After Darwinism

Lynn recently introduced me to the ideas of Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris. She is a biologist who presents a framework for science that motivates the transition to environmental sustainability. The most interesting part of her talk was that Darwinism only describes the adolescent stage of human society development. After that, there must be cooperation to create a sustainable ecosystem.

I think she mischaracterizes entropy, though. Entropy is orthogonal to destruction vs organization. It is simply going from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. If you build something, like a house, you are adding organization, but you are putting a lot of energy in, so the entropy of the whole system is still increased, although the entropy of the house itself is decreased. The sun decreases entropy on the earth, but in the scope of the universe, entropy is still increased. It seems like people who talk about sustainability and ecology really like talking about entropy. I don't really get it.

Lynn at Problogger!

Lynn is one of the 40 Bloggers to Watch in 2011

her blog is Upcycled Love

Wow! She used to blog here before she started up her own blog!

Lynn Posts on Gulf Spill

Lynn wrote a blog post on the gulf oil spill at the Green Blog.

Gulf Oil Spills Onto Political Shores

Yes, the House Republican Conference has assembled an “Energy Rapid Response Team” ready to convince you that more offshore drilling is necessary, for great fear of rising costs of importing oil and fueling at the pump.

Earrings From Lynn

I got Lynn's earrings in the mail, and I wore them. Whooooo!

Lynn Jewelry Inc

Lynn has started making earrings and selling them on etsy, and I bought a pair today! They are kind of like these.

Lynn at Smark's House!

Always up to no good

Good Times Keep Rolling

Smark's Grammy

Smark's Mom's tasty food

Smark and Lynn



Priorities

Chemical Free

My coworker told me that sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) and parabens are found in almost all personal cleaning products, like body wash, soap, and shampoos. But they are really bad for you. Anything that you apply to your skin will get absorbed into your bloodstream. SLS is the same thing as sodium dodecyl sulfate, a reagent we use in bio research. The function of SDS is to denature proteins so that you can run them on a gel and see if your protein of interest is there. So proteins are usually folded up in a certain configuration, and SDS is negatively charged, so it interacts with all positively charged amino acids and binds, unfolding the protein. And protein structure = function. I'm not sure of the clinical implications of SLS, but companies use it because it is very foamy and sudsy and we all love suds so we pay for it.

I was reading that all of the chemicals in most commercial shampoos are really bad for your hair, and can create chemical buildup and you can start losing your hair. And I think this might be happening to me... I was using Dove for the longest time b/c it kept my hair shiny and smooth and smelling fresh. But lately my hair has been brittle and thin and easily sheds and Dove isn't really working anymore. I'm not sure if it's the oxidative Los Angeles sun and air, or if it's the Dove. But I'm definitely switching to chemical-free.

Parabens are some type of cancer-causing chemical, I'm not really sure what they do. But anyway, the less industrial chemicals... the better for me. I tried this all-natural, organic soap:



And it is really awesome! It leaves my skin feeling super smooth. So I'm looking into replacing my shampoos and conditioners too. I found this site that has a pretty good collection of chemical-free stuff.

Oh yeah, I think I am going to get the shampoo on that link, since it's the cheapest and seems promising.

Branding

I'm interested in branding for nonprofits and progressive causes. Who's your target audience? What's your message? Whats the best way to convey this message? It'd be interesting to look at successful brands, such as Obama's and the current Democratic party vs. the failing GOP brand. But I don't know if I have the skills for being a good brander. I've just started looking into it. And also, I have this other belief that people will be able to understand which is the good policy without branding, but with substance. But hey, the Obama brand just made me like him even more. So maybe it has more value than I'd think. I just don't like the thought of paying $50 for the brand, when the real value is only like $1. But that's for retail. But it's similar for other things. Branding has that degree of psychological manipulation... But then again everything you say to people, every argument you present, is a form of psychological manipulation. And I want to be manipulative anyway, or at least have those skills to convince people of things when I need to.

Edumacation

I think that schools should teach kids more about recent history and civic engagement, and give a more honest description of history (not hiding all the ugly parts, maybe some though if its bad for kids or something).

And I've been thinking about what I'd really want to be involved with, and I think it is advocacy of some kind... Sort of like lobbying legislators or else community organizing, or else marketing. I think marketing for bills and causes is a really good idea, and should be more commonplace than it is. Then again, I'm not sure how crowded the media would get. Schools should also teach general life skills, like taxes and finance (insurance, etc.).

Oh yeah, and just for fun... Green up your sex life! Use organic, paraben-free, glycerin-free lube. Here's why.

Job Searching Schemes and Devious Thoughts

One of my goals right now is to find a job in life science research, preferably related to neuroscience and a job that does not require me to kill mice/rabbits/frogs/other vertebrates simply for a single organ or cells, or just because they have become unfit for the research. Anyway, while I am looking through university career sites as well as biotech career websites, I thought I would try out a different scheme. I would look through faculty of interest, and read a couple of their papers and then e-mail them about how much I love their work and why I would be a qualified and competent research associate.

So I printed out a couple of papers. The first one I read was a review paper related to the biomolecular mechanisms behind learning and memory, using the small marine snail Aplysia as a model of study. For a little history of the study of learning and memory in neuroscience: somewhere around the 1950's, investigators discovered that if you poke or shock (lightly, not fatally) the Aplysia, it withdraws its gill and siphon as a natural defense reflex. If you continue to shock a few times, and then lightly touch it a few hours later, it becomes sensitized to the touch stimulus, and withdraws its gill and siphon anyway even though your touch is pretty harmless. And if you continue to touch it harmlessly, it habituates and doesn't respond to touch stimuli any longer with its defense reflex. As life science research methods improved, the focus on learning and memory shifted to animals of higher complexity (such as rats and other vertebrates), and Aplysia drifted out of popularity. The paper I read essentially proposed to unify two disagreeing theories on the learning mechanisms in Aplysia, and explained that this was similar to findings in animals of 'higher intelligence'. The investigator further concluded that perhaps learning and memory mechanisms had developed early on in evolution and have been conserved through time, through natural selection. And I had an epiphany.

Neurobiology makes it difficult to believe in free will, since we are mostly controlled by mechanical, biochemical processes. So with that in mind (yes, first consider suspending free will, and then you can consider this part), I wonder if humans actually have control over their learning? We don't actually take the knowledge and concepts we want to remember and place them into our memory, we make up tactics to facilitate our ability to learn. We make up mnemonics, explain a difficult concept to ourselves a number of times before it sinks in, but we don't actually make it sink in, if that makes sense. Like the simple organism Aplysia, or even an earthworm, our learning and memory follows a few basic rules. If the basic learning and memory circuitry is essentially a passive process (aka no divine intervention, or other will at work), then why wouldn't the same be true for more complex organisms? Of course, the circuitry becomes progressively more complex as we travel through our evolutionary timeline. Complicated, yes, but still passive. Sort of like a supercomputer?

They returned the like 460 children that were taken from the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas, part of a Mormon fundamentalist sect (the FLDS church). I have nothing against polygamy or polyamory, so long as there isn't any force or sexual abuse involved. But of course FLDS communities are nothing but a playfield for sexual predators. Basically, if you're a man, you become a sexual abuser. How is it okay for these communities to keep on existing? 13-year-old girls get pregnant b/c they're supposedly spiritually married off to their like 35-year-old uncles. And you know they don't want to have sex with their uncles. Everyone knows about them, why don't we stop them???? Are we really trying to say that religion is so sacred that we have to tolerate so much harm inflicted upon others??

I read half of Traci Lords' autobiography, the pornstar from like the 80s or so. Basically she had a fucked up childhood, raped at 10 years old by this 16 year old guy she was in love with, sexually molested by a pseudo stepfather but the only adult she could trust. Got pregnant in high school by a boyfriend, who of course turned his back instantly, and had to get an abortion. Thereafter, she essentially got tricked into doing nude modeling because she needed a job to pay for the abortion (she didn't think it was nude at first). Her stepfather didn't bother to tell her the truth of course, and told her basically that everything was good and normal. Vodka and coke lines later, she's a nude model at 15. And since she has no family to turn to or friends, she stays with the porn industry, and eventually gets pressured into softcore and hardcore films. Anyway... Sexual abuse is fucked up... Why do people do it? It boggles my mind...

Oh, and she has a terrible opinion of the porn industry, says everyone has something messed up to say about their private lives. Understandable. But then again I have heard of not so traumatic things from others in the porn industry. So yes... Getting tricked into it is pretty horrific.

And I started my internship with MAPLight, and am working on a few practice bills right now. Conservatives and industry are fucked up. I'm working on this one bill, S-MINER Act of 2007, basically a comprehensive safety bill for miners, focusing especially on coal mines. Industry says, yes we love safety, but the costs are overbearing for business (the penalties and fees for safety oversight by a separate gov't department), so it isn't worth it... It'll be a detriment to the American economy, and we'll have to lay off people. God can't you just make a little less money???????????!!! It's people's lives! The technology is there, so we should use it. More evidence of the fucked up nature of human mentalities.

Basically I'm given a few bills, and I look up all the supporting and opposing organizations for the bill, list them and the source, find out a general sense of what the organization is about, and then write a comment about the bill. It's really fascinating reading some of these things... I'll generalize more after I get through some more bills... I'm tempted to generalize right away about conservative mentality, but I shall hold my tongue.

Obama

I just wanted to say I <3 Obama. And I'm so happy he performed quite well today. I think I will cry when he is officially proclaimed our next president.

I got an interview at this place called MAPLight, which attempts to make public all of the contributions towards certain candidates, campaigns, or bills. Woohoo! I hope I get it, that'd be exciting. But it doesn't matter, getting the interview means I'm at least somewhat interesting for political organizations.

Obama Speech on Race

Read and Watch the Speech here

Awesome awesome speech.

Agriculture Policies Etc

This is mostly in response to Yang's previous post. It's long so I just decided to make a formal entry of it.

I'm taking an Envrion Sci class right now about International agricultural policies. Monsanto apparently has been eating up all the small seed companies, and has been developing transgenic seed lines, such as their corn and canola lines that are resistant to the herbicide that they developed, Roundup. And they put a PATENT on the transgenic seed itself, not just the gene. How do you patent life??? WTf. it doesn't make any sense. But anyway, so a bunch of small farmers have found the transgenic plants in their farms and they don't even want them there, but since they use the herbicide Roundup for their main crop, they spray the weed with it, and it doesn't go away. So Monsanto finds out about it through whatever devilish means, and sues the farmer for having their product in their farm without Monsanto's permission. And of course b/c Monsanto is big and scary with nice rich fat lawyers, they often win. It's completely fucked up.

Plant biotechnology is new, and untested. And it's created for about 99% of the time in the interest of making more profit, so new plant lines are created to be compatible with herbicides, and there's also this terminator gene that makes the new seeds sterile so you have to return to the company to buy new seed every time. Anyway, so a lot of Third World countries (this concept of 3rd World btw, along with the idea of Development itself was conceived at the end of WWII) decide maybe they can improve their economies by improving agriculture, and maybe they can do that by having a Green Revolution (import Monsanto's plant biotechnology). Because Monsanto promises higher crop yields and therefore more profit for the farmer, BUT Only the large landowners who are wealthy can afford the technology package (Synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, seed, etc) and so the average farmer doesn't benefit from it. And the high yield doesn't last, since it erodes the environment, taking out more than the soil is capable of handling basically. I'm not completely clear on the bad effects to the environment, but it's definitely bad for the farmers, and makes people completely dependent on large $$-hungry corporations. So it doesn't have any good intentions, and it's not sustainable, so it isn't good for the long run. Additionally, there used to be like 75,000 different genetic varieties of plant food that humans ate. Today, there are like a few thousand, nowhere near where it used to be. And plant biotech promotes the growth of monocultures, basically just one genetic variety of, say, corn. Lack of genetic diversity is bad because if you have any kind of climate catastrophe, it could wipe out the entire species of corn since there's only one strain of it. So monocultures are vulnerable and don't last long. You need a diverse variety of agriculture to fall back on.

Also, currently because of corporate lobbying, the US government gives its farmers subsidies for using seeds from large corporations such as Monsanto. So when small farms decide to be organic, they are okay in the beginning, but as demand increases, they have a more difficult time competing against larger farms with government subsidies. This explains in part why organic food is more expensive than non-organic foods. And we don't label our genetically-modified foods because of corporate lobbying, and shushing the media, so people aren't really aware of GM foods in our market. But it's found mostly in highly processed foods. The reason supposedly is that if you have a bad allergy to a GM food, and you report it to your doctor, your doctor will have trouble tracing the source of your allergy, and therefore will not be able to create a database (for an allergy to GM food) and therefore the company won't ever get into trouble.


Anyway thats all I have to say.

Hillary's FactHub: Source of All Amazingly Well Written and Credible, Factual Information

Memo!

Memo one of her campaign people posted in response to Obama camp.

Ok, so maybe she has a little bit of real merit in Northern Ireland and a little bit more in Kosovo. Her explanations for Bosnia, China, and Rwanda are not at all strong arguments.

I'm Upset

Clinton is pushing this idea that she would choose Obama as her running mate. Obama rightly explained himself and why she chose to say that. Obviously, she's trying to marginalize him, trying to make herself seem like she thinks she's going to win but be a nice winner and let Obama get VP. But she's running these ads that say Obama isn't ready to be commander-in-chief. What the hell is she doing? Anyone that's paying attention should figure it out that she's just milking people. She's not serious. Obama is still clear in his goals. He doesn't want to play the game, he's going to defend himself when he gets attacked, but he's not going to lose his mind like Clinton has. And if he was losing, he'd get it and move on. He wouldn't be such a crazy fiend that Clinton has become, solely interested in winning and losing sight of our ultimate goals.

And all of these attacks on Obama will be bad overall for Democratic reforms. McCain could easily say, if indeed Obama did win the nomination, that even Senator Clinton thinks these bad things about Obama. It's not just the Republicans anymore. An attack on Obama has much more validity when both McCain and Clinton agree to it. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?! All in self-interest. GRRRRR!!!

West Wing

Obama as the inspiration for the Matt Santos character

Oh, and I saw Richard Dawkins speak today in Berkeley. It was thrilling! And he signed a book for me. AWwwww. A truthful description of the man.