Vida Enigmática – Page 56 – "Who speaks for Earth?"

Here’s something manufacturers and industrial designers need to think more about: backlash on planned obsolescence.

September 8, 2016 — leslie dean brown

If there’s one thing in this world that I can’t stand, it’s companies like Microsoft and Apple…

Who seem to make things go obsolete well before their time. And no one can tell them not to. They just keep getting away with it. Why? Probably because they make a lot of money getting away with it. That’s why.

But there are no laws to stop them getting away with it. And what this materials scientist thinks right now is “by fucken oath there should be [laws to stop them getting away with it]”. That is coming from an ex materials scientist. Right.

I think you all know what I am talking about. I’m talking about ‘old’ printers that don’t work with newer computers simply because the ‘drivers’ have ‘issues’ with the “operating system”. I’m talking about new software that won’t run on old hardware. I’m also talking about new hardware that won’t run old software. I’m talking about Apple’s proprietry connectors.

Let me tell you a little anecdote. I can even remember my dad saying about 15 or 20 years ago way back when I was a kid that Apple (you know, Macintosh it was once called) forced you to use their special cables and connectors, and thus were able to charge a premium.

At the time, I took what he said with a pinch of salt. I thought “well it’s their computer system, I suppose they would want to do that. Who can blame them?”. But now, fast forward twenty-odd years and my old man is dead [RIP, he died last year] and what he said to me in the 1990’s is looking even wiser now than it did when he said it all those years ago. Because it just so happens to be true. This man, my father, would be 90 years old if he were alive today. He was old but he knew something that I didn’t. That something is called ‘wisdom’ and all early adopters from what I’ve seen tend to suffer from a severe lack of it.

Back in the day, we used things called serial ports and parrallel ports to plug in our printers. So they got the information from one cable and they got their power from another completely separate cable. The thing is, they were slow. Really slow. But when USB came along, all those printers and mice and things became much less useful. The same thing happened to compact discs when Apple decided not to include a CD drives on their latest desktops.

People will always need to buy new peripherals to work with new plugs on their new computer system. That is now happening with USB-C connectors. Do you want to know what I think? I think USB C can go and get fucked, that’s what I think. All of my stuff (two external hard drives, external sound card for microphone, graphics tablet, mouse, wireless solar keyboard, external webcam, flash drives, the entire bloody lot is USB2 now isn’t it?). USB2 and it is plenty good enough. I’m sticking with it.

Yes, I’m talking about Apple ditching the 3.5mm headphone jack on it’s newest smartphone. Now, keep in mind that I don’t even own an Apple iphone. In fact I have never owned an Apple iphone. And here I am, compelled to write a blog article about how narky it makes me feel. Because knowing what I know, I probably won’t ever own an Apple iphone. I’m writing this from an imac retina. I don’t own an ipad. And right now, that is the way it is going to stay. After buying just one Apple product, I’m fast becoming anti-Apple. And the headphone jack decision is my last straw. It is the catalyst to me becoming “anti-Apple”.

So I’m going to just say it here in black and white. I’m going to share with all you strangers the reason it makes me so narky. Because this is my blog, my little ‘space’ and I can say pretty much whatever the hell I want. Right? There’s this thing called “free speech” in the West that not enough people take advantage of… this is vida enigmática… [Read more…]

Our environmental footprint

September 5, 2016 — leslie dean brown

carbon footprint — Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2019. All rights reserved.

Most of the global economy is based on the idea of selling physical products. And if you’re not selling something yourself, your clients are people that do.

B I’ve noticed that in some environmental discussions and debates, Westerners automatically assume that their country is less polluting than poorer countries. I don’t think pointing the finger at China really helps. And here’s why:

I think our blatant consumerism in the West doesn’t compare favourably to the third world, because all of the things that we buy have a kind of “environmental footprint” if you like. And note that I’m not even really talking about CO₂ emissions here (even though the US carbon emission per capita is 17.56 metric tons while that of China is ‘only’ 6.19 metric tons per capita). Carbon is not the only element on the periodic table although it is the one that goes into the atmosphere more than the others.

If China pollutes rivers or whatever making loads of stuff for the West, who is really doing (causing) the polluting? The chinese manufacturers? Or is the Western consumer demand for those products ultimately to blame?

My main backround if materials science. One of the more eye-opening subjects I found out about (in terms of environmental degradation) is called “extractive metallurgy”. Extractive metallurgy is the study of chemical processes that we use to extract an refine metals from their ores. Basically, in a nut shell, all materials have to come from somewhere. Ususally it’s either the Earth’s crust itself or sea water.

In most of the processes, you need either need huge amounts of electricity and/or high temperatures and/or huge amounts of other chemicals to obtain the desired elements and/or compounds.

For example, here is just one of the many steps in the refinement of germanium:

GeO₂ + 4 HCl → GeCl₄ + 2 H₂O

In this step, the reactive gas chlorine is being used to make germanium more reactive. So chlorine, which is toxic, is used in one of the processes to extract the element germanium from its oxide. Okay.

And here is just one of the steps in tellurium refinement:

HTeO−3 + OH⁻ + H₂SO₄ → TeO₂ + SO2−4 + 2 H₂O

In this step, sulfuric acid is being used to make tellurium more reactive. Okay.

And where are germanium and tellurium being used you ask? They are two semiconductors that are the basis for integrated circuits and other electronic components in all sorts of electronic devices. Not so good.

In fact, many other nasty chemical compounds are used in the extraction, refinement and manufacturing industries. Many others.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think the worst offenders are the electronic consumer devices, simply because they contain the most number of hard-to-extract elements. The harder-to-extract elements require more chemical treatment steps. That’s just one of the reasons why they these elements are so expensive (not just that they’re rare). In fact I can probably go so far as to invent a new theory, which goes something like this: “the higher the unit price of an element, the more damaging its extraction process is to the environment.” But I digress…

Here’s the thing. There are a lot of chemical elements used in computers and extracting them from the ground and processing them taxes the environment (especially when you consider all of the planned obsolesence we see today). Our current way of life creates more and more electronic waste that cannot be recovered or recycled (except perhaps the gold bits)

I recently asked a few questions on Quora and I’d like to share those questions and answers with you now. Listed here are some of the toxic chemicals and semiconductors that are used in electonic decices. Go on, take a look. Can you begin to see how big the problem is now?

The point is, nasty chemicals are used at all steps of the extraction and refinement process. We just don’t ever see them being used in industry. Oh but they’re there alright. They’re being used all the time.

Suffice it to say that if Westeners think they pollute the Earth less than a typical 3rd-worlder, in my eyes, they are sorely mistaken. [Read more…]

If we were living on Mars…

September 5, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2019. All rights reserved.

I’d like to remind people of two things:

1Would Mars colonists be doing things the same way that we are here and now? For example, would they be mowing grass if and when they manage to get it to grow under their domed little base stations?

I think not. Not very sustainable, is it? Using up petrol and mower parts all for what? To keep the grass shorter and produce less oxygen? (at least that’s the excuse I give now for only mowing 9/10 of our backyard rather than the whole darn lot) Why do we cut grass anyway? Those are the sorts of questions humanity ought to be asking itself.

2Just imagine if all of 7.4 billion of us humans were *already* living on Mars (indoors) and we just happened to “find” Earth in the ‘state’ that it is in now, except with no people…

Do you think we would stay on the planet Mars? Where do you think we would move to? That’s right, we’d move right over to the planet Earth, where you can breathe freely… where the essential things like oxygen and rain are still free… where dirt is *almost* free (right now it costs $10,000,000 to launch a tonne of dirt into outer space). The planet with the deep oceans and millions of species already there. The planet that doesn’t need terraforming because its already terraformed.

So now knowing these two things.

Why the hell would we want to even consider moving away from here? Why would we want to cut down more forests here, if next-generation colonists wouldn’t do it on another planet in future? Otherwise, we’re just going to make the same mistakes on planet #2.

Here’s a simple thought experiment. Why aren’t we simply pretending to be living on a new colony already? That way we don’t even have to waste resources getting there.

Of course, getting other people to change is very, very difficult. All I can do is change myself. So what if I pretend that I am living on the planet Mars. What would I do if I was living over there? I would plant trees, not cut them down. I’d grow more forests that I cut down.

What else would I do? Why, I’d use my own urine as liquid fertiliser instead of going to the store and buying something that was obtained from a phosphate mine, wouldn’t I?

I think a lot of people on Earth have lost hope and they think that it’s almost like a “lost cause”. And I say: “fuck that”. I’d like to remind everyone that it’s FAR easier to get ourselves back on the right track here than to start from scratch over on Mars…

I do think that the biosphere is a lot more resilient than people realise. It just seems to me that people are giving up or losing hope on this planet that we all call home. But right now, Mars is in a much worse state than what we already have here!

I hope this has given a few of you some much-needed inspiration!

Would you want live on Mars? I wouldn’t. Please comment, and let’s get this discussion started.

Some perspective about colonising the planet Mars.

August 29, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Imagine if 7 billlion people had always lived on a dust-bowl Mars-like planet with no life outside of the base stations. Imagine if that’s the way it had always been. Imagine if that was humanities’ entire existence, on the red planet…

With that in mind, I’d like to do a little thought experiment. I want you to imagine what would happen if we were to start exploring the solar system, from our home Mars.

The closest other world, Earth, looks very promising. We’ve spent a hundred trillion dollars on this latest space mission, okay. It’s been 30 years in the planning stage alone…

So we go to this new place called ‘Earth’.

And we don’t find another dust-bowl freeze-your-arse-off planet with no oceans, a toxic atmosphere* and a severe lack of oxygen. We don’t find it to be uninhabited. We don’t find the gravity extremely off-putting. We don’t find a desolate, barren wasteland devoid of all life like the home planet. No.

Instead, what we encounter is another world no unlike this one, the one we already know as ‘Earth’, exactly the way it is now, but without all the humans. Without any civilisation.

Imagine if we found 60 amur leopards, 400 Sumatran tigers, 880 mountain gorillas, 1826 giant pandas, 4080 snow leopards, 4848 black rhinos and 10000 blue whales!

Impenetrable jungles! Countless species of insects! Fish! Crustaceans! Molluscs! Birds! Frogs!

“Frogs? What an unusual name. What are they? Oh they’re slimy but harmless critters –amphibians– that thrive both on the land and in the water and use jumping as a form of locomotion.”

Lakes containing fresh water! Glaciers! Too many animal species to list!

“They’ve got a whole interconnected web-like thing scientists are calling an ‘ecosystem’ over there on that other planet. We’ve been trying for close to a millenium to get something like that going over here.”

Meanwhile back on Mars inside our dry and dusty base station, we get a breaking news report about the existence of all these weird and wonderful creatures on the new world. That’s right. Millions upon millions of new species that had never been seen or even reported before and now, as if by magic, all of a sudden they existed! Imagine what the news media would say if that was what we discovered when we weren’t even expecting the most modest and basic life-forms!!

Don’t you think we’d want to “swap planets”?

“No? What do you mean she is still not convinced of going?!

Because on the new planet they have oceans! Water falls from the sky! Food is abundant!

“Mate! You sure you still don’t want to leave here? They’re saying that not only could you breathe without a respirator, but everyone could literally walk outside, without ever having to wear a space suit. Your body would never be at risk of ‘exploding’! No airlocks required. A-fucking-mazing. I’d like to live there. Fuck this Mars shithole I say.”

But they’re not on that other planet, they’re right here on this one, now.

So just imagine if, miraculously, we materialised over there on the new and way cooler planet Earth with lots of life. Yes. Imagine if we didn’t even have to travel through space to get there; no need for a mass-exodus from planet Mars to get over to planet Earth.

“I’m telling you it turns out we don’t even have to travel anywhere Duncan! We’ve all been part of a cruel social experiment. Everyone has been living in a dream world. Just step outside and take a look for yourself. Its all out there”.

Imagine if we just found out about all that’s here, today. Imagine if it was only yesterday that we were totally ignorant and only today that we all just found out about all these new and never-before-described animals.

Giraffes, chameleons, snails, dragonflies, bees, grasshoppers, stick insects, jellyfish, toucans, macaws, catepillars, hermit crabs, barnacles, sharks, barracuda. Not to mention flowers.

Wouldn’t that be incredible? Wouldn’t that thought give you an unbelievable feeling inside? Do you think that would give us some sense of hope that “all is not lost”?

Next, I’d like you to imagine if we were given a second chance at everything. A chance to do things right. Imagine if, despite all the well-documented mistakes we’d made in the past, we were somehow expunged of all of our “conservation inaction guilt”. Imagine if we had a chance of recolonising this planet Earth. Do you think we’d be so naive and myopic as to make the same mistakes all over again on the new planet? No I don’t think so.

I think we’d all say something like:

“no hang on, we tried internal combustion engines on that other planet Earth and it didn’t go so well”.

I think we’d probably be a little more prudent the next time around don’t you think?

What you’d like to hear me tell you is what we could and should be saying:

“Yes we already know from our land survey data that there are plenty of coal & oil reserves on this new planet Earth. But knowing what we know about the alternate timelines, sooner than dig all of these fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them, we’d be better off building massive solar power stations instead. Better to utilise electric cars and have them recharged with renewable energy…”

Wouldn’t you agree that the new Earth colony could very easily put a government mandate in place that prohibits the use of fossil fuels and other toxic materials?

But that’s precisely what we are not doing, isn’t it?

Because we’re waking up every single day hoping that this problem will all just somehow “go away” all by itself.

We’re waking up every day with this second-chance-option, every single day, and we’re not taking it.

We already know that many animal species are threatened with extinction. Many people find this news very depressing/distressing (myself included). But they’re not extinct yet. No not just yet. I don’t mean to say that they won’t ever become extinct. I’m not saying that at all.

Last of all, imagine if we learned that instead of thriving on this new planet, the survival situation for quite a few of those species was more than a little precarious. Many of them are doing okay and still breeding fine but some niche species aren’t coping very well at all.

Now imagine we’d spent all that money to get to this other planet, one hundred trillion dollars, and then imagine we’re too fucking stingy to save even a few of the thousands of endangered species. What do you think would make news headlines on that day?

My point is, we haven’t even spent a hundred trillion dollars on some ridiculous space mission. Not yet.

Rather, it’s more a case of “they’re already here and we’re already there”. That new planet is this planet.

So to me it looks like the majority of humans are either stingy, lazy, stupid or a combination of all three. Most people have this “can’t be fucked attitude” about a problem we ourselves created.

We’re not stingy when we’re buying the latest generation mobile phones though are we? No, it seems we all have plenty of money for that.

See, I think we’re acting worse than a typical teenager who doesn’t want to clean up their own mess. They expect that someone else will do it for them.

But we’re not teenagers. We’re adults. And you’d think that we would have more responsibility for our own actions.

Instead, we’re treating dear planet Earth a bit like our first proper girlfriend or boyfriend —the one we used to hold on a pedestal, the one we looked up to, the one we tried so hard in the beginning for, the one we never imagined would end— and by foolishly and repeatedly not respecting the others’ limits and boundaries, we inevitably lost them. We then suffered the unimagineable heartbreak of the completely avoidable relationship breakup.

So in this rather unusual post, I’d like to remind everyone that we are taking what we have here for granted. Massively so.

We’re making the same mistakes we always make. And it really makes me rather sad. I feel like I shouldn’t even be living in this timezone…

Because scientsists are warning everyone, the entire world, that we might not even be able to recover from this particular “relationhip breakup”. It’s going to be far worse than our first-ever divorce. It’s going to be that hard and way harder still.

I don’t think we can make it on our own. I don’t think we’re ‘smart’ enough.

We still need this world. And I hope this blog makes people aware of that.

The way I think of it is this. Mars is just another example of a ‘shithole’ (meaning uninhabitable) planet in our the solar system. Why do I say that? Well I don’t see too many 5-star resorts being built in the middle of a deserted wasteland thousands of miles from civilisation. No. See, we already know that there’s this consensus that the nicest places to be and more importantly stay at are generally the ones where there’s either a city, a river, a lake, an ocean, a beach, a mountain or a forest. Or preferably combinations of them.

Mars has none of that. Who the fuck is going to want to voluntarily live there? Slaves? Miners? People with no imagination for what it’s actually going to be like living there on a day-to-day basis, sign some contract and get stuck there? Poor people who can no longer afford to live on Earth. Probably the latter. Maybe this is what this is all about. An ultra-rich class of people wanting to find a new home for all of us poor people.

Forget Mars. Earth is where it’s at. We’re already on the good planet Elon. If you want to go and live there, by all means, go. I think you’ll be back. You’re realise it was a bad invesment

Discrimination is second nature.

August 25, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Every time you select a piece of fruit, based on the condition of its skin, you’re judging the contents.

No one likes to eat a soggy banana or a rotten apple. We’ve come to learn that if a banana is bruised & blackened on the outside, inside is most likely a soggy fruit mush.

Even 3 year old children know the difference is in the taste. They won’t eat it. Although sometimes, despite multiple bruises and other exterior imperfections, the interior is not as bad as we think; we are rewarded by what we find inside – 100% intact fruit! Succulent, delicious. Generally though, after years of practice, we learn to judge fruit correctly…

There are two ways of describing this situation:

Some might say I am discriminating against all fruit with a certain type of skin (be it the colour or the texture); I am pre-judging, I am being critical.
Others might say that I have a distinguished, discerning or refined sense of taste; I am a perceptive, particular and sensitive person.

One of these sentences contains positive statements whilst the other definitely has negative connotations. Clearly, something is wrong, and I think you’ll easily spot the pattern in the words below-

Synonyms for the adjective “discriminating”:

analytical, astute, authentic, canny, careful, choosy, clever, correct, cultivated, defined, definite, detailed, discerning, distinct, distinctive, distinguish, eclectic, exacting, exact, explicit, genuine, incisive, ingenious, insightful, intuitive, factual, faithful, fastidious, finicky, fussy, judicious, just, keen, literal, methodical, meticulous, observant, particular, picky, proper, prudent, refined, right, rigorous, scientific, scrupulous, selective, sensitive, skillful, smart, specific, strict, subtle, systematic, tasteful, true, unerring, unmistakable, veracious, wise.

Synonyms for the verb “to discriminate”:

assess, be bigot, brand, categorise, classify, collate, compare, contrast, delineate, designate, differentiate, discern, draw distinction, evaluate, extricate, disfavor, favor, hate, incline, judge, pigeonhole, know, note, be partial, perceive, portray, remark, segregate, separate, set apart, show bias, single out, specify, split hairs, tell apart,treat differently, typecast, victimize.

So we can describe someone as being discriminate or discriminating, but the act of discriminating against something without enough knowledge is forbidden.

Whenever you turn on the radio and choose a station you are being prejudiced towards new music styles and discriminating against them by not listening. I prefer cotton over wool, because I’ve found that wool makes my skin itch. Am I biased towards cotton plants or racist (specist) against sheep? Whenever anyone thinks about making any kind of informed decisions, discrimination is second nature.

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