Rhinocrisy

One of my favorite subversive notions is the idea that knowledge gets lost.

An important myth in our society is that scientific progress, like entropy, defines the arrow of time. Without a doubt, we are learning more every day; our understanding of the world is greater, and better, than at any moment in the past. Thus, we have nothing to learn from history, no call to preserve ancient knowledge. On the contrary, we have an imperative to eradicate that inferior corpus and replace it with the more modern understanding of the world.

As a literate society we find it hard to imagine that knowledge could actually disappear. After all, everything we learn is recorded in such incredible detail that posterity will surely retain it. But recorded knowledge and functional knowledge are two separate things, as anyone who has struggled with a textbook can attest to. I’ve heard it said that if we wanted to go to the moon today, it would be impossible. Not because we lack the capacity; but we do lack the skills and the people with the necessary accumulated knowledge. Maintaining a body of people equipped with a specific expertise requires an active effort. In the absence of expediency, we let those skills atrophy; we let it decay. What would have been basic knowledge in the past - how to lead a horse, how to sow squash seeds - is forgotten now, because it became unimportant.

This need not always be the case. For example, in India knowledge of how to construct aquifers has largely vanished, thanks to the introduction of centralized irrigation systems. The enormous efficiency of a mechanized irrigation system means that the old (ancient) system of constructing dew collectors, wells, and so on, became outmoded. Obsolete. So naturally, with time, the knowledge of their value and their construction eroded away.

Now, in the era of water scarcity, the modern irrigation system is suddenly failing. Water tables are dropping, and ancient aquifers are almost completely drained of their accumulated treasure.* Here, those older techniques might be usefully resurrected. But that knowledge has vanished. It must now be rebuilt through active effort, relearned by the new generation.

This is a rather sad idea, but I find it compelling, and exciting, because it demands that we do NOT forget the past, that we reject the notion that newer is necessarily better, and that the way things will be done is an improvement on the way they were.

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* The same is an issue in the U.S., where agriculture draws heavily on underground aquifers without replacement. Eventually these supplies will be depleted, prompting a crisis. But, honestly, I don’t really care as much about the cattle industry as I do about Indian villagers.

Note: This is the first in what may be a series of posts regarding disability issues.

A cooperative house I know uses a complicated system of rent payments and chores to ensure all housemates work an equal number of hours inside and outside the house, regardless of how much you get paid at work. When I heard about this, my first reaction was: cool! My second reaction was: uh oh.

You see, I’m disabled and unable to work an ordinary schedule, in the house or out. These people are probably respectful and if I wanted to join their house, we could probably work something out. But when I told a disabled friend of mine about the house and their system, he had the exact same reaction I did, so I think it’s at the least worth talking about.

So if you were the coop, how would you handle this? I think one fair solution might be that if the disabled person receives financial aid (say, from their family), then they simply account for it as if it were income earned for outside hours working.

But most disabled people I know would find it really difficult to ask for a special dispensation like this–even a fair one like the solution above. One reason is that asking for special dispensations can force you into the “sick” role. When I applied for government aid, I literally worried that I didn’t “look sick enough” as I went to the doctor for my medical evaluation. What would this be like in a house? Should I feel like a guilty freeloader every time I have a good day? Clearly not, but I probably would. It would be even harder to ask for a dispensation if you weren’t receiving any aid, or the aid level you received didn’t cover normal expenses. Most smaller cooperatives can’t afford to effectively provide charity to people who need it.

Are there solutions that will make disabled people more comfortable within the coop. movement (whether it be housing or economic)?

Uh. So, the government released a new “Food Pyramid”. This one seems to be a slight departure from the “Food” portion of the concept, since it also includes recommendations on exercise. You can find it at MyPyramid.gov (proving that our government is staffed entirely by dorks).

I don’t hate it. It does things that are generally good, emphasizing the positive, telling you what to eat and why it’s good for you. If people follow it they would generally do better, health-wise. And the inclusion of exercise recommendations is a great bonus.

The obvious failings are the same as with previous editions of these guidelines:

First, it is passive. It’s unlikely to have much influence outside of junior high school health curriculums. And we all know how much respect health teachers get. None. They get no respect.

Second, the pyramid still refuses to say what you should avoid, and why. There are several additions to the American diet that are horrible for public health: refined grains and high fructose corn syrup, for example. Simple, direct messages about why these things are bad for you would be extraordinarily effective at curbing consumption of horrible foods. But since these guidelines are published by the USDA, which is probably the branch of government most comfortably in the pocket of industry (maybe the Department of the Interior rivals it), there’s little chance of seeing recommendations that would surely depress sales of crap-quality foodstuffs. Just imagine the shitstorm if the USDA came out and said “Soda pop makes you fat. Stop drinking it.”

Anyway, I’ll say it for them.

So this one time I was in Death Valley for a week and I come out to Vegas and it’s just about New Years and the radio is nothing but news about someone named “Peterson” or “Petersen” or something and I have no idea what they’re talking about. Suddenly, everyone knew something that I simply didn’t know. It happens.

It’s the same feeling I just got by looking at Americablog. Am I the only one who didn’t know that RatzingerBenedict XVI was Hitler Youth. He is pro-gay-basher, but he wouldn’t let his anti-gay bias get in the way of defending gay men when they happen to be pedophile priests.

So — am I late to the game? Or is this one of those collections of knowledge that will never make it above the choppy sea of data, into the clear air of, you know, Michael Jackson and the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry?

(There was a time when being outed as a Nazi got you ejected from polite company. No more. Forget seems finally to have won its race with forgive.)

Good news: our life of satisfied primal appetites and minimal toil are having a less bad effect on mortality than previously reported.

Which is good, because I plan to store up all the lipids I can over the next few years. According to the Oil Depletion Analysis Center (yes, there is an Oil Depletion Analysis Center, which I suspects employs about .2 full-time equivalent workers, but which has a phone number in Britain and is therefore a reliable source), the world is running shorter and shorter of fatty acids. Or beer. Having read this analysis carefully, I suspect the author might have been using the latter in order to build up his body’s supply of the former — just before writing.

You can always brew more beer but, as far as I know, no one is brewing oil. The other problem is that, according to industry consultants IHS Energy, 90 percent of all known reserves are now in production. This is another indication that there’s little more to come.

So, at some not too distant point the ability to offset Type 1 and Type 2 depletion will be greatly restricted and Type 3 will spiral upwards. At this point supply will really be falling quite quickly, with Type 3 depletion possibly running at over 3mn b/d each year.

Note to self: Don’t drink and draw up press releases.

This morning I caught ten seconds of BBC Newshour between smashing my alarm clock and ten minutes of high-powered catnap. They had on two dudes talking about computers - one was a fatuous blowhard named Ian Pearson and the other was Barry Fox from New Scientist. NS is hit or miss, so I was expecting the worst, but ole Barry surprised me. Ian opened with the usual starry-eyed clap-trap: in 40 years, computers will think, feel, do our taxes, be our best friends. Barry responded with: “No. No they won’t.”

But never mind that I think Barry is correct, that the future is never going to arrive in a way that ever fulfills the promise of our imaginations. Ian is really the more interesting man of the pair, because he is not the cynic realist that Barry is; his viewpoint is fairly representative of what we’re striving to achieve. That is, a world where humans don’t work, don’t think, don’t even share emotions with each other. The best way I can describe that state is: death.

I’ve never understood this drive to think harder, and faster, and better, so we can get it all out of the way, so we can be DONE. When we have our slave army, we can all relax on the beach, drinking mai-tais* and groaning, “Oh, YEAH, this is the LIFE!”

I’ve never understood it, because that’s a stupid impulse. Beyond the fact that it’ll never happen. It’s a stupid impulse because we wouldn’t want it. We want to live, after all. Most of us, anyway. We want to do things with our otherwise pointless lives that make them feel meaningful. When we don’t have those things, nothing to keep our hands, our minds, our souls busy, we suffer. Why would we orient ourselves as a society towards such a bizarre goal?

Those of you who know me may find it ironic that I am advocating this viewpoint, since I’ve historically been a big pooh-pooh-er of the idea of a work ethic. I’ve been pushing this Bertrand Russell quote (from this essay) for years:

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

But I am not misspeaking. I think we orient ourselves the way we do because we are overworked; because our relationship with work is so tweaked. Leisure is a premium item that we ration out. It’s the gold nugget we’re digging for: who wouldn’t want it in infinite abundance?

But imagine this: you travel to the future and find your great-grandson, fat like Crassus, drinking protein syrup from a straw while robot masseurs keep his flabby limbs from atrophying. Ah, he doesn’t have to work, doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to emote. Don’t you just hate him?

Two things fall out of this+:

1. Take it easy. We’re never going to get there, so why work so frantically to do it?
2. The ride has got to be enjoyable.

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* Whatever those are.
+ I realize this essay should be about 20 pages longer to really tear into its intellectual meat in the way that it deserves. But I’m not that serious a writer, and you’re not that serious an audience. So… exercise for the reader.

I’m afraid there is nothing funny about this post. The Wall St Journal today (don’t bother to click this link, since they only want you for $65 a year as a paid subscriber and because they do what they can to evade anyone linking to their stories from elsewhere on the net (dinosaurs much?)) reports that the U.S. government isn’t alone in covertly paying pitchmen in the major media. (Nor am I alone in adding unnecessary assonance (and parentheticals).)

Advice for Sale
How Companies Pay TV Experts For On-Air Product Mentions
Plugs Come Amid News Shows And Appear Impartial; Pacts Are Rarely Disclosed Energizer Gets on ‘Today’
By JAMES BANDLER

In November, Child magazine’s Technology Editor James Oppenheim appeared on a local television show in Austin, Texas, and reviewed educational gadgets and toys… the audience didn’t know: Kodak paid Mr. Oppenheim to mention the photo album, according to the company and Mr. Oppenheim. Neither Mr. Oppenheim nor KVUE disclosed the relationship to viewers… praised products… Atari Inc., Microsoft Corp., Mattel Inc., Leapfrog Enterprises Inc. and RadioShack Corp. All paid for the privilege… In the “Today” segment, Mr. Oppenheim talked about products made or sold by 15 companies . Nine were former clients and eight of those had paid him for product placement on local TV during the preceding year… Mr. Oppenheim is part of a little-known network…

Am I the only one who’s noticed that every bizarre little profile in the Wall St Journal is a glimpse into a “little-known network”? Anyway…

Mr. Oppenheim is part of a little-known network that connects product experts with advertisers and TV shows. The experts pitch themselves to companies willing to pay for a mention . Next, they approach local-TV stations and offer themselves up to be interviewed… segments… typically air during regular news programming… indistinguishable from the rest of the show. One reviewer may conduct dozens of interviews with local stations over the course of a day in what the industry calls a “satellite media tour.”

The familiar faces on this circuit include Mr. Oppenheim, “Today” Tech Editor Corey Greenberg and trend spotter Katlean de Monchy.

Meanwhile, the LA Times has the integrity to offer a head on a tray for what seem to be considerably less egregious crimes against the truth: marginally fictionalized reporting about hazing at Chico State, in California. The reporter said the hazing victim drank from a water bladder but it was really a plastic jug. Whatever. He invented quotes. Very bad. And thus, today’s “>editor’s note:

FOR THE RECORD
… published a correction of four errors in a March 29 article… editors began a full review… the paper has concluded that the article fell far short of Times standards…methods… were substandard…anonymous sources and … named sources… could not be verified…Additional inaccuracies found during the investigation…The writer of both articles, Eric Slater, has been dismissed from the staff.

Now if the TV networks could have those kind of ethics.

I was 99.99933% out of the door. I had woken up in a timely fashion, bumbled around, taken a shower, eaten a bowl of cereal (no hard-boiled eggs today), had a bit of a good-morning with my roommates, found my kung-fu pants. I was good to go.

Unfortunately, that other 0.00067%, the part that wasn’t quite out the door, happened to be the tip of my left middle finger.

In the aftermath of this incident I sat around and chatted with the roommates (we were having one of those celestial convergences), and ended up sharing some good finger-smashing stories. Mostly involving car doors.

So let’s hear your damaged-digit stories. The bloodier and pulpier, the better.

Satisfied at last. Each night, I emerge from under my hedge and root around in the news. Each night, I seek out statements deserving of being nibbled to nubbins with my strong if smelly teeth. Tonight, the scent of spring jasmine and wild irises almost kept my wild-animal nose from finding the stupidity — but some stupids stink enough to attract even a drowsy, flower-stoned hedgehog.

Tonight’s winner: The Washington Post quotes Nancy McGuckin, a geographer who calls herself a “travel behavior analyst.” She said,

If you see people replacing an in-home activity like brewing your own coffee with an activity that requires a new [car] trip, that’s not exactly the trend we’re looking for.

I’m sure she knows that there was a time, not so long ago, when a trip of more than 5 miles was a very rare event. When all those goodies we now get outside the home, from Corn Flakes to sexual fantasies, were available, if at all, by the sweat of our brows in our very own homes. No supermarkets or adult bookstores, no traffic congestion, and no oil imports. Take-out coffee is just another part of a long-term trend toward specialization. So maybe McGuckin thinks that the cause of vehicular congestion and wasted oil is, at root, the division of labor? Hmm.

Here’s what I think. Hedgehogs rarely make coffee at home but we like to go out for a cup now and then. And no, we don’t drive cars. So the problem here is not that people are increasingly going out for their coffee. The problem is they have bought into the absurd line that living close to other human beings is a “low” quality of life, and have therefore stuck themselves into isolated automobiles for even the most mundane, inherently local trip, like a trip to a cafe. The problem is with suburbia and car culture, not with take-out espresso. She’s seeing one tiny symptom and calling it a disease.

Via DC Media Girl, a giggling midnight-Friday-in-Frisco-and-I’m-blogging-because-I’m-a-grad-student-ergo-winner shout out to the Idaho state legislature for even allowing on their website a bill that includes, no shit

2 WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the
3 Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote “Nay” on this concurrent
4 resolution are “FREAKIN’ IDIOTS!” and run the risk of having the “Worst Day of Their Lives!”

This kind of post is why I closed down my relatively boring old blog that had nothing but, you know, information and sarcasm. I love good news. And it is good news when legislation can call its opponents “FREAKING IDIOTS,” if only for the awe-inspiring self-referentiality of it all.