debitage | ||||||
2003-2004 excavation at the Danielson site, Worcester MA. Yuccacentric
wockerjabby
Changed Priorities Ahead
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25.3.05 ANWR And Organs And Travel, Oh My I'll be gone until late Tuesday. In the meantime, I give you my comic from this week's Scarlet: 22.3.05 Charles Bird has a very long post up at Obsidian Wings, giving a somewhat sympathetic conservative's take on the problems of the environmental movement. His argument is basically a combination of 1) Nick Kristof's claim that environmentalists are alarmists and extremists, 2) the standard (though not necessarily off the mark) conservative charge that liberals complain but don't offer solutions, and 3) the assertion that environmentalists need to not only reach out to conservatives, but adopt most of the conservative agenda -- basically a right-wing version of Shellenberger and Nordhaus's proposal in "The Death of Environmentalism" that environmentalists should fight for the entire progressive agenda. 21.3.05 Bring On The Steroids And Schiavo! I'd like to thank Congress for wasting so much of its valuable time on investigating steroid use in professional sports and intervening in the Terry Schiavo* case. Given the Republican dominance of both houses, any legislation they pass is almost guaranteed to be pernicious. So I'd rather have them waste time on these relatively minor issues than focus on handing our national wealth over to big business. Some people are making a little too much of a new poll that shows that two thirds of Americans think driving a more fuel-efficient car is patriotic. Presumably many of those who said yes are indicating that fuel efficiency is compatible with patriotism, not that it's required for patriotism -- much like a civilian would not be hypocritical for calling military service a patriotic career. Certainly the question is not set up well to distinguish these differences in opinion. The poll itself (pdf) also seems a but unreliable. The fuel-efficient patriotism question offers an argument in favor and solicits the respondent's level of agreement. The previous question asks about agreement with a set of pro-fuel-efficiency findings by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Presented in this way, the questions seem likely to sway undecided respondents toward the environmentalist viewpoint.
20.3.05 Abiola Lapite poses an interesting problem:
Occupation-wise, he argues for including a particular mix of scientific/technological specialists such as medical doctors and physicists. He doesn't include any computer scientists, because it will be some time before the colony is able to support a viable semiconductor industry. Yet I wonder whether that argument ought not to be extended further. Modern medicine, for example, depends heavily on an existing economic infrastructure that will be absent on our new world, rendering many of our doctors' skills moot once the ship's pharmacy runs out. It also depends on a large population to generate demand and make specialization possible, but our colonist group is probably going to be in the vicinity of only 100 people (the minimum for genetic viability) to start off with. I would be inclined to prefer some people with knowledge of "natural" medicines and other wilderness survival techniques (though their utility does depend to some degree on how closely the new planet's ecology resembles earth's, as these sorts of folk skills are often very context-dependent). There's an interesting synergism between this concern and Lapite's other argument, that in order to maximize genetic diversity in the colonist population we should select around 70% Africans. It seems logical that any scientific specialists that we bring ought to be taken from developing countries, as those individuals would have more experience applying their skills in a context where access to resources and support infrastructure is more limited. Stentor Danielson, 21:52, , |