20 May 2003 | Don Schenck said...

Fake Christmas trees are FAR worse on the environment than a real tree. No contest.

But NO, I do not like artificial stuff like you mentioned. I also hate the DH rule, aluminum bats, and machine-made cigars.

:-)

20 May 2003 | Tim said...

Interesting article...thanks for the link...

Tangentally, this past weekend I drove up to a northern coastal town here in MA to help my mom open up our family cottage that she has decided to sell. In a nutshell, what was once a quiet, beautifully overrun-with-nature little penninsula has turned into an expensive, overrun-with-suburbia and developed playground for the fairly well-to-do. The gentle hum of lobster boats had been replaced by the beeping and grinding of earth-movers.

Nothing out of the ordinary, of course, and certainly not unexpected.

However, just that one afternoon there (I hadn't been back previously in probably over a year) showed me a lot about our relationship with our natural surroundings. The people moving in and developing this area were scraping, sculpting, molding, and revamping their surroundings to their own desires. Is this natural? If you adhere to Manning's Kubrick statement "that once you have the tools, the rest is inevitable," then sure, it is. Is it good or bad? My gut says it is annoying, yes...but I don't think I can really judge the good or badness of it...

One of the more telling stories from my mom: the houses are arranged on a hill that slopes down to a fairly good-sized bay...with some houses midway up the hill, then a road, then houses further down the hill. Apparantly, in order to get a better view of said bay, some folks who live midway up the hill have taken to girdling (killing) bunches of taller trees in the yards of those folks lower on the hill.

Heh, well, not sure where I am going with this...but it was just a frustrating little afternoon displaying a bit of our more destructive side.

20 May 2003 | Tim said...

Can you enjoy a plastic Christmas tree that saves a tree each year, but lacks the pine smell and feeling of tradition?

Well, I guess it's just a matter of individual experience ;) Since I grew up with the same plastic-shedding boxed-in-the-attic Christmas tree, year after year, that IS my tradition. I would think that a real Christmas tree would lack a certain prefab tupperware-esque feeling of tradition.

20 May 2003 | Charlie said...

How the markets and consumers handle biotech is very strange. Who's driving the acceptance or the rejection of it isn't as plain as we'd think. The research group I work for focuses on public acceptance of biotech, and recently co-published this article:
http://emac.missouri.edu/news/000146.html

It's the supermarkets, man!

Ta!

20 May 2003 | rjs said...

Are humans part of nature or have we risen above it?

Philosophy geek response:

Humanity/culture can be concieved as a structure of salient high-level elements that stand out against some background structure of lower-level elements. A slightly tired but appropriate analogy would be gliders and ships versus cells in Conway's Game of Life. Gliders and ships have properties like movement and periodicity that their constituent cells don't. Without an understanding of those high-level elements, a Life scenario would seem meaningless and random, but the bits get twiddled either way.

The Life analogy allows us to make a bit of a point tho.. if an observer has the ability to meddle with the state of the system, it matters a hell of a lot whether or not she understands that a specific configuration of cells will shoot across the grid while another will explode or stagnate. An understanding of the system allows the observer/participant/superhero to make the system 'Do Something' -- and she can make things more interesting or destroy the whole thing.

26 May 2003 | Fredy said...

This essay-article covers a few topics but comments on Bio and Nano Technology, it is an interesting read, in particular, this quote:

"I am concerned about the threats and opportunities posed by 21st century science, and how to react to them. There are some intractable risks stemming from science, which we have to accept as the downside for our intellectual exhilaration andeven morefor its immense and ever more pervasive societal benefits. I believe there is an expectation of a 50% chance of a really severe setback to civilization by the end of the century."

It was written by Prof. and Sir Martin Reese of Cambridge University.

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