Video- Cynical

Simpsons- Movie “no answers”

South Park--

Jonas Brothers—disney, Christians

Mormon song

Playlist- Cynical/Antireligious

Music

Dishwalla “Tell me all your thoughts on God (Counting Blue Cars)

GreenDay -Gloria

Own Personal Jesus

Joan Osborne- What if God was one of us

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Wings of a Butterfly- HIM

Mama- MCR

Statehood and Burning Man

Jared Diamond is a damn interesting writer.  Consider this passage from his seminal novel: “…Those are the reasons why large societies cannot function with band organization and instead are complex kleptocracies.  But we are still left with the question of how small, simple societies actually evolve or amalgamate into large, complex ones.  Amalgamation, centralized conflict resolution, decision making, economic redistribution, and kleptocratic religion don’t just develop automatically through a Rousseauesque social contract…”

 

Note to self:  I agree with Diamond.  For alll the anti-statehood embodied in BM, statehood is the natural result of power struggles (“kleptocracies”) between large groups of individuals, which naturally dominate over smaller ones.  I guess the lesson from all of this is that the State simply is—it’s not anti-evolutionary or anti-people, it just is.  And a corollary for me might be that working for change of it (even if a small part) is not necessarily an exercise that is anti-instinctual or even unhealthy. Viva America!  Viva California!

Burned Impressions…

pro:

freedom from ads—go anywhere talk to anyone, no agenda, less ‘fakeness’

trust/responsibility

nakedness! without shame or even self-consciousness

 

con: showers! electricity!

unsustainable at length

unevolved hippies still living in the 60’s

Burning man notes

todo:

campsite/contacts/purpose/generator

ride

gifts

Get: 

goggles

bike

tent, pad, silverware, shower?

drugs –meth, E, shrooms/acid

On Climate Change

I was actually a big fan of Gore’s big video (An Inconvenient Truth) until revisiting the issue after a Dish link.  I looked at the Wikipedia page to try to understand things better, and despite the truth of the infamous CO2 graph (with the parodied mechanical riser), it seems there is more going on than just gases and temperature.

The whole story seems to be:

in the last million years (1Ma), multiple variables of the earth’s orbit correlate with a complex cycle (or cycles) usually known as Milankovitch cycles, that affect temperature AND CO2 AND other measurements (how all of this is measured would be interesting).  The temperature changes due to the Milankovitch cycles are longterm (over 10-15k years, around 5deg. C).

Unresolved issues: 

-the broadest scientific question to me seems to be why the model doesn’t incorporate an explanation about what happened at 1Ma

-it’d be nice to see more consensus and/or information on the last 1Ma in the wikipedia article, but this seems beyond me.  I left a teaser comment in the talk page on the Milankovitch cycle, I’ll see if it gets answered.

Some of the graphs only go back 400ka

 

 

 

Unresolved questions:  what happened between 1Ma and before to cause the cycles?

white paint in the oceans?

Inspiration:

idea: cover the ocean with white sheets/particles to make it more reflective.

Drawbacks:
sheer scale involved. Would probably have to be easily made with abundant substances
perhaps easier to simply bioengineer the atmosphere.
less heat to the oceans may upset ocean life (but perhaps one could spread just enough to offset how much warmer it is from overall earth warming.-- calculate atmosperic contribution and balance increased polar heat from ozone?)

What about fake icebergs (or even giant mirrors?--- biodegradable plastic?)

Tangential thought: Snow reflects more light than rain. Therefore, any effort to increase snowfall (vs. rain) could be explored. Corollary to this is that less snow could produce positive feedback loop for more/less warming (I've heard this before)


wide areas of land with white. The highway system has already been suggest