-health treatment. Americans spend about $12 billion a year on antidepressants, but we still have little understanding of how or whether they work. In 2006, the National Institute of Mental Healthreleased the results of the largest and longest depression study ever undertaken, the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression Study, or Star-D. Star-D rejected typical clinical study design and aimed to create a real-world representation of how patients actually experience and treat depression: through trial and error, taking one drug after another, searching for one that helps. The results were mixed. Star-D found that if you’re depressed and spent three months on a potent psychotropic drug, you had a one-third chance of achieving remission. After almost six months on drugs, your chances bump up to about fifty-fifty — a coin flip — and you still risk side effects like sexual dysfunction, insomnia and weight gain. Those may be good odds for the industry, but it seems a poor bet for a patient.
At PatientsLikeMe, Ben Heywood sees pure opportunity in such statistics. “Those odds just aren’t good enough,” he says[/b]. “So you try Wellbutrin, and after six weeks it doesn’t work. Then Prozac. Doesn’t work. Now what? Where do you go next?” Plugged in to a community of patients sharing their depression histories and treatments, Ben argues, patients could readily find someone with symptomatology close to their own, compare drug regimens and go straight to the drug that may be more likely to work for them. This, for patients, is the promise of a mental-health community: better tailoring of treatments. It is also the promise of the site as a business. The pharmaceutical industry should be eager to improve the accuracy and efficacy of its treatments. After all, sometimes side effects can turn into blockbusters, most famously when Pfizer scientists learned that their hypertension treatment was causing erections in men, leading the way to Viagra. Since PatientsLikeMe forgoes advertising, selling its data to pharmaceutical companies is its best apparent way to make money. But so far, it seems, the drug industry has balked at the prospect of knowing so precisely what happens to their products after they reach the market. (-- pgs. 33-37) |
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Last edited by editor on Fri May 30, 2008 2:23 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 2:16 pm Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
The Green Issue
Why Bother?
Looking for a few good reasons to go green.
In a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted
from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and
involving not too many drives to the garden center), you
can grow the proverbial free lunch - CO2-free and dollar-free.
By Michael Pollan
April 20/08
| Quote: | Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it's one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren't great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives "as if" they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.
So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to "conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day." Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn't involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.
But the act I want to talk about is growing some - even just a little - of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don't - if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade - look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.
... At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. (emphasis added) ... (--pgs. 23, 88) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:53 pm Post subject: |
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BC Business
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In the genes
Challenging apartheid, abandoning a job at Harvard, studying rare disorders that others ignore - Michael Hayden has never been one to follow the conventional path. And that's precisely what makes him one of the most successful scientists and biotech entrepreneurs working in the province today.
April, 2008
| Quote: | ... Getting into Harvard wasn't something Hayden had dreamed about; he felt he'd lucked into it and, for that reason, wasn't all that committed.
So when UBC came calling, he accepted, shocking his Harvard colleagues, who thought he would be wasting his life in the boonies. In 1983 Hayden began teaching and practicing at UBC Hospital. "I saw there was space for me to do things," he says. "There was an openness, a perspective about building. I just had this feeling you could do great things here. It was not fully formed. It was nascent. Boston was pretty fixed, where Vancouver was really in flux."
Hayden threw himself into research, publishing his results in prestigious journals such as Cell, Nature, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. But gradually he grew frustrated with the limitations of being a university scientist. "Many of the discoveries had significant potential for patients, but we were always coming to a place where we had to talk to others," he says. "You never had a chance to be the advocate for your program, to determine the fate of what happened to it."
Even if a drug company wanted to license a discovery, that didn't mean the company would develop it commercially. "It might want the licence to kill it because it didn't want competition in the field," Hayden explains. ...
"For me, this is like a dream," says Hayden. But he's not resting on his laurels - not yet. He'd like to hit a home run with Xenon too. "We're interested in having a thriving company here in Vancouver that becomes a next-generation genetics pharmaceutical company. We have to see whether we can be successful and then resist any advances. My goal would be to maintain a Canadian-run company here." He's optimistic, but cautiously so. "We need a bit of luck, because finally when you make a drug you never know about side effects - not that we have any reason to be worried. Still, you need some blessing, some luck, some feng shui." (-- pgs. 54-57) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3820#3820
Last edited by editor on Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:06 pm; edited 6 times in total |
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