2008 sustainability resolutions

This last post of the year will be fittingly for sustainability resolutions. Year’s end is always a good time to look back at the past year and to look into the future to see what needs to be done.

For 2008 I have two resolutions. One is to reduce my consumption as much as possible. I didn’t choose to help reduce consumption of others as a resolution because I think I have a long way to go I can truly say I am ecologically responsible. So until I can say I practice what I preach I must continue to improve myself first. I am speaking in the Buddhist sense that enlightenment (whatever that means) needs to be gained first before I can impart that to others.

The other resolution is to teach my children to be ecologically responsible beings. This is where I have a duty as a parent. As they are my responsibility I have to guide them as much as I can, even if it means I may be wrong. It might seem a contradiction to the explanation in my first resolution, and in some ways it is. But by choosing to become parents means we are choosing to take responsibility of another’s life, that is, our children’s.

To ask for a perfect world is silly of course. These seemingly contradictory or hypocritical tasks are something I think we must continually balance as life is never black and white. There is every shade of grey in between imaginable.

Wishing everyone a happy new year.

Goodbye Netscape

I am a little bit sad that Netscape is finally calling it quits.

Nerdy me used their first browser back in 1992. Seeing those blinking text informing me of “new content” or “page under construction” was truly an exciting way to communicate to others to say the least. Like everyone else I saw the potential of the internet immediately. I went to the book computer store and bought myself a teach-yourself guide to HTML. I then proceeded wrote my first web pages on Japanese Literature, my passion back then. Like a child, using a counter site I would watch how many people had visited my page. I had also created my own portal page, a kind of personalized page that lets me access everything I like. It would be years before Yahoo!, Excite or Infoseek came up with personalizing search engine front pages with cookies. Today I still use a portal page to launch my browser.

As much as a could I had tried to use Netscape and any other software to get around the world wide web. For email I use Eudora. Before that I used UNIX. And for chat I using IRC. The objective was to get away from using Microsoft as all cost, a philosophy I had gained from a hacker friend at university.

Today of course I use Firefox. This is a browser made by the same people who got fired from the Netscape project after the AOL buyout. It is what I had always hoped Netscape would be. Firefox does the things I had wanted it to do and more. The net having moved on to Web2.0 is a different but better place. who needs an email client or chat program when plugins and extensions can do all that in your browser now. In other words, the internet is a slicker product, a much easier to use place.

Blogs have somewhat replaced these personal pages. But it is still different. Blogs are meant to be public spaces while personal are just that personal. The thing I lament about Web2.0 is the way we can personalize pages. Knowing HTML and (and now CSS) allows us to create, to tweak it as much as we like. With blogging all that is gone. That is why I moved to Blogspot for a while, because I am allowed to mess with the code, the HTML. But I am digressing here.

Like natural selection (or Buddhist impermanence) things do perish and become obsolete or extinct. And Netscape had to go that way. Perhaps Netscape didn’t adapt to the changes as quickly. Whatever the reasons part of web history has died. And part of my personal history goes with it. For that I am just a little sad.

Dawkins and Postmodernism

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Makes for great reading for this particular holiday season – Christmas.

For those not familiar with the work it is about atheism and why we all should be atheists in this day and age. The gist of the argument is that blind faith in a god simply has no place in our lives when we now know so much about the world we live in. Why religion still dominates is because of a false belief in the existence of something non-existent is placed in our minds which through circular logic does not allow us to escape from it.

He makes a good clear thorough argument but it is not new. I was surprised to see Dawkins did not resort to Postmodernism even though every word reeks of it. For instance, “circular logic” here can be replaced by Lyotard’s term grand narrative. And “god” has long been the ultimate example of presence in Deconstruction’s obsession.

But because Dawkins has written it without use of Postmodern jargon he had made it accessible to a much wider audience. So perhaps there is a lesson in writing to be learnt from this, and not just one about whether or not we should become atheists.

I wouldn’t keep my eyes anywhere else

This sign was in my university library. I doubt I’d get much work done or find my way around the library if I followed the instructions.

[Update]: Perhaps I should make this clear as no one seems to know what I am talking about.

There is a difference between “Please keep your eyes on your valuables” and “Please keep an eye on your valuables” To keep your eyes on something is to concentrate on it, for example, keep your eyes on the road (said to someone who is driving). But to keep an eye on something is to pay attention to it, or be wary of something about it, whether you are doing something else or not.

But either way, to keep one or both eyes (literally) on something rather than in your eye sockets is simply gross. Linguists love to play with words even if they are seen as sick people.

Population: is it about food supply or food distribution?

Trinifar commented here: “Some regions with plenty of food have low or negative growth (Japan, for example, has a negative growth rate in 2007…)“.

Not quite accurate here. True, the Japanese population is decreasing, but whether food production is meeting the needs is questionable. Japan is largely an importer, whether this be food or raw material (and an exporter of finished goods) of food. In other words the food supply is largely something purchased from others.

The shear complexity of import and export as well as migration makes for an unclear picture. But can we say at the global level that growth will occur in proportion to food supply? The argument seems false. A look at the distribution of food against where actual population growth (not population growth due to migration) is occurring will make this point clear.

Most industrialized countries are experiencing population decrease even though they are food rich. While industrializing (poor) countries have real natural growth even though they are food poor. so if food supply is a function of population growth then these numbers don’t make sense.

I believe supply is still greater than demand today. Otherwise the African situation cannot occur. This is still true even when the affluence of industrialized nations is taken out of the food demand equation. Eventually though food will be a function of population growth. It is a question of when.

And when that happens it will not be so much food supply but food distribution that will be our focus. In the future those hamburgers will probably have the same fat content as now. And even though population may be decreasing by then it will once again be about the haves and have nots. The fat (read: rich) stay fat and the thin (poor) get thinner.

Vico was right. History does come in cycles. We are forever doomed to say ‘we have gone back to the 1950s’ or some other past period.

WordPress… you’re the best!

It just didn’t feel right.

I tried… I tried really hard but in the end i came back to my true love: WordPress.

Blogger just didn’t cut it. The templates weren’t as good. The sidebar functionality is crap (can’t even have a Recent Posts set up alone (had to go RSS to fix that). And no Recent Comments! And Trinifar was right. Commenting on Blogger was so much harder with verification needed.

In short, Blogger is old and it sucks. The so-called “new version” is basically a facelift.

Chicken pox … among other things

My daughter has the chicken pox. She got it from her brother. He had it two weeks ago. And today is my day to look after her. It means I have time to blog, even if it is just to say I haven’t the time to.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been following the news. I read the IPCC report. And also see that Australia is about to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol. China also has been making the news with their proposal for industrialized countries to reduce CO2. But say so and acting so are two different things. China’s headlong rush to industrialization is damaging to the environment to say the least. Yet neither are they showing self-restraint, nor is anyone stopping them or think modernization is a bad idea.

I wish someone would.

I read Electric Universe by David Bodanis this week mainly to find out more about the impact of electricity on life on our planet. I read it while keeping in mind the damage production and use of electricity can cause. While I now have a better understand of the subject again I still have a problem with our inability to show self-restraint.

I also the documentary The Dodo’s Guide to Surviving Extinction. According to the program the number one rule for survival is avoid human beings. I thought that was funny, cynical and true all at once.

So I must end it here. I must attend to my neglected sick daughter who is running around the house tearing up our Japanese paper doors. The destructive force of one unsupervised child is something that still amazes me. How the Japanese have coped with this cultural furnishing with children for so long, I don’t know.

I haven’t proofread this, so forgive me.