Wired article on Climate Engineering

Haven't read this Wired article yet, but just by the title a read is warranted: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/07/geoengineering

Pop-up cities in China

A found an article done by Wired about a suburb of Shanghai thats being designed from the ground up to incorporate many of the current ideas about sustainable urban design. This includes building high density housing, preventing sprawl but expanding along a transportation corridor, building water zones to control flooding, and using solar/wind plus capturing lost heat from buildings and burning organic matter. And around the city they plan to have lots of green space, including high yeild organic farming. Also they are banning all CO2 emitting transportation vehicles.

The opportunity to build cities from the ground up is an awesome chance to experiment with ideas in sustainable development. And like the article mentions cities like London and New York are products of the 19th and 20th century. Now it is time for 21st century cities to start rising. China is obviously a good place for this, with its massive population and heavy pollution problems.

As far as the article says, the project as been approved, and is waiting to break ground in a couple years. I know theres a somewhat similar project that has been started by William McDunough and Co. According to this article things don't seem to be going so well. None the less, I'm interested to see what happens with the Shanghai project, and I think a project like that would be a really awesome project to work on.

she, he, she-he's...it's all good!

First, I'm not sure if this is the proper way to respond to your blog. Making a new 'blog' about it?

Anyway, in not so formal terms and certainly not researched, 'they' is totally confusing. Let's take it from the perspective of a non-native speaker. Non-natives can already find difficulty in vocabulary ("Would you pass the k-niff?"), why extend the confusion to grammar? By improperly using pro-nouns, the invitation is out for major miscommunication. "Oh, there was only one person coming to my party? But I was assured that they were coming." Hmm, maybe a poor example, but you catch my drift?

In addition, I dig the 'she or he' or as some people prefer 'he or she' steez. It clarifies that someone like a computer programmer could well be a female or male, and hey, if there's a word limit on a term-paper, the rule throws in at least 4 more words. The professor would be expected to appreciate the consideration that the student took to be sensitive to constructed gender roles in our society. Besides, they went to school, they should know what's up with it. ;o)

Gender pronoun weakness in English

Note: Another post I wrote back in November 2006. I hope this can be a starting point for more of a discussion of ideas about gender and feminism.

In English when you want to refer to someone using a pronoun, you have the option of He as a subject and Him as an object. Likewise for a female you have She for the subject, and her as an object. Both of these are singular, so they refer to only one person. Besides these English offers It, which is a non-gendered singular pronoun, that can be either a subject or object.

The problem is that English has a serious shortcoming. He/him implies the male sex (gender). Likewise she/her implies the female sex (gender). It, on the other hand, implies a neutral reference(or in some cases simply non-human, such as "Cute dog! What's its name?"). However, there are many times where we are making a non-specific reference to a singular human, in which case it seems misleading and problematic to imply gender. For example, I came across this sentence: It is usually difficult for a programmer to check for vulnerabilities in his own software. We already know there are gender balance issues in fields such as computer programming. Having language like this doesnt help, and might in fact have something to do with the imbalance.

What English needs is a gender-neutral singular pronoun. While It technically fits the description, at present, like I mentioned, It references non-human items. So It could be a good solution, but I also think its good to have a non-human pronoun (tho anti-anthropocentrists might strongly disagree with this). Luckily We already have a solution to this problem, it's just that a lot of people don't seem to be comfortable formally acknowledging it. We use it all the time for informal speech; it's known as singular They.

The problem is that grammatically prescriptive people insist that is "incorrect". And from their perspective, it's understandable why they might thing so, for one simple reason: They is traditionally a plural pronoun. Thus it would seem that it has no place being used as a singular. But therein lies the beauty of language, which prescriptivists often seem to lose sight of, in their quest to eternalize a certain form of speech. Language is ever evolving, and much of what we say is contextual. In fact we have references going back to the 15th century of singular they, which certainly provides some precedent, and should displace any notions of "improper" usage. But more importantly, the solution singular They provides to the need for a non-gender singular pronoun is much more important than any confusion which may be produces from They having the potential as both a singular and plural pronoun. In fact, thanks to context there should be very few chances for confusion (at least for native speakers), thanks to subject-verb agreement.

Of course, a better solution would probably be a whole new pronoun, but its not such an easy thing to just inject a new usage into a language. Whereas with this people are already using it, and have been for quite some time. The next step is to formalize it, thus teaching it in grammar classes, and one way or another showing the prescriptionists then benefit and necessity in defining a non-gendered human singular pronoun.

Long live they!

Here's an article on Wikimedia discussing the issue: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_gender-neutral_pronouns

Environmental Criticism

Note: This is a post I made 7 Dec 2006 on a different blog. Just thought I'd repost since its somewhat relevant. I'm not sure that I fully agree with what I wrote (and I certainly didn't proofread it well), but at least its a starting point. -y

I'm in my senior year of a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Studies at an urban public university. I transferred to this school two years ago, and was generally a fair bit less knowledgeable about the science between aspects of the environment. I'm by no means an expert, but I've been exposed to the basics for ideas such as climate change, global warming, green house gases, ozone holes, evolution, speciation, and biodiversity. I've also been exposed to policy, campaigning, ideology, and philosophy.

Over these last two years, I've found myself disenchanted by the movement. To put it bluntly, a lot of people are entirely too emotional and ideologically based in their thinking. The so called left, in which the environmental movement is rooted, has alienated itself from mainstream thinking, and has consistently been the target of the right. Now its no surprise why extreme right wingers want to take pot shots at these treehugging liberals. Besides merely enjoying the activity, the acqusation the ecos make are essentially directly at the right. Its true theyre direct at everyone (except perhaps themselves, but who can escape some level of hypocrisy), but the further to the right you are, the more the left blames you.

But very early in my academics, I distanced myself from the social science of environmentalism. Too ideologically based, not factually and logically grounded, and too subjective to the whims of fallible humans. So basically the same problems that everything else has. But I found understanding the science of this stuff at least was interesting. And if I had to waste time getting a Bachelors degree, then I'd rather understand a bit about Ozone molecules being dissociated by ultra violet light.

But as I've spent time trying to better understand the science, theres two take-home messages I've gathered:
1) Our science is getting better at understanding these complex processes, but theres still a lot we don't know
2) People are willing to make emotionally based assumptions based upon science that isnt fully understood

Let me just get out there and say a few basic things. I think people overreact when it comes to things like climate change. No one fully understands the process, and we certainly don't know whats going to happen as these processes are changing. These processes might not be changing, or not to the degree and by the mechanisms we think. Maybe the last 50 years has just been a weird little funk in the climate. The climate doesnt vary in a direct linear fashion, theres lots of little ups and downs throughout any larger trend. And let me clarify, I don't doubt the existence of an anthropogenic influence on a larger natural process. But we are only one portion of the environment. Yes the environment is precious, yes its fragile (sometimes). But its also much bigger and more complex than we are. And lets not forget we're nothing more than a little blip on the radar of the earth. And the earth is a rather insignificant planet, and a rather insignificant solar system, which I have no doubt is located in a rather insignificant region of a rather insignificant galaxy (to gratuitiously borrow from Sir Douglas Adams). And yet we think we're going to somehow cause the world to blow up and cesse functioning.

See thats where our heads are stuck up our asses, and we're making many of the same mistakes of past generations and societies. The only ones that are threatened are us. Sure other species are gonna go down with us; our last great legacy: we might be the 6th major extinction cycle on Earth. But you know what, no one blames the dinosaurs for all those other plants and animals that died with them. And then lets not forget, the fuzzy little mammals only got their come-upins because of the fall of the mighty "lizards".

So this whole freak-out that we're going thru with the environment right now, its totally anthropocentric. And yet all these people that are most extreme about the problem, tend to also association with broader biologic philosophies such as bio- and ecocentrism. A total load of crap, we care about ourselevs and our species. Why is loss of biodiversity bad, because it threatens our our species survival. Why is climate change bad, because it threatens us. The earth will keep on ticking. She's made it thru many of these. Seen many a species. Its been hot, its been cold, microbes used to dominate the earth (and some would say they still do). We used to have a reducing atmosphere, now its highly oxidizing. That is the beauty of nature and the environment. Yet so many "environmentalists" (I term which I never have and never will associate myself with) are so fixated on freezing the entire earth into a static state. They fear change, they fear the unknown, they fear what is different, they fear death.

And just for the sake of argument, some might say its the rate of change. Yes it seems quite fast. But I think there are two basic ways to approach this. One is to realize that we are in the middle of all this. Our perspective on time is utterly skewed, since we're moving with time. Thus we might think things are changing rapidly, but its just our perspective. And this has a lot to do with psychology. Now that climate change has become a bigger topic, we're thinknig about it more, more aware of it, more likely and willing to attribute climatic variation to this great climate change. The second way to think of the rate of change is that yes in fact things are changing faster than they used to. And yes, this is anthropogenic. But the influence of human society seems to have sped up a lot of things. Societies and their technology are evolving at a faster rate than use to be. If this is true (which is disputable), then whats to prevent the natural mechanisms interacting with social mechanisms to also speed up. I'm not saying the earth will literally spin faster, or days become shorter. But if the rate of carbon emission has increased, then the rate of response (theres always been a natural response in the past) will also be better. In essence some of these natural cycles might be speeding up. There no doubt will be side effects; effects we cannot calculate or even think of. But the system will check us. As I always conclude when thinking thru these things with myself, in the end, the worse case scenario is our species is dessimated and we die off. Maybe that doesnt bother me as much as some others, but the reality is this will happen eventually. Even if we escape this planet and this solar system (the star dies in another few billion years), we'll be so evolved by then, there would be no resemblence to this ancestral form we currently are. Much of our history and knowledge will be forgotten. And the outcome of this cycle of climate change, no one will even know it was even an issue.

The thing is, I'm not for driving SUVs and polluting. But for me its an issue of logistics and practicality. Its not an emotional debate. Even if the climate wasnt changing, there are many reasons why those types of things are unwise.