Getting a word in edgewise
Also
Who could possibly put me up in the Bay Area this weekend, the notice, it is too short.
I could read on the plane though. Hell, I’d probably get _more_ reading done that way… It’d also be kinda funny if I flew back to mpls on the same flight as Dan Kammen.
[ETA: DC is cheaper, and if I’m willing to wait, West Palm Beach and Atlanta are both cheaper, and Cancun is not much more expensive. And I’m going to the Bay Area for 5 days in about a month anyway…]
So, We have a 4-port wireless router at home. Except one of the ports doesn’t work at all. So, really, we have a 3-port wireless router. Except the wireless is pretty flakey. Okay, so we have a 3-port router at home. Except my port was being flaky. I swapped it with
Time to go hardware shopping. Does linksys usually suck this much? Who makes better routers?
[ETA: Woohoo! 19″ lcd monitors for less than $300? Who cares about the absence of flying cars, yay for teh future.]
This quote happened at a talk on carbon sequestration today. They were specifically talking about storing CO2 under the earth’s crust dissolved in huge aquifers. When this hypothetical carbon storage breaks out, it’s bad. The participants are Charismatic Guest-Lecturer from Princeton (CGP) and World’s Awesomest Advisor (WAA).
CGP (salesman voice): Of course, if this were in an inhabited area, maybe it would break through at a little girl’s slumber party and kill everyone.
WAA (in a tone of attentive interest): I was thinking a day care in West Virginia, but go on.
Maybe you had to be there. But I thought it was great. These sorts of exchanges really warm my heart. On the bus ride back to my campus, I was chatting with a fellow humphrey lecture attendee, and I told her about the Kansas City Hotel Disaster (and got it partially wrong; I placed it at least 3 decades before it actually happened and overestimated the death toll) where 114 people died and over two hundred were injured because some guy too “smart” for anyone’s good decided on a last minute design modification which actually left the structure insecure. Maybe I just have a woodie for the macabre.
Okay, so our upstairs neighbors have dogs. The dogs take dumps in the backyard. Our neighbors do not reliably pick these dumps up. I bike. I often come in after the sun has set. The easy way to bike involves taking the alley and coming in through the back door. I’m guessing you see the connection here. This makes twice that I’ve unknowingly tracked bits of dogshit into the house. I’ve already mentioned that I’d really appreciate it if they quit leaving the dog shit in the back yard. I’m thinking next time of picking it up in a bag and leaving it right at their doorstep with a note saying something to the effect of “I really don’t like accidentally stepping in this, nor do I appreciate having to guess where it might be when I come home after dark. Please pick up after your pets.” Only if they really piss me off will I start emptying the bag at their doorstep. (And tonight on passive-aggressive theater…)
So, we’ve already seen the “Oh my gawd, I love my teacher so much, I mean she’s just so COOL,” post and the “There’s this boy, and he’s so sweet, but he’s gone and I’m sad,” post. Now it’s time for the confused, empathetic, angry 14yo girl scu to pop her head out.
Before I get into this, I want to point out that my public policy education has not been focused on international interest issues. My focuses are economic development (where I’ve had about a 2/3 slant towards domestic issues) and science, tech, and environmental policy, which has also had a pretty developed world slant. So, when it comes to international political stuff, world history, foreign relations, etc, I’m no genius. I’m just a schmo with some public decision making, economics, and stats courses, and a more than passing interest in the subject matter.
When Scott left for Germany, he left a thing or two for me. I mean, yeah, he gave me his bed (queen size!). And a torch lamp. And a desk lamp. And a skirt for the bed. And a phone and answering machine (not that I have a land line). And there’s a power strip and additional comforter waiting for me at his coop. But strangely, that’s not what I’m thinking about. I swear he didn’t mention it before he left. Really. I don’t remember it at all. I don’t think I forgot it. He left a card and a bar of (very nice, organic, vegan, fair trade) chocolate.
It took me a couple days to notice. It was underneath the condom baggie. The card was full of praise and thanks and expressions of endearment. (though noteworthily absent were praise for my memory and my keen attunement to my surroundings; he’s no fool. =)
I can’t bring myself to eat the chocolate. It’s kind of silly. I mean, it’s not the nutritional content or anything; I know that one bar of chocolate will neither make nor break me. I don’t feel like I deserve it. Or his effusive praise. Who am I to receive such generosity? The practical side of me can encompass the practical gifts, be thankful, and not dwell on it. But the chocolate is a little thing, a touch of pure thoughtfulness. And I can’t quite bring myself to eat it. Because then it’ll be gone.
I get blindsided by my emotions sometimes. And I think this is one of them. But I don’t want to forget and move on. It’s still silly. But it’s still there. I like to remember when things touch me more deeply than I expect.
So, I promised my soon to be advisor that I would make the process as painless for her as possible. She is a busy woman and she hasn’t got all day. So, I filled out the paperwork so that it requires only her signature, then we’re good to go. And we then sat down and ended up shooting the breeze for at least half an hour. We talked about my goals, my feelings about grad school, etc, etc. I was straight up with her and told her I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t necessary for a return to a job I’d very much enjoyed. She was straight up honest too, no sugar coating. When I said I didn’t want to be a full on prof in a research institution because I didn’t want the research pressure, she made frenzied faces and self strangling gestures, then said I was so lucky I wasn’t her husband. We talked about my interests, and how they’ve changed. I talked about my possible interest in a PhD program, and she asked me why, then picked apart my reasons. We talked for at least 15 minutes about homo stuff, and she didn’t even blink, just kept relating. I mentioned burning my notes for the introductory course in the field she got her PhD in. We both went to CMU. We’ve both lived in the Bay Area. And she was frank that UMN wasn’t a top notch institution and she talked about the culture differences between here and CMU. (They make you sweat for it at CMU.) I told her honestly that her class was the only one I really cared about or felt challenged in this semester. She said the other profs saw her reading list for the class and wanted to know if she was trying to kill her students and she told them “No, I want to make them feel it.”
She’s likely the prof I will have the most classes with during my time at UMN. 1 this semester and 2 next makes for three. I’ve had no prof for more than one class up to this point, and I expect that I will have at most one other duplicate next semester.
So, here’s to her, and here’s to making the best of an *enh* situation.
Two from Daniel:
Join the folks from District 202, the Twin Cities queer youth drop in center, is holding an event on 2nd Tuesdays. This month (tonight) it’ll be at JetSet from 5:30 to 7:30. This is not a fundraiser. More details on the link.
Thank you,
Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle points out the environmental damage attendant to a number of new technologies, citing them as a result of a linear model of thought and calling for the development of sustainable technology. He suggests that continued use of these technologies will lead to great challenges to human survival. The record on his predictions is somewhat spotty: many of the problems noted by Commoner have been reduced since his writing, many have not. On another note, there are categories of ecological damage that his evaluation glosses over or misses completely, particularly depletion of natural resources. Furthermore, his calls to develop more sustainable technology do not discuss incentives for encouraging this development.
Commoner’s central thesis was that humanity needed to “close the circle” by making sure that what we produce, whether for our own use or as a by product, would be reused or made into a form such that it would not be damaging to the ecosphere when we discard it. As such, he could be one of the first voices calling for recycling as an industry.
In his focus on the outputs of modern technology, he neglects other ecological problems. Humanity has just attempted to take himself out of closed ecological cycles. Humanity has damaged the environment in other ways. Resource depletion, including deforestation, soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, and easily accessible fossil fuels seem like an obvious element to inspect more closely, which would be in keeping with his views on “closing the circle.” While he does mention this principle with respect to metals, which is somewhat ironic in light of the continuing improvements in the supply of metals, this is a small . He does not pay attention to concerns about resource scarity to nearly the same degree that he pays attention to ecologically damaging outputs.
While his call for the development of technology which does not exemplify the faults of this linear model of production are clear, how he plans to get there from here is not. He spends a chapter examining the economics of the situation, and concludes that economic decisions should play a secondary role to ecological decisions. He never examines the role that economics has to play in informing ecology or encouraging the development of more sustainable technology. This book primarily highlights a set of problems, particularly relating to pollution and the absorptive capacity of the environment, and says very little about the solution to the problems it highlights.
The Closing Circle provides insight into issues surrounding pollution and recycling. While these are useful underpinnings, the author seems to believe that these are the central issues of ecology. The book is an informative, but narrow view at a particular set of problems, that fails to clearly situate itself as such, and fails to develop usable guidance on how these problems might be addressed.