Wired sells out to Monsanto

I picked up my new Wired magazine and immediately read their cover story, an inflammatory ‘environmentalists are full of shit’ piece. It really pissed me off. They end their series of anti-arguments based on facts focused around cutting carbon dioxide, with a “take it with a grain of salt" letter from the editor of Worldchanging.com. He basically says the article is a short-lens focus that could get us into even more trouble. Isn’t the damage already done with a cover like “Keep your SUV, forget organics and screw the spotted owl?” I suppose it would be okay if they were using it to get people reading but then dole out some actual wisdom inside, but they don’t.

Here are my reactions to the articles:

1) A/C is OK. Here they say it takes more energy to heat a house in a cold climate than it does to cool a house in a hot climate. Good point, but really do we want everyone to move to the Southwest? The area is already burgeoning and just beginning a mega-drought that could last up to 150 years, where are they going to get enough water to live? What about clamping down on cheap housing construction and passing ordinances requiring better insulation. We’ll all have to pay more per square foot but maybe it will have the doubly beneficial effect of making our houses use space more efficiently.

2) Live in cities. Yes, for the most part, urbanization is cool and better for the environment but they make an argument that exurbs are the same as living in a truly rural area surrounded by trees. People don’t live in exurbs to be closer to nature, they sprouted up because people (like in Los Angeles) couldn’t afford to buy houses in the city so developers bought cheap land 50 miles out of town in the desert and built affordable housing there. The article points a finger at lawnmowers (a product of the suburb/exurb) and I totally agree that lawnmowers are a waste of energy. But why not encourage people with land to plant trees and grow a garden to feed themselves instead of trying to get them to move to a city? Not everyone wants to live in an apartment.

3) Organics are not the answer. This one really burns me up. They say we should screw organic because it takes 25 organic cows compared to 23 industrial cows for the same milk and they put out 16 percent more greenhouse emissions. Are they f’ing kidding me? We should drink hormone-laced pus-filled milk from sick suffering cows for that differential? The only smart thing they say in this article, albeit stuffed in the middle, is that if you really want to do something for the environment, stop eating meat altogether. It’s true that we can’t go organic at our current rate of consumption but we (in industrialized countries) eat and waste too much food anyway. Instead, I think we should go organic 100% and patronize restaurants that serve reasonable proportions of quality food.

4) Farm the forests. The only good thing in this section is about culling dead wood out of the forests, it does prevent fires and with the climate heating up, we can’t afford the kind of fires it’s going to bring. But the rest of it, about becoming full time forest farmers and cutting down old growth trees is total bullshit.

5) China is the solution, not the problem. I agree! (See next post) China has become the number one producer of alternative energy solutions for export and use in their own country. Due to decades of rapid and untethered production and growth, their feet are now much closer to the proverbial fire than ours; they will likely find and implement environmental solutions quicker than us.

6) Accept genetic engineering. If I read one more thing about biofuel, I’m going to be sick. They just made the point that we should use more public transportation in the “move to the city” argument but now they’re talking about how we should embrace genetic engineering so we can grow more biofuel. They attack fertilizer and say nothing of chemical sprays, but fertilizer is necessary because of our addiction to monocrops (and profits). Thousands of years ago, farmers rotated crops and used trees and companion plants that naturally kept bugs away or attracted complimentary insect relationships (like worms) and enrich the soil to the benefit of certain crops. The author mentions Monsanto as some kind of wonder company here to save our lives. Monsanto is a chemical company that produces the world’s best-selling “herbicide,” a chemical that kills everything. They then got into the agriculture business producing 90% of the GMO crops on the planet, specifically engineered to resist their herbicide. Roundup kills everything except the crops they engineer. They are corporate bullies who use lawsuits and threats to wipe out local farmers. "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food," said Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job." Unchecked, everything we eat will be engineered by Monsanto. If Wired really gave a shit about us and the environment, they’d do a full report on how they control our food supply.

7) Carbon Trading doesn’t work. I agree, good idea that needs improved.

8) Embrace nuclear power. There’s been a lot of talk that the only way we’ll produce enough energy for the billions of us on the planet in the future is from nuclear. They call it the cleanest of the fossil fuels because of the low emissions, uh, but what about the huge volume of nuclear waste produced? We already have tons of it buried in leaking containers under the ground in Washington and other states, we have no safe way to dispose of it and it remains toxic for thousands of years. Let’s focus on energy saving and efficiency before we make feeding our voracious appetites the top priority, eh?

9) Used cars not hybrids. Okay, I get the argument. New cars cost a lot of energy to make. If you’re driving a ten-year old fuel-efficient Toyota like my RAV, it’s better for the environment to keep driving it than to buy a new car. Except that my RAV will never end up in the landfill, there will always be someone waiting to buy it. They suggest (again, to be inflammatory) by the same logic you’re better off driving a Hummer because making a Hummer contributes less carbon to the environment (because of the nickel in Prius’ battery). They say nothing about the fact that cars in Europe are twice as fuel-efficient as ours and are the same as a Prius, which is why you don’t see hybrids there. It’s all a bunch of crap. We’re sold gas-guzzlers on purpose so the hybrids look good in comparison. While it doesn’t affect our carbon output, the quiet drive of the hybrids has many other benefits.

10) Prepare for the worst. Yes, things are going to get much hotter and much worse before they get better and we do need to accept that and prepare. They quote Stewart Brand who says, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" and suggest that we take over completely by using our technology to fix the things we've broken like helping birds migrate, for example. We're destroying their natural habitat, building over open spaces that break up long migration journeys, disrupting communication with our noise and killing them and their food with pesticides but the scientists are going to save the birds with assisted migration? Then again, they mention that Monsanto, who brought us Agent Orange, PCBs and Bovine Growth Hormone, will save us with genetic engineering. What is this issue sponsored by Bush and the chemical industry?

I agree we better figure out ways to adapt and continue to innovate but we are consuming and disrupting the natural order of the planet at an unsustainable rate and technology alone will not save us (or the birds). We need to continue to make our small but impactful changes like eating locally produced food, driving less, taking a tote the store instead of using plastic bags, planting trees and food in our yards if we have them, installing energy efficient appliances, using less energy by unplugging what we aren’t using, and continuing to pay attention, support innovation and demand responsibility from corporations and governments.

Here's the first part of a two hour-long show about Monsanto:

The World According to Monsanto 1 of 4 27min

Letter to Radiohead

Dear Mr. Yorke,

I've been reading the articles about you and your band in Wired and am really excited about the changes in the music industry, especially as they put the music directly into the hands of the fans. I've never had such a varied music collection as I do now. At the moment, I can't stop listening to your solo album (thank you!) which I bought on an old-fashioned CD.

So I read your interview in Wired this month with great interest, especially your dilemma over making most of your money touring but not being a fan of the ecological impact. I'm a fan, a filmmaker and a marketer and I have an idea to address this issue.

First I considered why people go to a live show:
- To be close to the band
- To enjoy the music with other fans
- To be part of a once-in-lifetime event
- For an experience beyond the album
- For a great show!

But there are certain limitations to concerts:
- You're never close enough to the band
- They’re expensive, making them inaccessible to many people
- They have limited dates and times, again making them inaccessible
- Late hours and long distances keep people from going more than once
- Big venues, unruly crowds and traffic jams can make the show impersonal and unsatisfying

A couple of years ago, I saw a screening of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars at the Henry Fonda Amphitheater in Hollywood. It was part of the LA Film Festival so the price of admission was the same as a movie, about $10. It was a summer night and the amphitheater was packed with people of all ages. The film was beautifully shot and the projection and sound were amazing. People sang along, clapped and shouted as if they were at a live performance. The film brought us so close to Bowie, we were practically onstage with him. I honestly felt like it was 1973 and I was watching the one and only Ziggy Stardust. Truly a beautiful experience!

Then this New Year’s Eve, a friend of mine sent me a video of a “silent disco” she went to in London. Hundreds of people wearing headphones danced in virtual silence as they tuned their headphones to one of two DJs and listened at whatever volume they liked. They were having no less fun than if they were all listening to the same live music. The virtual experience is rapidly catching up to and in some cases surpassing the real thing.

So here’s the idea: You shoot a concert series with one or several filmmakers that screens in small venues all over the world for the price of a movie. The series runs as long as people attend, like a film, and you own the rights, you don’t have to travel, your concert is ten times more accessible and it’s available forever!

Here’s how it could work:
- A small audience of diehard fans, or a random audience via a sweepstakes on your website, is selected to be your live audience
- You shoot a number of concerts with your selected audience in beautiful, historic or otherwise significant locations, each show is a little different so people will want to experience all of them
- Because there are several different films, multiple venues in the same city can competitively screen the series at the same time
- Radiohead sells the DVD through the website
- Venues can use the headphone idea to create a more personalized experience

I see you've already booked your tour dates for 2008 but maybe you could consider this idea for the next go around. Or maybe you love the idea of making your own Pennebaker classic and will contact this eager young filmmaker for more great ideas.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Cheers!

"What does technology want?"

Another one of my favorite Pop!Tech lectures asks the question, “What does technology want?” Kevin Kelly doesn’t give technology a sentient voice, but he examines the behavior of what man creates and makes some startling conclusions. Technology “doesn’t want to be prohibited,” it wants to “increase its efficiency,” it wants to “replicate easily and without restraint,” it wants “to become more complex,” “wants diversity,” and “alters it’s environment to suit itself.” But, he says, it’s not that technology wants to take over the planet, we can live with technology in cities and still have nature coming up to the border of that city. He ends the lecture with a summation that technologies are like children, there are no inherently bad technologies, just bad applications. And it’s our responsibility as the creators of technology to discover the best application for it.

Then I read an article in Wired about the Internet in China and there’s a great illustration where a river is rushing towards The Great Wall and then right over it. I remember someone wrote me an email about China, asking my opinion about censorship and I said that I thought restricted information was better than no information. It seems to me that having the Internet available, filtered through the Chinese government, is better than no Internet at all. (You'll notice that there are no red dots in the giant land mass of China on my ClustrMap.) But this lecture beautifully illustrates how the Internet, as technology, has an agenda of its own and enables people, as this article says, to subvert the sensors and get access to restricted information. Technology wants to be replicated and doesn’t want to be prohibited.

I love this idea of technology, not as something with consciousness but as an organism with it’s own method of evolution and survival. We might give birth to it but it doesn’t mean we know why or how it exists.

Innovation starts on the inside

Wired and National Geographic’s cover stories this month are about biofuel. For every unit of energy used to produce ethanol from corn, it yields 1.3 units. Ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil and other South American countries, by contrast, yields 8 units. We can’t grow sugar cane in the Midwest, though, we grow corn. Corn and soy (used to make biodiesel - yielding 2.5 units) are now our two biggest crops.

The downside: It’s not cost efficient, it uses oil to produce and it gets fewer miles to the gallon than gasoline. The government has to subside it and we need to get clever about how to reduce the harmful emissions producing it creates. On the up side, it’s a step towards reducing our dependence on oil, it’s a boon for farmers and an even bigger boon for big companies that have invested in this technology.

But it only makes a dent in our energy production, like every other alternative source, and it’s a food product. We won’t be feeding it to cows or using it to make human food, it’s going to run our cars. People are starting to get worried that we’ll be using all our farmland to make fuel. What happens then? What happens when China and India do the same thing? China is already planning to pave over a lot of their farmland to accommodate their growing hunger for cars.

Is it possible to be so ignorant that we could literally starve ourselves by driving our food instead of eating it? Another article in National Geographic about emissions get nitty gritty about what we need to change and how fast it needs to change. The article ends with a note of hope but the rest of it is pretty grim. It says we need to change almost everything about our lifestyle, our economy, our government, and we'll have to do it practically overnight, to survive. When in the history of humankind have we ever witnessed that much change? Never, really, and that’s the real gist of the article. It’s possible but not likely.

I suggested to some friends that in the future I could see the west going to war with the east over resources, after we've made all these changes and they haven’t (I say we because I hope – ha ha ha – that the US will adopt the changes Europe has been making). Our water, air and food will be at stake and we might have to fight for it, not that it will make a difference. They thought it was a grim idea and didn’t like me for saying it so I’ll defer to the "optimistic" end of the National Geographic article:

In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of live? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively – and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.

Wired tends to be more optimistic, believing that technology will save us! (I love the description of Wired on Treehugger). Their article pins our hope on cellulose technology that (if we can develop it) will tap our energy from the tiny little plants that started this whole wonderful world. An enormous amount of money is being spent on developing those solutions - ones that don't require that we change our lifestyle. But I think in this case, it's not technology but our ability to innovate and change ourselves, that will save us.

Getting wired on cocktails

This weekend, I went for drinks one night and dinner another night with a co-worker and some of her friends. In an unprecedented series of moments, I got to reference my beloved Wired magazine with two people, actually involved in the issues, not just watching from the sidelines like me. The first was an attractive guy who had just returned from China. I had literally just told a friend of mine that it was unlikely that I would meet the kind of guy that would interest me, in a bar. He blew that theory out of the water in the first 15 seconds. “Why were you in China?” I ask, to make the kind of small talk that I know I’m supposed to make, not thinking it would lead to actual conversation. I don’t remember exactly what he said, something about going to scope out a project he might be working on, something to do with the environment. Oh, I say excitedly, “China is building a green city, on a wetlands” and I go on to describe in as much detail as I can recall, an article in Wired that I blogged about. Yeah, he says, that’s the company I’m hoping to work for, on that project specifically. So I get to hear about it, from someone who actually knows!

The next night, we met up again and this time my co-worker had brought another couple of friends, married to each other, both doctors. They were beautiful and nice and smart - the kind of people you fall in love with immediately. He’s a neurologist, she’s a dermatologist, but not the kind that gives fat injections and acid peels, unless you’re a burn victim or someone in an equally dire situation. She works in a hospital, helping people who really need it. I get to talking with the neurologist and I get to ask about all kinds of things I’m super excited about: Jared Diamond (who teaches at UCLA where my new friend went to medical school), Oliver Sacks (he worked with him at Columbia) and of course, Wired magazine! I mentioned an article I’d read about these electrodes that are surgically implanted in the brain to stimulate tiny nerves. They’re used to treat Parkinson’s and other diseases where drugs have been ineffective. I learned much more from the doctor, however, and it was more fascinating that you can imagine. He described himself as a mechanic, if the brain was the engine of a car, and said his job was to diagnose the problem and get the thing running again or running properly. He’s a technical person, not prone to the kind of work that involves a lot of guesswork or lack of precision. When I asked him how he chose neurology, he said it was the most intellectual of the medical sciences and he’s a thinker. A thinker working on brains, how apropos! So these little nodes attach to a nerve and are triggered, electronically, to stimulate on a regular pulse. They’re powered by a battery, which is connected by a wire. The wire runs down the inside of the neck, from the brain, to a place in the chest where this small battery that lasts about 12 years in implanted. In the chest!

I never imagined that reading Wired would make such interesting cocktail conversation. Either I’m moving in smarter circles or I’ve moved to San Francisco (or they're the same thing).

The wonderful world of Wired

Do you ever get the feeling that despite ALL the time you already spend on the web that there's a million, even a gazillion, totally cool things happening that you aren't experiencing? I have come to realize that I'm a creature in conflict. I dream of living a simple life and resist technology in so many small ways (like insisting that I don't need the Internet on my phone when I find myself MANY times a day wishing that I did), and at the same time curse that I'm missing all this cool stuff on the Internet.

I spent the day browsing eBay, bidding on items and putting on up for sale, and was led into a rabbit-holes looking for veg shoes which led me to etsy. I ended up creating an account to buy some super cute t-shirts and then subsequently found another site where a woman makes clothes from old clothes, which are so interesting but most is sold out. My coworker wanted music and I started a radio station with CocoRosie on Pandora, which I visited once a year ago but didn't come back for some reason, and have since been listening to the COOLEST f'ing music that I've never heard of!

I've also been online researching video sites and found that Wired partnered with PBS to create a science show. Wired magazine has been some of the best reading since Chris Anderson took over as editor-in-chief and now this is just so fantastic. You can watch videos and see demonstrations of the weird and wild stuff Wired reports on. Science hasn't been this cool since the turn of (last) century. And they were smart enough to cast a cute host...hey, I know this guy! Our short films played at a screening together in Hollywood. Ah, Hollywood, I miss ye.

Who wants $1.44 billion?

The world population is projected to double from its 2000 figure by 2050. DOUBLE! Urban areas are going to be hardest hit as population grows faster than schools and roads and homes can be built. The only way we can survive this kind of population growth is to change and change fast. But the key is that we can’t stop changing. We’re not moving from point A to point B, it’s not just about taking ten new technological anti-global warming actions. It’s about shifting our slow and steady thinking to something much faster, simpler and smarter. Los Angeles is already in a transportation crisis. We have to think NOW about how to accommodate 50% more people, because in twenty years, they’ll already be here.

A while back, I wrote a letter asking Gov. Schwarzenegger (do you know his name is now included in Microsoft Word’s dictionary?) asking him to support high-speed rail. The proposed train would provide transportation between San Francisco/Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. His office wrote back:

In November 2006, California voters approved one of the largest bond packages in the state's history. This money represents a considerable down payment on repairing and building our infrastructure and boosting the public services necessary to preserve our quality of life. And, with the tremendous population growth expected for California over the next two decades, the Governor has put forward an even broader proposal that will include funding for flood control, schools, courts and the correctional system.

But the Governor's proposed budget does recognize that high-speed rail is a viable transit option worth exploring for the future, and so it includes $1.2 million for staff support of the High-Speed Rail Authority. He is also willing to consider other potential payment options for such a rail system, including private financing.

So we're not building light rail because we’re still playing catch up trying to build more prisons and schools even though veryone already thinks those two systems are broken and need a major overhaul. Meanwhile, for the last ten years, there’s been a whole staff of people working on a light rail project that isn’t being built. In the private sector, I got laid off after two months without a project! Yet I get a letter saying from my government saying we don’t have enough money to build something we clearly need but rest assured, they've spent $1.2 million x 11 years or $13.2 million on this non-project. WHEW, that's a relief!

I-5 is really the only quick way to get through the state from one end to another. In these summer months, the highway is packed with people all day long and there are only two kinds of travelers: tourists and locals going from Southern California to the Bay Area (there’s not much in between) and trucks hauling stuff from one end of the state to another. I tried to drive up last weekend but the highway patrol closed the northbound 5 for over four hours after a big rig flipped over. Closed! I had to turn around and go home but not before sitting for two and a half hours on the freeway with thousands of other people trying to leave town. Everyone’s car was running the entire time because we would have cooked in the 100-degree heat without air conditioning.

The quickest way to get to San Francisco is to fly. If you plan the trip a month or more in advance, the lowest fare is $120 plus taxes and fees, plus the cost to park at the airport or get a taxi there. But get a last minute flight and it’ll be $250-$300. The flight is only an hour and a half but include the one-hour check-in, the one-hour driving and parking and shuttling to the terminal, and the one-hour on the other end, it’s 4.5 hours. It took me almost 7 hours to drive but at the right time it can take only 5 and it costs three tanks of gas or $120.

CalPirg estimates that “between 2000 and 2020, traffic on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles will increase 64 percent and between Los Angeles and Bakersfield will increase 56 percent” and light rail decreases overall oil use by 20%. Amtrak’s existing train along the coast takes TWELVE hours to travel from LA to SF and costs more than flying and yet they expect to triple their customers to 12 million riders by 2020. By comparison, the high-speed rail would take 2.5 hours and is easy and comfortable and people would be willing to pay $120 for the ticket!

According to an article in Wired, transportation is the single biggest household expense in the U.S. at 18%. The average American spends $8,344 per household on transportation, compared to $7,432 for shelter. That makes transportation a pretty good business to be in, so why isn’t anyone stepping up to build the light rail? 12 million estimated rail customers x $120 per ticket is $1.44 billion per year. Any takers?

Who wants a second life?

Isn't one life more than a handful? I'm trying to figure out the Second Life phenomenon. I read a while back that it was the most played video game ever. Of course, call it a video game and immediately announce that you are not one of the residents of Second Life. And, a video game it is not. It's more like a cyber lounge. Visit an alternate universe, change your image, take a class, go to a nightclub, meet another player to share some (ahem) indiscretion.

I have to ask, why walk around on a computer when I can walk in real life along the coast and actually get exercise? Why watch a woman play the guitar in a virtual club with virtual people when I can just go to a club? Are the people playing too unsightly to go outside? They live somewhere with no live music available? Are they paranoid schizophrenics who have a hard time dealing with strangers? Or are the streets where they live too dangerous for walking? Is it possible that there are over seven million people in this predicament? If not, it means that someone I know must be playing Second Life.

With 7,573,799 residents and growing at 36% per month (although only 1,739,352 have logged in during the past 60 days) the popularity of Second Life is difficult to ignore. Do you know that the average user spends FORTY HOURS PER MONTH on Second Life?! Holy crap, that's like a whole work week. Is it just like the rest of the Internet, people connecting via blogs and online dating? Or is it something more, the only way we'll connect in the future? I'd love to meet someone who can tell me what's cool about it.

At the risk of sounding like someone's grandmother, are people living a second life instead of a RL? (In SL, an RL means real life.) I used to work with a guy who was very sweet but seemed a little lonely. He had a four year old daughter and lit up whenever I asked about her. One day I said something about Second Life and he said he wife "was on there all the time." They have a four year old, he's working and she's living life online? It's a good thing it isn't that expensive or people would be losing their RL homes to buy land in SL.

This is what I have been able to ascertain so far:

1) The worlds are created by users so it either looks like our world or looks like someone's sci-fi version. In other words, most of it is hideously ugly. I expected it to be much weirder and "out there". This is just like the real world except badly drawn.


2) The activities, while fantastic (like flying) are only happening on a computer screen. What happened to the REAL futuristic technology of simulated reality? Let's just plug into The Matrix already! Honestly, I think I'd rather go to Disneyland.

3) Video games are created by artists and writers - they have details, a history, they have an objective, they make sense. This just seems haphazard to me. Here's a question. Does a man living in SL as a woman have the same experience as a man cross-dressing in RL? Otherwise, what's the point right?

4) It has rapidly been taken over by what else, sex. I guess most people want their second life to have more/weirder sex. Except again, let me remind you that there's no actual sex. At best you're watching your badly animated avatar humping another one. (Realistic body parts cost extra) Yuck!

5) Every business on the planet has jumped on board and as usual has no idea why. They don't even know what it is they just hear the numbers of how many people (i.e. consumers) are online and want a piece of the action.

Wired published a traveler's guide because, of course, they have an office there.

They list three minor "hazards and annoyances":
1) It's confusing and can be difficult to master even the simplest of actions.
2) Crowded places slow your frame rate to a slow crawl, apparently just a fact of life in SL.
3) It's ugly and overwhelming (already noted).

Gee, maybe I was being too harsh before. It sounds fun. I wonder if people are spending 40 hours a month on it because that's how long it takes to learn things and refresh the screen. Ha ha ha. Here's something potentially interesting. Virtual Hallucinations was created by UC Davis medical staff to simulate the audiovisual hallucinations associated with schizophrenia. Wander through and voices tell you to kill yourself. If you look in the mirror, a death mask stares back. (Educational!) This is at least on the right track, experiencing how other people see the world, but not nearly as impressive as the virtual reality chambers being used to treat soldiers suffering from PSTD.

Browsing photos on Flickr of residents' Second Lives, I get a sense of the appeal. It's a creative outlet for the average person. Without any special technical abilities, anyone can create a character, a world, or a product and see it move and interact with other people's creations. I can dig that. I still don't think it's for me but if anyone has done it and liked it, I want to hear about it!

Science, meet nature

I blogged a while back about an article in Wired detailing the new HD camera techniques used to capture the extraordinary footage in BBC's Planet Earth (watch clips here). I then noticed a curious trend. In every issue of Wired, there's an article on the same subject in the corresponding month's National Geographic.

In April, Wired published a column on disappearing fish reporting that 96% of all wild fish considered edible, are endangered. The amount of marine fish captured has remained virtually the same since 1995 despite increasingly aggressive tactics. To make up for the difference, and equal amount of fish is being raised on farms. The biggest change for the consumer is the kind of fish we're eating. Fish that are easier to grow like carp and tilapia (which can literally be raised in a bucket of water) are more prevalent. (Mmmm, me like bucket fish.)

That same month, National Geographic published a special report on the vanishing ocean dwellers. Sixty-six pages of photos and articles detailing the state of our oceans in an explosive mix of cruelty, hope and despair. 40 million sharks per year are killed, definned alive and then left to die to support the taste for sharkfin soup in Asia. Recently banned in some countries, heavy iron doors scrape the sea bed for trawling nets where 50-80% of the haul is discarded as "bycatch." Urchins, fish, rays, suffocate aboard the vessel before being thrown overboard. Longline fishing unintentionally traps loggerhead turtles, marine mammals and albatross which make up a 30% bycatch. Shrimp, cod and sole, the intended targets, are becoming harder and harder to find sending fishing boats further offshore for longer periods of time.

The majestic giant bluefin tuna, a fish that can live for 30 years, grow up to 12 feet in length and weigh 1,500 pounds, can dive a half mile to swim at a speed of 25 miles per hour. This large swimmer is easily tracked by sonar and helicopter. Spotters in the air call to boats to tell them where the tuna is traveling, they are captured and kept in offshore cages to be fattened for sushi markets before being shot and slaughtered. Five-million dollar boats are equipped with nets that can encircle 3,000 adult tuna. Caught while they are spawning, or before they can, the species is on the brink of collapse. International laws are weak and easily flouted, more than twice the legal limit of fish is being extracted from the sea.


While nearly two-thirds of the earth is ocean, only .01 percent is protected to 12% of the world's land and despite protection, recovery is slow if not impossible. A hundred years after a ban on hunting bowhead whales, among the largest and longest lived animals on earth, they are still endangered. Entire communities have been devastated by the sudden depletion of fish and in Africa fisherman sell what they catch to Europeans leaving locals to starve or purchase the remaining carcasses for food. Ironically, it was this article, rather than Wired's that illustrated how technology has almost single-handedly led to the ocean's exhaustion.

The next month, I read in National Geographic about factory cities in China that sprout up in a matter of months drawing thousands of workers from rural areas looking for work. Traveling performers come through town to entertain the amassing population and the government shows free outdoor movies in the streets. Within a year, middle-income families have moved into high-rise housing in the area built by razing hundreds of hilltops.

Yet it was Wired that reported on the world's first "green city" being built in China as an experimental response to the environmental devastation sustained by the country for the last sixty years. In a 1940 speech, Mao Tse-tung urged China to conquer nature in order to reach its industrial future. Since then 90% of the trees in some provinces have been razed. For decades, Chinese families smelted steel in their backyards until the untreated waste turned their rivers black. It wasn't until last year that the government calculated what the environmental damage was costing the country: 10% of their GDP or $200 billion a year. Unsafe drinking water, air pollution and vast deserts that have caused flooding and other damage, are the result.

The thrilling challenge of building the world's first eco-city belongs to the international engineering firm, Arup, and their newly recruited star designer who believes the proposed metropolis, Dongtan, "was a rare chance to demonstrate that growth could happen a different way." Elaborate calculations determine how high to build, how dense to populate and ultimately, how much land is green.

A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.

Next, the city needed green power. But the planning process grew complicated. A city is a huge mess of dependent variables. The right recycling facility can turn trash into kilowatts. The right power plant can convert waste energy into heat. The right city map will encourage people to walk to the store instead of drive. "These are things people don't normally plan together," Gutierrez says.

This month, both magazines feature articles on the Noah's Ark of seeds, the Svalbard seed vault. National Geographic reports that The Global Crop Diversity Trust is spearheading a project with funding from Norway to preserve up to three million different seeds from key plants. The mostly food seeds are being kept in an arctic vault for the day when humanity has wiped out the majority of life on this planet - a day fast approaching. While seed vaults already exist, they are incomplete, vulnerable to damage or mismanaged.

Wired details the technology used in this massive undertaking by laying them out like something from Ocean's 11. The vault is guarded by bight lights, motion sensors, cameras and guards in a control tower. At the end of a tunnel that bores 400 feet into a mountain, are two airlocked chambers and protected against fragmenting rock by a steel sheath. The shelves inside the vault are a third of a mile long and hold envelopes with unique serial numbers each containing 500 seeds protected by a five-layer composite material, housed in plastic boxes and chilled to 0 degrees Farenheit, preserving them for centuries. The "living institution" is meant to preserve the means to grow food. One study showed that of 8,000 crop varieties grown in the US in 1903 had dwindled to only 600 in 1983.

The collective consciousness has become so saturated in environmental issues that you can't do, think or say anything without wondering about its impact on the world. I was recently working on a little video timeline of the century for a friend and it occurred to me that things change very quickly. We can change them for the better but the concern is that without conscious effort to do so, we can also very quickly change them for the worse. In the words of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."

Building a better killing machine

Waiting for my haircut last week, I was reading an article in Rolling Stone called "Soldiers Lost." I think the point was just to humanize the American soldiers by featuring the stories of nine who have died in Iraq. Eight of the nine died by IED, an improvised explosive device, which is the #1 killer there. The massive gas-guzzling Humvees have provided inadequate protection against these devices that kill everyone from civilians to medics.

The other person featured in Rolling Stone was Jeffrey Lucey, a soldier from Massachusetts. He returned home safe but killed himself shortly after by hanging himself with the garden hose. His family had tried to remove everything from the house that he might use to harm himself but hadn't thought of the garden hose. He had spent weeks drinking and taking drugs and repeatedly yelled at his sister "don't you know your brother is a murderer?!" He was haunted by the memory of "the bumps in the road," bodies of children they often had to drive over. In this new war, even children are terrorists and his superiors told him that killing them is included in the new "rules of engagement."

Frankly, I'm surprised that only 1 in 8 soldiers returning are reporting PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). Americans have essentially never gone to war to protect ourselves on our own soil. We fought for our freedom on our soil when we founded the country and fought each other later but our modern wars are fought elsewhere against people who have nothing to lose. Our soldiers have something to live for and can afford to question whether it's right to take a life.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has spent 50 years innovating breakthrough technology like the Internet but have only recently ventured into human augmentation - the science of making the human body more powerful. Around the country, the government is funding projects to make soldiers smarter, stronger, need less sleep and food, and give them more energy in life-threatening conditions. One project regulates the body temperature with a special glove that can keep a body from freezing to death or keep a soldier active when his body would normally overheat.

I think this technology is cool, of course, but why aren't we addressing the real problem of war? None of this technology will help the soldier struggling to live with what s/he's done. None of it will help us deal with the fact that war includes killing children. None of it will keep us from going to war. I wonder when we will put our superior brains to work on finding a way not to kill each other instead of killing each other better.

From the gut of a kangaroo (and other ridiculous ideas)

I love a good burger as much as anyone, even though as a former vegetarian and current animal rights supporter I feel terribly guilty about even the little mostly farm-raised beef that I do eat. The fact is, beyond the whole "cows have feelings and are really cute and the way we treat them is horrific" argument, there are many more economic and environmental reasons not to eat beef.

A vegan ex-roommate of mine has no particular soft spot for animals but boycotts animal products because a) killing is avoidable and unnecessary (and as we continue to evolve into more humane creatures, might be wrong) and b) the industries of producing animals for consumption is both wasteful and damaging to our environment.

In both the June 2007 issues of National Geographic and Wired, there appear small articles that reference problems created by cattle. I use the term cattle to denote herds raised for consumption rather than a cow here and there that an individual farmer or landowner might keep. And yet, neither article even hints at the obvious solution, let's stop raising cattle.

In National Geographic, the problem is the black-footed ferret (which is also very cute). A popular pet in some states, this is North America's most endangered mammal. There are less than 1,000 in existence and they live in the Badlands of South Dakota. Now I know the people of South Dakota have got it rough. A former co-worker from there has told me about the hard times her ranching family has come upon.

However, here we have a curious chain of events - perhaps caused by global warming - that affects our subsistence on cattle that in order to maintain will require even more tinkering. There's a drought in South Dakota so less grass is growing. The cattle have less grass to eat and are competing more now with the prairie dog, who also eats the grass. Ranchers want to poison the prairie dogs but guess who needs to eat them to survive? The cute little ferret!


Wired's story presents a much more serious problem. Cows produce 300 lbs. per day of methane gas, each, by burping. Methane is 20x worse for the atmosphere than CO2 but dissipates almost immediately. All we have to do to stop the damage is stop the methane.

The solutions proposed sound like the top ten list on Letterman:
1) The Aussies are working to extract a bacteria from the gut of the kangaroo, who also eats grass but doesn't produce as much methane, and inject it into the cow.

2) A California inventor came up with a "gas mask" that the cows would wear containing methane-consuming microbes.

3) We could put (yet even more) additives in their food, this one shown to cut methane by 20% but also causes cancer and is expensive.

4) Australia and New Zealand are already working on a "burp vaccine" to eliminate the methane producing bacteria in the cow's gut.

5) Canada proposed carbon credits (the "politically palatable" version of an earlier methane tax) for ranchers. Not sure how this one works...

Now, take the methane gas the cows are making and the effect it has on global warming and go back to the National Geographic story. See? The cows are making the grass dry up but now we're going to kill some animals that will in turn kill even more animals so these animals that we're going to kill have something to eat. Is it just me or is that totally nuts?

Expose yourself

This blog is starting to sound like a dream journal but I have been having some vivid and bizarre dreams lately. Last night, before going to bed, I decided to blog about an article in this month's Wired.

Five years ago Bangladeshi-born Hasan Elahi, a 35-year old artist and Rutgers professor, was detained at the Detroit airport by the FBI on suspicion of stockpiling explosives in a Florida storage facility. He was released when they were convinced they had the wrong guy but it landed him on the US terrorist watch list. A list that's apparently very difficult to get your name taken off of.

In response, Elahi started a website where he posts his location via a GPS he wears, a feed of his credit card transactions and, since he travels frequently, photos of every meal he's about to eat on an airplane. He also calls the FBI before every trip so they can alert their field offices. He hasn't been detained again.


Elahi says by flooding the market with information about himself, he deters overly ambitious agents from getting the details wrong in their snooping. He says with the younger generation, like his students, posting their personal photos on Flickr and writing journals on MySpace, Big Brother just might go out of business.

So last night, I had a dream that I was detained by a group of Scientologists. They told me that they had my friend's newborn daughter and unless I cooperated with them, they would not give her back. I got to see her for a moment. She was tiny like a Barbie doll and she was attached to a piece of cardboard with twisties like a doll when you buy it. I touched her little hands and started crying.

(I guess that the reason they had this particular friend's daughter is because she has a celebrity blog and doesn't say very positive things about the Scientologists. It's rumored that Scientology has maintained such a high profile list of followers by taking advantage of actors, desperate for success, and leeching their darkest secrets from them.)

They had my journals from high school and knew everything about me. They never harmed me physically but wore me down in questioning. They made me feel weak and vulnerable and then came in like my protector. "If you join us, we can protect you."

This is how Homeland Security works. Without their snooping, our cities might be bombed by terrorists every day. We don't know for sure, but we're scared and worn out, so we give in. At one point during the interrogation, I started hitting and punching the woman who was questioning me. She didn't react at all. She was like an android without any feelings. They continued to name the people I cared about that they had access to if I resisted. The dream ended with me saying "I want my life back. I want my job and my friends and my apartment and my boyfriend. I want my freedom back. I want the choice to say no to you" and I woke up sobbing.

I immediately thought about the Wired article. See, when I went to bed I thought "right on, good for you!" to Elahi taking charge of his life and refusing to be a victim. It could be his site that has kept him out of Guantanamo. But this morning I had a different view. I wasn't harmed in my dream but I clearly felt that my freedom had been taken from me. I realized that even things like the job I don't have anymore represent choices that I have, choices that I often take for granted. And I wondered, is this trend of total exposure and radical transparency really a victory?

Spider-Man or 20 interesting films?

During the Monday morning meeting this week, the talk was about how bad Spider-Man 3 is. "Do NOT go see Spider-Man" one co-worker warned. "It's the worst movie EVER" another chimed in. They were mad at one guy who said he thought it was good but the smirk on his face suggested he liked it BECAUSE it was so bad.

As we left the meeting, my cube-mate said "I don't know why they're so surprised. The third movie is always bad." She went on to name a series of franchises in which the third was bad. I wasn't really listening as I don't usually see franchises at all and I didn't think the first Spider-Man was all that great (aside from the special effects).

Of the big Hollywood films that I like, the third has been actually been good: Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter. "Well, Lord of The Rings is different," she murmurs, "that was one story that they made into three movies." Okay, and she hasn't seen any Harry Potter films.
Where I thought she was going was "Why are they surprised? Almost everything that comes out of a major studio these days is crap." Spider-Man 3, despite getting terrible reviews and (apparently) actually BEING terrible, it's well on it's way to grossing more than the previous two.

On NPR the other day, an industry expert was talking about why record sales are plunging. One of the biggest reasons he gave is that the artists the major labels are signing aren't putting out enough music. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that they sign lame no-talent teenagers that are manufactured and overproduced? I can't keep up with all the great music being released by real artists. The second biggest reason (curiously similar to the first) is that the major labels can't seem to find the hits. Where oh where ARE those hits?

Here's where the music industry is as lazy and greedy as the film industry. They really aren't interested in producing quality entertainment and they aren't as concerned about profitability as they are with big bucks, the jackpot! They're in the business of gambling and they have secured their fortunes through control of the distribution. They are basically like the mob except they don't have to break our knuckles to purchase their crap, we do it willingly!

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains the ridiculous process the record industry uses to "test a hit" and why it doesn't work. People don't know what they want and when they like something, they can't explain why. We're also enormously influenced by the context in which we experience something. It's not insignificant that $150 million was spent marketing Spider-Man 3. It's not that people just can't wait to see it, we're bombarded with advertising that has us following the flock to movie theaters.

These industries are still trying to hump the "mainstream market" despite the lack of evidence that such a thing ever existed. It's not like The Beatles sat around trying to figure out how to sell records; they developed their talents, took incredible chances and sold records because people liked their music. Not EVERYONE, just a good chunk of loyal listeners.

Little Miss Sunshine, according to The Numbers, was made for $8 million (plus probably $20 mil for marketing) and grossed $97 mil. That's a 350% profit margin! The 40-Year Old Virgin was made for $26 mil (plus $27 mil for marketing) and grossed $177 mil! Even the British indies have fared well. The Queen, made for $15 mil grossed $113 mil worldwide and Bend It Like Beckham, made for only $5 mil grossed $76 mil.


So why aren't the studios making every $10-30 million movie they can find? They could make twenty indie films with Spider-Man 3's $450 mil. With an average profit margin of 300%, even if half of them fail, they'd still make out with $711 million and we'd have at least ten good films to watch! Problem is, Spider-Man 3 is on track to gross about $900 million and they want the easy money. It's too much work for the big studios to find quality scripts and develop them.

This is why, one of these days, the big guys will get swallowed up by a swarm of little guys delivering better music and better movies to exactly the right people - meganiches of a million or more folks each. Meganiches unite!

I want my Spatial Orientation Enhancement System

My ex-boyfriend used to say of my appalling bad sense of direction, "Whichever way you think it is, go the other way." Sadly, he was right. You can spin me in a circle in my own neighborhood and I'll be lost. If I don't go exactly the same route to a location, chances are, I'll get lost. I have no sense of direction.

As it turns out, I'm not the only one! Humans don't have an innate sense of direction. We visualize streets and such (and men are better at spatial navigation than women) but we aren't actually navigating by cardinal direction.

According to an article in this month's Wired, we can't develop new senses but scientists have discovered that we can train the senses we have to do new things!

"Here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want — the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared — into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it's time to build them."

The Spatial Orientation Enhancement System was built and tested to see if humans could navigate blind, as pilots need to do when they lose visual control. 11% of Air Force crashes are the result of spatial disorientation.

The non-pilot author of the article tried it in a simulator and reported amazing reults:

Flight became intuitive. When the plane tilted to the right, my right wrist started to vibrate — then the elbow, and then the shoulder as the bank sharpened. It was like my arm was getting deeper and deeper into something. To level off, I just moved the joystick until the buzzing stopped. I closed my eyes so I could ignore the screen.

As soon as they can figure out how to make the feelSpace belt look less like something strapped to a suicide bomber, I'm getting one.

Amazing Planet Earth

Every month, I hit the gym with my new Wired magazine and read it cover to cover. Even things I don't think I'll find interesting, I become engrossed in. Last month, they featured an article about new camera techniques, made possible by HD video, that allowed photographers to capture footage of animals in nature better than ever before. The techniques were used for a miniseries running now on the Discovery Channel called "Planet Earth."

If you haven't seen it, it is breathtakingly gorgeous, awe-inspiring, and simply amazing. I think it's so fantastic that we have used our awesome technology to record the wondrous beauty and fascinating complexity of our planet. Quite simply, this footage is like nothing you've never seen before.

I was giggling hysterically at the sped up footage of hundreds of gelada baboons in the Ethiopian Highlands all following the same daily agenda. My jaw hit the ground at the extremely slowed down footage of a great white shark LEAPING out of the ocean while swallowing a whole seal in a split second. And I was wowed by the aerial view of a MILLION caribou, the largest traveling pack of animals on the planet, streaming across the tundra, pursued by wolves.

It's available for pre-order at Amazon and I've already secured my copy. You can see some of the fantastic-ness in the meantime on their official site.