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| Doodle Feb. 5, 2018. |
Might explain later... #drawfool
.... sometime later the next day. So? Fear. Looking out through the teeth of death from the inside. Perhaps this was an exaggeration? The red eyes are only tail lights. The dark rainy zero visibility stop and go traffic, cut into by oncoming headlights might form a jagged jawline. A crash could chew up our fragile human bodies like an ambivalent monster. Except, bumper to bumper at night in the rain, even for a couple tiring hours, isn't death. I did draw this after we got out the car. We had cut over from a stop-and-go highway to another parallel highway, and on that tree-lined road, we hydroplaned in complete pitch black. The water deep enough to not be able to see the asphalt, any lines, nor the edge. That slipping zig-zag lasted only a couple seconds at most. Probably less. We didn't cross over. We didn't hit a tree or slide into a ditch. It was just another commute.
Regardless, these long tiring commutes are why I daydream about number 9 from last week. No matter how many trillions it will cost, no matter how many decades full of engineering challenges would be required to finish that paradigm shift worthy transportation redesign. I escape the fear monster and daydream how things could be better.
Captions below read:
1. Me: When I like an idea, find it clever or funny even no one responds. Only to crap or in reply about themselves. Why?
2. Plant: Did you just ask some crap about yourself and ask me to reply? ... That's why.
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| drawfool doodle Feb. 6, 2018. |
Daydream number 12/50. Crowdsolving how-to-save-the-world with the collective intelligence.
As any Science-Fiction fan knows, from the Star Trek TV show abomination -- The Borg, the idea of crowdsourcing could go very badly. The Borg are extremists, relentlessly attempting to assimilate everyone with any brains into “The Collective”. But, data results like how people’s attention shifts from the characters in a movie or show, when a dog is in the scene, are consistent. We’d much rather pay attention to the dog.
I thought I’d write up an idea about how crowdsolving metadata could be used to solve climate change via the wisdom of the crowd. But, then some Trump supporter started tweet-yelling at me. True confession: I’ve had better conversations with plants. After that, I got distracted by reading some science blog articles as a logical antidote to our current social insanity.
Crowdsolve question: How are you? dear crowd to solve "everything".
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| Doodle in the corner of my thought book, 2/7/18. |
Sheeples are a thing, very relevant currently.
Daydream 13/50. Goats and sheep, lama, etc... in movable fences, to clear brush and trim landscaping near paths and roads, fertilize and aerate land - instead of herbicides, controlled burns, machines and chemical fertilizers.
This is happening. Tho it’s been my observation that people often get impatient with the pace of the animals. The goats don’t clear as fast and as sharply as the machines. The problem is the same. We live in a capital-first time-is-money “free-market” valued over life, economy. Our entire way of thinking about roads and yards, and grassy areas that are bigger than yards needs to slow-down for sheep trimmed grass to be a thing, that becomes part of our way of life. Perhaps we need to move backward in time on a few things. My grandfather lived on the family farm after everyone else had left. He very impressively tended to the farm neatly, almost by himself (he and the neighbor’s helped each other on jobs that required more than one person). Beyond the actual farming, and his giant garden and pantry full of home canned food. He had a small herd of sheep and cows. The sheep he moved from one area to the next closer to the house. The cows were in bigger areas out by the creek. I remember asking why the sheep were in the front yard. My Mom told me that sheep bite the grass, they don’t pull it up by the roots, so Grandpa will move the sheep when they are done trimming around the house. He also used to pasture the cows to clean up the apple orchard of fruit on the ground. But, cows are another story. He didn’t want them making a mess around the house, so they were always in larger fenced-in areas, farther away from the house, like the apple orchard.
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| Feb. 8, 2018. #drawfool #doodle |
What the heck is a “moderate”, anyways?
Seems easiest to start with what a moderate is not. A moderate is not an extremist.
If you have any view at all on a subject, then how do you know you are not an extremist? Because moderates annoy the hell out of extremists. For example, let’s take my most persistent and therefore strongest political view. I am pro-environment. Climate change is in my opinion worth fighting against. But, even my green ideals are moderate.
For example, Greenpeace (ironic name considering some of the unpeaceful things they have done over the years). I am not an owl-first people-second environmentalist. Yep, I said owl-first. Slash and burn clear cutting is without any question heartbreaking and in my opinion next to evil. We need to modernize past destroying the entire forest from the soil up. Then take an old battle, lumber versus endangered owls(and sadly more than a couple other species). I like wildlife but believe there are sustainable techniques to harvest trees and leave old-growth habitat. It does require hard work, surveys that require miles hiking, most of it without trails plus years of planning to best determine how much to cut where and when, but for the life of the planet, our forests are worth it. Some of the better plans for harvesting trees even help to prevent forest fires. Thusly I’m a people-first environmentalist-moderate.
Same goes for food. I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian. I’m a flexitarian. I do eat vegan sometimes and vegetarian a lot of the time. But, I’m going to roast a turkey and enjoy it with my family, thankfully. I like a good elk burger and I think a bit of fancy bacon is a great flavoring for lentil soup. Thusly dietarily I’m also a moderate.
Food is easy, lets move to a much more touchy subject. Yoga pants/bike shorts on public transit. Someone I love yelled at me, about how women are not sex objects, we are people, and we should be able to wear whatever we want, whenever we want. We should even be able to go around naked if we want. …. Or? Something like that. Okay. My point of view is. People are mammals, therefore any human of reproductive age male, female or other, (like it or not), is actually a sex object. The sexual focus of the human animal, polite, unintentional or not, is the entire pelvic and butt-area. My thoughts about what we should wear on public transportation when we are crammed into trains, airplanes or buses. Is to look at someone who runs and jumps around a lot, and wants the focus to be on ‘the game’, professional basketball players. I think, if we are sticking our butts or pelvises in the faces of people sitting in seats, we should at least wear a garment that covers as much and as loosely as a basketball uniform. And I apologize for stating the obvious, ladies, no side-boob or camel-toe please. If it wasn’t obvious then the phrases ‘side-boob’, 'nip-slip' and ‘camel-toe’ would not be a thing. So, again, I’m not an extremist. For me, as a moderate it’s all about respect. I respect that I have no idea how repressed or not my fellow human beings are, and I want to be respected in turn as a fellow human, not as a sex object, when on public transit, i.e. when not at home or suntanning or swimming etc... I dress how I believe to be polite and respectful as much as I am able to do so. Also, if you look at it like, it's not about you, active or not, everybody of age is a sex-object and everybody wants to be respected, well it just simples things up a bit.
More than just negating anything, or passing endless useless laws and regulations, being moderate is about balance and understanding of the pros and cons of both the left and the right. Most folks tend to be conservative about some topics and liberal about other things. I believe most people want to be somewhat moderate. I know we want to respect each other rather than bicker and fight constantly. Respect requires understanding, and understanding results in common sense, and if any two words define a moderate, it’s ‘common sense’.
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| #doodle for Feb. 9, 2018 |
Daydream number 14/50. Organic food by default shoud be - stickerless and crude oil packaging free.
This one annoys me (and a few other millions of people). Organic food should be packaged free of plastic and stickers. A sign on the bin. A paper carton for small berries etc... or paper potato tomato bag for larger produce. The bag could read organic and maybe has a list of SKU numbers printed down one side or could be blank and there is a pen on a string. But, no stickers stuck on the organic vegetables or fruit please!
Contrarily all non-organic or GM (genetically modified) foods grown with chemical pesticides should be clearly marked. The type of genetic modification color-coded and printed on the label, the sticker is red if it’s a “Round-Up” or whatever brand of pesticide bred into the plant. Yellow if it simply has tougher skin or is a plant to plant hybrid. Orange if it’s grown in pesticides but not GM, etc… Yellow and green if it’s a hybrid grown with natural pesticide-free farming techniques etc.. Remember I’m a moderate. If they genetically modified food in a safe way to be easier to grow organically, for example, that’s okay to mark is as naturally farmed, as long as there isn’t any pesticides or crude oil fertilizer products used in that farming area.
Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are personal to me, not just a couple words. Do you recall my grandfather and his small farm? (a couple paragraphs up on this post). The family farm was part of a cancer cluster. My grandfather died years before old age in the radiation booth, being treated for a brain tumor. The friend on a neighboring farm who helped him on the farm, also died of cancer. My grandmother also had various tumors. My family has a BRCA1 deletion/mutation. I got breast cancer in my 20s. I don’t just buy organic because it’s trendy. I buy it because I think of all the people growing and harvesting our food and vote with my dollar every time I shop for groceries. So, when I say it annoys me that organic food has a sticker glued on it or is sold in a plastic bag, it’s not even close to the ire I feel about pesticides and chemical fertilizers not being clearly marked.
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| Feb. 10, 2018 #doodle #drawfool |
Rat tale + daydream 15/50. Compost. -- Inspired by the giant rats I watched roam the streets in Portland in the 90s.
Once upon a time, there was a clever port city rat who knew the best alleys and gutters to scurry. It grew fat and large as a cat on slightly out-dated cream, aged meats, and crunchy bread. When it was too large for gutters it roamed the sidewalks, eventually lording over the alley behind a doughnut shop. There it raised three rat families almost as fat and big as himself in holes under the edges of hedges. Until one day when a plague-infected flea hopped by and bloated them all to a morbid bursting vector of death. Plague-infected obese rats are terrifying regardless of if it's people who spread the plague to the rats or rats that spread the plague to the people.
All urban areas need to sort urban compost from urban garbage and recycling into smart bins that rotate and properly contain pestilence and if a bin is in a high traffic area like next to a dog park, send a signal for pick-up of a full bin tank.
Many urban areas and some suburban areas have composting bins in operation, right next to recycling. Some areas have been composting for years now. This is great, super, world-changing. Regularly collected bins rats can’t climb out of, need to be standard in all populated areas where garbage is collected.
Composting should be the norm. Food waste should never be mixed with other "garbage". All food waste should be composted as locally as is safely possible, never hauled long distances. Urban compost turned into power/energy is not a pie-in-the-sky daydream, nor limited just to household garbage. For example, meat & bone meal MBM contains 2/3rds the energy of coal. They are already using MBM in Europe to generate electricity. The electric generator next door to meat processing/slaughter warehouses. Tho to be clear it's not about the energy produced replacing current sources. The energy would realistically only supplement the current system, not replace it. The real benefit is the savings of not having to haul smelly garbage mixed with plastic, glass etc... as well as a reduction of pests, rats, cockroaches, flies etc...
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| #doodle #drawfool Feb. 11, 2018. |
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