Vida Enigmática – Page 71 – "Who speaks for Earth?"

Petition to ban the publication of unethical lethal whale research

January 26, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I have started a petition to ban the publication of unethical lethal whale research.

I have attached a transcript of my letters to SpringerLink regarding this issue in chronological order because it makes for more interesting reading. It’s interesting to see Springer’s official stance change completely when they are called out.
Maybe this will make interesting reading for someone… in about 300 years time when people realise that some animals are more important than humans:

From: Dr. Leslie Dean Brown [mailto:info@lesliedeanbrown.com]
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2016 9:56 AM
To: Onlineservice, SCSC
Subject: TN606818 “I speak for whales” [petition: banning lethal whale research] FS

Hello,

I’ll get straight to the point.
As I’m sure you’re aware, people all around the world are getting more and more annoyed with the Japanese that continue to kill whales and do unnecessary scientific research on them. Many people thought the research was all lies. The really scary part is that it is actually true. Yes, they are in fact researching whales… :-(

I am writing to you because some of these papers have been published in the Journal “Polar Biology” with the latest appearing in 2014:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00300-013-1424-3

I have started a petition to ban lethal whale research:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/en-gb/656/717/561/ban-japanese-%22research%22-that-is-lethal-to-whales/

I hope you take notice of this petition and reject all publications by the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO), the International Whaling Commission (IWC) or any other organisations that are involved in the slaughter of whales and the whale meat industry.

Did you know that the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research openly sells whale meat in exchange for financial support from the public? [Read more…]

The ultimate rant from an environmentalist.

January 4, 2016 — leslie dean brown

So I was signing a whole bunch of petitions on care2 just now and came across this text written by a man named John Smith, which was left as a comment!

I don’t believe in any form of god, but I think this man is at his wit’s end already and I know exactly how he feels. I thought I’d save it for the sake of posterity, and to hopefully encourage some of you [Read more…]

Blue Moon of Josephine.

November 15, 2015 — leslie dean brown

We estimate that 3.4 billion individuals – or 71% of adults worldwide – have wealth below USD 10,000, while the group of millionaires, who comprise less than 1% of the global population, account for 45% of total wealth.[source]

SO. It seems the rich are indeed getting much richer. There is a truly massive gap in the distribution of wealth and it just keeps getting wider and wider and wider.

I’ve had most of this post sitting in draft format for quite a while. But just today, I learned that Joseph Lau, the billionaire Hong Kong real-estate tycoon, paid a record-breaking US$48.4 million for a cushion-shaped internally-flawless fancy vivid blue-coloured diamond, called the “Blue Moon”. He named it “Blue Moon of Josephine”. And he bought it for his seven year old daughter.

For his seven year old daughter! [Read more…]

What you don’t have you don’t need it now.

November 13, 2015 — leslie dean brown

How often have you bought something expensive only to want to replace it with something else –something even pricier– within a very short period of time? In short, you’re no longer satisfied with what you have. You want more. You want to maximise.

OOriginally people used to buy higher-priced quality items because they last longer than poorly-made, cheaper items. So the idea was that we’d spend more in the short term but less over the long term. Which is great because buying something that lasts longer it makes more economical and ecological sense. We never used to purchasing a replacement item solely because it was an “improved” model. Originally, we paid for quality items because they added some kind of value to our lives.

Now you may think all of the vendor’s products are so good, that you want to buy more than one model, so that you can choose which one to use based on your personal preference that particular day. A bit like the Thunderbirds — they had a fantastic selection of transport vehicles to choose from, didn’t they?

Usually you feel strangely compelled to buy something new because the new product is bigger, better, faster, more accurate, has more features, contains more memory, is smaller and lighter, stronger or more fashionable. Brands have become so strong today that we start to define our own identity by them; we associate with some brands and not others.

But where exactly did we go so wrong? We hardly even question anymore whether we really need the new item — we buy it because we can. We buy it because it’s fun. We also buy it because our government tells us that buying things is “good for the economy”.

Most people don’t even give so much as a second thought about throwing out something that still functions. These days, things become superceded or obsolete at crazy rate.

[Read more…]

The puzzle of language learning

November 13, 2015 — leslie dean brown

I often use the analogy that learning a language (including your first one) is like fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together to form a picture. Each puzzle piece could represent a word, clusters of pieces representing a phrase or an expression. The effectiveness of communication of a concept or idea is the ability of the puzzle to represent an image you are trying to portray. The number of puzzle pieces correlates directly with the number of words that the language contains, while the complexity of the puzzle reflects the difficulty of learning the language in question.

The Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use. Many other archaic words exist but are now considered obsolete. The average English speaker possesses a vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words, using only a fraction of that in everyday conversation, the rest being recognition or recall vocabulary. Hence, no one can finish the entire puzzle, even given a lifetime of trying. The puzzle is only ever at most partially completed.

As you begin to learn a new language, the puzzle at first appears not to make sense. If you don’t recognise more than 2 or 3 key words in a 10-15 word sentence, it becomes almost impossible to comprehend. Hence, a vocabulary of 1000-2000 words is not enough to understand what is going on.The puzzle pieces don’t connect, and you can’t see the overall picture.

In my opinion, there are a minimum number of words (I estimate 1000~5000) before you can actually begin to communicate and have a proper, meaningful conversation with somebody. My estimate was based on highlighting the new words I had learned in a Spanish mini dictionary, and approximating the average number of highlighted words per page with the total number of pages. When I approached and surpassed that vocabulary level, my ability to communicate improved drastically. I could understand past, present & future tenses, and I also knew how to augment my knowledge of the language by asking appropriate questions in that language. In other words, I could use the new language to learn more about the world, including the language itself.