The End of Nature, Nature's End, PhotoModeler, Sketchup for Google Earth: How do they relate?

I am sitting at my desk reading the product tour for a software package called PhotoModeler ("Meauring and Modeling the Real World") and I can't help thinking about a Whitley Streiber/James Kunetka thriller I read years ago called "Nature's End" (Schwarzer Horizont in German) and about how all this relates to Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature" which Professor Susanna Hecht assigned us in our urban planning classes at UCLA back at the turn of the century (did nature end with the millenium?).

If I recall Nature's End properly (I read it at the beginning of the 90's) it begins with hero John Sinclair using 3d modeling/animation/simulation software to reconstruct the many possible paths a crime could have followed so that the jury can decide which seems the most plausible. It would seem that Photomodeler sotware is beginning to be used in exactly this fashion. On their own website Eos Systems, the creator of Photomodeler, states,

" PhotoModeler software is used extensively by police, investigators, and forensics firms worldwide. Using photographs or video images taken at the scene, PhotoModeler helps to extract accurate 3D measurements and models quickly and easily, allowing you to analyze and measure crime and accident scenes long after the incident has taken place! ... PhotoModeler has capabilities to help solve even the most advanced accident reconstruction cases."

What is interesting to me is that Streiber writes books of fiction as "simulations" or "models" of events that either have happened, but where it is difficult to establish the true facts surrounding the events (e.g. alien encounters -- a kind of "accident reconstruction case") or could happen (e.g. the kind of future environmental disasters that formed the basis of the Roland Emmerich film "The Day After Tomorrow, inspired by Whitley Streiber and Art Bell's Prophetic "The Coming Global Superstorm", later novelized by Streiber himself.) But while the "1 dimensional" linear narratives found in books can do a decent job of laying out possible paths in a sequential, or serial fashion, and films can do a nice job of fleshing out those paths with rich graphics, real-time interactive 3D simulations based on actual physics and measurement can create the most compelling cases for any given scenario.

This is where a combination of Photomodeler and Google Earth Sketchup and some as yet unchosen Game Engine (like the Havoc Physics Engine, which is not free, or the Blender Game Engine, which is) can produce the desired outcome suggested by Bill McKibben in "The End of Nature".

In his book McKibben offers us two choices (as Led Zeppelin sang in Stairway to Heaven, "yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run... there's still time to change the road you're on"). McKibben says we can take the path he calls "The Defiant Reflex" using our technology to macromanage and micromanage the environment so as to reduce its negative effects on us as it degrades, or we can take "The Humble Approach" whereby we give up our dream of "control".

The idea behind our Solar Cities Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game is that we should be able to use software like Photomodeler, Sketchup, Google Earth and Blender to create the kind of simulations John Sinclair could use to defeat dangerous fanatics (like Gupta Singh and George W.) and play them out in the court of humanity in front of an international jury of connected minds who can rationally and democratically vote on and thus choose the paths we take into the future.

I personally believe that McKibben's binary logic is flawed and that both "The Defiant Reflex" and "The Humble Approach" can work in tandem. In fact I think that they will see-saw back and forth, as our greater control over and understanding of the political and environmental ecology of the earth help us lose our fear and give us more confidence in devolving some of our control (if not all of it) to the collective intelligence of the God-Earth-Mind system. Call it "Gaia" or call it "Hive Intelligence" or "Swarm Intelligence", or simply call it "The Invisible Hand" tempered with "Moral Sentiments"; the idea is that we didn't create this system, this earth, this universe, it created us, and we can trust it to do its job of creating and nurturing living systems once we understand where it functions and where it fails (for us!) and how to tweak it, when necessary (as all living beings do) , to try and avoid suffering and extinction.

Perhaps "The Defiant Path" will lead inexorably to "The Humble Approach", much as Marx predicted that Capitalism was a necessary phase on the journey to communal harmony through an "inevitable" socialism. I think the jury is still out on that -- but of course all of these eschatological theories contain deep epistemological flaws in that they all involve definitive "end points" -- a flaw echoed in book titles such as "The End of Nature" and "Nature's End", to say nothing of Fukuyama's "The End of History".

The point today, class, is that a tool such as Photomodeler, and other technologies that let anybody, anywhere easily reconstruct the past or make predictions of the future based on easily obtainable physical evidence in the present, CAN be used for social and environmental good, if we will only orient our thinking that way, and contribute actively to the collective task at hand.

"Avatars are really just points of view made flesh"...

Read more about it on Ogle Earth...

Interacting in Google Earth: Creating a "Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game" -- The Sky's the Limit!

"Good morning class! It's a bright sunny day with a mild breeze here in Essen, Germany; perfect for taking a run down by the Baldeneye See. I would love to show you the locks along the river that have made transporting goods so cost efficient for the past couple of centuries that "land-locked" areas like Westphalia have been able to prosper long before the Autobahn and other highway systems transformed our landscape and environment.

"Of course, this is an on-line course and you are in places as far away as Texas and North Carolina and Dobbs Ferry, New York, and I don't have time to put together a video for the class like I did when we visited the Zeche Zollverein coal mine to discuss how air quality has affected psychology since Germany switched to natural gas.

"So what to do? We talked at the beginning of the class about using Second Life as a way to meet and explore environments in 3 Dimensions and interact in real time. The problem, of course, is that Second Life is a fictitious environment, so while it offers many simulation possibilities, it can't help us with historical or contemporary spatial geography.

"Now, however, in researching ways to create our "Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game", I have stumbled upon the good news that we may soon be able to use Google Earth as our "realistic" version of Second Life.

First, there was the discovery that Google Earth already has a built in flight-simulator. Type Ctrl + Alt + A (Win) or Open Apple Key-option-A (Mac) and you can choose between F16 fighter plane or an SR22 Propellor plane. Then you can select any airport in the world for your take-offs and landings, or start in the air and fly anywhere on the known earth from right above your favorite location. With so many Google Sketchup models beginning to turn Google Earth into a truly 3D landscape, Google Earth is quickly becoming the best flight simulation game out there! Marco Gallota gives great examples and pics on his blog.
Folks reacting to Marco's enthusiasm on Digg.com have predicted that we will soon be able to use Google Earth as a hyper realistic virtual gaming environment, replete with user controllable avatars. This would be perfect for the development of our "serious" gaming -- the Solar Cities Political Ecology ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that was inspired by Buckminster Fuller's World Game.

There are already tools that are making more personal interaction with Google Earth possible. One that I downloaded last night, called "Unype" , created by (and you will like this as Mercy College students!) New York's own Murat Aktihanoglu. Murat is not affiliated with Google but offers his excellent program for free in the best cyberpunk spirit (remember the cyberpunk motto is "information longs to be free!"). Clearly Murat is an aficianado of Neil Stephenson's seminal novel "Snow Crash" (which inspired Second Life) as the avatar he created for Unype in Google Earth for his tutorial is named "Hiro Protagonist"!

Murat's brilliant program allows a "multi-user Google Earth Environment" and works in tandem with Facebook and Skype. When you launch these three programs simultaneously, the Keyhole Mark Up language file generated (yes, that is what .KML really means, in case you forgot -- though I have encouraged you to think of it as a "coordinate markup language") lets you see where your facebook friends are in Google Earth, lets you coordinate your actions via Skype (here is the tutorial) and moves your avatar around their Google Earth (and vice versa) as you explore Google Earth locations on your screen. That way you can follow people down paths and yes, I could take you on a tour of the Locks in the Baldeneysee river!

Due to limitations in the Google API (not in Unype allegedly) the avatars are static 3D meshes (no moving feet or arms or faces, but fully skinned and texture mapped) and they don't move freely -- there is a lag, so they kind of "hop" around the screen every few seconds as you move your cursor. It ends up feeling a bit like playing a protracted game of chess.

In time, however, we can expect the Google API to improve once they see how useful Mr. Aktihanoglu's app is (we know from on-line gaming that bandwidth is not necessarily the issue).

How soon can we expect Google Earth to take on the true characteristics of an on-line game experience and thus be useful for creating our Political Ecology ARG? Rumors are flying, but there is a hopeful site with encouraging news called Ogle Earth that keeps you updated about all developments in virtual earth technology. They inform us that Google Earth is already working with Chinese developers to come up with true avatars for Google Earth, and that part of what is driving this seems to be healthy competition with Bill Gates' Virtual Earth technology.

Apparently everybody wants to make a real world version of Second Life that lets virtual shopping interface with real shopping (try it, then buy it). Our hope in this Environment and the Psychology of Behavior class, and at Solar Cities, is that the potential of using these GUI's for social and environmental justice is not lost on the developer community! Bill and Melinda Gate's foundation does great things in Africa, for example, and with the advent of the "hundred dollar laptop" -- IF the computer designers to skimp on the processing power -- it should be possible for even the poorest among us to participate in the redesign and improvement of our communites.

In a few weeks, when I have finished creating some of the buildings and "green technologies" for the slums of Cairo, you will be able to download the .KMZ files (zipped forms of .KML files) of our field work locations from solarcities.eu (which is very much still under construction) and install Unype and Skype and register on Facebook and we will take a "class field trip" to the poorest sections of Cairo, Egypt, and take a look at our development efforts in Darb El Ahmar with the Muslim craftspeople community of Medieval Cairo and Manshiyat Nasser with Coptic Christian Zabaleen garbage recycling community.

From this tour (an analogue in virtual reality of the tour we took Professor Randall Crane and his 25 graduate students of Urban Planning from UCLA last year) you may find yourself inspired to come and work with us or to contribute some of your ideas for sustainable development on-line.

The idea, of course, is to turn Game Development into a vehicle for Sustainable Development!

And now, with Google Sky giving us the possibility to actually leave the Earth and explore the heavens, we may even be able to further Pat Friedrich's excellent class project, and virtually terraform Mars!

It seems that as we develop our political ecology Alternate Reality game using Google Earth, the Sky's the limit!!

The Solar Cities ARG concept

Solar Cities: Founders: T.H. Culhane (California, New York, Iraq, Egypt, Germany) Dr. Sybille Frütel Culhane (Germany, Iraq, Egypt), Board of Directors: Andy Posner(California, Rhode Island, Russia), Michelle Finnel (America), Ahmed Khalifa (Egypt, Germany, Kenya), Neda Pouryekta (Iran, Germany, Kenya) , Frank DiMassa (Italy, Northern California)

(Note: This page gives you access to the .KMZ files we are creating for Darb El Ahmar and Manshiyat Nasser's Solar Cities ARG project (described below). For access to Google 3D Warehouse components useful in making your own solar city, click here.)

It all started in 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the gravity well of earth and went into space. Buckminster Fuller proposed the creation of The World Game" (a.k.a. "The World Peace Game") as the core curriculum for Souther Illinois University.
Bucky's visionary idea was ""make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone."
The idea behind Fuller's World Game was to find an alternative to War Games (already being modeled on computers by specialists isolated from the public) and put our collective intelligence to use for social and environmental welfare.

Finally the technology has caught up with Buckminster Fuller's vision. Our idea at Solar Cities is for enthusiasts of sustainable development and renewable energy to help create our part of the game, and make it competitive not only with military planner's War Games, but with all the time-consuming video games siphoning off so much of the publics' problem solving genius.

Our goal is not to replicate the great work being done elsewhere, but to enhance and extend it by creating game modules dealing specifically with the local microeconomic realities and individual and household needs issues pertaining to the communities in which we work.
It is hoped that others will jump on board, mod and model such games for their neighborhoods and areas of interest, and that little by little we will fill in the gaps.
This section, very much under construction, will allow visitors to access .kml files (archived as zipped .kmz files) that can be used with Google Earth.
The goal is to work together to create a unique data visualization tool for the areas where Solar Cities is working so that local citizens, planners, policy makers and global participants can envision and virtually experience the current urban Cairo environment (circa 2007), propose and make necessary and desired changes, simulate, view and even role play the results, and then make recommendations for real world changes.

Ultimately we hope that this site will act as a kind of "WIKI" for sustainable development. We hope to create an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) in which participants use their collective intelligence to solve real world problems.
The "game" would combine familiar elements of SimCity4 and The Sims 2 but would use the simulations merely to model and role play alternate realities that that, once agreed upon, could be truly implemented.

The hook of the game would be that "the system" or "the machine" would be programmed with A.I. following the logic of the dominant modernist, capitalist paradigm that seems to drive so much of the real economy.

"Players" would get to pit themselves against "the machine" or "the system", struggling to introduce a post-modern ("both-and" as opposed to "either-or") and post-capitalist ("profit is no longer a zero-sum game") paradigm that the A.I. avatars (and possibly other real life players) would find antithetical to their worldview.

The A.I. in the game would endeavor to vigorously fight any moves toward "sustainable development" and "environmental and social justice" that upset the status quo.

Players would have to negotiate their way around hostile agents representing industry, government, local and international business, and threatened community members.

Winning the game would involve working toward win-win situations that satisfy both the "idealists" playing the game, and the programmed paradigm posing as "realism".

The first step in this game is developing the game itself. To do so, we first have to create a digital, 3D Darb-Al Ahmar Muslim Craftsperson community and Manshiyat Nasser Zabaleen Christian Community.

This virtual community needs real household attribute data -- all the socioeconomic indicators (poverty level, income, infrastructure, access to credit, family size, gender distribution etc.) that would allow us to model a faithful representation of the actual communities.

An interface needs to be designed that allows for friendly data visualization (see SimCity 4 for some ideas).

Once we have created the community AS IT IS, with reliable data, we then need to develop a game engine that allows us to interact with and manipulate variables in the community.

The game data would have to be updatable as real changes occur in the real community.

Players would try to introduce and create renewable energy technologies, training centers, workshops, small business opportunities and the like (as in The Sims 2 "Open For Business" expansion pack), and see how these things affect the community when played out.

Ideas that game out as producing "Pareto Optimality" would be shared by players with real life planners and policy makers.

Ideas that seem to cause too much conflict and disruptions would be red-flagged and saved for analysis to get better ideas of why given attempts to improve the community don't work.

While all of this is very ambitious, the first stage would be simply creating KML files for use with Google Earth that allow the overlay of 3D architecture, photographs and attribute tables of local infrastructure and demographic information.

As a first step, and an invitation for others to get involved, I am posting my progressively evolving KML files here:

Click here to download Solar Cities first attempt to create buildings with solar panels in Google Sketchup

This file is only 186 KB

Click here to download the KMZ file of Solar Cities first attempts to map infrastructure in Darb El Ahmar

This is a 9 MB file that has two CAD base maps created by the AKTC showing water and electric services, with Google Earth pins (posts) making them clickable in Google Earh.

Using these files is very simple. Simply download the .kmz files, double click on them and they should launch Google Earth and take you right to the location. Alternately, you can download the files in a folder, then click and drag them into the left sidebar in Google Earth.

Here is a first attempt at creating a 3D view of Building 72 with the home built solar hot water system on top.
The view is looking from Darb Al Ahmar West to Al Azhar park and you can see the Muqattam Hills in the background.

Here is a crowded view of the data from above:

Here is a closeup of the map with overlays:

What is needed now are posts showing the building numbers, so we can tie (geocode) survey information with real locations.

If you have map data about innercity Cairo you would like to contribute to this project, please contact us at thculhane@gmail.com

The Last Mimzy: Connecting to Future Environments

Yesterday my wife was in a funk after reading Der Spiegel -- Germany's version of Time or Newsweek magazine. She was legitimately worried about the future of our world and there was nothing I could say that would banish the fears that so many articles on military interventionism, weapons buildup, terrorism, police-state security techniques, climate change, biodiversity extinction, nuclear reactor building and other horror stories force our psyches to well up.

We looked at pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope in The Universe: 365 Days by Nemiroff and Bonnell to gain some perspective. Then we sang Monty Python's "The Universe Song" from The Meaning of Life, and that helped just a bit (here are the lyrics in case you have forgotten:

THE UNIVERSE SONG, from Monty Python's THE MEANING OF LIFE

"Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, and things seem hard
or tough.
and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and you feel that you've had quite enouuuuuuuuugh...

Just
re-
member that your standing on a planet that's evolving,
and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour...
That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day.
in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick,
but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.
We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point,
we go 'round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light you know;
twelve million miles a minute, that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!"

That kind of cheered us up for about 10 minutes, and then we listened to Harry Nilsson's heart wrenching version of John Lennon's song "Isolation":

"People say we got it made don't they know we're so afriad
Isolation
we're afraid to be alone, everbody got to have a home
Isolation

Just a boy and a little girl
trying to change the whole wide world
Isolation

All the world is a little town
everybody trying to put us down
Isolation

I don't expect you to understand
after you caused so much pain
But the again you're not to blame
your just a human, a victim of the insane

We're afraid of everyone, afraid of the sun
Isolation

The Sun will never disappear
but the world my not have many years
Isolation"

Again we found some comfort in the perpective that we are just mere humans, victims of the insane, and it is fear that makes us make such big mistakes, and isolation that keeps us from using our collective intelligence to make things better.

And Lennon was right: we are afraid of the sun. Afraid of the Urspring of all life on earth. Afraid of the ultimate source of energy that, if properly utilized, could get us safely out of this fossil fuel and nuclear fuel melodrama that taints our would-be, could-be technotopia. (He was wrong, of course, that the Sun will never disappear, but one can take poetic liscence with the term "never" when the time line is on the order of billions of years...)

Still, the songs and the photo tour of the universe weren't enough to improve our psychology. What we needed was an immersion experience in an environment that could stimulate more of our senses and stitch the inputs together into a narrative that would create a feeling of lasting hope.

Thus we found ourselves at the Cinemaxx in Essen in an otherwise completely empty theatre watching the afternoon kidee matinee of "Mimzy, Meine Freunde aus der Zukunft" (English title: "The Last Mimzy").

The premise of the film is that both environmental and cultural schadestoffe (pollutants)are threatening the future of the human race and the only solution is for the people of the 22nd century (or was it later?) to send probes and time-travel communication technology to the early 21st century to get a sample of unadulterated DNA (assumedly mitochondrial as well as nucleus-borne) from a little girl to help heal our distant descendants.

Somehow the film acted as a release trigger for many pent up and frustrated emotions. In the simplicity and innocence of the two child protagonists and their willingness to go out of their way to help unseen future generations we found reason for hope -- hope that maybe the little things we do can have a profound positive effect on the future, and certainly hope that if such a beautiful film embracing cosmic perspectives can be made and released, we are not so alone here today.

In effect the film gave us both a universal perspective and banished our feelings of isolation.

Properly constructed story environments can do that; this is the magic of the film medium.

But when we got back and started thinking about constructing our Environmental ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for connecting the people of today to the possible future environments our children and grandchildren will have to inhabit, we found that the "Mimzy Concept" (people from degraded futures reaching back in time to warn us and seek our help) actually turns out to be the premise of one of the first "serious alternate reality games". Apparently there is a (fictional?) company called "Temporalkinephonics" that (in the game?) is run by former MIT grad students who have invented a type of telephone that spontaneously started receiving "calls" from the future.

The premise of the game, as stated in the "Tomorrow Calling Elevator Pitch" by Jim Wolff and Andrew Sides is that we can further develop Turner and
Morrison's experience (2005) of creating an ARG as a pedagogic tool (see Suit Keen Renovator: alternate reality design, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 123 Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment). Tomorrow Calling uses the fictional idea of people from a degraded 2085 world environment trying to contact people in the present to actually help avert climate change and loss of biodiversity and environmental services in the "real world". People can actually "play their way to solutions".

As Wolff and Sides (2007) point out, movies (like The Last Mimzy -- and this would apply to Monty Python's Meaning of Life and songs by our favorite artists) may be great at providing some perspective and emotional discharge, but they are passive experiences and cannot really engage us in meaningful problem solving.

What is needed are experiences where we get to BE the little girl who receives a Mimzy from the future, or to be Mrs. Brown taken on a tour of the vast universe. Instead of living vicariously through a linear narrative depicting the lives of our heroes, we need to become the heroes -- safely and in a controllable environment, however filled with adventure and challenge -- and try out our collective critical thinking skills for problem solving.

Wolf and Sides, with their temporalkinephonics "Tomorrow Calling" narrative, may just be creating such an experience. They hope that the ARG will encourage a greater use of digital earth and data visualization technologies and put them into more common use. The onus then is placed on the rest of us to develop even more such ARGs, and incorporate the Data Visualization tools that Hans Rosling's Gapminder Organization has developed and is making available to the public.

To end this blog, you should know that while the works of art andfiction we treated ourselves to helped give us the courage to face the day, Sybille and I ended the evening by watching the following "real" movie of Hans Rosling demonstrating gapminder technologies. The fact that the REAL DATA shows hopeful future trends, and that it can be seen so dynamically through his animations, is what gave us the real hope that let us sleep peacefully last night.

I encourage you to watch it here:

The Problemis not Ignorance, it is Preconceived Ideas

Obliged to Play: Using alternate reality games to improve our environments

As a Biological Anthropology major at Harvard I learned that PLAY was serious business. When I was in high school my father had often quoted Mark Twain as saying "work is anything a body is obliged to do; play is anything a body is not obliged to do", and I took that to heart. But at Harvard, studying sociobiology and evolutionary biology and ethology with E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould and Burt Holldobler, among others, I came to learn that large brained animals, in fact, were obliged to play, and that play had evolved and was encoded in our genes (and those of other mammals and of birds; the jury may still be out on fish)because it confers fitness advantages over those animals that do not play.

We know now that play and games among young animals, are serious precursors for survival in the adult stage. They are serious adaptations, so serious in fact, that it can be argued that not playing is maladaptive to the point of being life threatening.

The book "Primates in the Classroom" by J. Gary Bernhard; 1988 (an analysis of the sociobiology that makes most schools so maladaptive) points out that play is important for child development, critical thinking and broad learning, and that the failure of most education systems may be the way they discourage productive play.

Many parents and teachers, by contrast, are concerned about the time their children spend playing "mere games" and today, with the advent of realistic simulations of 3d environments that seem to inspire "obsession" among those who play them, there is deep concern that children are "losing touch with reality" and are somehow being harmed by their desire to "play" in this new medium. After all, if people are spending their time learning to adapt to virtual reality, how well will they fare when faced with the "true reality"?

This may be where ARG's can play a profound role. ARG's are "Alternate Reality Games". They can be distinguished from "mere" virtual reality games in that they make use of all realities and all media that the human animal can perceive and interact with using her five senses.

An ARG makes potential use of computer-based audio, video, text, internet, web and 3D virtual environments, of sms, telephony, television, books, magazine, comic books, films, theater and concert experiences, libraries, local and foreign travel experiences and social networks... in short, every possible medium and environment from which information and experience can be garnered and through which puzzles and problems can be solved, insights discovered and connections made.

I won't go into the history of ARG's except to note with irony that one of the first was apparently a tie-in to the Steven Spielberg film "A.I." and the point of the game was to help the fictional robot child find his way home. People around the world became so obsessed with helping the distressed android that they went out of their way to engage in collective problem solving with complete strangers.

Today, with the gap between the rich and the poor widening and the number of urban homeless people and homeless international refugees fleeing war and environmental devastation, it would be nice to think that we could harness this kind of obsessive energy and turn game playing into the collective construction of a true "alternate reality". Hopefully it would be a better reality.

Since games model the real world and give us a chance to safely role play alternate behaviors in response to simulated environments, it would be advantageous (and adaptive, I believe) if we could use the physics engines and other game developer tools to simulate areas of the world where the poor live and suffer and where their environment has become unliveably degraded, and let people -- both those who "have-not" and those who have the means to help -- role play the difficulties of life in those areas and then collectively work toward alternate reality solutions.

Throughout such a "sustainable development ARG" the "players" could experiment with solutions to intransigent social, political, infrastructural and environmental problems, and then, in order to "win" the game, could vote on the most appropriate and hopeful solutions.

In this way a properly designed "environmental ARG" or "social change ARG" could become a new force in democracy and participatory planning.

My idea is not wholly new nor untested. Already plans are in development for "serious ARGs" (which will hopefully be as fun and engaging to play as they are important) and many of them can be found at the Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Here are a couple of quotes from their site for definition:

"These games (which are usually free to play) often have a specific goal of not only involving the player with the story and/or fictional characters but of connecting them to the real world and to each other. Many game puzzles can be solved only by the collaborative efforts of multiple players, sometimes requiring one or more players to get up from their computers to go outside to find clues or other planted assets in the real world..."...an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community...

"These games are an intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more. That blend of real-world activities and a dramatic storyline has proven irresistible to many."

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a plethora of games out there that taught proper environmental science, technology and development theory, helped us solve the "intensely complicated series of puzzles" involved in protecting biodiversity and ending poverty, and actual became irresistible to many?


One such game is fortunately already under development. It is called "Tomorrow Calling" which challenges players to evaluate what it will be like living in an environmentally challenged world. It is linked to another deep ARG called "World Without Oil" which uses Youtube videos, blogs and personal websites to create an environment of truth telling through the eyes of the everyday citizen as the backdrop for the game. It poses the question "how will we survive in a world without oil". By playing through the game the hope is that we will use our swarm intelligence to find answers.

My wife, Sybille Culhane, and I, T.H. Culhane along with our colleagues Andy Posner and Michelle Finnel, are now working on our own Environmental ARG, to be set primarily in the slums of Cairo Egypt and the jungles of Central America, inviting players to help solve both urban and rural development problems by playing through the deeply imbricated connections between city and countryside.

The first step in our ARG is the creation of 3D virtual environments that model the historic slum neighborhoods and informal settlements of inner city Cairo and the rainforest villages of northern Guatemala, and to that end we are begining to learn Google Sketchup so that we can make these environments available as .kml files to be integrated into Google Earth. On these kml maps we are beggining to plot infrastructure information, such as the presence or absence of water pipes, electric substations and transformers, renewable energy systems, rooftop gardens, sewage connections and treatment plants, and microeconomic data such as preference information on the demand for hot water, solar thermal systems, photovoltaics, and other public and private goods that policy makers could help provide better access to if they knew what was going on at the household level.

The game, ultimately connected with a fully immersive and interactive experience (perhaps built as a Half-Life Mod using the Havoc Physics Engine?) would theoretically take you into the houses and huts and give you the chance to interact with the people and learn their needs and difficulties. Armed with this knowledge the game would then allow you and others to mod the environment, much as one does in The Sims 2 and SimCity 4, and see if you can help make these parts of the world better.

One of the goals of the project is to take advantage of and introduce new Data Visualization Tools that finally are making it easier to wrap our minds around difficult concepts and the significance of large and complex data sets. In particular we are inspired by the tools Hans Rosling presenting at the TED conference in a paper called "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen".

At this point we are in the planning stages, and we invite any students, professors or other citizens of our global commonwealth to participate!

1008 - 1037 Responses to student improvements and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, i.e. DON'T PANIC !

Message no. 1008[Branch from no. 952] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:37pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Indeed Daniella, Architecture is a powerful tool to control the mind as you have said. Read about the work of the architect known as LE CORBUSIER and you will see how he wanted to use architecture to control the public. His style is still used to that effect today, and many people find it hideous (although his original work was rather inspired!).

Le Corbusier's most famous line is "A House is a Machine to Live in" -- he would have never understood your mother's love of the baked clay look of the paint in her room -- he would have prefered a dining room that got people to efficiently consume their nutrients as quickly as possible and then get back to work. His attitude made a lot of cafeteria designers go for ugly functionalism that creates a higher turn over.

Nice summary!

Message no. 1010[Branch from no. 964] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:40pm Subject: Re: summary

Glad to see how a personal experience with the correctional system has influenced your thoughts about utopia. I also now feel that we must eliminate abuse from all systems -- punishment is not a way to prevent crime, in fact it breeds it!

Message no. 1026[Branch from no. 1013] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:25am Subject: Re: chapter 7-janita

That is so true Danilea, and the trick of learning and giving yourself a powerful education as a life long learner is to find a way to relate EVERYTHING to your own life history. It seems hard at first (what is my relationship to statistical mechanics, or stained glass making, for example?) but it turns out that if you dig a little bit, you will find you are related to everything.

Personally I believe this is because we are all the creation of the one and only loving God, and thus we are all connected. Learning is about finding those connections.

As written in THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY:

"...since every piece of matter in the Universe is in someway affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake."

You may also be familiar with the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" which shows that we are all connected to everybody else by an average of six other people (six degrees of separation). This also applies to every TOPIC in the world. Once you find your connection, away you go! You can write, muse, talk for hours....

It is all about relating to yourself, isn't it?

Glad you have made that discovery!

Message no. 1027[Branch from no. 1014] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:34am Subject: Re: Summary

Your story about the effect of changing the conditions of the bar you worked in are inspiring! I will use this anecdote in my future discussions about how environment affects behavior. Thanks for that incredible piece of evidence!

That is what makes these relational summaries so valuable -- you add your own data to an ever growing pool of data that can be used to make society a better place! You see, you can make a real difference, just by reporting your experiences in a context.

Now you may get an idea for why I conduct the course the way I do -- I am doing research, and your relational summaries are, in effect, survey responses. The "questions" in my survey are the topics in the chapters, the answers are what you report about your experiences. This way the entire class acts as a giant laboratory for environment and the psychology of behavior! I have learned, from you guys, how changing the atmosphere of a bar affects business, about how chaning the environment in a hospital or old age home affects the people within them etc...

Thanks!

Message no. 1028[Branch from no. 987] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:47am Subject: Re: relational summary

Keep turning those lights off Daniela!! I do the same thing! It is an ethic we must all adopt! And I loved your story about the ticket for the Chicken McNuggets litter -- I will tell this to people here in Cairo. The other night, just outside the McDonald's drive through, a man and his friends were about to throw their entire bag of trash out the window at my feet. I glared at the man and he thought better of it. So instead he drove a hundred feet down the road, then stopped and threw the whole bag into a garden and then sped off! Wish I had the ability to write a ticket, or that the police (who were standing right there doing nothing, as usual) cared!

In fact, Egypt could raise a lot of money fining polluters and litterers!

Thanks for the insights in your summary!

Message no. 1037[Branch from no. 1032] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:14pm Subject: Re: Chapter 2 redo-

This was great Janita! I really enjoyed how you linked the chapter to the development of your son and to your own dawning awareness of how your behavior impacted others and your environment. Well done!

989 - 1005 Responses to student improvements

Message no. 989[Branch from no. 986] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:13pm Subject: Re: Daniela Final Part II

Glad you are enjoying it Daniela!

Your final is almost there. As with Adrienne's I need you now to list, not just summarize, the results of your survey questions along with each person's consumption patterns so we can see what correlates with what. Then your analysis will be more targetted and not just a general summary. In other words, since you suggest that AGE is related somehow to consumption and size of family is too, let us know how old person one and person two and person three etc. are, and let us know the size of their families and all that good stuff. That way we can draw our own conclusions and see if they match yours? Capisce?

A little more detail and we're there Daniela! Go for it!

Good first stab!

T

Message no. 991[Branch from no. 974] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 18, 2007 5:39am Subject: Re: chap 10- Janita

This summary is one of the best you have posted Janita -- just as you felt connected to the passage in the book, we feel connected to you and your experiences and the psychology of your behavior through your writing about your insights. And that is the point of these relational summaries. If you could insert a bit more of "YOU" into the other summaries, even at this late date, it would make a world of difference and make it easier to grade well. You know, inject a bit of your personality into the other summaries, as you have done this one. The others are so dry -- as if they were mere restatements of what the book said, which we have all read. What we have been interested in in this class is YOU -- how you relate to the ideas in the book, how your personal environment affects your behavior and how you were affected by what you learned! And by the way, having grown up in inner city Chicago on the south side, Playgrounds for me were just as you described them -- safe places where everyone looked after one another and interacted. In fact, even in those times of tension and crime, my parents thought it safe to let us go to the playground alone. As you say times have changed! I agree we should bring the playground standard back to society.

Message no. 1004[Branch from no. 938] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 4:52pm Subject: Re: chapter 3-

Janita -- to get credit for these summaries remember they have to be RELATIONAL -- that is RELATED TO YOUR LIFE AND EXPERIENCES! Otherwise they appear to just be cut and paste factoids from some book or website.

You MUST (and this applies to any of you who have written summaries that are mere summaries, without personal info and without quotes and page numbers so we can SEE what you have copied) go back and insert the personal information and the reference pages and quotes or IT DOESN'T COUNT!!

This is the time to do it ... open all your relational summaries, re-read them and ask yourselves "does this document show others HOW I RELATE TO THE IDEAS IN THE TEXT?"

DO NOT be afraid to be personal. You count. You matter. Your psychology is important. Stop thinking that learning is about facts. It is about how you integrate facts into your daily life. It is about YOU YOU YOU.

No go for it!

Message no. 1005[Branch from no. 939] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:24pm Subject: Re: chapter 5

This is a very good relational summary Janita! It is very much what I am looking for in all of your summaries -- a personal relationship with the material. You know, as a trained nurse, that personal relationships can make all the difference in the life and death of a patient! We need to be personal in our relationship with everything and everyone we touch -- authentic in our engagement.

Thanks for showing me the level of interaction you can achieve with a subject when you feel related to it!

Message no. 1006[Branch from no. 958] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:27pm Subject: Re: chapter 7

Again you have done a nice job on this one Janita, and again I think it is because the topic relates so closely to your nursing experience. It was a pleasure reading about your insights into the trauma nurses suffer doing their job and dealing with disasters! It certainly opened my eyes!

Message no. 1007[Branch from no. 931] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:30pm Subject: Re: Summary

I liked this summary Dana. I realized that I am a "hugger" and wondered about my effect on people who feel invaded by this behavior. I think I am comfortable in the Middle East and Mediterranean cultures because they are very tactile. Strange that I should marry a German though... hmmm...

983 988 nature vs. environment

Message no. 983[Branch from no. 978] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:37pm Subject: Re: Final pt.2...Varshawn

I like the way you set up your survey Varshawn, with the multiple choice answers. It makes it much easier to formalize and code the data for analysis!

I agree with your conclusions (similar to Adrienne's and Michelles) but don't get too pessimistic -- the turning point is near I think! Reading the book "Critical Mass" by Phillip Ball, which I have mentioned often, convinces me that things will change for the better even without most people being aware!

Anyway, now that you have got your data, just follow the same recommendation I gave Adrienne and Michelle -- list ALL your data so we know which person said what and can correlate it with their consumption, and analyse by pointing those correlations out to us and you have a winner!

Thanks!

T

Message no. 988[Branch from no. 985] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:07pm Subject: A job well done!

Consider yourself done with the final Adrienne -- you've done a tremendous A class job! This will set the standard for others to follow.

Looking at your data, I agree that the variables don't seem to have much explanatory value -- in fact the two values that you talk about but which are not specifically in your questionnaire -- income and the lavishness of lifestyle -- seem to have the most explanatory strength -- it does indeed appear that those who have the most money do the most consuming (which makes some sense) and are the most wasteful (because they can afford to be?). Interestingly, they are the one's who could do the most good (because they could immediately afford clean efficient technologies that are too expensive for others of more modest means). Unfortunately, most of my rich friends and relatives are the first to tell me that "solar is too expensive" (for example) -- I once told a rich friend in Malibu that I had installed a solar electric system on my apartment roof in L.A. for $7000 dollars on my teachers salary of 28,000 a year. He said that was way too expensive for him, but later that afternoon told us about his trip to Canada and Las Vegas the previous weekend where he had a great time - he rented a private jet to get to the Hockey game in Canada, then flew into Vegas to gamble -- the weekend cost him 50,000 dollars! Hmmmm. Values....

Interesting you should note that people consider "nature" and "environment" different things -- of course for the rich "nature" is usually preserved at some resort somewhere, and the environment of the rich is kept clean and healthy by gardeners and service staff... they are different things...

Anyway, no need to belabor the points -- you have done a marvelous job of pulling your data together and starting down the road to a serious scientific analysis. Thanks for spending the extra time! Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did!

Cheers and congratulations,

Professor T.

981 982 Peer Review

Message no. 981[Branch from no. 969] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:29pm Subject: Re: Final

Thanks for your patience and mutual assistance group! My computer is on the fritz again, so it is great to know I can count on you guys to help each other toward clarity. Please take a look at Adriennes final and my response to see how you can create the "perfect final". As for when it is due, this week is a good time! We need to get grades in next week! I don't mind you polishing things us over the weekend though, in light of my comments!

Enjoy, and keep helping and inspiring each other!

T

Message no. 982[Branch from no. 972] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:33pm Subject: Re: final part 2

Yes, it is an eye opener, isn't it Michelle!

As with Adrienne's post, can I urge you to give us all the raw data and tie your analysis to correlations that we can also see? This is what science is about -- PEER REVIEW. We must not only share our conclusions, but HOW we derived our conclusions. Otherwise scientists could just make up figures and tell us things like "video games lead to violence" or "the death penalty deters crime". In fact many bad scientists have done just that, but it is wrong to do. Good scientists present their data so the rest of us can see if we agree with the conclusions or if we see some other pattern in the data.

The idea is to lead us through the data and tell us why you think it proves what you think it does.

Cool?

Do that and you will have a great final!

Thanks!

980 Almost perfect Final!

Message no. 980[Branch from no. 970] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:26pm Subject: Re: Final Adrienne

Hi Adrienne,

Wow! This is an almost perfect final! I say "almost" because there is one piece missing that makes all the difference in science -- the raw data from which we can correlate the variables and look for co-variates. That is a fancy way of saying we need to know WHICH of the people you surveyed answered which questions so we can look for a link between, say, the person who said that "yes" they were a nature lover and the number of planets they use and their carbon footprint. If we don't do that, the data doesn't help us understand how environment and the psychology of behavior are related. Do you see what I mean?

So, for example, we would like to know if Person #7 used 3.6 planets, and person #3 used 12.9 ( a big range, as you have pointed out!), what did person #7 say about loving nature, about awareness of the five simple things they could do, and how did person #3 answer those questions? Where did they live? We should know this about each person. The data should look like this, for example:

Person #7 Food 2.6 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 1.2 Goods 2 Total 6.5 3.6 Planets

Survey for person #7: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East? Mid East 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? No, I walk to work. 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? No, I live off of the fruit trees in my garden. 4. Do you have children? Yes, and they do all the composting. 5. Are you a nature lover? Definitely. 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? Gardening does it for me! 7. Do you have a college education? Yes. Undergraduate only. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Very! 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? La illah allah illa allah! 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? Yes, I use a fan instead of an airconditioner, I eat local produce, the meat comes from my neighbor's sheep, I take public transportation, we use the bath water to irrigate the fruit trees and use the sheep droppings to make biogas for the stove.

Person #3 Food 4.9 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 26.7 Goods 24.9 Total 57 12.9 planets

Survey: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East?

U.S., Florida 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? 150 miles each way 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? Always! 4. Do you have children? Three 5. Are you a nature lover? Only on T.V. -- Discovery Channel 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? If I could, I'd go hunting. 7. Do you have a college education? Multiple degrees, up to M.D. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Global warming is a myth - Michael Chrichton said so in a book I read on an airplane to golf in a resort in Malaysia. 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? Not particularly 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? I take out the garbage on sunday, and pay my greens fees to the country club...

Note that I have obviously made up these answers according to stereotype assumptions that may have nothing to do with consumption!! Your actual data contradicts my stereotypes - you said that ALL claim to have stressful lives and that all claim to be religious. Thus those two areas are probably NOT covariates with consumption, as my stereotype answers would suggest. That makes us wonder "is there anything that truly differs between the low and high consumers"?

Can you give us the real answers for Persons #1 through #10, so we can see what patterns jump out, if any? And then, in your analysis, make reference to those specific values -- as you do, but so that we can see what the facts are and what your interpretation is. For example, you mentioned that the Florida doctor consumes the most, but that your brother in law in Saudi Arabia also is a high consumer, and you said that they have relatively similar incomes. The conclusion that one could draw from this (though it is most likely very wrong!) is that "hot climates make people big consumers." We would have to have a data point from someone in a cold climate and a medium climate to test this hypothesis.

Anyway, your job is not to do all of that, because this is an introduction to the methodology, not a Ph.D. thesis! But you are so close to having what I consider a PERFECT final I would love it if you could just give us that raw data and refer to it in your analysis, and with that you will be a model for the rest of the class and a contributor to the exciting and ever growing library of human knowledge!

Thanks Adrienne, well done!

T

950 Multitudes in the Valley of Decisions

Message no. 950[Branch from no. 946] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 4:10pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

What a fun summary Dawn (though it ends kind of abruptly, wouldn't you say... we kind of expected a summary to the summary, a "and they all lived happily ever after" tag at the end... some conclusion...

Your metaphors (the dog choker, and the "where's Waldo"for example) are great, and you paint great imagery.

Also, thanks for bringing new perspective to the idea of why people don't leave home even if it is dangerous. I think I go a bit overboard trying to paint people as rational, and you helped me see the powerful emotions that come into play when considering one's territory or home environment.

I think in terms of the way an environment controls our behavior we have to ask what our behavior would be like without the context of an environment to constrain it. What is freedom without an environment to act in? Don't environments help determine how we want to behave? Joshua Epstein (2001) quoted in Phillip Ball's chapter "Multitudes in the Valley of Decision" (p. 295 of Critical Mass) "When I'd had my coffee this morning and went upstairs to get dressed for work, I never considered being a nudist for the day. When I got into my car to drive to work, it never crossed my mind to drive on the left. And when I joined my colleagues at lunch, I did not consider eating my salad bare handed; without a thought I used a fork." The author also quotes Karl Mannheim from 1936 saying, "Only in a quite limited sense does the individual create out of himself the mode of speech and thought we attribute to him. He speaks the language of his group; he thinks in the manner in which the group thinks."

I think one of the tensions in our modern society is that we are uncertain to which group we belong. We are aware of a pluricultural potential for behavior and it is hard to design for so many cultural norms. At some point though, we do conform to what we each consider normal. I think our dogs do too -- I observe that many animals, particularly pack animals like dogs, do not exhibit a free range of behaviors but "choke" themselves into postures of dominance and submission and "appropriate behavior" depending on the social environment around them.

Your thoughts?

949 Clarification of the Survey

Message no. 949 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:55pm Subject: Coming up with the survey

Hi Class,

Varshawn sent me an email asking for clarification on the surveys. Here is my answer:

Yes, you come up with your own surveys -- pick the questions from the eco and carbon footprint websites you find most useful and will use and add to them your own questions about lifestyle that can help explain why people have the footprints they have. You then plug the information into the footprint calculators to get values for your friends and then try to explain the similarities and differences by the answers you get to your other questions.

For example, I put my father's footprint information in, and I found out his lifestyle would take 3.5 planets if everybody else lived like him, and I put in my uncle's info and found that he would need 8 planets. Now I want to know what the underlying differences are that affect their different behaviors. Yes I know that my cousin drives a gas guzzler and has a huge house and eats steak everyday and my father has a hybrid car. Okay. That went into the calculator. But what explains why my cousin is such an energy hog? Is it their beliefs, their jobs, their incomes, what?

It turns out , for one thing, that my uncle lives in the Midwest where there is no public transportation, where there is a tradition of having big trucks, where beef cattle are raised, and where real estate is cheap enough for middle class people to have big houses. So even though their incomes are the same, location helps explain the differences in their consumption. Also, interestingly, though my Dad grew up in the Midwest, my Dad saw Bambi as a kid and decided he didn't want to kill animals, and he moved to New York to be a writer, while his brother became a hunter and likes that "everything big is better" macho tradition. These things describe a possible "psychology of behavior" and that is what this course is about. See what I mean?

You should speculate on these things based on the questions you ask in your survey. As Philip Ball says in Critical Mass (page 296) "Not even the most ardent supporter of individualism could reasonably claim that our choices are truly independent. How in a society flooded with mass advertising, can we hope to make decisions free from the influences of our environment."

You might ask the question "how much television do you watch a day" or "do you shop at Best Buy" and see if people who watch alot of television have a larger or smaller footprint, or if people who answer yes to shopping at Best Buy have a larger or smaller footprint.

How you EXPLAIN the data you get is where you can have fun and be creative!!!

Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics!". You may find, in your tiny data set, that out of 10 people you survey, 8 have an above average footprint and they just also happen to all love Alanis Morrisette (if that was one of your questions!). Does that mean that listening to Alanis Morrisette makes you consume more? Yikes, Alanis would hate that, because she is on a "green" campaign. But your data might show that! How would you explain the psychology?

It may be that listening to Alanis has NOTHING to do with consumption, but it was a case of the roll of the dice that your data shows a correlation! Remember CORRELATIONS ARE NOT REGRESSIONS, i.e., they aren't statistically significant. For example, as our textbook says, people who ate ice cream in one study were found to be involved in violent crimes. Does that mean that ice cream causes violent crimes? No, it just turned out that the crimes were influenced by a heat wave, and the heat wave also made people eat ice cream.

The fun of environment and the psychology of behavior is trying to figure out what causes what!

You don't have to come up with the survey all by yourself by the way == you can share ideas and develop it with other class mates!

See what you come up with!

927 937 947 Responses to students

Message no. 927[Branch from no. 911] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 5:02pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ...Varshawn

What is your theory about your co-workers -- what is making them anxious? And how does maintaining space help reduce that anxiety? Or is it that lack of personal space is what is making them anxious? What are the spatial characteristics of your work environment? How can you set up an experiment to test your theory?

Message no. 937[Branch from no. 932] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 10, 2007 2:29pm Subject: Re: Summary

Dana, can you elaborate on this summary? All -- Remember we need at least three quotes from the book with page numbers and three outside references, and the summary should relate to you and your life experience and observations. This is the criteria I have to use for evaluating now that grade time is coming up! Thanks!

Message no. 947[Branch from no. 941] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:39pm Subject: Re: Varshawn...Part 1

Yeah, the Japanese calculator is pretty confusing and lousy == thanks to Michelle we have much better calculators to use now! But at least you got a sense, I hope, that people are doing this all over the world now -- one day soon responsible citizens may be asked to balance their carbon budget the way we now balance our checkbooks == trying to be carbon neutral or carbon negative may be the next status quest! ("How low can ya go!?" People may ask each other)

Message no. 948[Branch from no. 945] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:41pm Subject: Re: Dana Boothroyd

Thanks for sharing the new climate calculator Dana -- much better than the Japan site I found. I think that one is best suited for the electrical appliances found in Toy Story and used by Buzz Lightyear: To infinity, and beyond! :)

925 926 Environmental Justice

Message no. 925[Branch from no. 914] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:55pm Subject: Re: relational summary

Thanks for the links to hazards affecting rivers in New York! Hard to keep up with all the things criminal businesses and negligent people get away with that affects innocent unaware people.

I don't any longer agree that "we don't learn our lesson" though. I think what happens more often is that people do learn the lesson -- and move away from the places where disasters occur and many try to stop doing the things that are dangerous. I think what happens, however, is that population pressure, lack of alternatives and business incentives provide a never ending stream of newcomers who can be duped into living in bad and dangerous conditions and areas. The safe property is bought up by the rich and the dangerous areas are offered at low rates to anybody who is willing to trade the risk of dying in a disaster or through toxic exposre for the risk of dying of poverty. For this reason you will notice that, for example, when California had our earthquake in 1994 64 people died, while in Turkey many many thousands died. Disasters and poverty go hand in hand, and we tend to look at the poor as if they were a homogeneous mass. In fact individual poor families try desperately to get out of dangerous places and often succeed when they can find an opportunity. But there are so many poor people with even less opportunity that others immediately move in again. It is rarely the same people.

For this reason we have a movement in the world called "The Environmental Justice" movement. It says that people are trapped into being victims, not that they don't learn from other's mistakes.

I believe that there is a propoganda that makes us believe that "we" are all to blame, as if human beings were just stupid and flawed and keep on doing dumb things. This obscures the fact that criminal behavior by developers and speculators is putting enormous numbers of people at risk.

Our job should be to put a face on individual families and see how hard most people struggle to do the right thing. I'm proud of the human race; I'm just suspicious of the very few who control the wealth and the media.

Message no. 926[Branch from no. 912] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:59pm Subject: Re: Varshawn...Relational Summ...

I think you are right Varshawn -- asthma seems to be telling us that our immune systems are overwhelmed by the toxins and particulate matter in the air.

924 Every act of creation is preceeded by an act of destruction

Message no. 924[Branch from no. 916] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:43pm Subject: Re: relational summary

You are right Dawn -- the cycles of life and death and decay, of fire and flood, are necessary for life overall to persist. As the Greeks said, "every act of creation is preceeded by an act of destruction." Still, this time destruction is happening on a different scale -- one unprecedented except for the 5 times in our past when we had mass extinctions. It is like the idea that we need to tear muscle to build muscle, but if we rip our arm off, no muscle can grow again. A question of rate and scale and scope.

As for dating in the future -- I don't see any reason why we would have to wear face masks and tanks indoors -- but you did remind me of a wedding I witnessed underwater in Hawaii in a lava cathedral 50 feet deep. The bride was in white gown that flowed like the fins of a delicate fish in the current, and the groom was in a tuxedo, but they had face masks and scuba tanks on. It was wild!

923 It's the End of the World as we Know It, and I could use a drink!

Message no. 923[Branch from no. 913] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:36pm Subject: Re: Varshawn....relational summary

Glad to see how your awareness of the intricacies of the global warming process is growing Varshawn!

It is an immensely complicated and dangerous situation, as you have pointed out. What is so very very sad is that Newsweek magazine last month released a cover story article trying to explain "the pros and cons of global warming". (See Newsweek International, 04/16/2007 . PROS of global warming?!!! I found the article sick, because yes, it acknowleged that millions of people would die in Africa and other poor continents, but it said that we should look on the bright side -- ski resort operators can convert their snowless resorts into spas and casinos, and even though the Mediterranean Beaches will be underwater along with coastal cities, beachgoers can now party on the beaches of the Baltic sea and other formerly frigid waters! It said that agriculture would fail in Brazil and Spain, but take heart! We can grow wine grapes in Alaska and Siberia!! So we never have to go a day without Chianti!

And they said that when the ice caps melt we will find it easier to drill for oil!! They actually said that! Gee, that way we never have to stop using the messy cancer causing stuff!

It is the most egregious example of how out of touch our media and political machine is with the state of the world when all over the world Newsweek is telling people "the party won't stop for the rich and famous just because the rest of the world will be suffering so badly!" Look on the bright side, right? Every dark cloud has a silver mining for the rich!

As our text book points out, at some level increased heat can lead to agression, and at another level it can lead to apathy. What such environmental determinism doesn't explain is how the partying greedy rich, in their air conditioned luxury cars and yachts and villas, can do such violence to the world and what makes them, no matter what the temperature, create a climate of lies and distortions so that they can continue to commit acts of agression against the rest of humanity. By telling the world that Global Warming isn't such a bad thing after all, because wine growers, resort operators and oil companies will still make a profit, Newsweek and other arms of the propaganda machine are acting in the most agressive way I can think of. Do they hope that the rest of us will either be hot enough that we will kill ourselves or so hot we will sit back and vegetate?

Did you guys see that article? What do you think?

Update, September 5, 2007:

A German television program on global warming made the same outrageous argument -- First they showed the dire consequences of Global Warming, then they showed excellent footage on how to insulate your home (conservation of energy and resources is the least expensive and most effective fix we can do!) but then they had a segment on "the bright side" of global warming, interviewing a Scandanavian who has started his own winery because the temperature just doesn't get low enough to freeze the grapes. All I can think of is the title of my friend Professor Scott Sherman's excellent environmental thriller: "It's the end of the world (as we know it) and I could use a drink!"

922 A Doll's House

Message no. 922[Branch from no. 920] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 3:58pm Subject: A doll's House

That was an immensely enjoyable and entertaining relational summary Dawn!! I loved the way you went from Barbie to Gerbil cages and showed the tension between our desire to play Creator and the desire of marketers to get us to copy their designs and product placements.

The gap between designer and client becomes easy to understand when you start thinking of your chinchilla or gerbils as the clients -- do we design for what they really want or for what we think would make the coolest "doll house" for our little pets (furry mobile Barbie's essentially). A playground for our personal manipulation, as you say.

During the 4 years I worked for the L.A. Zoo I was fascinated by the way zoo designers created exhibits not to please the animals but to please the public or, worse, to please the cleaning staff (making it easy to sanitize). It was on one of my many trips to the Frankfurt zoo in Germany that the director of the Zoo took me to the new Tiger exhibit and showed me that they had eliminated the concrete and tile floors and replaced everything with many feet of soil, humus and wood chips. It was an indoor exhibit. The director said, "the cleaning staff screamed, but it works much better. Now the organic material of the floor of the exhibit absorbs the urine and the feces and bacterial action breaks it down. I ask the staff to go in and rake and shovel and take some of it away for compost -- but the thing is the Tigers are happy -- like house cats they scratch and bury their waste the natural way and they play in the dirt and wood chips and the exhibit is actually much cleaner!

The same technique was used in the new Polar Bear exhibit at San Diego Zoo where the staff told me "it used to be we would paint concrete blocks white to look like ice flows, and tint the water blue so it would seem like an "arctic" place. But the polar bears hated it, and they weren't fooled -- this is southern California! Now we let them play in dirt and grass and leaves and flower beds and we tell the public "this is what Polar Bears do in the summer" which is true. Why should they suffer because we want to pretend California is Alaska?"

Planning for the client is indeed very important!

Good job on your summary! Keep up the fun writing!

921 Sites for Carbon Calculators

Message no. 921[Branch from no. 910] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 3:43pm Subject: Re: sites for carbon calculators

Good sleuth work Michelle! Now we are cookin'! Some of you have got a start figuring out how many planets we would need to live as you do, which should really make you think about what we might need to make your eutopias real for all also. Tough huh?

Has anybody played with the numbers to see how we would all have to live in order to fit on just one planet? Give it a try!

The carbon footprint is a difficult measure, and I see the Japanese calculator is giving infinity for some people, so I am glad you found some other carbon calculators for us, Michelle!

In modelling the world we need as many different models as possible since each one of them is bound to be oversimplified or to contain flawed assumptions and these throw the results off. Bravo for finding more models.

907 The Tree of Knowledge

Message no. 907[Branch from no. 903] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 2:25pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

It is scary, isn't it Dawn! Awareness always is -- maybe that is why God warned us not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Always fills me with shame... but it is too late, and now ignorance cannot lead back to bliss, so we must strive on and learn ever more! :)

I don't know if country people consume more or less than city people in the U.S.... good question. One could argue that transportation needs are greater with the longer distances in the country and this uses a lot of resources (both getting the stuff yourself and shipping the stuff out to the stores there). One reason for cities of course was that by concentrating resources in one place you lower the transaction costs and increase efficiency. But of course, cities are no longer near the sources of resources as they once were. We have long since consumed the forests and mines and fisheries and fields of good soil that used to surround cities. So now our resources come from the "country". Theoretically it should be better to live near the resources, and for this reason people in third world countries who live in the "countryside" still consume less than people in the city. But in the U.S. that may not be true, because resources first have to go to the city to be processed and then get shipped BACK to the countryside to be used. In fact very few of us in advanced countries who live "in the country" live close to the land at all. Rather, we are almost like living in space stations orbiting the city, but at a distance so we can pretend we are in the country, while tied to the economics of the urban sphere.

Thanks for being the first to take the plunge and start investigating how many earth's you use!

906 Talkin' Trash: A Melodic-Mnemonic Song About the Value of Garbage

Message no. 906 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 2:00pm Subject: A song about pollution

Hi class,

Speaking of Disasters, Toxic Hazards and Pollution, I just finished writing this song about pollution called "Talkin' Trash" for the upcoming documentary film "Recycle Circus", part of the trilogy of documentaries about our Circus Guy Musical Goodwill Ambassador Program. Check out http://greenheadmedia.org/pages/documentary.html if you want to see the first documentary, Solar Circus, and parts of the second documentary, Water Circus.

In a week or so I will hopefully finish a demo recording (a scratch version) for you to hear. Meanwhile, here are the chords and lyrics (any musicians among you?).

Talkin’ Trash c 2007 T.H. Culhane Cairo, Egypt

(Bb6/F arpeggio to F#7/E arpeggio twice)

(Bb6/F) Look beyond the garbage in the (Gm) streets to find the (Gm7/F) garbage in your (F#7/E) mind… Then (Bb6/F) rise above your prejudice of (Em7b5) class to see there’s treasures there to (Ebmaj7) find… (Ebmaj7/C) in (Gm9 pull off )garbage… (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) in garbage… (Gm9 pull off to Ebmaj7b5 pull off)

(Bb) Everyone is told (Everyone is told) (Bb/A) that one man’s garbage is another’s gold But (Gm) why’re we never told (why’re we never told) (Gm/F) that one man’s gold creates another’s (Cm) garbage? (Ebmaj7) (F#7/E)

(Bb) Lies are often told (Lies are always told) (Bb/A) If they obscure the facts they think our hand will fold (Gm) We’ve got to lay it on the table’n BOLD (Gm/F) that “Pollution is always someone else’s (Cm) profit”… (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) (They’re makin’ lots of money off it…)

Dm / Cm / Dm / Cm / (with cello)

(Dm) (spoken): “It’s a fundamental idea in economics that surplus value creates profit. If that (C#m) surplus can no (Cm) longer be extracted from labor then it must come from the externalization of production residuals – what we call (C#m) “garbage”. (Dm) This means to both the firm and the family that ‘negative externalities’ must never be paid for, (Cm) must never be accounted for, must (Cm) always be thrown into, dumped into, someone else’s back yard…” (Gm pull off)

(sung): (Dm) When we gonna learn (when we gonna learn) That one man’s gold creates a-(C#m) nother’s (Cm) garbage? It’s an adage we recycle, we reverse the lesson that we all earn our (Dm) Livings from a dustbin from a trash heap of worn ideas (C#m) gleaned from (Cm) garbage (Cm!)that one’s man’s trash can be another’s gold obscures the (Cm!) darker story that’s never told (Ebm!) For all that glitters, new or old, is (Ebm!) in the mind, spun into gold by (B!) those who learned “sell high, buy low”, the dogma (B/A) behind the status quo is (Bb) garbage… (F#7/E) just garbage… (Bb) (F#7/E)

And it’s (Gm) more than mere frustration without (F) point-source (Cm) separation we (Gm) enforce immiseration having (F) no appreciation (Cm) that there’s a (Gm) downstream side relation to it (F) all… (Cm)

There (Gm) persists a sad delusion that the (F) problem of (Cm) pollution can be (Gm) solved by mere dilution – but that’s (F) not the right (Cm) solution and there’s (Gm) still too much confusion about it (F) all… (Cm) We’re now (Gm) plagued by concentrations, (F) caused by bio-accumulation (Cm) for many (Gm) toxins simply don’t disperse at (F) all (Cm)

(Ebm) There’s two spheres in which we should operate One well established, one inchoate (B) An ecosphere and a technosphere put organics there, inorganics here (B/A) this industrial ecology’s the (Bb) way… (F#7/E) to…

(Bb6/F) Look beyond the garbage in the (Gm) streets to find the garbage in your (F#7/E) mind Then (Bb6/F) rise above the blindness of your (Em7b5) past to see the profits men have (Ebmaj7) mined… (Ebmaj7/C) from (Gm pull off) garbage… from (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) garbage… It’s all (Gm pull off) garbage… (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) garbage… We’re talkin’ TRASH… Bb5 A5 Gm6/9 !!! Bb5 A5 Gm6/9 !!!

905 Connections

Message no. 905[Branch from no. 904] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 1:55pm Subject: Re: Summary

Connections, that is what drives the world -- starting from fundamental particles (superstrings? quarks, gluons, bosons, mesons... protons, neutrons, electrons, the four major forces, from gravity to electromagnetism, all the way up to molecular interactions and ecosystems and societies -- everything is connected, as Dana's summary makes manifest.

Some call this "the butterfly effect". One thing affects another. But we ain't seen nothin' yet! Since energy ultimately drives all affairs, just wait until the prices of fossil fuels really start reflecting their relative scarcity. Since all transportation relies on them, as does heating and cooling and electricity production and packaging and fertilizers and pesticides and construction materials and and and.... the price of everything will rise.

The solution: invest all the money we have NOW, while things are cheap, in technologies that capture renewable energy resources (sun, wind, water, biomass, biogas) and stop waiting, hoping prices will go down. They won't. Not until we are decoupled from fossil fuels. Then prices will of course go down. But now we must invest and invest quickly. It won't just be mattresses that will rise in price, but even the price of a good nights sleep, knowing we can make it through tomorrow...

Keep those connections in mind -- anticipate the relations and we will do fine!

902 Chapter 10 Debates: Red Mars vs. Green Mars, Should we Terraform?

Message no. 902[Branch from no. 884] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:46pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Chapter 10 The City Relational Summary

This is a good point Dawn, and it goes to the heart of the "Red Mars vs. Green Mars" debate. The trouble with worrying about whether we will do the same thing on Mars is that Mars lost its atmosphere and its oceans many many hundreds of millions of years ago. It is now a desolate and inhospitable planet. In order to make it habitable for biological life forms we will have to TERRAFORM the planet from a lifeless red planet into a lush green one.

There are those who think this is "messing with Nature" and who are opposed to us doing this. They say to leave Mars as it is. But as it is, Mars is incapable of sustaining life of any kind, much less human.

If we meddle with Mars' environment and make it green, would this be "destroying" its environment? Can you destroy a dead planet by bringing it to life?

Now suppose we did terraform Mars and bring back its oceans and atmosphere and put life on Mars. Would we destroy that life too, the way we are doing earth's life?

This is a tricky question but most economists think the answer is no. Remember the "Tragedy of the Commons" argument in your textbook? The argument was that we are destroying the earth's environment because we don't really agree on how much it is worth. The air and the sea that belong to all are being polluted because this is how companies make profits -- if they had to pay to properly recycle the chemicals and waste they produce they would lose money. So they dump them into "the commons", expecting the rest of us to pay the costs in terms of our health and sanity.

There are two basic ways of making a profit in this economy. The first is to extract "surplus value" from labor. That means that I pay you 5 bucks and hour to make, say, tables, that I sell for 20 bucks, and I pocket the 15. If you join a union and demand a pay raise to 7.50 an hour plus benefits equaling 7.50, I suddenly lose profits, but I can still make 5 bucks off of you each hour. At this point, though, I decide to fire you and replace you with a machine that makes 4 tables an hour instead of one, and I lose money until I have paid off my investment in the machine, but after that I start making a profit again. The problem is, soon all my competitors buy machines like mine and the prices of tables go down. Now I am stuck because the prices of machines are the same for me and my competitors, and machines get more expensive as they get more complicated. So I have to search for another way to extract surplus value. I can't get it from the machine -- if I don't maintain the machine properly it will break. In the old days of slavery and before labor laws I could work my human laborer until he or she collapsed or died and then simply hire somebody else. As long as there was a rising population of poor people in need of a job I had an "unlimited reserve army of labor" (as Karl Marx called the working class). But once I have automated I can't do that -- new machines don't come cheap and don't come knocking on my door looking for work.

So what do I do as a capitalist? In order to maintain profits I use my second option: I pollute. I get my profits by refusing to clean up after myself. I don't pay for recycling or dealing with poisonous wastes, I simply dump them in someone else's backyard.

This is the problem with the world today (well, one of the big problems). The industrial age has driven businesses to use environmental polluting as one of the two ways it makes a profit, and has driven the others to favor overpopulation as the other. You see, to make a profit you either need to throw things away without paying to clean up your mess, or you need a huge army of reserve labor (the poor). So in industrialized countries you manufacture and then pollute by dumping wherever you can, and in underdeveloped countries you encourage policies that lead to overpopulation so there will always be plenty of cheap labor around that you can exploit.

On Mars it should be different -- since it will be governments and companies that build the life support systems they will know exactly how much they cost and who owns what. And since the population will be low for the first 100 generations labor won't be cheap. So it is unlikely that anyone will dump toxic waste or mess up the life support system, and it will be difficult for one group to exploit another because if they get any group mad enough they COULD use terrorism to destroy the life support systems as revenge.

In the effort to colonize space it is more likely that people will develop ways to be cooperative and to make life fluorish rather than destroy it. If we don't, of course, we will die long before we even start building a habitat on Mars or any other planet.

the problem with the earth is that we inherited this lovely planet without truly understanding how precious she is!

I'd love to hear what you think about these scenarios. Plausible?

901 The 29th Day

Message no. 901[Branch from no. 892] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:26pm Subject: Re: Pat Friedrichs Relational summary

Nicely argued Pat.

Surely we WILL one day find the human race extinct (or rather, something will, since if we are extinct we won't be around to find anything! :)) The question is, will our offspring be able to evolve into something better adapted for the world to come, or will the extinction take our genetic line by surprise and simply hurl it into a dead end? If it does, will some other animal evolve self-reflective intelligence?

It always makes me feel lonely to think that we are the only truly self reflective and communicative and creative beings in the solar system, and that therefore the fate of intelligent life depends on us! David Brin writes a lot about the evolution of intelligent machines and the enhancement of intelligent in other animals and his speculations give me some hope. But you are quite right in extrapolating this trend of destructive population growth into the future.

Paul Ehrlich, in his classic book "The Population Bomb" and his subsequent books, argued that at the current rate of expansion there would be, in a few thousand years, more people than there are stars. This is the trouble with geometric growth.

Lester Brown wrote a book called "The 29th day" in which he asked the question, "if you place a Lily pad in an empty pond and it divides to become two lily pads the second day, and 4 lily pads the third day, and 8 lily pads the fourth day, and you know that the Lily pond will be completely filled with Lily Pads on the 30th day, on which day will the pond be half full?"

The answer, of course, is the 29th day.

Brown suggested, back in the 1980s when there were only about 4 billion of us on the planet, that the earth was already half full. He said it was our 29th day.

Ecological footprint analysis shows us how many earth's it would take for all 6.5 billion of us to live the way you or I do. For my lifestyle it seems it is about 4 earths. However, if we switch to renewable energy and recycle and compost, we might get down to the Egyptian average (1.5 earths) or to the African average (about 1) without any loss in quality of lifestyle. Once we do that, of course, it will still mean we can't grow any more (if it takes 1 planet earth to sustain all 6.5 billion of us we certainly can't grow without others being less well off or killing ourselves -- this is called "Pareto Optimality").

So we will still have to look for other planets if we want the dream of an ever increasing quality of life and an ever increasing population.

Will we then fill up the entire universe, as Ehrlich predicted?

Or will we use virtual reality to increase our quality of life without increasing our consumption?

These are deep deep ideas for us to speculate on.

Thanks for bringing up these heuristic, if troubling, notions!

900 Anticipation is making me crazy

Message no. 900[Branch from no. 886] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:13pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

Yes, I think being mentally prepared does have a profound impact on the way we experience things. Anticipation helps us cope by allowing us to mentally rehearse responses. I think this is one reason I find such pleasure in movies about the future or in video games about the future -- even when the theme is disasters or threats, I feel I can prepare myself, and this illusion of potential control gives me some solace.

However, Baum and Greenburgh's study seems to say the opposite of what you and I describe -- they seem to show that anticipating crowding creates greater stress. Perhaps this is true when you have to get ready for an unpleasant experience that is not only unavoidable but which you know will not give you any control at all. In that case imagining the future discomfort can merely add to your stress, because you in effect have to go through the stress at least twice. This may be why most of us don't really want to know when or how we are going to die. If it is unavoidable and it isn't pleasant, some experiences are better off taking us by surprise, huh?

899 The Day After Tomorrow: What Global Warming Brings

Message no. 899[Branch from no. 867] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:03pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Thanks for sharing your fears and nightmares and the uncomfortable truths of disasters in this excellent summary Daniela! Sorry to hear the chapter brought back bad memories! I imagine you would not enjoy movies like "The Day After Tomorrow" where floods and tidal waves cause havoc!

I am indeed sorry to hear about the asbestos problem you are now facing at home, and about the radiation induced problem affecting your boyfriend's relatives. It does get discouraging, doesn't it? My only way of dealing with these things is to try to learn as much as possible about potential threats, to try and prepare as much as possible so that problems don't turn into disasters (I do this by asking "what is it that would really make the situation bad -- is there a way to keep having food, clean water, shelter, light, warmth and the ability to dispose of sewage if the city breaks down... can I prepare for this...?).

I also thank God that we live on a planet like the Earth that has a magnetosphere and an ozone shield to keep us relatively well protected from meteors and cosmic radiation, and is filled with ecologies of diverse life forms who give us air to breathe and purify the water and decompose our wastes, making them fertilizer. It could be much worse, and we are so lucky, really! Imagine if we had to rely on our machines and technology to keep us safe and alive! Then every time there was a breakdown we would have a real disaster!

I worry mostly for those brave people who will live off the earth and for those who will try to survive on the earth after the ecosystem has collapsed. We have grown accustomed to being subsidized by a really gentle and benign planet that has always taken care of our needs so that we can consider an occasional storm or tidal wave "a disaster". There isn't another place as peaceful as the Earth in the entire solar system, and there hasn't been a time in the earth's history when things were so good (imagine living during one of the many ice ages!).

We shall see what global warming brings...

898 The Value of Speculative Fiction

Message no. 898[Branch from no. 847] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:38pm Subject: Re: Pat Friedrichs Relational summary

Nice blend of personal and planetary perspectives Pat. My wife and I are also "downgading" our living space -- moving next month from a spacious three bedroom apartment in the expatriot suburb of Maadi into a refurbished tiny two bedroom apartment in the slum area of Darb El Ahmar where our work is. Since the rent is 7 times lower than what we pay here we think it is worth it, even though it means "going native" and leaving the relatively uncrowded streets of the foreigners area to cope with the stresses of dense Egyptian life. The advantage is that we won't have to ride on the crowded metro or in traffic to get to work -- that means much less stress. And the beautiful Al-Azhar park is 5 minutes away -- the first park built in Cairo in a hundred years. We decided that the illusion of living a good life in the foreign community is shattered by the high prices and the loss in time and comfort getting in and out of the inner city. Also, since two buildings are being built next to ours, there is constant construction noise and noise from delivery trucks at 2 am that wake us up.

At some point you have to think, "Am I really getting what I pay for, or am I just getting the illusion?" While very few foreigners move into the Egyptian slum areas, we are fortunate to find a place that we can afford that will probably give us a higher quality life than in the so called ritzy areas. No doubt in a few years others will discover these little pockets and the prices will go up -- this always happens. But for now we think we are making the right decision, even though it cost us 1,350 dollars to have the interior of the little apartment refurbished.

As for travelling to other planets, I am reading two collections of short stories that I highly highly recommend to all of you:

The first is Beyond Flesh, which speaks to your reflections on crowding in cyberspace,

and the second is "The River of Time" by David Brin http://www.davidbrin.com/storycollections.html#river

Sometimes the best way to approach an issue, such as personal space and territoriality, is to test your theories by taking them to their logical conclusion. This is the value of speculative fiction!

897 Ecological Footprint Calculators

Message no. 897[Branch from no. 896] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:25pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Interestingly, by using the calculator at http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi I find that the English site saying I emit 7.9 Tonnes of CO2 a year is equivalent to 7900 kg; the Japanese website says I put out about 8100 kg per year, so that is close.

Still, the assumptions of the models are quite quite different...

Remember to do conversions if you are using different units!

896 Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Message no. 896[Branch from no. 895] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:20pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

An addendum:

If you click on the attached photographs you will see that one website suggested it would take 2.2 earth's to support people like me, while the more detailed analysis suggested it would take 6.8 earths! That is a big difference, and shows you how the models differ. In the first model, the assumption was that I lived in England (they didn't give any alternative). In the second I got to pick my country and I picked Cairo. So already the models are different. Relative to an Egyptian I use an enormous amount of space and resources. For consistency, I should have picked England for both, I suppose. Try it different ways, and always RECORD WHAT YOU DID. That way we can look for explanations for the results!

You will notice that my CO2 output is huge too, even though I only checked watching TV for two hours a day and put my car use (which is taxis in Cairo) at 5 km a day, with an average of 5 km per liter (I did this based on the idea that there are approximately 4 liters in a gallon of gas, and I figured the taxis here aren't very efficient, maybe getting 15 miles to the gallon. 20 miles is about 32 kilometers. 15 miles is 24 km. So a car getting 15 miles to the gallon would equal a car getting 24 kilometers every 4 liters or so, so that would be about 6 km per liter. So I put down 5.

The carbon calculator is for Japanese. For some reason it is easy to find ecological footprint calculators for Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, but very hard to find them for the U.S.!!

Isn't that interesting!!

Have fun with all this and see what you come up with.

A good web based conversion calculator is here: http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi

Okay, since I know it will take between 2.2 and 6.8 planets to support people like me, I'm going to go look through my telescope and see if there are any out there besides Mars we can terraform. Patricia already has Mars, but maybe we can negotiate a real estate deal... :)

895 Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Message no. 895[Branch from no. 893] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 12:52pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Thanks for asking Pat!

1) First, read this:

http://www.gdrc.org/uem/footprints/index.html

You can click on many of the documents and reports and calculators to get a really good overview of the ecological footprint approach.

2) Then, take this brief quiz (around 3 minutes) and write down the results from the simple calculator. Report to us how many "earths" it would take to survive if all of us lived like you:

http://www.bestfootforward.com/carbonlife.htm

3) Next, fill in this survey and write down the results (takes 5 -10 minutes). See how they compare with what you got from the simpler calculator above. How many earth's will it take according to them?

http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp#

4) Finally, if you have a windows based machine, see if you can download and use this ecological footprint calculator (try the version that includes Java VM)

See what it comes up with and compare.

5) Now, calculate your CARBON footprint from electronic appliances from this calculator and write down the results. It is one thing to know how many earth's we would need to accomodate a population of clones of you, it is another to know just how much you are contributing to global warming.

http://www.gdrc.org/uem/co2-cal/co2-calculator.html

6) Read the following information on ecological footprint methodology.

http://www.rprogress.org/newprojects/ecolFoot/faq/index.shtml#housing1

7) Then do a web search for another web based ecological footprint or carbon footprint calculator that I haven't listed and try it out. The Australians and the New Zealanders and the British have great calculators you can try (don't worry that you aren't living there!) Compare the results you get.

8) Share all the results and discoveries with the rest of us in posts.

You should see that each calculator gives different results because they use different ASSUMPTIONS about how our behavior affects our environment and vice versa.

To do good science we need REPLICABILITY and REPEATABILITY and we need to be able to make comparisons. There is no one TRUE value, so we have to estimate.

Step one of the final project is to get as accurate an estimate of your ecological footprint (including carbon footprint) as possible. This can only be done by trying out as many different calculators as possible and then taking the AVERAGE of all the values you get.

As usual we start with our rule of threes -- to get reliable results we need to repeat the experiment at least three times. The more times you repeat the experiment, the better the results.

Once we know how many earth's you need, living as you are now living, and how much carbon you produce, we can go on to part two of the assignment, which is to survey at least 10 of your friends, relatives and acquaintainces. Our survey, however, will include other information not found in the carbon and ecological footprint calculator, such as income and awareness of environmental problems. We will seek to correlate the behaviors that are asked about on the ecological and carbon footprint calculators with variables such as wealth, housing situation, education, and awareness of environmental issues. This way we can see IF ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR in any predictable way.

Once we have done that, we will have reached the end of this introduction to the field of Environmental Psychology, for we will have done real statistical science, proving or disproving the hypothesis that there is a correlation between environment and psychology.

Neat, huh?

So for this week, let's see how your ecological and carbon footprints measure up!

P.S. I'll be in the Sinai desert for the next three days, so I will give detailed instructions on the survey part of this over the weekend.

The Professor

889 The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Message no. 889 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:18pm Subject: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Hi guys,

Thanks for your patience with me as I construct our final project! As some of you have pointed out, our chapter options are dwindling, and by now we should all have done a relational summary for each of the 14 chapters in the book, and created a Midterm Eutopia.

The final project should reflect what we've learned through this process, and it should also give us a first attempt at doing some real environmental psychology science.

Science, as you know, is about testing hypotheses through empirical research. That means we try to prove things by gathering data.

If you recall our early chapters, because there are ethical issues involved in conducting experiments on human beings, we tend to use surveys to get information from people.

What I propose for the final project is the following assignment, following the message in Chapter 14, broken into two steps:

Assignment Title: Getting into Hot Water to Get us Out of Hot Water!

Synopsis: Global Warming is considered the greatest environmental threat facing humanity today, forcing behavioral choices upon us that our parents and grandparents generations gave little thought too. Whether we choose to change our personal lifestyle earlier or later , every one of us will be forced to change at some point. This assignment helps us investigate how we can begin to take personal steps out of Global Warming's threat by exploring our ecological footprint, what it takes to reduce that footprint and how we compare with our friends and neighbors.

Part I: Calculate your ecological footprint using the website calculators presented earlier in the course (I will refresh them for you soon). Figure out which part of your consumption pattern contributes the most to global warming.

Part II: Send a survey to at least ten of your friends, family or colleagues (which I will help you prepare) that will help you to get data on their average energy consumption and their willingness to change some of their behavioral patterns.

We will then pool the data and see what trends emerge, and see how close we are to the kind of change our eutopias demand!

In the next couple of days I will send you a copy of a survey I have prepared looking at home energy use for the largest producer of greenhouse houses you produce: the energy required to heat water. Then you can add your own questions to that survey format and throw it back to us. Once we have agreed on all the questions we want in the survey, we will each send it out to the people we know and hope to get at least 10 responses each.

I will clarify more in the next couple of days. For now -- get on the web and start calculating your ecological footprint!

Cool?

Looking forward to doing some science with you all !

Professor T

877 884 887 888 Chapter 10; The City: Relational Summaries

Message no. 877[Branch from no. 839] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 11:01am Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Wonderfully creative approach to writing a summary of the City -- thanks for the links, the pictures , the film references , the song lyrics and the discussion of "poetry". Hope you had as much fun creating this colorful interactive summary as I did reading it!

Message no. 884[Branch from no. 728] Posted by DAWN WRIGHT (dparker3) on Friday, April 27, 2007 3:31pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Chapter 10 The City Relational Summary

"Say we do develop ways to survive on Mars, aren't we going to create problems there like we did on earth? Are we creating a band-aid effect without actually fixing the original problem. It's kind of like drugs, they treat the symptoms, not the cause."

Message no. 887[Branch from no. 881] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:49pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

My wife and I really enjoyed the film "The Pursuit of Happyness" with Will Smith -- based on a true story. It shows the value of not judging somebody who is homeless and giving people a chance to develop their fullest potential. Thanks for your enlightening points -- you are right, chance plays a huge element. In the book "Critical Mass, How one thing leads to another" by Philip Ball he points out that despite the faith economists put in economic models chance seems to play the biggest role in whether or not people or firms succeed or fail.

Message no. 888[Branch from no. 879] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:02pm Subject: Re: Adrienne Chapter 9

Adrienne, that was great of you to bring up the Palestinian refugee camps -- my wife and I did a tour of refugee camps in Palestine last summer, and I had toured several times in years previous, and they are as you describe. Most of America has very little concept of the misery the Palestinians have to endure every day, so it was great to have you relate their situation to this chapter! Shukran!

My memories of Jones Beach are a little different from yours -- in high school we would drive out there after midnight on a winters night, park in front of the empty beach and put on pink floyd tapes and watch the sun rise. For us it was an environment of solitude to "get away from it all". The difference in our Jones Beach experiences reminds me of something Bill Mollison said in his book on Permaculture "sometimes the best thing to do when you see a crowd going in one direction is to go exactly opposite". I often wonder, though, if, as the world gets more and more crowded and we still continue to try to avoid crowds, we will find that even winter nights at Jones Beach will be packed like Sardines... will there be any such thing as "off peak"? I notice that here in Cairo there is rarely any time that the streets aren't crowded. The same is true of public buses in Los Angeles -- even at 2 in the morning on the Wilshire Line you can't get a seat, and often can't even get on the bus.

This is known as "latent capacity" in Urban Planning circles, and it explains why it is useless to build more freeways to try and solve the traffic problem -- the more roads you build the quicker they fill.

876 The human element of caring: Seeing the homeless as just like us

Message no. 876[Branch from no. 858] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:59am Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

Hi Varshawn,

I really appreciated your empathetic approach to the issue of homelessness and for emphasizing the difficulties people in the city face that we may never know. I find many people far too critical of the homeless, always blaming the victim or tossing it off as, "well, they are usually drug addicts or drunks" as if that justifies their condition, instead of empathizing with the history that might have produced such despair. I am also an emotional person and my heart goes out to every suffering person as if they were me. The Paul McCartney song "Well it could happen to you..." runs through my brain all the time, and the haunting adage "many of us are just one paycheck away from being homeless." Fortunes are made and lost, and often it is sheer luck or chance that we got through the scrapes we did and are comfortable.

Thanks for bringing that very human element of caring and being an advocated of those less fortunate into your analysis!

875 RATE

Message no. 875[Branch from no. 837] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:52am Subject: RATE

Dawn you have once again introduced some very very interested heuristic concepts into the discussion. The most valuable of them, in my view, is your recognition of the concept of RATE. As you point out, it matters very very much HOW FAST or HOW SLOW we are able to proceed with certain processes. When you ask, "How fast can we expect to recycle waste? How fast will plants and animals grow to feed the swarms?" you are hitting upon the most important issue in environmental science -- obviously if we had infinite time our wastes would degrade to safe levels, and our resources would regenerate. The problem with overpopulation is primarily a rate problem -- relative to the speed at which biological and geological processes can occur, we are overburdening the ecosystem and our own nervous systems. Whether the waste is physical or the burden is emotional, overpopulation interferes with our ability to process the negative stimuli and find balance again.

If we think "rate or reaction" everytime we percieve a problem, and try to figure out how to solve the problem within the time and energy budget constraints imposed on us, we may see solutions more clearly.

Thanks for bringing the concept of rate into all of this!

874 Lost in a Sea of Information

Message no. 874[Branch from no. 872] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:22am Subject: Lost in a sea of information

Dawn you are quite right -- with the explosion of information it becomes impossible for even the most highly ambitious and educated person to stay abreast of the news and filter out what is true from what is sheer propaganda and disinformation. It becomes a war of influence, and the richest companies and their "spin doctors" can influence public opinion through a barrage of confusing messages, half truths and even outright lies. One only has to watch the X-files to see how this can be done effectively. The truth is out there, but as you point out, it is hard for us to discover what it is, even if we can read.

For this reason I put my faith in the scientific method and empirical verification of sound theory. People can tell me certain things don't work or do work and I check with theory and experience to see if the claims are accurate. You are right, it is so much about all of us reading, it is knowing how to decipher the facts and figure out whether we are getting a snow job or not. We must teach and learn "critical thinking" and "media literacy".

Have you ever seen the film "Wag the Dog" with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman? It is about how the media can be used to spin the truth. Take a look at it -- you will enjoy it! (You might also like the film Network with Faye Dunaway, where people get fed up with television and say "I'm sick and tired of the lies and I'm not going to take it anymore.")

873 The Language of Space

Message no. 873[Branch from no. 845] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 4:55pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ..Varshawn

Glad this chapter caught your attention Varshawn, and thanks for the insights-- you are quite right in your analysis of archetecural determinism, and as you may have figured out, I am a big believer in it. The best description of the phenomena I have read is in the chapter on "The Language of Space" in the book "Critical Mass" by Philip Ball. He says, in response to the idea that designers don't often design with the occupants comfort in mind, "there is more to all this than poor planning. Urban design... is political. "The nineteenth century dreams of a social order, in which the benefits of capitalism are retained through the creation of a quiescent working class, are dreamed in a strongly spatial form." IN other words, urban communities were redesigned in the Victorian age to reproduce and reinforce social hierarchies... Urbanization tended to increase and diversify people's interactions up until the time when new templates for planning were introduced during the Industrial REvolution. Whether consciously or not, these templates reduced social encounters and fragmented communities, discouraging collective activity and keeping people passive under an imposed authority. High-rise blocks, for example, pack living spaces together densely while reducing the frequency of encounters that generate a sense of social solidarity. "It is wrong to say that high-rise estates are unsuccessful... for their unmanifest purposes of community reduction they are extremely successful." (page 140)

This is the same argument I used when I was a teacher in the ghetto. The newspapers would say "our schools are failing". I would say, "Our schools are succeeding in doing what they were really designed to do -- to keep the "working class" poorly educated so they will consume without thinking, work at jobs that nobody likes without questioning the futility and waste of their human genius and prescious time making somebody else rich, and fight wars they barely understand without questioning the leadership." In doing this our public school are supremely successful.

Notice that most public schools in the inner city are surrounded by barbed wire fence, and have security guards like a jail. Is this to keep people out or to lock people in? Another example of architectural determinism?

I'd love to hear you ideas about this!

Good summary!

T

868 Pursuing Perfection

Message no. 868[Branch from no. 862] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:55am Subject: Pursuing perfection

Well said, Michelle. As you state, since the makers of technology are not perfect, it would be impossible for the product to be perfect. Now we get to a curious theological question: If the technology (i.e., the world of useful objects or "tools") is imperfect because the "maker" (humanity) is imperfect, is humanity thus imperfect because OUR maker (God) is imperfect?

The thought upsets us, because we are taught to think of God as perfect. We then assume that God's creation must be perfect. Many so-called environmentalists claim we should "go back to nature" because they think that "nature" is perfect becuase it was created by a perfect God. This would imply that only we humans are flawed and imperfect (which then begs the question of why God would create only one "mistake", and why He would make a mistake at all if He is "perfect". We talk about original sin as a mistake of Adam and Eve, which got them thrown out of the "perfect" eutopia of Eden -- after which they came into the "imperfect" world of earthly nature. From the perspective of Genesis, then, the earth is not perfect. So it would seem that God created imperfect people and an imperfect world of plants and animals and geology for them to struggle through their imperfections.

A scientific analysis of "nature" reveals many imperfections, despite the beauty with which ecological systems work. It turns out that STATISTICALLY SPEAKING ONLY can we say that nature works very well -- it has fostered life on this lonely little planet and sustained it for 3.5 billion years, which is amazing, but it could be wiped out or driven into extinction at any moment by many forces -- asteroids, meteors, population explosions of pests or predators or parasites or diseases, wars, weapons, climate change etc. The only perfect paradise exists in our imaginations and in Heaven.

The IDEA of perfection, in my belief, comes from a Perfect God whose perfection is manifesting only at the scale of the entire universe, where every equation balances out in perfect symmetry. But in local pockets of the universe, like our galaxy, the equations are unbalanced. There are localities filled with life and localities filled with emptiness. There are hot spots and cold spots. There are places of joy and places of sorrow. Add them all together and you get the perfect sum: A UNI-VERSE -- a "single story" (by definition, UNI - one, VERSE - story).

With our minds we can perceive the IDEA of perfection and struggle to realize it on earth (eutopia). But we must know from the beginning that it is unacheiveable. AT BEST we can create moments in time and history in certain places (such as you have been describing in your assignments) that feel "perfect" on a local level. But we can't create perfection for everyone and everything and for all time. Not with the tiny corner of the universe we inhabit and its fragmented bits of matter and energy. No, perfection is not acheivable here on this smallish worldly scale. The idea belongs only to God, and can only be manifested on an even smaller personal scale -- you build your own eutopia for as long as you can maintain it. When you vanish, the ebb and flow of matter and energy will consume it and subsume it and recycle all its parts and another being will have to come and struggle to rebuild our monuments to the idea of perfection.

That is how I see it.

For support of this idea, I encourage you to read the astrophysics/philosophy book "The Life of the Cosmos" by physicist Lee Smolin (see here for quotes: http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Lee-Smolin.htm)

866 I Profess: Etymology and linguistics and the war of words...

Message no. 866[Branch from no. 857] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:23am Subject:

Thanks Pat! As a professor I try to remain clear and aware of what the rights and obligations of our profession is. To do that I try to return to the ROOT of the words we use to define ourselves and our behaviors, because language is what separates us from the other animals, and in language we have the seeds of civilization.

PROFESSOR and PROFESSION both come from the word "TO PROFESS". Here is a string of definitions for the word:

pro·fess (pr-fs, pr-) v. pro·fessed, pro·fess·ing, pro·fess·es v.tr. 1. To affirm openly; declare or claim: "a physics major [who] professes to be a stickler when it comes to data" Gina Maranto. 2. To make a pretense of; pretend: "top officials who were deeply involved with the arms sales but later professed ignorance of them" David Johnston. 3. a. To practice as a profession or claim knowledge of: profess medicine. b. To teach (a subject) as a professor: profess literature. 4. To affirm belief in: profess Catholicism. 5. To receive into a religious order or congregation. v.intr. 1. To make an open affirmation. 2. To take the vows of a religious order or congregation.

Note that definition 1 in both the transitive and intransitive verb categories equate professing with affirming openly, which means stating your convictions or beliefs. Definition three says "claiming knowledge" before "teaching". Only definition 2 is negative: "to pretend".

My fear is that many so called professors and professions involve people who are mere pretenders. I believe that we have an obligation to live up to our claims to knowledge. What is more, I think that, given the origins of universities as quasi-mystical places where the professors were usually priests who had "professed" vows to a congregation (v intr definition 2), we also carry the historical burden of having to reveal TRUTH through our "professions".

We "profess" to care, we "profess" to give support, so we are obligated to do so, in my view. Otherwise we can not claim to be "profess-ors". A professor is someone who professes. If we don't live up to our professions (which are like "confessions" -- think CONFESS, CONFESSOR, CONFESSION) than we are liars.

What is interesting to me is that by "professing" we create mental environments and draw cognitive maps for students who then must decide how to behave in the imaginary world of ideas we have constructed and professed. These environments have profound effects on the psychology of behavior.

I appreciate your constant feedback and support in my efforts to create a healthy and productive learning environment, and hope that all are benefitting from the eutopian construct I am striving to build with you all!

Sincerely,

The Professor

861 Fantasies of Control: The problem with those who want to "master" their environment

Message no. 861[Branch from no. 850] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 23, 2007 6:58pm Subject: Re: weather

Chilling thoughts aren't they? The purpose, if it is true, would be to fulfill fantasies of control, as we were talking about in the posts on technophilia and technophobia. People have wanted to control the weather and natural events since we first mastered the creation and use of fire.

The other night my wife and I watched the German film "Der Untergang" ("The downfall") about Hitler's last days in the bunker in Berlin just before World War II ended. It shows him on his 50th birthday in the bunker and how he and Evan Braun cowardly committed suicide when it was clear Germany would lose the war, rather than face the consequences of their actions, as did the Goebbels (family of his right hand man) who first poisoned their five children (!) not wanting them to live in a world they could not control.

What was clear from the film was that Hitler and his Nazi party cronies were intoxicated with the fantasy of control. The wanted a world of harsh discipline and Hitler said, as the German civilians were being slaughtered by the Russian army when some of his generals said "we must surrender, our people are all dying" -- "they don't deserve any better. If they can't survive, they are weak and deserve to die. It is the law of the jungle. If our dream of controlling the world can not be fulfilled then we are worthless." Hitler saw the German people (and people everywhere else) as mere pawns on his chessboard. It didn't matter to him how many of his own "civilians" died for him to express his vision.

Hitler was obsessed by control, and his party put the idea of controlling every aspect of life on the top of the governments agenda. Unfortunately this power lust was not confined to the Nazis, and it infects people in all societies and regimes everywhere. It is as Lord Acton said a century ago, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!"

Power is about control. Have no doubt that in the search for the ultimate weapon of control even rulers in a "democratic" society will consider innocent individuals expendable.

However, we can take heart in the fact that an informed citizenry in a democratic countrycan bring about positive change. As Jefferson said, ""An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.. . . The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe." So knowing about what our corporations and governments are doing is key to bringing eutopia to our earth!

860 Technophilia/Technophobia II

Message no. 860[Branch from no. 849] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 23, 2007 6:41pm Subject: Re: Technophilia/Technophobia II

Yeah, Pat, I know what you mean -- our fear of lack of control got us to invent technologies to help us take control, but since the universe is ultimately not ours to control, when the very things we create to give us the illusion of control fail, they infuriate and frighten us because they thus defy the very purpose we created them for, making us feel more helpless than ever. It is like a betrayal.

The more I study statistical mechanics the more I believe that the "law of large numbers" is on our side (i.e. life persists overall) but that we, as individuals, must learn to give up our fantasies of control and have faith that there is a larger plan that we have the privilege to participate in and should not fight too hard against.

I keep telling myself "we didn't create any of this, and we certainly didn't create ourselves, so why should we think we should be in charge?" Sometimes that helps put things in perspective for me. But it is hard!!

843 Passing Out Violence in our Environment

Message no. 843[Branch from no. 836] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 6:37pm Subject: Re: Keep on truckin'!

Adrienne, your emotions about the Virginia Tech shooting really affected me, making me think about how I fled Los Angeles for years ago when two men tried to shoot me and that I came to Egypt partially to find a relatively safe place with few drugs or alcohol or guns where I could continue my work among the poor without feeling threatened everyday. Of course, as we see, obviously it isn't only in the poor communities where violence strikes with such constantly (and we can suspect that the resource hoarding and exploitive practices of the rich, and the constant marginalization that people suffer as they try desperately to climb the supposed "ladder of success" and to get social approval foster the conditions for disatisfaction that lead to violence . The violence rampant in America is a systemic illness that spreads for complex reasons. At least here in Egypt it can seem a far off bad dream.

Now that you have me thinking of how we might end violence and suffering I thought I might share with you an email I wrote to Janita, who is back on line with us after suffering severe computer problems and being out of the loop for a while. I share it because she asked if she can still "pass" the class, and I think you might all enjoy knowing that I think the whole system of "grades" and "passing" and "failing" is part of the systemic violence that destroys our society. The very notion that somebody can "fail" in the self-initiated effort to learn about the world, or that some outsider can "judge" success or failure in learning, is absurd to me. The idea that we use vocabulary like "pass" -- which conjures up the travel passes issued (rarely!) by Israeli soldiers to Palestinians, or that the Nazi's issued to Jews on occasion (while incarcerating the rest) is offensive, don't you think? The issuance of a Pass-port, by nature, suggests somebody is trying to control your movement and your growth. What I love now about visiting my wife's family in Germany, is that the whole EU is now one big country of countries, and we can drive or take the train from Germany to Belgium, to France, to Spain, to Italy without ever having to show a passport! It is beautiful!

What right do we have to "Pass" somebody, as if we were the border guard standing between college and freedom to pursue happiness? Is my job to examine your documents and decide who gets to "pass" through the gate into "the real world" of opportunity and who has to "stay behind" and slavishly work for minimum wage or in a job they hate?

Yick.

This attitude of passing and failing people seems to me to lie somewhere near the root of the world's problems with violence and dissatisfaction and hatred and intolerance. Every gang kid in L.A. I taught who had history with violence also had a history with someone "failing" him. Every gang kid I succeeded with grew in confidence because we abolished the very concept of "passing and failing" and focussed only on self-awareness and growth. It taught me a powerful lesson: screw the grades and focus on building relationships and consensus and community!

So here is what I wrote to Janita (hope you don't mind me repeating it for the class -- our eutopian community -- Janita! They are your support group, and the real audience for your work, not me!)

Hi Janita -- glad to know you are alive and kickin'!!

Here is my philosophy of life as it relates to your situation: we each have an obligation to learn everything we can about the operation of the world and focus our efforts on using that knowledge to "paying it forward" and making the world a better place for our children and grandchildren. I don't care much for institutions and man-made rules that get in the way of those pursuits so I reward people when I have institutional backing for making the effort to improve their surroundings for those who come later.

The only deadlines that concern me are the ones currently threatening humanity -- global warming, nuclear energy and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, poverty and suffering, extinction of God's creation, cruelty and abuse to those who cannot fend for themselves... you know what I'm talking about. The climate change clock is ticking, as I said in a video I posted to our class, and the fuse on certain social time bombs are growing short. I believe we have obligations to do as much as we can as quickly as possible to solve world problems and end suffering.

When you share with us the way that you have been internalizing the information you've been learning from reading the text, from exploring outside and web reading, and from processing all that with your own experiences and insights, your love of life and your hopes, dreams and ambitions, and when you integrate that into a presentation of how you would use that information to make the world a better place (your eutopia!), I consider that you have fulfilled your obligations to the rest of us and our planet. So I reward that.

The short answer is, "YES", of course you can still pass at this point! There is enough "punishment" in the world for us hard working souls who were not advantaged with the wealth stolen from the many to make the few rich. I'm not going to penalize anybody because of the digital divide -- I'm lucky enough here in Egypt that I was able to somewhat repair my computer power supply or I wouldn't be on line tonight! I know where you are coming from!

The important thing is that you are doing the work, and we all look forward to your posts when you upload it. Just make sure you get everything to us with sufficient time for me and others to read it all and respond -- part of the course grade is about interaction!! I'm sure the others will welcome your return to "THE GREAT CONVERSATION".

So don't ever get discouraged!

Welcome back to our eutopia!

T

834 Cooperative Males, Competitive Females?

Message no. 834[Branch from no. 821] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:36pm Subject: Re: relational summary

I agree with you from my own experience Michelle -- I find that crowds of males can be very cooperative and at times I am more worried about being in a crowd of women. It depends on the goal the men are pursuing. Men are socialized to be cooperative in packs for hunting and for waging war or playing group sports. So, if we think we are part of the same tribe, crowds can make us more helpful. I have read that women are less prone to bond in crowds because over evolutionary time they had to compete for access to males who had control over resources, whereas men had to cooperate in order to go out and get the resources. The equation completely changes though, once the competition is over a woman. Once this happens men will destroy each other!! Isn't that what Shakespeare's Othello is all about? :)

833 Man Eating Bugs

Message no. 833[Branch from no. 832] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:31pm Subject: Man Eating Bugs

Just in case you thought I was crazy -- some cookbooks you might consider!

832 Keeping your personal space personal

Message no. 832[Branch from no. 823] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:28pm Subject: Re: I chose this because

I have a particular and peculiar way of getting rid of people if they pester me when I want to be alone -- I drag them into my vision of eutopia so enthusiastically that they have no choice but to either engage me in the thing that I am obsessed about or get as far away as possible as quickly as possible! What I mean is that rather than them hijacking my mind, I try to hijack theirs!

A good example that I have done many times: At home in L.A. years ago telephone salespeople from AT and T would call up to ask me if I wanted to switch my service. Immediately I would say, "does your company donate money to social or environmental causes like Working Assets does?" They would say, "excuse me, sir"? And I would launch into a tirade about corporate responsibility and the need for any company to give back to the community and would state that if they would like I could send them brochures and examples and perhaps they could switch THEIR telephone provider.

One time a street preacher started accosting me about how we were all sinners and how I should repent and be saved. I immediately jumped into a conversation about why, if he were saved, he was so worried about the rest of us and why he was screaming and yelling and getting mad. I said, "shouldn't we be good role models for what it means to be saved? Why don't we pray together." And you know what? We did!

Other times, like on airplanes, when I don't want to talk, and I'm reading a book and somebody starts talking to me for their own sake of just talking, I turn the conversation to the book I'm reading and start showing them passages that really interest me. Sometimes (but rarely) they get into it, and we have a great conversation. Most times they feel overwhelmed (as you can imagine, now that you know me!) and they quickly get absorbed in something else and want to avoid bothering me again.

It is about defending your personal space in a nonthreatening way, I think. If you feel you are being invaded, use the Akido technique in martial arts and use the agressors energy against them. It is, after all, their energy, not yours. You just want to be left alone.

So what I normally do I don't consider a bad thing, it is a defensive posture, maintaining your personal space by KEEPING IT YOURS.

This may not work so well for women, as men may take it as a come on if a woman responds to the provocation, but then again, many men are intimidated easily and will back down if the woman holds her own ground with what is on her mind and doesn't let the man dominate the conversation. Usually the man will retreat.

On one occasion this led to an interesting result: Walking through a forest in Germany years ago, I started talking to a woman( a friend of a friend whom I did not know) who was in a contemplative mood and thus in no mood to talk. Rather than be rude or tell me she didn't want to talk, she used the presence of an inchworm hanging from a tree to immediately started talking about her fascination with eating insects. She later told me that she did this often to men to get them to think she was weird and leave her alone, but I didn't know that at the time. So I responded by telling her about my various trips to places in Borneo, China and Mexico where insects are on the menu and then invited her, if she ever came to Los Angeles, to have dinner with me at a great Thai restuarant where they serve delicious fried water bugs and crickets.

At this point she was intrigued and we talked for hours. We ended up dating for a year and she did, in fact, come to L.A. several times where we went to that Thai restaurant and to a great Mexican restaurant for chapulines con queso (grasshoppers and cheese).

So you never know what will happen if you defend your personal space....!

:)

831 Chapter 7 Volcanoes and other "natural" disasters

Message no. 831[Branch from no. 828] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:09pm Subject: Re: Pat Friedrichs chapter7 Relational summary

Thanks for the link to one of my favorite websites, http://space.com, the sister website to http://livescience.com. After reading the article on vulcanism on mars, though, I have to say I wouldn't worry too much about volcanic activity raining on your eutopian parade -- seems the youngest activity is at least a million years ago, and more likely 3 to 10 million, and if it is active it would be "one every 10,000 years or so". Given that people still build houses around Mt. St. Helens (which erupted in 1980, remember?) I shouldn't worry about Mars volcanoes! Might rather worry about Volcanoes in Los Angeles (Have you seen the Tommy Lee Jones film, "Volcano" about just that? Great flick, which I think about every time I pass the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Blvd on my way to UCLA from the L.A. Eco Village!

Have you seen Dante's Peak, with Pierce Brosnan?

That is another fun "volcano destroys real estate on the west coast so don't build here" movie!

Speaking of carbon dioxide, did you know that navy divers use "oxygen rebreathers" or CO2 scrubbers that chemically bind with and remove CO2 from the air we breathe? They will be no doubt necessary on Mars. Usually what happens is that we pass out from a surfeit (too much) CO2 before we run out of oxygen. A Co2 scrubber removes the CO2 we breathe out so we can go on breathing the air until all the oxygen is gone. Here is a website that you might get some good facts from your Mars colony from:

http://www.frogdiver.com/scrubber.html

As ever, I enjoyed your post!

830 Ecological Buffers and Ecological Services

Message no. 830[Branch from no. 819] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 5:54pm Subject: Re: chapter 7 Adrienne

I was under the impression that the major damage was not done by Katrina itself but by the levee bursting, which was the effect of very poor planning and criminal negligence on the part of politicians. Years ago, in 1991 I think it was, I was presenting at a National Science Teacher onference in Puerto Rico and we visited what was left of the El Yunque rainforest. From the top of the hill we could see down to the ocean -- where once there had been forest and then mangrove to the waters edge there was instead development and farmland. Sadly we could see that Hurricane Hugo had devastated much of the coastline and inland areas. Our guides told us "in the past hurricanes would hit Puerto Rico, but the reefs and mangroves and forest would soften the impact so we didn't really worry too much. Now with all the deforestation there is no longer any ECOLOGICAL BUFFER to soften the blows. So every hurricane is a disaster, leading to erosion, floods, landslides and other chaos."

We then scuba dived on what was left of the reef. It was all but dead because the silt and sand from the runoff and landslides had buried it.

That was the first time I had heard the concept of "ecological buffering". Now I know how important it is in land use planning. Did you know that most floods can be completely prevented by simply keeping the tops of mountains and hills forested? It is part of watershed management. The tree cover and root systems keep the water in place and keep its flow rate slow. We call these ECOLOGICAL SERVICES.

It is as though nature were a service provider, taking care of our needs for very little money. What economists are doing now is trying to convince the public to pay attention to the dollar value of ECOLOGICAL SERVICES. This way, if a company wants to, say, remove a forest, they have to pay the cost of what that forest provides in terms of flood protection. It turns out to be cheaper to keep the forest.

I think that sometime this century enough people will understand the value of ecological services and include them in planning. This will probably happen, unfortunately, after most have been destroyed and had to be rebuilt at full cost. Once we have a spreadsheet of the costs of reforesting an area to prevent floods, and compare it to the cost of building flood control channels, we will see that Frederick Law Olmsted and his son were right in their crusades to plan our riparian development (development around bodies of water) better!

I certainly don't think disasters are inevitable!

And think of this for fun: If we invest in solar heating and electric infrastructure now, while we have surplus energy in the form of oil to make capital investments in equipment and building, do you think even the next ice age would be disastrous, given that even on the coldest days solar heating and electricity work great?

Optimistic I remain!

T

829 Keep on Truckin': Designing Environments we Desire

Message no. 829[Branch from no. 822] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 5:39pm Subject: Keep on truckin'!

You keep on adding to it and I'll keep visiting! That's the spirit -- the true eutopian spirit -- eutopia is ALWAYS a work in progress. Like any attempt at perfection -- which, as you've pointed out, is an impossible state in this world -- we never truly get there but the striving keeps us alive and fulfilled. What I like best about visiting the eutopian experiments you guys create is they always show me what humanity wants most and what we feel is impeding us from getting there. The more I learn, the more I see that it is NOT impossible, and the more hopeful I get, because we all seem to want the same things -- just in different measures and at different times. This means that we can DESIGN environments that give us all that we desire if we are clever enough about it, don't you think?

I think that these days, with virtual reality and a sophisticated understanding of psychology, we can even satisfy the people who seem to crave power and violence or have sadistic streaks and "cure" them of their ability to inflict harm on others or on our environments.

I like your message of finding peace on earth -- though I think a perfect eutopia is impossible, I think the goal of peace is actually achievable. I think we will always have some measure of local violence (which can be prevented from getting out of hand by good design and enforcement) but I think that larger regional or global conflicts can be eliminated once the profit motive and reward system for weapons manufacture and sale and use is gone.

I read yesterday that Syria is having secret talks with Israel and they may be close to a peace agreement. Wouldn't that be nice?

Anyway, please do keep adding and adding, and I'll keep visiting and visiting, as, I'm sure, will many many others!

The prof.

817 Using My Space for the Midterm

Message no. 817[Branch from no. 772] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 5:14pm Subject: Re: Midterm-Daniela Vitiello

Hi Daniela!

I have posted kudos and a two thumbs up reaction to your wonderful use of myspace to inform us about "your place", your eutopia, as a reply to your blog on your blog. Let me know if it came through!

Well done!!

Sincerely,

Professor Culhane

812 Weather in a Sate of Fear

Message no. 812[Branch from no. 799] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:36pm Subject: Re: weather

I am no geophysicist, but after I read Michael Chrichton's poorly written thriller "State of Fear" (which is the worst attempt to convince the public that global warming isn't real) I started wondering if people could trigger earthquakes and tsunami's themselves, using some powerful technology. A little websearching revealed that rather than fictional "envirowackos" (as in Chrichton's book) trying to do this, our government has been working on such weapons for the past 40 years. The one that gets the most attention these days is the HAARP project (the weapon is located up in Alaska I think -- sorry Dawn!)

When we were in Italy in 2005 on a Mercy College Faculty trip around the time of the big Tsunami, one of the professors in the Psych department said to me as we crossed the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence -- "some people believe the tsunami was caused by a test of the HAARP weapon." I didn't know what he meant at the time, but I remembered it after I read "State of Fear" and now I am curious.

Here is a website that talks about it, and the book "Angels Don't Play this HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology"

http://www.haarp.net/

Which one of you wrote that post many weeks ago talking about TESLA? Another connection to that discussion and to our discussion of technology and disaster?

Hmmmm...

A Tale of Two Monitors: Getting an external monitor to work with Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro

Having two monitors is a must for the kind of data visualization we are working on in this class.

If you are doing urban and environmental planning, creating architecture and landscapes in Google Sketchup, working with Google Earth and Google Maps, doing video editing, working with photoshop and other multi-media programs, or creating a thesis or other professional looking document using MikTeX, you really want to have at least two screens at your disposal.

For example, using Final Cut Pro or other video production software, or using DVD Studio Pro, you want to have one screen displaying your sequences and timelines and bins, and have another screen for showing your video. Similarly, when writing your dissertation using MikTeX or LaTeX, you want to have one screen available for writing your text and markup language codes, and another for viewing the compiled document as it will appear.

Much of the work we do in this "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior"class involves exploring virtual environments on a computer screen. A computer screen? Let's make that "several computer screens". What you really need to explore and create environments on a computer is more "Lebensraum" --more room to live, work and play. Just as we have a need for increased access to real estate in the real world when we want to explore or create, we have a need for increased real estate to move around in the virtual world. (Would that be "virtual estate"?).

The larger the better.

Since I am still at Ph.D. student, however, I share the student dilemma of having no money. Following Moore's law (roughly paraphrased as "every two years performance doubles and prices halve") I went down to Medion (a wholesale electronics market here in Essen, Germany) and bought a 17" Flat Pro Technology (Flat Screen) monitor for 119 Euro, ignoring the 19" monitor that cost twice as much. The idea is, save the extra 100 Euro and buy the larger better monitor next year, increasing your real estate size to three screens, or, better yet, giving your older second monitor to the needy!

The Medion monitor worked fine with the Mac OSX, but when I rebooted into Windows XP it would start out mirroring the Windows XP bootscreen, showing that it received a signal, and then it would suddenly go black, saying "Kein Signale" (No Signal). I went to this forum to look for a solution:

http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternative-operating-systems/291840/bootcamp-external-monitor-on-macbook-pro/

There I found all sorts of people having the same problems and lots of attempts to work around it. One thing they kept saying was to go to your ATI control panel and try to fix it from there. I couldn't, for the life of me, find any ATI control panel. I tried downloading one from a site and it kept crashing.

For the longest time I have been unable to use an external monitor with my MacBook Pro in Windows XP mode using Bootcamp and it has been driving me nuts. Today, however, it seems that I have solved the problem, and I want to pass the solution on to you if you are facing similar problems.

It seems that ATI finally has posted bootcamp drivers! Go here:

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/mac/bootcamp-xp.html

When you get there, you will see this:

Apple Boot Camp XP Software Graphics Drivers

Download Link	File Size	Version	Date Posted	Package Includes
Display Driver 1 of 2	11.6MB	8.353	May 3, 2007	Display Driver
Catalyst Control Center 2 of 2	9.8MB	8.353	May 3, 2007	Catalyst Control Center

Download both the Display driver and the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) and install them. Then plug in your external monitor, reboot and when you XP is running go to Programs\CatalystControlCenter and click on the CCC program file. The CCC wizard will ask you how you want to configure your monitors and, presto, your external monitor should work!

The next step is configuring your monitors. I use CCC Advanced. I keep my larger external monitor to my right, so monitor 1 is generally the laptop screen, while monitor displays the big movies and things. This is fine for working with programs like Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro and MikTeX and others that let you move the windows around, but it doesn't help for game play. When you start games in full screen mode they tend to play on the primary monitor.

To get around this and make the games appear on the larger external monitor, go into ATI Catalyst Control Center and, in Graphics Settings (left hand tab) click on the Displays Manager. What you want to do is to change the order in the Desktop and Display Setup. You want Desktop 1 (on the left) to be your external monitor and Desktop 2 (on the right) to be your laptop. To do this, first notice the display boxes on the right (blue boxes with numbers 1 and 2 in them on a grey field). Click and drag Display 2 and put it to the left of Display 1. This tells your computer that you are going to want monitor 2 (the non primary monitor where the game WON'T play) to be to the left of the monitor that shows the game (in my case, the laptop is going to be reassigned to Display 2, and the large external monitor is going to be reassigned to Display 1 so I can play my games on the bigger screen).

Now, to reassign monitors, right click on the icon in the Desktop 1 window (the one that shows colored computer monitors in it. You will notice when you hover over it that the cursor changes into a little mouse icon with a grey blinking right mouse button telling you to press that). Select "Swap Displays: Maintain Per-Display Mode Settings". The screens will go all funky black with blocks and lines through it as it adjusts and then it will appear as if your primary monitor is now the external monitor and your extended monitor is the laptop monitor.

Your mouse should move from left to right and right to left as if you were on one big monitor. Now you can keep a document with instructions open on your laptop screen and keep a document you are writing open on your laptop screen while your game plays on the bigger screen to the right. Naturally you can't use your laptop screen while the game is playing, but you can toggle out of the game easily by using the Alt-Tab buttons, and return to your game the same way!

This way you can explore virtual environments in the game and keep returning to your open document to record your insights and how the virtual environments affect the psychology of your behavior!

Hope that helps!

Goodnight, and good luck!

Getting rid of false spyware remover messages

I don't know which is more annoying: trying to drive along the beautiful beaches in Chapters 7 (Highway 17), 8 (Sandtraps), and 9 (Nova Prospekt) of Half Life 2 without getting attacked by the persistent and aggressive antlions that infected the earth after being transported from Xen by the portal storms or trying to do your homework on your PC without being attacked by persistent popup messages telling you your system has been infected and needs YET ANOTHER spyware cleaner!

In the case of Half-Life 2, even going into God mode doesn't restore your tranquility -- the antlions can't kill you anymore, but they still pester you until you go crazy! (BTW - to enter God mode you need to bring up the console and enter cheat mode. Instructions are here: http://cheats.gamespy.com/pc-cheats/half-life/). In the case of using your computer for *serious* work, even having an anti-virus like Avira or programs like "AdAware" "Spyware Blaster", "Spybot - Search and Destroy" don't seem to help. All they do is make trying to fix your computer FEEL like you are playing a video game, searching for and destroying malware as though it was a nest of antlions.

The problem with trying to eradicate malware from your computer is that it can take up every bit as much time as a detailed first-person-shooter, but with none of the cool graphics.

For the past two days my computer hasn't given me much leisure time, let alone peace of mind, as every two minutes or less a false "security message" pops up on my screen telling me that "windows has detected an internet attack attempt" or that "Trojan.W32.Looksky has been detected on your computer". A little red x appears down at on the right on my task bar, and occasionally the entire screen goes horribly red with a message that my security has been compromised. Scary stuff. Forget even trying to get serious real work done -- you can't even play Resident Evil 4 because just as you are about to shoot the infectious parasite that has emerged from the back of your nemesis in the boss battle, a popup parasite telling you your PCs security has been compromised emerges from the background process and kills the game! The metaphorical implications are chilling!

The Parasite Popup takes you to a website that promises a cure. Be warned: IT IS A TRAP!


The "solution" is supposed to be that if I pay attention to these "security alerts" and click on them, whatever "munificent" protector (the great and terrible Oz?) is running behind the curtain will take me to the website of a benign company whose software will "automatically" clean my system of the infection. It will try todownload "cleansurf" or "spyaxe" or some other "helpful" program.

Turns out its a scam! The only thing threatening my computer is the supposed spyware cleaning software company itself! And the more you do battle with the infection by means of their tools, the more infected your system gets. I'll take antlions any day over this nightmare!

So what to do?

For the time being my problem seems solved thanks to a retired IT director who goes by the handle "MFDnNC Distinguished Member" from Piedmont North Carolina (that's the NC) who posts his valuable advice for the rest of us in the big wide world on Tech Support Guy forum:

http://forums.techguy.org/malware-removal-hijackthis-logs/618395-solved-trojan-w32-looksky-do.html

MFDnNC suggested using SDFix.exe. Here are his instructions:

Download http://downloads.andymanchesta.com/R...ools/SDFix.exe and save it to your Desktop.

Double click SDFix.exe and it will extract the files to %systemdrive%
(Drive that contains the Windows Directory, typically C:\SDFix)

Please then reboot your computer in Safe Mode by doing the following :
· Restart your computer
· After hearing your computer beep once during startup, but before the Windows icon appears, tap the F8 key continually;
· Instead of Windows loading as normal, the Advanced Options Menu should appear;
· Select the first option, to run Windows in Safe Mode, then press Enter.
· Choose your usual account.
· Open the extracted SDFix folder and double click RunThis.bat to start the script.
· Type Y to begin the cleanup process.
· It will remove any Trojan Services and Registry Entries that it finds then prompt you to press any key to Reboot.
· Press any Key and it will restart the PC.
· When the PC restarts the Fixtool will run again and complete the removal process then display Finished, press any key to end the script and load your desktop icons.
· Once the desktop icons load the SDFix report will open on screen and also save into the SDFix folder as Report.txt
(Report.txt will also be copied to Clipboard ready for posting back on the forum).
· Finally paste the contents of the Report.txt back on the forum with a new HijackThis log"


I did what he says, and it seems to have worked! Hurrah! Thanks to MFDnNC's advice my computer seems to be malware free at this moment! Still, I'm nervous... will it happen again? How long will this halcyon period last?



I feel like Robert Neville in Richard Matheson's "I am Legend" , "the last man on earth" waiting for night to fall and for the zombie vampires to attack again. For now, the infection is "cured", but my computer still feels a lot like London in Twenty Eight Weeks Later -- someone on the inside (it could be your loving wife!) could be an infected carrier. Oh, she may appear healthy enough, but in her blood the parasite stirs...

We will see how long it is before the plague of popups and security alerts begins again...

For now though, it is back to hunting antlions... (I know what you are thinking: "Get a life!" ... well, at least a half-life!)



(P.S. Other sites that may help you if you have similar problems are: http://www.spywaredb.com/remove-spyaxe/
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-37190-Your-computer-is-infected-Windows-has-detected-spyware-infection.html)

811 Technophilia/Technophobia II

Message no. 811[Branch from no. 810] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:13pm Subject: Re: Technophilia/Technophobia II

Another thought about our love/hate relationship with technology:

Just as I wrote in my reply to Adrienne about "Thirdspace" perspectives (the spatial perspective) there is a technique many of us in sustainable development use to think differently about technology.

First we take the word etymologically by its roots -- "Techne" means "art". By this we (and the Greeks who coined the word) generally mean something that was "manufactured" or created by "man". Interestingly the word "Man" also is found in "Manual" and in the French word "Main" which means "HAND". Thus, technology is anything that involves the hand.

This makes sense: one of the things that separates us (and our primate cousins) from the other animals is the fact that we have hands. Hands enables us to use "tools" which is the other word for "technology". Nowadays we distinguish between "hand tools" (low technology) and "machine tools" (high technology), but all that means is that we have found ways to create tools that can be used to use other tools. There is little difference conceptually between computers and digging sticks. Once an animal starts using a tool it has crossed a threshold into the use of technology.

We primates aren't the only ones to use tools. Besides the famous cases of chimpanzees in the wild creating termite sticks and sponges, we know that crows and other birds use sticks and stones to open things and sea otters use rocks to break open abalone shells.

What is fascinating is when you stop thinking about "tools" as things apart from the body and start seeing the world through these eyes: HANDS ARE TOOLS. HANDS ARE TECHNOLOGY. And so are beaks and claws and teeth and feet.

Once you see the world through this optic your fear of technology goes away I've found (unless you have an equally healthy fear and respect for the naked hand! Do you remember the old commercial for Jinzu knives where the man says, "In Japan, the hand is considered a lethal weapon... but not against this tomato!!!"? Did you ever watch the show "Kung Fu" -- the whole Karate phenomenon is predicated on an understanding that the human body is a technology that can be used to further our goals and protect ourselves. Thus, in Japanese, Karate means "Empty Hand" (Kara -- Empty, Te -- Hand).

The fact that a spirit can make a body move is fascinating -- if we are indeed avatars filled with holy spirits then we are their "technology".

I guess what I am saying is that technology is not the thing to fear -- it is merely the physical world that acts in the world. The old adage "guns don't kill people, people kill people" comes to mind -- but you should know that I am an advocate of many forms of gun control because I also recognize that some tools are too potentially dangerous to be left around in the hands of people who aren't responsible.

Where does that leave us? Well, I think that if we think of all objects and every part of our bodies as technology we can see clearer when a technology can be used to control us or can get out of control, because we can analyze how it is linked to the psychology of behavior.

And here is where I will end this post: I suggest to you that TECHNOLOGY IS THE ENVIRONMENT. THE ENVIRONMENT IS TECHNOLOGY. And that environment includes your body, not just the things that surround it. Your body is the environment of your mind and spirit. The rest is just an extension of that ever widening space that ultimately includes every object in the universe. So it is really all about "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior" isn't it? :)

810 Technophilia/Technophobia

Message no. 810[Branch from no. 792] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 5:56pm Subject: Technophilia/Technophobia

Pat, I think we all straddle the line between embracing and fearing technology -- it is a love/hate relationship because we develop technology to give us a greater sense of control, then we lament it when "the law of unintended consequences" shows us that sometimes that control turns out to be an illusion and we end up more out of control than we started out. And often we allow technologies into our lives that do give greater control -- but not to us! As I mentioned in my reply to Adrienne when we were talking about whether we have to accept that cars and powerplants inevitably bring risk to us : "Pollution is somebody's profit". That famous quote is from the great activist Poet Gary Snyder in his beautiful book "A Place in Space" from 1995. (see quotes here http://www.netwalk.com/~vireo/Snyder.html and you can read him selected poems here http://www.neonalley.org/snyder.html).

The same logic applies to out of control technology (or technology that makes us feel out of control). I would echo Gary Snyder by saying "Out of control technology is somebody's controlling technology."

If you watch the video clip I linked to in my reply to Adrienne, where Amory Lovins talks with Charlie Rose, you will see and hear him describe how and why so called "peaceful" nuclear technology benefits only the governments who build it. Keep in mind that the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (and the hundreds of other accidents that we don't hear about; see http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/rep02.html for a list compiled by Greenpeace in a "Calendar of Nuclear Accidents" month by month) made alot of people very rich.

To give you an example, I play in a rock band here in Cairo with a great guy who is an engineer with U.S. AID. His day job involves flying to Beirut to help rebuild the bridges and clean up the tragic oil spill resulting from the Israeli bombing campaign of terror last summer. He just spent our taxpayers money over there in Lebanon to the tune of 5 MILLION DOLLARS hiring contractors to help with the oil cleanup. The last 100,000 dollars was going to be spent sending the sludge sand from the beach resorts to London to a waste treatment facility (of course we have to clean up the Lebanese beach resorts first with US taxpayer dollars!! What would the rich do if they didn't have beaches to lounge on during the coming hot summer? They would leave for Greece or something. The poor fishermen and their families will have to wait!). My friend thought that was a waste of money, making some British company rich off of Lebanon's disaster, so he thought he could find a better solution. When he blocked the shipment of sludge to England the group decided to ship it to Egypt to be buried in the desert, putting the money in the pockets of the Egyptian government. My friend blocked that too. Finally he said, "Why don't we use it to build roads and bridges right here in Lebanon. That way the money can stay in the country it was intended to help" (He is a good man!). They asked him, "how would you do that?"

He said, "we build roads out of rocks, sand and tar. We have scraped rocks sand and tar off the beaches -- after all, oil sludge IS tar. So we can just make it into roads and bridges."

"What about the combustible waste we have collected?' they asked.

"We can burn it to heat the tar to make the asphalt. It is a free source of energy."

When he got back to Cairo last week he was smiling from ear to ear. He said to me, "I love my job. I love my life. It is great when you can make a real difference and turn waste into a golden opportunity!".

So this story has a happy ending. But my friend also talked about the dark side of what he does. He said, "my brother works for McDonnel Douglas. He builds the bombs that knock out the roads and bridges that I repair. We joke about it when I go home to the States. I say, "brother, stop giving me more work!" but that is the way it works -- his company bombs 'em, my company rebuilds 'em."

In other words -- every time there is a war or disaster, the companies hired to "fix" the problem make big money. If the taxpayer is paying the bill -- as with FEMA and other disaster cleanups, then it would behoove any politician with connections to companies that contract (like Haliburton Mr. Cheney!) to encourage the use of technologies that have the side effect that they could lead to "more work" for the contractor.

Thus, out of control technologies put certain people in control.

But that doesn't mean that "technology" per se is bad. It just means that we must analyze the consequences of our technologies and always ask "WHO PROFITS"? This question helps everything snap into perspective!

787 Ed Soja's "Thirdspace", Myspace, and Dawn's Alaskan Eutopia Midterm

Message no. 787[Branch from no. 774] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 9, 2007 6:40pm Subject: Re: relational summary

I so completely agree with you Adrienee -- we should be exploring our earth and oceans and protecting them! The way I think of all of this is in a UNIVERSAL sense -- especially after reading Professor Ed Soja's book "Thirdspace". What he points out is that we all live in ever expanding spaces. He laments that we tend to have a bias toward time and we don't often adopt a "spatial" perspective. The time bias makes us see things historically, as though we were trapped on a timeline and could only move forward in time (moving backward through our imaginations or stories) in a one or two dimensional way. We forget that we live in three dimensions (and that time is a fourth dimension) and that we can therefore move with many more degrees of freedom.

When you adopt a spatial perspective you stop thinking of your space as being merely the rooms or roads you occupy. You begin to see all the dimensions that also belong to you -- every possible space that you can move in with your mind and your body.

"Myspace", which a couple of your colleagues in the class have used so wonderfully to construct their eutopias in, is another example of this new "spatial" perspective.

When we adopt the spatial perspective we see that the oceans and the forests and the mountains and the air and the vacuum and the moon and Mars and the spaces between molecules and inside our bodies and hearts and minds are all just new dimensions for us to explore. At any given time we will be limited to how deep we can go into them, but they are all available to us (or at least, to us as a species!).

So, given that there are 6 and a half billion of us, and will soon be 10 billion of us, we should be exploring as much as we can.

They say we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own oceans, but I think that is because the Moon is so small and so easy to observe. The oceans are vast and covered with often impenetrable water depths. It is very hard to map them or explore them. But we are certainly trying!

Maybe what we need is to encourage more people (children particularly) to nurture their curiosity and sense of responsibility to make more spaces known and safe for people to visit and live in. Perhaps we should consider every space, inner or outer, as our proper home.

What do you think? How do we get people to see not only the whole world as one, but the whole universe, inner and outer?

And... can we one day explore inner space -- as in the movie Fantastic Voyage?





Thanks for continuing this fascinating discussion with all your insights! It was great to remember more of the inspiring Kennedy speech!

Message no. 788[Branch from no. 771] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 9, 2007 6:59pm Subject: Re: eutopia

Dawn that was an incredible exposition of your eutopia in Alaska! I had never thought Alaska could have so much to offer, but through your eyes that northern state offers incredible potential! I love the way you have integrated micro-hydro electric generation and wave generation and ocean thermal energy conversion (ocean cooling) technologies into your treatment, as well as the way you provided great facts about log homes and their benefits!

The pictures were very well chosen and laid out, and the descriptions and arguments well worded! It was a very compelling demonstration of how you could turn "utopia" into "eutopia". Very realistic!

I also liked the way you talked about the psychology of going "eutopian" -- are we "copping out" or leading the way?

And your treatment of crime and its elimination showed that you have given this a lot of thought! Yes, it is a dilemma, huh?

Some say that in a properly designed environment one wouldn't need laws because people would not do antisocial things if the environment didn't encourage such behavior. Do you think it is possible to design away crime?

Food for further discussion!

Anyway, bravo! A really superb midterm eutopia which we will continue discussing in the days and weeks ahead!

T

786 Who Killed The Electric Car and The Forbidden Fuel

Message no. 786[Branch from no. 773] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 9, 2007 6:24pm Subject: Re: chapter 7 Adrienne

Sobering, somber stuff indeed, Adrienne, and you did a great job of capturing the feeling of the chapter and its content and the stress it causes just to think about these things, much less actually have to live through them!

I am still haunted by the statement I read somewhere that "Pollution is somebody else's Profit". I am still not convinced that technology MUST come with the potential for disaster. If you watch the film "Who Killed the Electric Car"

http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/

and read the books "The Forbidden Fuel" by Scott Sklar



and "Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives" by Edwin Black

http://www.internalcombustionbook.com/Chapter1.php

you will see that cars NEVER had to cause environmental problems. It wasn't the car that caused the problems -- it was the FUEL that was chosen for us to run the cars to make somebody else a big fat profit.

The same is true for electric power generation. You NEVER should have had to go through that Chernobyl inspired anxiety Adrienne -- for we have NEVER needed nuclear power. In fact nuclear power was never economically feasible, let alone technically. No private investor has ever invested in nuclear power because there is no return on investment. Atomic power plants were built using government funds to reward certain contractors and to increase the amount of nuclear material we have for our nuclear arsenal and so that politicians can play power games. Mubarak, for example, wants Egypt to go nuclear, not because it makes economic sense or because the power is needed (Egypt can produce more power from wind and solar more cost effectively) but because by "Joining the nuclear club" he feels Egypt will "finally be respected".

It is a male ego game. In fact, atomic power is the most dangerous way to boil water ever invented. And that is all it is -- a giant disastrous steam kettle!

You can learn more about it here from Amory Lovins himself (energy advisor to the Carter Administration):

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid1225.php

and view the video interview with Charlie Rose here:

http://www.video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4569577556800822039&q=Amory+Lovins

In essence what you learn from Dr. Lovins and Charlie Rose is that there has never been a need for disaster prone technologies! We could have taken the "soft path" a long time ago, and our lifestyles quality would have been EVEN HIGHER!!

Such a waste! I cry for all the ruined lives because we allowed certain corporations and politicians to steer us down the wrong path.

Even plastics could have been benign! The first plastics were made from plant materials and were biodegradeable. Ford even built a car body out of plastics made from Soy Beans!

Now we are struggling to reinvent safe plastics. If we hadn't turned to oil as our primary feedstock we would have been using "green technology" for the past 100 years now.

Don't let anybody ever tell you that disasters or harm are necessary by-products of technology! We can have our plastics and our power plants without harming anybody anywhere!

The solution is to always apply "the precautionary principle" to each discovery we make before we commercialize the technology. We can always find a safe way to do things if we don't rush things to market before we have assessed the dangers and looked at the alternatives.

Of course, I don't mind rushing inventions like Silly Putty to the market -- I loved using silly putty as a kid!!

Thanks for a great post!

T

785 Stresses on Mars

Message no. 785[Branch from no. 784] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 9, 2007 5:57pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Relational Summary Chapter 5 Noise

Hey, wow! What a marvelously written and informative relational summary Pat! I learned so much from what you wrote and the web sites you sent us to that I am all asmiles! I have to admit, I hadn't given any thought to the acoustics of the rarefied atmosphere of the Martian environment, so this was a real eye opener (ear opener?)!

I thought the youtube video of NASA's simulation of what the Rover went through on its voyage to and landing on Mars was absolutely stunning! To think that we put that little cute creature on another planet and that for several years now it has been faithfully rolling around investigating the hills and plains of a forbidding planet is just amazing. It is like a child in so many ways. Watching the animated footage of how it got to its current home I felt "so, we have proved that aliens visit other planets -- except the aliens are our offspring!"

When I last visited JPS laboratories with a high school science class I was teaching, my friend Sami Asmar, the manager of the radio science group that put the rover on Mars, showed us some of the rovers that were going to be launched to the red planet. They were being tested in the parking lot. It was great to see them then and to think that a couple of them actually made it!

Thanks for sharing that!

A thought about noise stress on Mars -- keep in mind that no human beings will be walking around on the surface of Mars without a pressure suit that has radio communications. When indoors, the colonists will be in pressurized rooms (just like the pressurized cabin of a 747 jumbo jet!). The atmosphere in every environment in which human beings will live and work have the earth combinations of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide at 1 atmosphere of pressure. Thus the sound transmission will be very similar to that on earth.

If somebody were to venture outside in a non-pressurized suit they would freeze to death and have all their fluids boil away long before noise stress (or the lack of noise) would have any effect.

Think of Mars as the opposite of scuba diving. In scuba diving you always wear some kind of suit and pressurized gas tank that delivers air using a regulator to protect you from the surrounding environment and give you the kind of air you are used to at the surface. Underwater you are surrounded by fluids at a high pressure, on Mars by fluids (gases) at a low pressure. So you would have a gas tank and a regulator to regulate the composition and pressure of the gas you breathe.

When we are scuba diving the acoustic environment is also very different than in the air. Because water is denser sound travels farther (whales can "talk" around the world!). On Mars, where it is less dense, sound travels a shorter distance as you indicate.

There are always stresses in coping with an alien environment, whether that environment is here on earth (underwater, on a mountain top) or on Mars. But I think the experience of your eutopians is going to be more like that of passengers on a big airplane -- depending on the size of the habitat they live in, they will get varying degrees of claustrophobia, by I don't expect them to suffer from the different atmospheric conditions on Mars unless there is a breach in the walls or doors of the habitat.

The thing that would probably most affect our Martian colonists is the lack of a suitable gravity! Being a third the size of earth Mars has about a third the gravity, meaning we will all be bouncing around (a hundred and fifty pound person will only weigh 50 pounds!). It could be great fun though!

The best books I can recommend on what colonizing Mars will be like is the award winning trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson "Red Mars", "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars" -- the story of how, over hundreds of years, people terraform the red planet so that it eventually resembles earth and people CAN walk around outside without any pressure suits!







These are some of the best entertaining novels ever written about the adventure our children may embark on!

Thanks for a great, thought provoking post!

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/marsindx.html

764 Movies about Mars

Message no. 764[Branch from no. 754] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 5:02pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Relational Summary Weather, Climate, and Behavior

Glad you are enjoying exploring our neighbor!

Here is a guide to all the fiction films made about Mars:

http://marsmovieguide.com/

I highly recommend the movie "Naufragos" (Spanish film, English title "Stranded") "Náufragos" 2002 Spain (Feature Film, 95 minutes) [TMS-SD Library] See "Stranded" "Stranded" 2002 Spain (Feature Film, 95 minutes) [TMS-SD Library] aka: "Stranded: Náufragos", "Náufragos", "Shelter, The" The first manned mission to Mars crashes onto the surface of the planet. The astronauts are faced with a dire situation. With no resources and no time to wait for the rescue team to arrive, they have just one alternative: three must die so the other two can survive. But who will live and who will die?"

In the film the crew takes shelter in the very caves you and Adrienne have been talking about, and discover ancient life forms there! I don't know if the filmmakers new about the caves or just hypothesized, but if you want to see a very realistic movie about a mission to Mars, check this one out.

763 Classrooms without walls

Message no. 763[Branch from no. 757] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 4:51pm Subject: Re: Varshawn....Relational Summary

I share your disaffection for open classrooms, Varshawn. When I was in the 7th grade they demolished our beloved old Middle School in Dobbs Ferry and built a monstrosity such as you described -- a fortress without windows or skylights, ugly orange carpets and harsh fluorescent lighting, concrete block exterior walls and only thin movable partitions for inner separators. It was hell to spend 8th grade in, and my performance suffered. Years later, when I began my career as a teacher I actually taught in my old middle school. It was even more hell as a teacher. To get away from it, I took the kids on a field trip across the aqueduct to the Mercy Woods (at that time they hadn't been destroyed by "The Landing" and the Fireman's housing project off of Cedar Street). In the woods we saw deer and raccoons and skunks and mushrooms and squirrels and rapids and rocks and hundred year old trees! We learned about how native americans hunted and gathered. When I returned to the school I got in deep trouble from the Principal for "taking the children off school grounds into an unpoliced and dangerous area." I was told I must never do that again. Instead, I could show films about nature. Now most of that woods -- the density of it, that made you feel you were truly in the forest, is gone. So I guess films is all kids will get.

Sigh.

When I think of classrooms without walls, I think of taking kids outside the walls of the classroom and into the world. I hope other generations of kids will get that chance.

762 Single Family Dwellings

Message no. 762[Branch from no. 760] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 4:43pm Subject: Re: Varshawn- Relational Summary

Welcome back online Varshawn! Hope you got your computer situation worked out! You comments about "suburban detached homes" made me recall a visit I made to a Dyak village in the jungles of Eastern Borneo back in the Mid 1990s. The Dyak had a tradition of building what they call "longhouses" -- these impressive long long long houses in which many families lived together. You entered from a ladder on one side of what looked like an enormous train without wheels, built on stilts, with a thatched roof. Then you made your way down an aisle in the center and there were rooms on either side. The walls were carved out of wood with cool figures. It was enchanting. We then visited an area where missionaries where working hard to introduce Western technology and ideas along with their interpretation of scripture. One Indonesian minister, trained in the U.S., told me "God doesn't want people to live in long houses. In long houses there isn't enough privacy." He took us to a place where they had used development money to build suburban type detached single family homes. It looked like Ohio dropped in the jungle. He said, "God prefers families to live seperately, so that a man only sees his wife and she only sees him, and they don't mix their children with other children."

It was useless to try and discuss the statistics of infidelity in the suburbs of Ohio, where wife-swapping and divorce and drug use and other indiscretions plague suburban enclaves for reasons that could have as much to do with suburban isolation and living in single family detached homes without the supervision and moral guidance of grandparents, uncles and aunts and other kin to help people stay faithful to family norms.

Apparently the modernist approach to reproducing labor and selling real estate had caught hold of the missionaries and development officials and they were trying to use any argument to destroy the long houses and the social fabric of the Dyak and put them all into little styalized work camps where they could be monitored and controlled.

I wonder if people really do prefer living in single family dwellings -- certainly there is a time in a families life when this is appropriate, but as people age they tend to want to live together in larger social groupings again, or suffer tremendous loneliness and isolation. Also, as the author of the blog we looked at in the post about "white flight to the suburbs" pointed out -- why is it better for children to play in a "backyard", isolated from other children, when they could play together in a common park?

I am suspicious of the trend toward single family dwellings. Having just come back from a kibbutz in Israel where I was teaching children about solar energy, I like the idea of raising kids communally. Hmmmm. What do you think?

A final question: If builders are using bricks and sheet rock because it is cheaper, why are the homes more expensive? When I read your second to last paragraph I thought " Hey... what's up! ? Are we being swindled?"

Let me know what you think explains this phenomenon!

Good job,

T

761The Goldilocks Principle: Where the Money Spent on Space Exploration Really Goes!

Message no. 761[Branch from no. 748] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 4:24pm Subject: Re: relational summary

Yo class! I gotta step in here again (grin!) and beat y'all up for not following my previous arguments in a previous post about where the money spent on "space" exploration really goes, and how it benefits us here on earth!

Let me reiterate so it is clear as vacuum (one C!) ! VERY LITTLE MONEY HAS BEEN SPENT IN SPACE, 99% OF SPACE EXPLORATION PROGRAM MONEY IS SPENT AND REMAINS ON EARTH AND 100% OF THE BENEFITS ACCRUE TO US ON EARTH. Yes, a few tons of space junk are orbiting the earth, and a few hundred pounds of metal and electronics gear have exited the solar system or landed on other planets (Venus, Mars, Titan), but if you compare that with the tonnage of metal and electronics that have been blasted into bits (along with human bodies) in Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Dafur etc. etc. serving no productive social purpose, and the amount of money spent on our OFFENSE and DEFENSE programs you will see that arguing against the tiny amount devoted to space exploration in the hopes that it might be redirected to social causes is like arguing that you should give up some of your salary so that the company you work for can give money to a charity while they continue to spend thousands of dollars every year on stag parties for their male employees. In other words, there are perverse uses of huge amounts of money that our government is spending, and there is incredible waste, but the public is told we should cut into one small part of the budget that actually benefits all of society (and lots of hard working engineers, factory workers, scientists, school kids etc.) rather than into the huge budgets devoted to destructive activities.

In fact the propaganda against the space program was designed because it is an easy target: most people are not given a realistic view of its benefits to them and it is easy to tell people that "space" is far away and removed from their concerns. It comes from a historical bias back in the days before Werner van Braun and the rocket scientists before world war II made it possible to actually send objects off the earth, and it goes back to a bias against people who dreamed of really seeing what was in the heavens when the Inquisition wanted to control people's interpretations of religious texts so that they wouldn't contradict the power of the old men who ran the churches in Europe. Remember that they threw Galileo in jail for looking through his telescope!

People in the past who insisted that it was technically feasible to touch the moon (a feat not achieved until 1969) were called, with spitting derision, "moon-touchers". The name in Latin was "Luna-tics" . Luna - moon. Tic - to touch.

Because of this history of control and oppression, trying to silence people who thought larger than those who sought to control and repress them, it was easy for the government after 1969, in the midst of the Vietnam war, without Kennedy's inspiring leadership, to try to shut down the space program and devote more money to the war.

Kennedy asked us, in 1961 "to go to the moon and do the other things -- not because they are easy, but because they are hard". His "other things" had to do with the social agenda of creating "The Great Society" that his vice president, Johnson, tried to implement after Kennedy was assasinated. Kennedy tied doing all the hard things together. He saw that if you shoot for the moon, you end up doing great things on earth.

I know you all know the adage "reach for the stars -- at the very least you will end up farther than you are now". When we only reach for what is nearbye, we never get very far because in every attempt we only get at most 75% of the distance we set for ourselves as goals. So our reach must exceed our grasp if we are to progress.

The problem with trying to solve problems on earth is that we simply don't put much effort into it. Before the space program was created we fought two world wars with devastating cosequences. We plundered and destroyed our planet and came to the brink of nuclear war. Then we began the space race with Russia. The race ended with us getting to the moon first and along the way inventing the personal computer and inexpensive photovoltaic panels, and clean stirling heat engines, and electric cars (the moon buggy was an electric car!) and fuel cells and clean hydrogen power (both used to power the shuttle and the space station) and water recycling and purification equipment and and and.... and at the height of the cold war with Russia our astronauts met their astronauts as friends in space while we were supposed to be enemies on earth. We successfully docked our spacecraft with theirs in complicated technical maneuvers that required great collaboration and communication across the globe from two warring countries. We celebrated together in on two joined rockets in space while politicians debated sending nuclear rockets to kill each other on earth.

Later, before the collapse of the soviet union, we sent astronauts to live with them on their space station, looking down together on the lonely, fragile, little blue gem called mother earth and vowing to protect it.

Today over 95% of the "space exploration" budget goes toward solving environmental problems on earth. We rarely send rockets our probes out of earth orbit -- instead, we observe the oceans, the forests, the land, the atmosphere, and try to correct the problems our politicians and business leaders got us into.

Think back to what you saw using Google maps and Google earth. Where were those pictures taken from? From space!

Think about the Ozone hole that is threatening our planet with skin cancer, blindness, crop failure and extinctions. How did we discover it? By looking down at the earth from space!

Think about global warming. How do we measure the loss of glacial ice in the polar caps and on Mt. Kilamanjaro, and the rise of sea level, and the frequency and direction of life threatening hurricanes and typhoons, twisters, tornadoes and dust storms? From space!

How do we discover new deposits of oil and gas and methane hydrates? By using remote sensing satellites in space!

How do we communicate via the internet and via our cell phones, and broadcast film and television and radio and all communications and news and entertainment across the globe at light speed? By using satellites in space!

What I am trying to point out is that our entire civilization now works because we constantly send rockets and satellites and telescopes and cameras and equipment and people into space. We monitor our crops and weather and predict rainfall and disasters and monitor toxic hazards and pollution from space.

And the more money we spend on space exploration, the more good we do right here on earth, because we keep finding out more and more about the nearest planet, the dearest planet that we can explore: the earth.

Only from space can we get in a glimpse what is happening on our entire planet. Only by comparing our planets with the other deadly lifeless planets with which we share the solar system can we get an idea of what the real risks of messing with our ecosystem are.

Venus: shows us the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. If we let global warming continue we will turn into Venus -- hot enough to melt lead! Venus was once like the earth. It is the same size and has volcanoes and plates tectonics like us. But something happened and too much CO2 and other gases accumulated in the atmosphere.

Mars: shows us the consequences of letting too much oxygen get fixed, letting the water freeze and letting too little Co2 accumulate -- cold, frigid desert planet.

Earth: Goldilocks' best bet -- not to hot, not too cold, just right!

Without this information we can easily push the earth past its tipping point.

Here is an entertaining video you should all watch to learn about the "Goldilocks' Principle":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qppnjQaSg2I

And here is an article about it:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_4_108/ai_54574612

I hope this journey into the field of space exploration convinces you that there is no advantage to be gained from turning our backs on investigating the universe around us and many many risks if we are foolish enough to do so. The people who are the most passionately pursuing solutions to our environmental and social crises here on earth are often precisely those who have awakened to the perspective of how fragile our little blue planet is -- a perspective we could have only gained when we got far enough away to take pictures like this:

Let's hope we never turn this tiny little gem into the barren pitted surface that characterizes our moon and most of the other lifeless rocks that orbit our Sun!

764 Racism, Fear, White Flight and the Decay of the Inner City

Message no. 746[Branch from no. 740] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 2, 2007 4:47pm Subject: Re: Adrienne

Very well written and thought provoking relational summary Adrienne! I was particularly taken by the blog you cited:

http://roccopendolas.blogspot.com/2006/12/urban-and-suburban-differences.html

I think the author's point was absolutely true: Racism is at the heart of most of the problems that plague the city/suburb disjuncture. At one time the inner city was the most vibrant part of human social life -- and it was dominated by the rich, who built those inner city neighborhoods. In Europe the rich still occupy the inner city (look at Paris, for example) so the city still retains its beauty and charm, while it is the banlieu (the suburb) where low cost housing was built to house immigrant laborers who were never fully integrated into racist European society. So crime and ugliness plague the suburbs, and in Europe it is considered dangerous to go outside of the city.

In America, because of all the space, "white flight" started occuring when people of color and immigrant ethnicity got civil rights and began to compete for space and jobs in the glorious inner city. Rather than share and build a great society (to paraphrase President Johnson), policy encouraged weathier people to move out of the city into apartheid controlled suburban enclaves -- walled or policed or gated fortresses for the wealthy. Usually this meant severe pressure and discrimination against people of color, which reinforced their poverty.

Crime -- i.e. the desperate and angry behavior of people trying to survive in an informal economy because they are denied access to the formal economy -- led to social decay. This led real estate prices to plummet in the inner city. Now wealthy people are buying up the inner city areas again and "gentrifying" them.



The color issue is fortunately fading away (far too slowly of course!) but the class issue is as bad as ever. The poor are literally being squeezed out from within and without, struggling to survive in "edge cities", usually on the most toxic soils next to factories and dumps.

I am not sure if I agree that people are more friendly in the suburbs. I think if you are part of the same social class or in-group people are friendly everywhere. My black and hispanic friends from South Central L.A. used to tell me that they felt very uncomfortable visiting me in Beverly Hills. They were always being hassled by the police and avoided by the pedestrians. But in the 'hood, when I visited, people always said hello, looked me in the eye, smiled and waved.

I don't think it is the city or the suburb, or population density, that makes one place or another friendly -- I think it is fear or a lack of fear. The most friendly part of Cairo I have found is the inner city. In America fear distorts our land-use patterns and our behaviors in them.

A good film to see that speaks to this issue is Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" documentary. You should particularly watch the part where "South Park" creators made a cartoon about American racial history. It is funny yet poignantly sad. Then watch the section about why people in Detroit lock their doors, while Canadians across the river keep theirs unlocked.



http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com

Fear and the psychology of behavior.

I agree with the author of the blog you quoted -- the wealthy have a RESPONSIBILITY to bring investment, opportunity and beauty back into the city, without excluding anybody. Once that happens, and we stop looking at people with fear because they are different, I think we will all be able to keep our doors unlocked and look into each other's eyes and say hello.

Thanks for the opportunity to think about all this through your great post!

745 Environmental Determinism

Message no. 745[Branch from no. 742] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 2, 2007 4:15pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

A nice summary Daniela! I think we can all relate to your reaction to the weather and its affect on your mood. Sluggish and lifeless describes how I have often felt when the weather changes too.

I wonder, however, if it is the weather itself, or a combination of our expectations and the kind of envrionment we spend most of our time in. If, for example, we spend most of our time in an environment at 20 degrees C and we go outside into an environment that is 35 degrees C, our bodies will have to acclimitize and this could affect our mood as well.

You talked in your summary about determinism, possibilism and probabilism. As you may know, there is an old hypothesis used to describe why Europe dominated the world culturally and technologically that comes under the heading of "racist environmental determinism". I'm sure you know the argument: People from warm climates are "sluggish and lifeless", i.e. lazy, while people from cold climates are "invigorated and hard working".

The biggest offender using this hypothesis was Thomas Griffith Taylor. Here is a quote from this website about his work:

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/382/taylor.htm

"Environment and Race: A Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settlement and Status of the Races of Man. London: Oxford University Press, 1927.

This the most scary of Taylor's books, where he lays out his theories of human evolution under the influence of environment. These ideas easily are turned into rationales for racism and imperialism.

"In the past it has been usual to explain national progress largely in terms of military power, religious beliefs, and sagacious rulers, as witness almost any history written in the nineteenth century. It would be foolish to deny the great influence of these factors, but there is a growing school of thinkers who believe that the environment is at least of equal importance, although the study of this factor has been neglected in the past. . . . Further than this, many scientists are coming to the conclusion that it is the variation in the environment which is the most potent factor of all in influencing human evolution, whether biological or social."

Racists who applied environmental determinism to social behavior used the hypothesis to justify conquest. What they didn't point out was how, if the theory were true, civilization emerged in the hottest climates while Europe was still hunting and gathering.

Could we design any real experiments to PROVE that climate has a real PREDICTABLE effect on behavior? As the first link you provided us states:

"Still, the claims of biometeorology are difficult to confirm. Although medical conditions from angina and arthritis to hip fractures and dental periostitis have been statistically linked to weather, statistics alone are not proof of cause and effect. "I'd rank this stuff up there with the signs of the zodiac and old astrology texts," says Dr. John Renner, a family physician and president of the National Council for Reliable Health Information. "Put it this way: Would they be willing to ground a pilot or a plane based on the current evidence? Let's separate the hunches and impressions from the hard medical facts." Surprisingly, many biometeorologists agree. "We have--and I exult in this--the Missouri attitude: Show me!" says Dennis Driscoll, a biometeorologist at Texas A&M University. "I would like to see both doctors and meteorologists take the bit in their mouths, so to speak, and start doing some definitive research."

But how? Designing such experiments is practically impossible. "I had one patient tell me, `The frost is on the pumpkin and the pain is in my joints.' How would you test that?" says Terence Starz a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. "It would be too invasive. You'd be sticking measuring devices in peoples' joints." Similarly, Sharon Phelan, an obstetrician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has been present at births that occurred during times of falling barometric pressure. "Hurricanes, too, have been associated with the rupture of the amniotic membrane," she says, "but it's all anecdotal. A study with real patients? I don't know how you would do that."

This becomes the real challenge of this course and of life: HOW DO WE DESIGN EXPERIMENTS TO PROVE OUR IDEAS ABOUT ENVIRONMENT AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR?

The third link you gave us suggests very powerfully that we can find CORRELATIONS between climate and behavior, particularly among many animal species:

"Effects of Climate: Spatial Synchronization and the Moran Effect Climate as a synchronizing agent for population fluctuations in space, the so-called Moran effect, has received much attention (12, 13). Rainfall changes associated with ENSO, for instance, produce a highly synchronic pattern of massive germination of annuals (14), rodent outbreaks (15), and vertebrate predators responses"

In reading this we can certainly predict that climate change is likely to increase the amount of infectious disease we will face. But can we really predict how humans will respond? When do correlations prove CAUSE and EFFECT?

A great book that I am reading now and suggest to all of you is "Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another" by Phillip Ball. It does a great job of describing the history of "the law of large numbers" and how we can use statistical science to understand human and social behavior. The book review says the following:

"In this wide-ranging investigation of pioneering attempts to explain social behavior by applying formulas borrowed from physics, Ball explains how maverick social theorists are now using discoveries about molecular motion and crystal formation to predict the behavior of various human groups, including crowds of soccer fans and clusters of pedestrians. Ball acknowledges that past "political arithmeticians" have often dehumanized their subjects by adopting mechanistic assumptions about individual psychology and have sometimes legitimated totalitarian rulers by giving them a putatively scientific charter. But Ball's numerous detailed examples of the new social physics show how statistical models from physics can yield highly reliable predictions for large-group outcomes without abridging the unpredictable freedom of individual choice. These same examples teach that a consistent physics of society yields not an ideological straitjacket stipulating how people should act but rather a detailed portrait of how people do act. Because the new social physics can help managers and policy makers in dozens of fields, this accessibly written book will attract a very diverse audience."



A good review can be found here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1178982,00.html

If you really want to get a handle on how science is used to predict human behavior, read this most excellent book!

Finally, Daniela, thanks for providing the quote from a Christian perspective on Global Warming!

http://www.lookinguntojesus.net/20040125.htm.

"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteous dwells." (2 Pe 3:10-13)

Reading that quote in the website you linked us to makes me wonder if perhaps we shouldn't all follow Patricia's lead in "looking for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteous dwells." A Eutopia on Mars perhaps?? :)

744 Patricia Friedrichs Relational Summary Weather, Climate, and Behavior

Message no. 744[Branch from no. 736] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 2, 2007 3:45pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Relational Summary Weather, Climate, and Behavior

Wow Pat, this just gets better and better and more and more realistic and more and more fun! Reading your evolving posts is like going deeper and deeper into an RPG like "Final Fantasy" or "Doom". Each chapter the storyline goes up a level in complexity. Good job!

Class -- Pat is trailblazing here -- not just acting as a pioneer in the new environment she is confronting trying to create a realistic eutopia on a hostile planet, but acting as a pioneer in a form of education we call "edutainment" -- entertaining education that permits greater retention of factual material by contextualizing it in an emotionally charged scenario that is at once personal and universal.

Follow her lead if the method works for you, because by using your "eutopia" scenario as the basis for reporting on your new insights from the book and applying them in your relational summaries, you give us a unique focus on what the concepts mean to you and to your vision of a better environment.

Notice that Pat has continued to include at least three quotes with page numbers from the book, and at least three external links, but now uses them to support and justify her arguments and ideas. It is as though she is filling in puzzle pieces, making her experience in her daily real life (dust storms in Texas, for example) relate to the challenges she would face if trying to work with her family to make a world more to their liking.

The fact that Pat's scenario unfolds on Mars merely heightens the challenge. But you could do this in any environment.

The exercise is a good one, because so many people on Earth are facing or will soon face extreme environmental conditions, created by war, deforestation, terrorism, global climate change, pollution and toxic waste, disease, natural disasters etc.

Though it may sound scary, this exercise in envisioning and defending your own "eutopia" may help prepare you for some very real challenges that you and your loved ones will likely face in your lifetimes. Hopefully by thinking through them and preparing, you will not have to face life threatening or debilitating circumstances.

Great job Pat! Keep leading the way!

743 Sounds of Baghdad

Message no. 743 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 2, 2007 3:25pm Subject: Sounds of Baghdad

Hi Class - I just received this beautiful letter from a good friend of mine, Mark Schapiro, who is on his second tour of Baghdad with the US State Department working as press advisor to people like Paul Bremer, connecting Iraqi journalists and American journalists and military planners -- he lives in constant danger but remains optimistic.

Mark is also a musician, and created the "Circus Guy Musical Goodwill Ambassador Tour" with me in Syria after the September 11th terrorist attack, as an attempt to create environments of cooperation and celebration to "change hearts and minds" and the behavior of Arab youth.

http://kuwait.usembassy.gov/pr_09262005.html



The Circus Guy band now teaches environmental science in the Arab world as part of its mission during festivals and solar powered concerts. You can see a documentary film on our work here:



http://greenheadmedia.org/movies/solarcircus_web.mov

http://greenheadmedia.org/pages/documentary.html

You might enjoy his reflections on "music", "sound" and "noise" and relate them to our chapter and discussions!

Cheers,

T

Mon, 2 Apr 2007 11:08:32 -0700 [11:08:32 AM PDT] From: Mark Schapiro To: markschapiro@yahoo.comAdd markschapiro@yahoo.com to my Address Book Subject: The Babylon Diaries - Frequencies of Bass

Dear Diary and friends,

There are parts of music that you can only feel. You can't hear them. Sound is generally unavoidable in this world, an essential part of life, but when it touches senses other than simply hearing, it means something to you. You feel it, and it controls your memories, your relationships and your instincts. I'm not being poetic here - physics tells us that sound comes in waves, and those waves hit you and have an effect on the body. Scientists can even use sound waves to move objects, which is one of the many theories I have heard about how the Pyramids were built. And studies have shown that Mozart helps cure the sick, raising endorphin levels and strengthening immunity. Now you can understand Beethoven, how a deaf man was able to feel things most people fail to distinguish from the ambient noise that surrounds us, and weave them into immortal symphonies.

I've never enjoyed the music taxi drivers play on the radio in the Middle East. If you have ridden in one, or watched a Bollywood movie played too loud on a long bus ride while traveling around Southeast Asia in the middle of the night, you know what I mean. It's tinny, way too high on the treble scale, and I swear that one of the instruments played in those recordings is the sound of fingernails grating on a blackboard. The effect of the Bollywood movies during those bus rides is particularly deadly, since it takes the obligatory high-pitched female singing voice to a hair-raising level not even dogs could bear.

I have come to realize in my travels that bass is a defining sign of Western civilization. From James Brown to Depeche Mode and 50 Cent, we have come up with bass grooves that could seduce a statue or stand in for a pacemaker. Bass balances the treble, shakes the room, and gets inside you the way no other musical register can. I'm sure it is addictive. Play James Brown in an Arab taxi or Depeche Mode softly before you go to sleep and you lose the entire effect. Each has a unique bass signature which you can actually recognize without even hearing anything, when others around you do not even hear the music. The philosophical question of whether or not there is sound if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it has always struck me as stupid. Of course there is. You feel it. Beethoven would have told you so.

None of the senses ever get any rest here. We are under constant bass attack. Mortars, rockets, footsteps on my hollow trailer floor, engines of various kinds, helicopters, jet fighters, generators... even when you are surrounded by noise in the cafeteria or a group of people behind the palace, you can still recognize the bass signature of a distant car bomb on the other side of the river. Even though most of my colleagues here will not even hear it sometimes, I can still tell them what just happened. If you tune your internal antenna in just the right way, you hear things others don't. You just hear it with your body. Same way you have a special reaction to the voices of the people you love. It means that we are constantly being bombarded by vibrations and waves that make us feel things we cannot control and do not understand because we cannot hear or see them.

Anyone who read the 2004 editions of these Diaries will remember that there is no shortage of noise in Baghdad, but not nearly enough music. Yet all the ingredients, all the waves, all the vibrations are out there, wild and unfettered. There is plenty of bass, plenty of sound you just feel and cannot hear if you are too far removed. It has always surprised me that Arab taxi radios never seem to have bass, because no other part of the world that I have yet seen is so nuanced as to lend itself quite naturally to the interwoven sound waves of a symphony. The bass is here, I feel it every day, and when it hits you are left feeling an involuntary mix of power, fear, addiction, and pleasure depending on the source. It is a potent and volatile cocktail of feelings, one that often keeps foreigners here for the wrong reasons.

Yesterday I flew over Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter, blown to and fro by powerful gusts of wind that brought bits of the desert into every part of my life. The deafeing Blackhawk bass groove, needless to say, blocked out any chance the street scenes below might have had to have an impact on me. Bass without the discipline and treble of Beethoven or the rhythm of James Brown is left on its own, an invisible force pulsing through Mesopotamia pushing and pulling Shi'a, Sunni and Kurd in directions they rarely see or hear, in bursts that often last but a second but resonate for generations. These waves do not come across on your TV screen back home, which turns your home into an Arab taxi - you hear a small fraction of an unfinished symphony.

A good song does not have to be very complicated. Look at the Beatles. Look at Egypt's Amr Diab. In today's information age, we feel out of control, due to the hurricane of sound waves that pummels us wherever we go, especially in Baghdad. Finding that harmony, that simplicity, is both more refreshing and more elusive than ever - even more rare is the terrifying sense of actually feeling it and surrendering to it. I often want to run away from here, grab someone I love and sit under a tree and listen to my iPod together as we watch the seasons change.

But I also feel other things. I feel all the pieces of a symphony, all the players in an orchestra, searching for a conductor, crying out for Beethoven. They have been here long before I arrived and will play on longer after I die. But right now it is late and as I head to my trailer I am tired, and I'm grateful others have written the songs and the symphonies that will move me to sleep tonight. My biggest decision right now is James Brown, Depeche Mode, or the voices of people I love.

Love, Mark

735 National Geographic article predicting the flooding of New Orleans

Message no. 735[Branch from no. 734] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, March 30, 2007 4:19am Subject: Re: relational summary

Here is the article from National Geographic (turns out to be from 2004) that PROVES we knew it was coming!

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/? fs=news.nationalgeographic.com&fs=plasma.nationalgeographic.com



By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner



The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.



It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday. But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party. The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it. Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far- fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse." The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when." Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's natural defenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have vanished beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes. A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes. While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison. Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin. To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks, and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-road marina. Today Frank "Blackie" Campo's ramshackle place hangs off the end of new Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 1918, sits a quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some 50 families and a naval air station during World War II, the little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says in the local patois. Gone forever. Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes twice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known as "Mr. Go," was supposed to provide a shortcut for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Maybe two ships use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consuming old Shell Beach. Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a late autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting the entire coast. "What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the levees on the river," Campo says, over the noise of a groaning air-conditioner. "They should take the levees out and let the water run; that's what built the land. But we know they not going to let the river run again, so there's no solution." Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that—letting the river run. A coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways would pump new life into the dying marshes. Only three such diversions currently operate in the state. I catch up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot—a 26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans named Caernarvon. "Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a technique," says Reed as we motor down a muddy canal in a state boat. The diversion isn't filling the marsh with sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of the added river water—loaded as it is with fertilizer from farm runoff—is plain to see. "It turns wetlands hanging on by the fingernails into something quite lush," says Reed. To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with slender willows, rafts of lily pads, and a wide shallow pond that is no longer land, no longer liquid. More like chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering marsh is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the problem. "Restoration is not trying to make the coast look like a map of 1956," explains Reed. "That's not even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural processes, then live with what you get." Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance, became a political land mine when releases of fresh water timed to mimic spring floods wiped out the beds of nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year a sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3 billion dollars. The case threw a major speed bump into restoration efforts. Other restoration methods—such as rebuilding marshes with dredge spoil and salt- tolerant plants or trying to stabilize a shoreline that's eroding 30 feet (10 meters) a year— have had limited success. Despite the challenges, the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern Louisianans to swallow. Computer models that project land loss for the next 50 years show the coast and interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid, leaving only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as Shell Beach, Venice, Grand Isle, and Cocodrie vanish under a sea of blue pixels. Those who believe diversions are the key to saving Louisiana's coast often point to the granddaddy of them all: the Atchafalaya River. The major distributary of the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone, would soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of its flow. But to prevent salt water from creeping farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water supply of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers allows only a third of the Mississippi's water to flow down the Atchafalaya. Still, that water and sediment have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state that's actually gaining ground instead of losing it. And if you want to see the delta, you need to go crabbing with Peanut Michel. "Peanut," it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six foot six and 340 pounds, the 35-year- old commercial fisherman from Morgan City wouldn't look out of place on the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch his aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we're skimming down the broad, café au lait river toward the newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of needlegrass, flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel calls elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by bushy wax myrtles and shaggy willows. Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in the broad expanse of Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from shore the water is barely five feet deep. As the sun ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake the wire cube of its clicking, mottled green inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss. It's done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the water. But it's a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are hot, and only a few crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is happy. Deliriously happy. Because this is what he wants to do. "They call 'em watermen up in Maryland," he says with a slight Cajun accent. "They call us lunatics here. You got to be crazy to be in this business." Despite Michel's poor haul, Louisiana's wetlands are still a prolific seafood factory, sustaining a commercial fishery that most years lands more than 300 million dollars' worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, and other delicacies. How long the stressed marshes can maintain that production is anybody's guess. In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. "My grandfather always told me, Don't live to be rich, live to be happy," he says. And so he does. After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head through the braided delta, where navigation markers that once stood at the edge of the boat channel now peek out of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue herons. Michel, who works as a hunting guide during duck season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight. "When the ducks come down in the winter," he says, "they'll cover the sun." To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and the rich coastal culture are reason enough to save Louisiana's shore, whatever the cost. But there is another reason, one readily grasped by every American whose way of life is tethered not to a dock, but to a gas pump: These wetlands protect one of the most extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation. The state's first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans. The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh. You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a bargain. "We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas," Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it." The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure— a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land above them to slump. "When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss in the state. The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration is profound. If production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has oil companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If such fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to continue. The upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be saved, not waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what. A few days after talking with Morton, I'm sitting on the levee in the French Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried powdery sweetness of a beignet from the Café du Monde. Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle their barges up and down the big brown river. For all its enticing quirkiness, for all its licentious pleasures, for all its geologic challenges, New Orleans has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is how long Lady Luck will shine. It brings back something Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said during our lunch by Lake Pontchartrain. "When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to pay." I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee, succumbing to the hazy lazy feel of the city that care forgot, but that nature will not.

734 Environmental Justice, Olmsted, Hurricane Katrina and a Planet of Slums

Message no. 734[Branch from no. 733] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, March 30, 2007 4:10am Subject: Re: relational summary

You are absolutely right that Katrina was a planning and design disaster, not a natural disaster, and that it affected the poor because they always are forced to occupy the risk prone areas for which adequate investment has not been made. This is one of the subjects in Mike Davis' great (but sobering) book, Planet of Slums.

summary is here: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10234

You would probably also benefit from reading about the fight that Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. had with the city of Los Angeles after he designed a flood control area around the L.A.River that would have made it a necklace of parks and bike paths and recreation and wildlife areas and one of the most beautiful places in the country. Instead, because only the poor working class lived around the river, the city ignored him and his great designs until the flood of 1938 killed hundreds of people and destroyed businesses. Then they called in the US Army Corps of Engineers, again ignoring Olmsted, and put the river into a concrete straight jacket, an eyesore that is with us to this day that wastes the cities fresh water and pollutes the ocean, and is a nest of drugs and crime. http://www.deliriousla.net/essays/2000-river.htm

http://www.deliriousla.net/lariver/2025e_more.htm Pehaps you are also aware that a National Geographic article from 2003 alerted the public to the hurricane danger, based on a government report that predicted the breaking of the Levees and the total destruction of New Orleans and that city environmental planners begged the government to strengthen the levees and were ignored. Like September 11th, we knew what was going to happen, but didn`t mobilize against it. The mentality that prevents action is a cold calculus that says "most of the people who die will be people from social and racial classes that don't have much voting power, so we aren't going to do anything. If anything, a disaster will further our political agenda (waging war overseas, converting poor areas into playgrounds for the rich etc.)

This issue is called by our textbook "Environmental Justice" -- a field of study where we learn that the poor are considered expendable by the rich and are mere pawns in a Ponzi scheme to get a few richer at the expense of those who live at the bottom of the barrel. The reason the environments get polluted or are exposed to risk is because it is cheaper to let them be the dumping grounds and to fall into disrepair.