Comments pinechild has made

  • should airline passengers just scamper away?

    I'm a little disappointed the article didn't share any of the ideas of how we can learn from natural systems- maybe there weren't in this book?

    For instance, how do marmots respond to Nervous Nellies vs Cool Hand Lucys? and are CHLs underestimating risk as NNs are overestimating risk?  How would what we know of marmots, or of birds or insects help us at the airport, say?  

    It seems that animals will overreact to a threat: err on the side of declaring a threat exists when in fact it may not- a human member of PETA walking by some birds pecking at food on the ground is as likely to cause them to flee as a hungry leopard.  In response, the birds increase uncertainty to its predator by scampering away.  Once the threat's gone, the birds fly back to land on the ground doing what they were doing.

    So at an airport, if we see a suspicious package or passenger... should we... ground all planes?  Once the package has been destroyed or ID'd as benign, or passenger apprehended/let go, do we go on with our normal business?  What if the terrorist repeatedly comes to this airport (the equivalent of stomping the ground near birds)? Will we have to abandon that airport eventually?On A biologist explains what security experts can learn from nature posted 1 year, 7 months ago 3 Responses

  • Nuclear

    Every now and then you'll run across the fascinating challenge of developing a visual language that will be used to keep humans away from nuclear waste dumps, for their own safety.  After all, who knows what language will be spoken near Yucca Mountain in the year 35,000 CE? If you use cartoons that show what might happen, that a healthy person exposed to radiation becomes sick and dies, how do you know future humans won't read the cartoon backwards and try to bring back to life their dead by placing them near the waste dump...?

    And of course, it's a most fascinating question to design a system that will withstand some 50,000 years.  A friend of mine worked at a consulting company that was called upon to do just that- a risk assessment that spans not a decade, not even a century, but millennia.

    It seems as if the more interesting the technical questions become, the more we ignore the moral ones.

    Al Gore in his statements to Congress, some of which he repeated here at the Masonic Auditorium atop o' Nob Hill in San Francisco, says that future generations might ask why didn't we do something to avert global climate change.  Wouldn't future generations, assuming our civilization remains uninterrupted, ask, similarly: why we decided to create so much nuclear waste?

    So that our great-to-the-Nth-grand children don't ask that question, let's ask, and answer, ourselves, have we really tried our best at finding non-nuclear, carbon neutral and otherwise environmentally sustainable ways of creating energy?

    My suggestion: spend those billions instead on conservation, solar power and other renewable and/or ecologically sustainable technologies, increased efficiency, and population control.  And if that's not enough, go nucular.  
    On An interview with Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers posted 2 years, 7 months ago 8 Responses

  • meat, toilets, raincatching

    There have been many good comments about meat... but it seems to me they would apply to factory farms.  How about grassfed beef and chicken? I would think their impact on water use is much much less both upstream and downstream.  I'm thinking of the farm that was profiled in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, Polyface Farms:

    http://www.polyfacefarms.com/.

    About low flush toilets- I think the idea is right, but the execution isn't always that great- I hear people complain that sometimes you need an extra flush to get things going.  There are now toilets that have to flusher levers, or two settings- No 1 and No 2- my workplace has these in the new buildings.  I'd like to collect grey water for flushing too, but I want my toilet to stay clean :-)

    Here in the SF Bay Area I would love to collect rain water, but where to put it...?  it's not like we have a lot of space for a big ol' tank... underground?On Umbra on water conservation posted 2 years, 7 months ago 15 Responses