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Feb. 9th, 2020 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I'll give Seven Worlds - One Planet - credit, they provide little stories of how there are humans who are helping to protect the planet. For example in Asian waters, the fishermen feed the largest fish -- a Matted Head Shark, which helps sustain the waters and ensures they continue to catch fish. It's a quid pro quo relationship that benefits both. Also these fish used to be hunted on the verge of extinction but now it is illegal to fish for them or kill them. And as a result their species is growing. Also, their are efforts to save the Sumatra Rhino and Orangutan. Palm Oil trees have just about destroyed the forests in Indonesia. But there is a way to combat the continuance of this -- buy sustainable palm oil that doesn't contribute to deforestation and helps local economy. Or don't buy it at all. (I've been reading the backs of things for some time now to avoid buying it.)
My sister-in-law has found a way to make sustainable bathing suits. And there's ways to recycle clothing and shoes at local farmer's markets.
I'm not doing great at this -- but I am trying. My brother is doing a better job of it, but he also lives on 11 acres of land in upstate New York.
Links:
* 50 Ways to Help Save the Planet
* Don't Know How to Save the Planet? This is what you can do.
* 50 Ways to Save the Planet via the Guardian
* 22 Inventions Saving the Earth
* 70 Ways to Save the Earth
I figure if everyone decides to do at least five on these lists...that will help.
Here's what I've done?
* I turn off my computer at home at night. And use a laptop.
* I get electronic books. No longer buy paper.
* I have a mug at work, and mugs at home, plus a water bottle that I use. And a Brita filter for tap.
* Canvas bags. And recycle the plastic ones at Foodtown as much as possible.
* Take public transportation and walk everywhere.
* Switch to 100% clean energy -- wind and solar.
* Use LED light bulbs.
* Recycle plastics, glass, and aluminum.
I'm beginning to think that I have to find a way to avoid buying things wrapped in plastic or encased in plastic as much as possible. Also get rid of the bags. I do have biodegradable plastic trash bags, so that's something. I have too much plastic in my apartment and at work, though.
Plastic is killing us.
2. I survived the Warsaw Ghetto, Here are the Lessons I'd like to Pass On
Given what I’ve learned over my lifetime I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Of course, many people did extraordinary things, but in most cases only because they were forced to by extreme circumstances, and even then, true heroes were very few and far between: I do not count myself among them.
The same applies to those who failed in their moral obligations during that time. Of course, there were many who committed unspeakable, unforgivable crimes. But it is nonetheless important to understand that we were a generation living in fear, and fear makes people do terrible things. Unless you have felt it, you cannot truly understand it.
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either. I must confess that for much of my life, I maintained the view that it was important for Poles to feel pride in their wartime record – leading me, when recounting my experiences serving in the Home Army in Warsaw under Nazi occupation, to omit certain examples of indifference and uncooperativeness on behalf of my fellow Poles. It is only in recent years, as I have seen that pride turn into self-righteousness, and that self-righteousness into self-pity and aggression, that I have realised just how wrong it was not to be completely open about the failings I witnessed.
The truth is that, as a Pole and as a Jew, as a soldier and as a refugee, I experienced a wide spectrum of behaviour at the hands of Poles – from those who sheltered me at risk to their own lives, to those who sought to take advantage of my vulnerability, and all possible shades of concern and indifference in between.
And although the Third Reich destroyed my world, it was a German woman who saved my life by introducing me to the men who would recruit me into the Polish underground. No nation has a monopoly on virtue – something that many people, including many of my fellow Israeli citizens, still struggle to understand.
3. For the folks who live in Arizona on my correspondence list - The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix Arizona
As Mars was once thought to be, Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals. Except for what remains of its desert setting, canals may be Phoenix’s most distinguishing feature. Varying little, pooling a personality, they make soft incisions through what surrounds them. As you jockey through traffic dizzied by small businesses and their signs, numbed by miles of ranch homes and convenience stores, your eyes will flicker coolly down what seems an open tunnel of water. Receding parallels of packed desert sand, twenty feet wide, clean of vegetation, frame an even, sky-reflecting flow. Glimpses of joggers and cyclists along the banks indicate that there is still human life without combustion. For all their sterility, the canals command moving water and thus retain more mystery than anything else in the valley. Because they so prominently display what makes a desert city possible, it would seem that to get to the bottom of the canals would be to get to the bottom of Phoenix.
Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Beginning around A.D. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. Having reached a population of twenty thousand, the Hohokam abandoned the Salt River Valley around 1400, possibly because they had depleted the soil.
4. The Best Board Games of the Ancient World
Long before Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and Risk won legions of fans, actual Roman legions passed the time by playing Ludus Latrunculorum, a strategic showdown whose Latin name translates loosely to “Game of Mercenaries.” In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. From Go to backgammon, Nine Men’s Morris and mancala, these were the cutthroat, quirky and surprisingly spiritual board games of the ancient world.
5. The cinematographer of Knives Out wants to end the Film vs. Digital Debate
“Film“Film has tremendous balls,” Christopher Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “Film is oak, digital is plywood.” And even in an era where more films are shot on digital than ever, it remains a truism among everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Detective Pikachu’s cinematographer that celluloid offers a visual quality that digital simply cannot match.
Steve Yedlin disagrees — not just with this conclusion, but with the foundation of the debate itself. Cinephiles might know Yedlin as Rian Johnson’s go-to cinematographer on everything from Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Knives Out. But since the early days of digital, he’s also gained a reputation for his rigorous technical study of the science behind image creation.
In April 2019, Yedlin released his scholarship’s latest fruit, the “Display Prep Demo.” An updated version of a video first released in 2015, the demo alternates between footage shot on 35mm film stock and a 4K Arri Alexa, industry standards for film and digital, respectively. Both have been processed to achieve what Yedlin says is “the look culturally associated with a traditional all-film system,” the kind people like Nolan say can only be achieved by actually shooting on film. Except, as Yedlin tells Polygon, when screened in theaters to an array of industry professionals, almost no one could tell the difference.
To anyone concerned with cinematography, the implications are huge: If you can make digital footage look convincingly like film, the debate over which format is visually superior is effectively moot. But for Yedlin, the first paradigm he hopes to change with his study isn’t actually about “film vs. digital,” but about how people think about cameras themselves.
6. How to Learn 30 Languages?
I'd like to be able to master two, and just managed to do one. The second one I'd like to master is Spanish, even though I took French in school. I hear more Spanish and Russian though, than the other ones.
When you consider the challenges for the brain, it’s no wonder most of us find learning a language so demanding. We have many different memory systems, and mastering a different tongue requires all of them. There’s procedural memory – the fine programming of muscles to perfect an accent – and declarative memory, which is the ability to remember facts (at least 10,000 new words if you want to come close to native fluency, not to mention the grammar). What’s more, unless you want to sound like a stuttering robot, those words and structures have to make it to the tip of your tongue within a split second, meaning they have to be programmed in both “explicit” and “implicit” memory.
That tough mental workout comes with big payoffs, however; it is arguably the best brain training you can try. Numerous studies have shown that being multilingual can improve attention and memory, and that this can provide a “cognitive reserve” that delays the onset of dementia. Looking at the experiences of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Canada has found that speaking two languages delayed dementia diagnosis by five years. Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an extra nine years of healthy cognition.
Those lasting benefits are a stark contrast to the failure of most commercial “brain training” games you can download – which generally fail to offer long-term improvements in memory or attention.
Until recently, however, many neuroscientists had suggested that most of us are too old to reach native-like fluency in a fresh language; according to the “critical period hypothesis”, there is a narrow window during childhood in which we can pick up the nuances of a new language. Yet Bialystok’s research suggests this may have been exaggerated; rather than a steep precipice, she has found that there is a very slight decline in our abilities as we age.
Certainly, many of the hyperglots I meet in Berlin have mastered languages later in life. Keeley grew up in Florida, where he was exposed to native Spanish speakers at school. As a child, he used to tune into foreign radio stations – despite not being able to understand a word. “It was like music to me,” he says. But it was only as an adult that he started travelling the world – first to Colombia, where he also studied French, German and Portuguese at college. He then moved on to Switzerland and Eastern Europe before heading to Japan. He now speaks at least 20 languages fluently, almost all of which were learnt as an adult. “The critical period hypothesis is a bunch of crap,” he says.
7. Sorry Keto fans, You're probably not in Ketosis
8. I was living homeless in Utah, but nothing prepared me for Koreatown in Los Angeles
oreatown, LOS ANGELES—Resting inside one of the stone entryways of St. James Episcopal Church on St. Andrews Place, Josh Law heard a drunken man’s slurred speech and then the sound of an opening zipper. In 16 months of homelessness, Law had learned to sleep in an altered state of hypervigilance. He grabbed his makeshift bed of clothes and blankets—and dodged the stream of urine.
Sixteen long months of hell, Law says. Sixteen months of adjusting his nightly agenda to the event schedule of the church so that he wouldn’t block a doorway with his bed. Sometimes he stretched out at 8 p.m.; sometimes he waited until 10 p.m. He always made sure he was up at 4 a.m., before the garbage truck drivers passed. “I didn’t want people to see me and think: ‘Oh, what a lazy homeless bum,’ ” Law said.
But the number of homeless people in this country is steadily increasing; there are far too many for literal—or figurative—invisibility. The statistics extend gloomily from there. Advocates who work with the homeless estimate there are at least 2 million unhoused people in the United States. Between 2018 and 2019, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s count, the homeless population in the city of Los Angeles increased by 16 percent—bringing the estimated homeless population to 36,165, at least 27,200 of whom were living on the streets. Koreatown, a neighborhood that takes up just 2.7 square miles, contains nearly 600 unhoused residents.
Here, in Koreatown, while locals have protested the building of a homeless shelter, forcing the project to relocate half a mile away, the homeless live on sidewalks, in alleyways, parks—and anyplace else they can find. Dilapidated tents bound together with rope create strange formations amid the city’s mix of modern and Art Deco architecture. They awkwardly jut from the sidewalks like poorly crafted spaceships.
Take-away, the number of homeless people in the US is steadily increasing. That's why whenever anyone tells me that the economy is booming, I think -- well no. It's only booming if you are wealthy enough to heavily invest in the stock market or have disposable funds. If you don't, it's not booming. Capitalism Gone Insane only benefits the upper income, everyone else struggles. But if you live in the suburbs, where the homeless are kept out of the streets and shuffled off to shelters or other areas, it's easy to ignore. They are there, but most suburbanites and rural folks are blind to it.
My sister-in-law has found a way to make sustainable bathing suits. And there's ways to recycle clothing and shoes at local farmer's markets.
I'm not doing great at this -- but I am trying. My brother is doing a better job of it, but he also lives on 11 acres of land in upstate New York.
Links:
* 50 Ways to Help Save the Planet
* Don't Know How to Save the Planet? This is what you can do.
* 50 Ways to Save the Planet via the Guardian
* 22 Inventions Saving the Earth
* 70 Ways to Save the Earth
I figure if everyone decides to do at least five on these lists...that will help.
Here's what I've done?
* I turn off my computer at home at night. And use a laptop.
* I get electronic books. No longer buy paper.
* I have a mug at work, and mugs at home, plus a water bottle that I use. And a Brita filter for tap.
* Canvas bags. And recycle the plastic ones at Foodtown as much as possible.
* Take public transportation and walk everywhere.
* Switch to 100% clean energy -- wind and solar.
* Use LED light bulbs.
* Recycle plastics, glass, and aluminum.
I'm beginning to think that I have to find a way to avoid buying things wrapped in plastic or encased in plastic as much as possible. Also get rid of the bags. I do have biodegradable plastic trash bags, so that's something. I have too much plastic in my apartment and at work, though.
Plastic is killing us.
2. I survived the Warsaw Ghetto, Here are the Lessons I'd like to Pass On
Given what I’ve learned over my lifetime I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Of course, many people did extraordinary things, but in most cases only because they were forced to by extreme circumstances, and even then, true heroes were very few and far between: I do not count myself among them.
The same applies to those who failed in their moral obligations during that time. Of course, there were many who committed unspeakable, unforgivable crimes. But it is nonetheless important to understand that we were a generation living in fear, and fear makes people do terrible things. Unless you have felt it, you cannot truly understand it.
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either. I must confess that for much of my life, I maintained the view that it was important for Poles to feel pride in their wartime record – leading me, when recounting my experiences serving in the Home Army in Warsaw under Nazi occupation, to omit certain examples of indifference and uncooperativeness on behalf of my fellow Poles. It is only in recent years, as I have seen that pride turn into self-righteousness, and that self-righteousness into self-pity and aggression, that I have realised just how wrong it was not to be completely open about the failings I witnessed.
The truth is that, as a Pole and as a Jew, as a soldier and as a refugee, I experienced a wide spectrum of behaviour at the hands of Poles – from those who sheltered me at risk to their own lives, to those who sought to take advantage of my vulnerability, and all possible shades of concern and indifference in between.
And although the Third Reich destroyed my world, it was a German woman who saved my life by introducing me to the men who would recruit me into the Polish underground. No nation has a monopoly on virtue – something that many people, including many of my fellow Israeli citizens, still struggle to understand.
3. For the folks who live in Arizona on my correspondence list - The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix Arizona
As Mars was once thought to be, Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals. Except for what remains of its desert setting, canals may be Phoenix’s most distinguishing feature. Varying little, pooling a personality, they make soft incisions through what surrounds them. As you jockey through traffic dizzied by small businesses and their signs, numbed by miles of ranch homes and convenience stores, your eyes will flicker coolly down what seems an open tunnel of water. Receding parallels of packed desert sand, twenty feet wide, clean of vegetation, frame an even, sky-reflecting flow. Glimpses of joggers and cyclists along the banks indicate that there is still human life without combustion. For all their sterility, the canals command moving water and thus retain more mystery than anything else in the valley. Because they so prominently display what makes a desert city possible, it would seem that to get to the bottom of the canals would be to get to the bottom of Phoenix.
Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Beginning around A.D. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. Having reached a population of twenty thousand, the Hohokam abandoned the Salt River Valley around 1400, possibly because they had depleted the soil.
4. The Best Board Games of the Ancient World
Long before Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and Risk won legions of fans, actual Roman legions passed the time by playing Ludus Latrunculorum, a strategic showdown whose Latin name translates loosely to “Game of Mercenaries.” In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. From Go to backgammon, Nine Men’s Morris and mancala, these were the cutthroat, quirky and surprisingly spiritual board games of the ancient world.
5. The cinematographer of Knives Out wants to end the Film vs. Digital Debate
“Film“Film has tremendous balls,” Christopher Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “Film is oak, digital is plywood.” And even in an era where more films are shot on digital than ever, it remains a truism among everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Detective Pikachu’s cinematographer that celluloid offers a visual quality that digital simply cannot match.
Steve Yedlin disagrees — not just with this conclusion, but with the foundation of the debate itself. Cinephiles might know Yedlin as Rian Johnson’s go-to cinematographer on everything from Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Knives Out. But since the early days of digital, he’s also gained a reputation for his rigorous technical study of the science behind image creation.
In April 2019, Yedlin released his scholarship’s latest fruit, the “Display Prep Demo.” An updated version of a video first released in 2015, the demo alternates between footage shot on 35mm film stock and a 4K Arri Alexa, industry standards for film and digital, respectively. Both have been processed to achieve what Yedlin says is “the look culturally associated with a traditional all-film system,” the kind people like Nolan say can only be achieved by actually shooting on film. Except, as Yedlin tells Polygon, when screened in theaters to an array of industry professionals, almost no one could tell the difference.
To anyone concerned with cinematography, the implications are huge: If you can make digital footage look convincingly like film, the debate over which format is visually superior is effectively moot. But for Yedlin, the first paradigm he hopes to change with his study isn’t actually about “film vs. digital,” but about how people think about cameras themselves.
6. How to Learn 30 Languages?
I'd like to be able to master two, and just managed to do one. The second one I'd like to master is Spanish, even though I took French in school. I hear more Spanish and Russian though, than the other ones.
When you consider the challenges for the brain, it’s no wonder most of us find learning a language so demanding. We have many different memory systems, and mastering a different tongue requires all of them. There’s procedural memory – the fine programming of muscles to perfect an accent – and declarative memory, which is the ability to remember facts (at least 10,000 new words if you want to come close to native fluency, not to mention the grammar). What’s more, unless you want to sound like a stuttering robot, those words and structures have to make it to the tip of your tongue within a split second, meaning they have to be programmed in both “explicit” and “implicit” memory.
That tough mental workout comes with big payoffs, however; it is arguably the best brain training you can try. Numerous studies have shown that being multilingual can improve attention and memory, and that this can provide a “cognitive reserve” that delays the onset of dementia. Looking at the experiences of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Canada has found that speaking two languages delayed dementia diagnosis by five years. Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an extra nine years of healthy cognition.
Those lasting benefits are a stark contrast to the failure of most commercial “brain training” games you can download – which generally fail to offer long-term improvements in memory or attention.
Until recently, however, many neuroscientists had suggested that most of us are too old to reach native-like fluency in a fresh language; according to the “critical period hypothesis”, there is a narrow window during childhood in which we can pick up the nuances of a new language. Yet Bialystok’s research suggests this may have been exaggerated; rather than a steep precipice, she has found that there is a very slight decline in our abilities as we age.
Certainly, many of the hyperglots I meet in Berlin have mastered languages later in life. Keeley grew up in Florida, where he was exposed to native Spanish speakers at school. As a child, he used to tune into foreign radio stations – despite not being able to understand a word. “It was like music to me,” he says. But it was only as an adult that he started travelling the world – first to Colombia, where he also studied French, German and Portuguese at college. He then moved on to Switzerland and Eastern Europe before heading to Japan. He now speaks at least 20 languages fluently, almost all of which were learnt as an adult. “The critical period hypothesis is a bunch of crap,” he says.
7. Sorry Keto fans, You're probably not in Ketosis
8. I was living homeless in Utah, but nothing prepared me for Koreatown in Los Angeles
oreatown, LOS ANGELES—Resting inside one of the stone entryways of St. James Episcopal Church on St. Andrews Place, Josh Law heard a drunken man’s slurred speech and then the sound of an opening zipper. In 16 months of homelessness, Law had learned to sleep in an altered state of hypervigilance. He grabbed his makeshift bed of clothes and blankets—and dodged the stream of urine.
Sixteen long months of hell, Law says. Sixteen months of adjusting his nightly agenda to the event schedule of the church so that he wouldn’t block a doorway with his bed. Sometimes he stretched out at 8 p.m.; sometimes he waited until 10 p.m. He always made sure he was up at 4 a.m., before the garbage truck drivers passed. “I didn’t want people to see me and think: ‘Oh, what a lazy homeless bum,’ ” Law said.
But the number of homeless people in this country is steadily increasing; there are far too many for literal—or figurative—invisibility. The statistics extend gloomily from there. Advocates who work with the homeless estimate there are at least 2 million unhoused people in the United States. Between 2018 and 2019, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s count, the homeless population in the city of Los Angeles increased by 16 percent—bringing the estimated homeless population to 36,165, at least 27,200 of whom were living on the streets. Koreatown, a neighborhood that takes up just 2.7 square miles, contains nearly 600 unhoused residents.
Here, in Koreatown, while locals have protested the building of a homeless shelter, forcing the project to relocate half a mile away, the homeless live on sidewalks, in alleyways, parks—and anyplace else they can find. Dilapidated tents bound together with rope create strange formations amid the city’s mix of modern and Art Deco architecture. They awkwardly jut from the sidewalks like poorly crafted spaceships.
Take-away, the number of homeless people in the US is steadily increasing. That's why whenever anyone tells me that the economy is booming, I think -- well no. It's only booming if you are wealthy enough to heavily invest in the stock market or have disposable funds. If you don't, it's not booming. Capitalism Gone Insane only benefits the upper income, everyone else struggles. But if you live in the suburbs, where the homeless are kept out of the streets and shuffled off to shelters or other areas, it's easy to ignore. They are there, but most suburbanites and rural folks are blind to it.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-10 05:06 am (UTC)I don't know how fluent these folks who claim to have learned umpty languages really are. They can no doubt say "hi" in 30 languages, maybe ask where the hotel or public toilet are, but I doubt they can read a newspaper in all of them. Granted I've talked to an Italian, me speaking Spanish and him speaking Italian and we understood each other, but I never claimed to be fluent in Spanish. I can understand a lot of most spoken Slavic languages and maybe a speaker of those Slavic languages could understand my Russian. I studied Spanish in high school, German and Russian in college and passed graduate level reading exams in Russian, German, French, Polish, Serbian and Bulgarian, but I'm no where near fluent in any of those but Russian. It was plenty confusing trying to learn Serbian and Polish grammar at the same time over a couple of years. Learning a language well in a month is not very likely.
Homelessness is a problem in most cities, but California cities are not a great place to be if you don't have a high paying job.