Articles & Nifty Links

If you read my last post–which I think of as "yesterday’s" but is really more like "two days ago’s"–you know that some very smart, observant, and well-spoken individuals think that the Era of American Participatory Democracy is either on the ropes or gone for good, depending on your reading of their arguments.  That, if true, would suck.  At the very least we’d have to deal with the fact that we’ve sold out our collective ability to make stuff, do stuff, and solve real problems in real time for cheap toys and doodads, which break if you play too roughly with them.

But as if that were not enough, now comes this. There is a decent chance (estimated at 10%, which is significant but not something to really lose sleep over on a nightly basis) that something big enough to punch a hole in our planet will hit us some time this century. That’s not really news to people who have any interest in astronomy or geology–it’s a big planet, and the solar system is crowded, and pieces of space junk are always hitting us or coming close to hitting us. Less often and to lesser effect now than, say, 1 billion years ago, when the solar system was  getting the last kinks worked out and mountains routinely punched holes big enough swallow Ontario in the planets and their moons. Until now this has not been that big a problem.  Mostly because, well, we’ve only been here a short time, nearly all of which (until just recently) has been spent dealing with more immediate concerns like hunting, gathering, and growing food and sheltering ourselves from the elements.

Think of it this way. We at some point all do the same thing, which is sit on our beds, and watch as the sunbeams stream in through the window, illuminating every speck of dust in the air before splashing down on to the bedspread and floor.  I’m still fascinated by that.  It’s possible to stare at this display of the sheer thickness of the air just in our bedrooms–air  filled with tiny particles shed by anything and everything around us, including dust, pollen, bits of skin, hair (both from us and our pets), plaster and insulation from the ceiling–for hours. Now, these things are all tiny compared to our heads, or even our eyes, yet the space around us is filled with them, but since they don’t bother us, we don’t even think about them. Then one day, some speck of God knows what hits your eyeball at exactly the right speed and angle and you feel a shooting pain in your eye, so you blink, then you stagger, maybe you fall down, and the only thing on your mind is how the hell did that happen?

Well, it happened because your luck ran out. It’s the odds. Ten billion billion trillion specks of dust whizz past you or smack into a part of you that’s not sensitive enough to notice, but eventually, your luck runs out, then owie!!

The solar system isn’t that different. The biggest difference is that the Earth is an eyeball that’s roughly 8,000 miles wide, and the last real owie that hit is was about 65 million years ago. The result was a massive underwater crater near the Yucatan Peninsula and a change in  environment that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.  It’s estimated that the rock which caused that was something like a mile wide which is pretty tiny compared to a lot of the stuff that’s out there now. But out there these falling rocks remain, just waiting for that ever so elusive gravity nudge that sends it on a course towards another major owie.

The thing we have going for us is that fact that we are here.  We actually have the tools and knowledge we’d need to see something like a mile-wide rock from space while it’s still far enough away to do something about it.  We aren’t doing much at the moment, which is disappointing because movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon aside,  it really is just a matter of time and  the chance of any given event happening is 100% if your time horizon is long enough.  Clearly the editors of The Atlantic though it was worth a cover story.

Anyway, read the article. Enjoy!

From WNYC’s web site:

Anna Kirkland, assistant professor of women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan and author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood, and  blogger Lara Frater, author of
Fat Chicks Rule!: How To Survive in a Thin-Centric World, 
look at the legal question of discrimination against the overweight.

You can listen on the radio, or you can stream the show.  Enjoy!

In the depths of my disgust at the news of the New York Public Library’s name change yesterday I completely missed this rather cool bit of news: Friday is gaming day at NYPL .

The article in the time is called "Taking Play Seriously at the Public Library With Young Video Gamers," and it begins:

And you thought libraries were supposed to be quiet. Not on Friday.

Under the Beaux-Arts arches of Astor Hall at the New York Public Library’s
flagship building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, thumping hard-rock
beats mixed with tennis-ball thwacks and the screech of burning tires
late Friday afternoon, as the library showed off the latest addition to
its collections of books, films, music and maps: video games.

Beneath
the engraved names of august benefactors like John Jacob Astor and
Simon Guggenheim, several hundred children, young adults and the people
who love them virtually jumped, drove, battled and rocked out as the
library celebrated its burgeoning “Game On @ the Library!” initiative.

      Good news, for sure. But the best quotes are a bit further down:

“What we’re seeing is that in addition to simply helping bring kids
into the library in the first place, games are having a broader effect
on players, and they have the potential to be a great teaching tool,”
Mr. Martin said. “If a kid takes a test and fails, that’s it. But in a
game, if you fail you get to take what you’ve learned and try again.

“In
a lot of these games you have to understand the rules, you have to
understand the game’s world, its story. For some games you have to
understand its history and the characters in order to play effectively.”

You betcha! That last paragraph applies to life as well as gaming, if metaphorically. (For anyone who doesn’t believe it, I have one word: "Iraq.")

(A great big thank you to Karen Munro, E-Learning Librarian and iLibrarian for nabbing this.)

Now that the weekend is upon us, I present you with some reading material.  No introduction for this article, except to say that if you are (or have been, or plan to be) heavily invested in "the market"–by which phrase we generally mean the financial institutions in which we park our life’s savings in hope of retiring wealthier than we are now–you should probably read it.  Heck, even if you remain a card-carrying socialist and think that markets are the worst things ever, read it anyway.

As always with the material I link to, I don’t agree with everything he says (although being the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, I’d expect he knows what he’s talking about), but I agree this subject is something to think about very carefully. (Very carefully.  I mean, this is your life’s savings here!)

"Deep Capture," by Patrick Byrne.

Enjoy!