The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Glitchbot: for all your corrupt JPEG needs
- RSA SecureID breach linked to hacker attack on Lockheed Martin; other US military contractors may be affected
- "Blade Runner" behind-the-scenes Polaroids, from Sean Young
- In memoriam: Gil Scott-Heron, "The People's Poet"
- Headline of the week: "Horse herpes outbreak forces rodeo queens to ride stick ponies"
- Blank City: documentary about '70s-'80s NYC underground film
- Classroom kit for Little Brother from Oakland International High School ninth graders
- Tornadoes, climate change, and real scientific literacy
- Where can you stash $1 million in $100 dollar bills?
- The last Shuttle spacewalkers
- An ode to the Mars Spirit rover
- About that autopen
- The Glencore Letter (FULL TEXT)
- Weird, veiny, plasticky sexualized illustration
- Bernie Sanders introduces anti-pharma-patent bill, aims to replace drug monopolies with prizes
- Prozac ingredient in Great Lakes killing off microbes, including E. coli
- Worst PowerPoint slides
- Interview: Ran Prieur
- Star Wars meets Withnail and I
| Glitchbot: for all your corrupt JPEG needs Posted: 27 May 2011 10:40 PM PDT  Glitchbot is a Flickr bot that grabs Creative Commons-licensed images, corrupts them, and re-posts them with attribution and compatible licenses. GlitchBot draws from a limited number of source images and a limited number of possible glitches and will theoretically yield all possible glitch derivatives. However, like the compression algorithms GlitchBot exploits, GlitchBot is an imperfect creation. Within the flickr comments and descriptions there can be found occasional typos, and much more rarely an image may pass through completely unglitched - a glitch manifested in the absence of glitch. Furthermore, though there is a limited supply of source images and of potential glitched derivatives, GlitchBot moves far too slowly (one image per day) to keep up with the rapid influx of new flickr uploads.Glitchbot (via JWZ)   |
| Posted: 28 May 2011 12:16 AM PDT  [F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), planes built by Lockheed Martin arrive at Edwards Air Force Base in California in this May 2010 photo. REUTERS/Tom Reynolds/Lockheed Martin] This week, Lockheed Martin—the largest U.S. military contractor—and several other defense contractors have reportedly experienced intrusions in their computer networks. Those intrusions may be connected to a hacking attack on RSA's SecurID security token division, disclosed back in March. Hackers penetrating Sony's Playstation network or Google, affecting the data privacy of millions of users? Bad. Hackers penetrating the networks of the US military's largest weapons makers? Really, really, really bad. Reuters was first tonight with the news of the intrusion at Lockheed, which the company is said to have first detected on Sunday.
They breached security systems designed to keep out intruders by creating duplicates to "SecurID" electronic keys from EMC Corp's RSA security division, said the person who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter. It was not immediately clear what kind of data, if any, was stolen by the hackers. But the networks of Lockheed and other military contractors contain sensitive data on future weapons systems as well as military technology currently used in battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Lockheed press statement, reprinted in part in the Wall Street Journal,
[T]o counter any threats, we regularly take actions to increase the security of our systems and to protect our employee, customer and program data. We have policies and procedures in place to mitigate the cyber threats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multilayered information systems security. John Markoff and Christopher Drew in the New York Times link the Lockheed hack to the March RSA breach. While Lockheed's problems may be the first publicly known damage from that attack, other firms may also be affected.
Raytheon published a statement today saying it took "immediate companywide actions" when the RSA breach became known back in March. General Dynamics denied experiencing problems related to the RSA breach; Northrop Grumman and Boeing declined to comment to the Times.
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| "Blade Runner" behind-the-scenes Polaroids, from Sean Young Posted: 27 May 2011 08:57 PM PDT  A gallery of polaroids snapped on the set of Blade Runner |
| In memoriam: Gil Scott-Heron, "The People's Poet" Posted: 27 May 2011 07:07 PM PDT [video link: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."] The poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron died this afternoon in New York City, at 62.
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| Headline of the week: "Horse herpes outbreak forces rodeo queens to ride stick ponies" Posted: 27 May 2011 06:38 PM PDT From KSL, a broadcaster in Utah, comes the week's oddest story: A recent equine herpes outbreak has forced "rodeo queens" to resort to "stick ponies." How did the horses get herpes? Don't ask. (Image via ksl.com, via Jesse Dylan)   |
| Blank City: documentary about '70s-'80s NYC underground film Posted: 27 May 2011 06:08 PM PDT StyleKouncil's Kat Yeh points us to a trailer for Blank City, a new documentary about the New York City underground film scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. What an amazing, inspiring, gritty, and creative period that must have been. From the film description: Directed by French newcomer Céline Danhier, BLANK CITY weaves together an oral history of the "No Wave Cinema" and "Cinema of Transgression" movements through compelling interviews with the luminaries who began it all. Featured players include acclaimed directors Jim Jarmusch and John Waters, actor-writer-director Steve Buscemi, Blondie's Debbie Harry, hip-hop legend Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, photographer Richard Kern as well as Amos Poe, James Nares, Eric Mitchell, Susan Seidelman, Beth B, Scott B, Charlie Ahearn and Nick Zedd. Fittingly, the soundtrack includes: Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The Contortions, The Bush Tetras, Sonic Youth and many more.Blank City (film site) "Blank Generation, Blank City," interviews with director Céline Danhier, Pat Place, and Amos Poe (WNYC) |
| Classroom kit for Little Brother from Oakland International High School ninth graders Posted: 27 May 2011 02:37 AM PDT Ninth graders at Oakland International High School read my novel Little Brother and produced a fantastic school reading kit with chapter summaries, student discussions, student-made comic strips, and further topics for classroom discussion. It's a tremendous piece of work, and I'm grateful to the young people in Sailaja Suresh's class.   |
| Tornadoes, climate change, and real scientific literacy Posted: 27 May 2011 01:13 PM PDT  The air grows thick. Dark clouds churn like a pot of boiling water overhead. The colors of reality become oversaturated--greens too green, yellow a sickly gold. This is what tornado weather looks like, and the United States has been hit with a lot of it lately. Make no mistake, the past two months don't just seem to be particularly twister-laden. This isn't one of those situations where an increased awareness of what's happening outside our own home states has made an average number of tornadoes appear more spectacular. In just five months, the United States has experienced more tornadoes than we often get in an entire year. And far, far more people have died. 2011 is already the deadliest year for tornadoes since 1953. As of May 23rd, 498 people have been killed. That's a big jump from normal. I was born in 1981. In my entire lifetime, annual tornado deaths in the United States have only broken the 100-person mark three other years--1984, 1998, and 2008. Clearly, there is something different about this year. The question is, "What?" The number of tornadoes is simple fact. It's relatively easy to measure. Definitely easy to report. Easy to process and memorize. The reasons behind the numbers, however, are decidedly more confusing. When weather-related disasters happen, the first thing most people want to know is whether the disaster was caused by global climate change. And there is more riding on the answer than just another statistic to remember. These tornadoes have been painful. The destruction they've caused is visceral. If this is what climate change looks like, then maybe Americans will be forced to look at decisions about climate-related energy policies in a new light. On the other hand, if the tornadoes of 2011 aren't caused by climate change, then maybe climate change isn't such a big deal. What can we do to us that nature isn't already doing? The trouble with looking at disasters this way is that tornadoes do not fit neatly into little, politically polarized ticky boxes. Science, in general, seldom works like that. In a May 23rd editorial for the Washington Post, environmentalist Bill McKibben took Americans to task for refusing to make a connection between environmental disasters--including the 2011 tornadoes--and climate change. His basic message: All these disasters must be connected and only willful ignorance allows us to ignore that. I have a slightly different perspective. What we have here is not a failure to communicate and accept the obvious effects of climate change. Instead, it's a failure to communicate and accept a critical point of how science works, without which scientific literacy is reduced to mere talking points. This is about nuance and uncertainty, and if the American public doesn't get those things, then we'll never get climate change. When scientists study climate they aren't really studying just one thing. Climate is a complex system, involving multiple natural subsystems and many variables--both "natural" and man-made--that can alter the way those systems work. This is such a complicated subject that we really only developed the computer processing power necessary to start making any sense of it in the mid 1970s. What scientists have learned since then is vitally important stuff. The Earth, as a whole, is warming as humans pump more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And those rising global temperatures, and rising carbon dioxide concentrations, will affect our lives in a variety of strange, and often surprising, ways. This is the science that should be influencing the way we plan for the future. But it's not. Not really. And I think the reason why has a lot to do with how science is taught to the vast majority of Americans, the people whose science education really ends along with the end of high school. In this country, we teach kids that science is a collection of hard facts. We teach them that scientists come up with a hypothesis--an idea that might explain some aspect of how the world works. Scientists then test their hypotheses and find out whether it's correct or not. If it's correct, then it becomes something that children must memorize. That story is true. But it's also vastly oversimplified. It gives people the impression that every scientific question can be answered with "yes" or "no." And if it can't, then the real answer is probably "no." That perspective might work okay when you're sitting in a high school science lab, studying the digestive system of a fetal pig. But it doesn't work as well in the real world. And it leaves people completely unprepared to understand something like climate change, and how we assess the risks associated with it. That's because all risk--and especially the risks associated with complex systems like climate--come with uncertainty. To a person whose knowledge of science comes from that simplified story we tell school kids, "uncertainty" sounds like saying you're wrong without having to say that you're wrong. But that's not the case. Instead, "uncertainty" is about complexity and randomness, it's about probability, and it's about how you attribute the cause of one effect that is really likely to have multiple causes. Case in point: Tornadoes and climate change. If you want a simple, talking-point answer on whether the tornadoes of 2011 were caused by climate change, the best you're going to get is: Probably not, or at least, not entirely. But there's a lot of uncertainty behind that statement, and you can't really use it to project your future risk. When scientists evaluate the connection between tornados and climate change, there are really two big questions they're asking: First, are the 2011 tornadoes part of a trend? Has tornado activity changed along with rising global temperatures so far? Second, scientists ask whether the factors that create tornadoes have been affected by climate change, and whether those factors are likely to be affected in the future. This is where all the uncertainty comes in. For one thing, our data on tornado trends is imperfect. At first glance, you might think the number of tornadoes has increased since the 1990s. But most of that is actually the result of better technology improving our ability to spot smaller, weaker tornadoes, and to notice tornadoes in places where few people live, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Bad data means that we can't reliably say whether tornado counts are increasing. So, instead, NOAA looks at the variables. Tornadoes are somewhat random things. We can find factors that are associated with tornado formation--things like moisture content in the atmosphere, quick changes in wind speed and direction, and what meteorologists call thermodynamic instability, basically mixing between layers of warm air and cooler air. But just because those factors exist doesn't necessarily mean a tornado will appear. There are many things that can affect these factors that make tornadoes more likely. Scientists have found that climate change is something that can affect tornado conditions. But when NOAA looked at data for the past 30 years' worth of Aprils in the Mississippi Valley, they didn't see evidence of any trends that would mean tornado weather is already becoming more frequent. Because of that, NOAA says it would be problematic to claim the recent spate of tornadoes in the Southeast were caused by climate change. But that's not the same as saying tornadoes can't be caused by climate change. It's not the same thing as saying that climate change isn't a contributing factor. Or that tornadoes won't be caused by climate change in the future. It's not even the same as saying that, years from now, with better data and technology, we won't look back and see a trend happening that isn't obvious today. NOAA's assessment is based on indirect evidence focused on one area of one country. The big question--Are tornadoes caused by climate change?--is made up of lots of little questions. And we don't know all the answers to the little questions yet. This is still good science. We still have enough information to say something about how the world works. But that statement comes with a lot of caveats. It's not really just a "yes" or "no" answer. It doesn't follow party lines. And it doesn't tell us what we should expect in the future. This is scientific uncertainty--where the things we know and the things we don't know collide, and we are left to figure out how to use what we have to make decisions anyway. If we want people to understand science, we can't just give them facts to memorize. Scientific literacy isn't about being able to win a game of quiz bowl. It's about understanding how science works, and how science can be used to guide human decision-making. It's about knowing that we don't have all the answers. But it's also about knowing that "we don't have all the answers" isn't the same thing as "we don't know anything." If we pump people full of facts, but don't teach them about uncertainty, then we can't be surprised when they dismiss anything that isn't 100% certain. The future of human life depends on how we respond to the risks of climate change. How we respond to those risks depends on how well the general public understands the messy world of real science. Cross-posted as a guest blog for the World Science Festival. Images:Tornado Weather, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mccun934's photostream. And Image: Parker Tornado, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from roper's photostream.   |
| Where can you stash $1 million in $100 dollar bills? Posted: 27 May 2011 11:29 AM PDT  Rob Cockerham says: "A gal named Brittany was so impressed with the "How much is Inside a Million Dollars?" article from 2005 that she withdrew 10,000 ones from her bank to better simulate the $1,000,000 experience. She sent a few pictures, and I asked her for a few more. They turned out pretty nicely." If you recall, the largest denomination of money in the US are the $100 bills. If you want to get one million dollars cash into a small package, your best bet is by stacking 10,000 of the $100 bills. Like most bills, $100s come from the bank wrapped in bundles of 100 bills ($10,000 bundles). Of course, $1 bills are the same size as $100s, so Brittany's pictures will accurately indicate the mass of one million dollars.A Million Dollars - Currency Photos   |
| Posted: 27 May 2011 11:20 AM PDT  This image, from NASA, documents the last spacewalk of the STS-134 mission, and the final spacewalkers in the 30-year shuttle program. NASA astronaut Michael Fincke worked outside the station during the fourth and final spacewalk of the STS-134 mission, which lasted more than 7 hours. Fincke and fellow astronaut Greg Chamitoff completed the primary objectives for the spacewalk, including stowing the 50-foot-long boom and adding a power and data grapple fixture to make it the Enhanced International Space Station Boom Assembly, available to extend the reach of the space station's robotic arm.Below, with components of the International Space Station in the view, NASA astronauts Andrew Feustel (right) and Michael Fincke are pictured during the STS-134 mission's third spacewalk.
They coordinated their shared activity with NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff, who stayed in communication with the pair and with Mission Control Center in Houston from inside the station.
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| An ode to the Mars Spirit rover Posted: 27 May 2011 10:57 AM PDT  Space reporter Miles O'Brien wrote a lovely farewell to the NASA's rover Spirit on the PBS NewsHour blog today, as NASA ceases attempts to reach the little robot that could. It discovered silica deposits, carbonates, and evidence for hydrothermal systems and explosive volcanism. Billions of years ago, Spirit's site was a hot, violent place, with hot springs, steam vents, and volcanic explosions, and the little rover managed to suss that out. Spirit No More: NASA Bids Mars Rover a Final Goodbye (PBS.org) Image, NASA, 2004: A computer-generated model of Spirit's lander at Gusev Crater as engineers and scientists would have expected to see it from a perfect overhead view. The background is a reprojected image taken by the Spirit panoramic camera on Sol 19 (Jan. 21-22, 2004). The top of the image faces north. |
| Posted: 27 May 2011 10:46 AM PDT  As noted here on Boing Boing yesterday, the US has renewed three key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that were to have expired last night at midnight, granting four more years of overly broad surveillance of Americans. After the Senate and House rushed the extension with only a few lawmakers drawing attention to civil liberties concerns, the bill went before President Obama, to be signed into law. What makes this news even more depressing? The president, who is on tour in Europe, didn't even sign it in person. According to a White House spokesperson, Obama used a device called an autopen, which mechanically reproduces a human signature. This was an act so important that it must be signed into law at once to protect us from what Harry Reid suggested could be immediate terrorist acts, but not so important that the president might be inconvenienced during a foreign trip to return to Washington, D.C. A Reuters item is here. Gawker has a timeline of Great Moments in Autopen History here, and links to this video (animated gif, Flash-ified?) of an autopen device in action. Over at the New York Times, Michael Shear notes that it's unclear whether president Bush ever used an autopen to sign a bill into law. ABC News examines the constitutionality of using an autopen here, but that isn't enough to comfort conservative Georgia Republican congressman Tom Graves, who sent an email to reporters today: I thought it was a joke at first, but the President did, in fact, authorize an autopen to sign the Patriot Act extension into law. Consider the dangerous precedent this sets. Any number of circumstances could arise in the future where the public could question whether or not the president authorized the use of an autopen. For example, if the president is hospitalized and not fully alert, can a group of aggressive Cabinet members interpret a wink or a squeeze of the hand as approval of an autopen signing? I am very concerned about what this means for future presidential orders, whether they be signing bills into law, military orders, or executive orders. I don't know that I agree with Graves' fears (a wink! a squeeze!). But something just seems wrong about automating the process of signing this particular bill into law, given its far-reaching implications for the privacy and liberty of all Americans, and all the secrecy this law entails. Maybe I'm having a Bill Keller moment: maybe the technology doesn't matter, and the analog ceremony of a human hand and a pen and a piece of paper is just familiar theater. But in this case, could the president have been any more detached? |
| The Glencore Letter (FULL TEXT) Posted: 27 May 2011 09:26 AM PDT Yesterday, it was noted here that lawyers representing Glencore warned British reporters not to cover the "extremely private individuals" that run the commodities firm. Okapi Factor has secured and published the full text.   |
| Weird, veiny, plasticky sexualized illustration Posted: 26 May 2011 10:35 PM PDT  Mirko Ilic's illustrations on Behance are like weirdly smoothed over, plastinated Giger, explicitly sexualized without being sexual per se. They're weird, veiny and gooey, and I like 'em. Sex and Lies Part I (via JWZ) |
| Bernie Sanders introduces anti-pharma-patent bill, aims to replace drug monopolies with prizes Posted: 27 May 2011 08:31 AM PDT Jamie Love sez, "Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation in the US Senate that would use prizes to reward medical R&D, and eliminate all drug monopolies. It includes an open source dividend of $4 billion per year." Both bills would eliminate all legal barriers to the manufacture and sale of generic versions of drugs and vaccines. The more ambitious bill is the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act, which would apply to all prescription drugs. The narrower proposal is the Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS Act, which would only apply to treatments for HIV/AIDS. The Medical Innovation Prize Fund would create a prize fund equal of .55 percent of US GDP, which is more than $80 billion per year at current levels of U.S. GDP. The HIV/AID Prize Fund would be funded at .02 percent of U.S. GDP, which is equal to more than $3 billion per year at current levels of U.S. GDP.Senator Sanders introduces two medical innovation prize bills in U.S. Senate to de-link R&D costs from drug prices (Thanks, jamielove!)   |
| Prozac ingredient in Great Lakes killing off microbes, including E. coli Posted: 26 May 2011 10:44 PM PDT Marilyn sez, "Scientists in Erie, Pennsylvania, have found that minute concentrations of fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac, are killing off microbial populations in the Great Lakes." Prozac Killing E. coli in the Great Lakes (Thanks, Marilyn!) (Image: Prozac, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from arenamontanus's photostream) |
| Posted: 26 May 2011 10:39 PM PDT  The winners of InFocus's Worst PPT Slide Contest are astonishing examples of unintentional obfuscation, baffling bullshit and design nightmares. Worst PPT Slide Contest Winners (via Neatorama) (Image: via @pinwale) |
| Posted: 27 May 2011 09:38 AM PDT  Ran Prieur is a writer and permaculturist Avi Solomon: Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Ran Prieur: I am known on the Internet as somebody who writes about dropping out of society, the critique of civilization, sustainability and the collapse. I'm a softcore doomer. I write about why this entire society is unbalanced and a large mistake and why the mistake is ending and how you can, how we can get out of it. How we can live better. Avi: Who has influenced you the most? Ran: I always tell people my two biggest influences are Ivan Illich and Charles Fort. Everything I write can be derived from those two guys. Ivan Illich wrote his most famous stuff in the early 70s. He was a big critic of industrialization and centralization and certain kinds of technology. Ivan Illich was not a primitivist. He thinks that technology can be used very well and can be used to live much better than primitive people but it mostly has not yet been used that way. Ivan Illich was so smart and wrote so clearly that reading him is like looking at the sun. You just read a couple of sentences and then you're like, "Wow! I have to look away, that's too much", and you kind of process those sentences and you go back and read a little more. I like to think maybe in 10,000 years, humans will be so smart that everything Ivan Illich wrote will seem completely obvious and self-evident. But for now, since he only wrote like 10, 20, 30 years ago, it still seems totally brilliant. My other big influence, Charles Fort, wrote about paranormal phenomena. He was like the grandfather of paranormal researchers in the early 20th century. In the 1920s he wrote several books where he would go through old scientific journals and pick out anomalies that dominant science ignored and he'd put these anomalies together into a lot of satirical science and satirical theories. But he also had a very serious side. The key to understanding Charles Fort is the first chapter of his first book, The Book of the Damned, where he's completely serious. After that, he's mostly joking. But what he's completely serious about is a philosophy in which it doesn't make sense to break up the universe. It's a single unified whole and if you break it up into parts and categories, it's like drawing lines on the waves of the ocean. All our systems of thought try to impose, at least our systems of rational thought, a certain kind of artificial order on this undifferentiated whole. And Charles Fort had this concept called the "old dominant" and the "new dominant," which kind of anticipated Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts, where you use a bunch of ideas, and then you get all these anomalies at the end that are excluded because they don't fit. And then finally you get a new story, this might be going a little bit into what Kuhn said, but finally you get an adaptation. You get a new theory that includes all the anomalies and that's the new dominant. But Fort understood that there's never a final theory. Only the universal can really exist. So no matter what kind of theory you have, you are always going to find anomalies at the edges until you get all the way out to the entire universe, which might be much bigger than we imagine. Somehow between Ivan Illich and Charles Fort, you can derive most of what I've written.
Avi: You seem to be an underground hero of sorts. Ran: Well, I don't know if I like to be a hero. I think it was Nietzsche who said that nobody who understands fame wants to be famous. So fame is like a mental illness in the followers of the famous people. I don't think I want to be a hero. I want everyone to try to be their own hero as best they can. I guess I like the underground part of it. It's certainly better to be an underground hero than to be a giant star. Avi: Who's your audience? Ran: My audience is a wide variety of people. I've got Anarchists and Libertarians, I've got Christians, I've got... my audience is mostly on the fringe though. I've had emails from people who live in vans, people who have vast amounts of wealth, more than they want to say. So my audience is people who read my website and like the way I think. It's hard to make any generalizations about them except that they're at least mentally a little bit outside the mainstream. Avi: Why is your 'How to Drop Out' essay so popular? Ran: That's easy. It's popular because people want to drop out of society. That's the number one way that people find my website. They go on to Google and type "how to drop out of society" and my "How to Drop Out" essay is the top hit on there. And they come there and they read it. Then, I suppose people like it because I'm not dogmatic about it. I don't know if anybody's read the CrimethInc books. The CrimethInc books are purely motivational books. They're like "Woohoo it's so exciting and drop out and live like an anarchist in the streets and hop a freight train to Bolivia" and "Woohoo quit your job now. Drop out now". All motivational writing is lies. If you take it seriously, if you take it at face value, it's all lies. It's always harder than that. But I still admire the CrimethInc people for inspiring people. It's very inspiring if you read it to motivate yourself, so long as you don't take it too seriously. I try to give more serious answers and explain how difficult and painful it is to live outside the system. The term "drop out" is problematic but using it for now, people think that it's a fun, easy escape. Like, "Oh we have to do all this dreary stuff in the dominant society and have this job. And if we can just suddenly drop out, it becomes easy". Then they crash and burn. They get drug addicted. They're not able to motivate themselves. It's actually much more difficult to live outside the dominant system than to live inside it. Otherwise, the system would not be so successful. Given how everybody uses the phrase "the rat race," it's popularly understood that the dominant society is not the best way we can live. And people want to live differently and it's damn hard, that's why so few people do it. I kind of emphasize that in my essay. One of the points I make that people really seem to resonate with is that you get depressed for a few years if you're in a highly regulated system, highly regularized from the first time we started school. From kindergarten on, we're in this rigid structure where every minute is regulated, especially with the younger kids. When I was a kid, we still had unstructured time, play time in the afternoons. And now, people have everything planned for them. When you quit that, and you have these vast blocks of time where there's nothing you're supposed to be doing, people get depressed. Even I got depressed, and I like unstructured time. What you're doing during that time is you're learning to self motivate. And it's not easy, you have to, it takes some time and you have to kind of go through a difficult time and almost hit bottom. I don't know why you say "you hit bottom." That's not a good phrase. But yes, you get depressed for a few years when the structure is removed and you have to learn to regulate yourself and motivate yourself in a life inside yourself. You don't have a life inside yourself because it's been crushed out of you. So over several years you have to grow that life inside of you to the point that it can motivate you to do things. If you persist, you'll get there.
Avi: What does self sufficiency mean to you? Ran: Well, I'm a little wary of the term "self sufficiency" if you take it in a strict sense, self sufficiency is a lie. Our ancestors have no history of individual self sufficiency. We lived in cities and towns and villages and tribes. They're always, you're always dependent on other people historically. That's the way we've always lived. There's the ideal of self sufficiency. Bill McKibben wrote a great essay, it's called "Old MacDonald Had A Farmers' Market: total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal". He starts off talking about how Thoreau was not self sufficient. He would go into town every night to his mom's house for a big dinner. He had friends come and help him out. He was not a mountain man in any way. He was interconnected to other people and people think, "Oh he's cheating. Thoreau didn't do it right. I'm going to do it without cheating." But there's really very few people in history who've been completely self sufficient. I guess I've here defined self sufficiency differently so that it's a good thing. It just means that you're not over a barrel. It means that nobody's got you in a position where you have to do what they tell you to, or something bad will happen. Especially no faceless institution has you in that position. I suppose arguably you could be dependent on another person where you have to do what they say. I don't know. I don't think so. I think really, in the ideal society, the ideal system, everybody has the absolute right to say no. The ideal, the root of all freedom is the freedom to say no. Before you can be free to do what you want, you first have to have the freedom to do nothing, which means, you're never in a position where you have to do what somebody says. So, that's the root of self sufficiency. The trick is to get in that situation where you never have to do anything alone, you have to do it through connections. It's too difficult to do it through mythical mountain man self sufficiency. You have to do it through connections with other people so you have to build communities or find communities around you that will trust you and give you slack to eventually contribute. Well, that's getting into all kinds of other subjects about community building and how people are depressed. You have to go through a period of depression to get between regulated and free. What happens if you have a whole bunch of people that are going through that period of depression at the same time, who takes care of them? These are difficult questions.
Avi: What's your take on permaculture? Ran: I'm careful to define permaculture. People have all these definitions of permaculture as this or that. First of all I should say I am a permaculturist. I've got the permaculture certification. I've taken a design course. I went to the convergence last fall. I'm going to go to another event in Spokane, maybe even another event in Seattle. I love the permaculture movement. But the word "permaculture", I always carefully define it as a brand. Permaculture is a brand like Nike or something. You know, Nike has the symbol. That's all they own, that wave symbol, and they use that wave symbol to subcontract the making of the shoes, and the advertising, and everything. And of course permaculture is noncommercial, but it's still a brand in the sense that they take this word and they bring all this stuff in under the umbrella of that word. Whenever there's a word that points to something good, inevitably people kind of veer off from reality. They start using that shortcut. They say, "Oh permaculture is good". And then, things that aren't so good can get in. We're seeing it happening right now with the word "organic" and with the word "sustainable". There's some marginal stuff. There's some dodgy stuff that's getting in there. So sustainability now means "let's continue the Western industrial lifestyle without making any sacrifices". That's a silly definition. And but that's kind of wormed its way into the definition of sustainability. Eventually, permaculture might point to some stuff that I don't agree with but for now, I like everything that the word "permaculture" points to. I like that it's focused on rebuilding the top soil and growing perennials and growing food and transforming yards into useful spaces, making everything have multiple functions. There's lots of permaculturists who're into lots of stuff about building. They're pioneering the rocket mass heater which is a great new technology that can greatly reduce the amount of wood we have to burn to heat a small place. So permaculture combines very ancient technologies with brand new ones.
Avi: What has being a caretaker of your land taught you? Ran: Well, being a caretaker is not that hard. If you've got primitive land that gets decent rainfall you just have to not kill stuff. Mostly, I just let Nature go up there. That hasn't taught me that much. But what I've learned from is trying to actively do things up there, like build a cabin and plant fruit trees. I've learned that you can't just stick a plant in the ground, unless it's a native plant. I've learned that you can't just stick a plant in the ground and expect it to thrive unless it's a native or invasive. I've planted a lot of plants up there that have died and the ones that survived, a lot of them are just squeaking by. So it's difficult to grow fruit trees and nut trees and berry bushes. And it's very, very difficult to build a cabin. I bought it in 2004 and I thought, "Oh, I'll go up there next summer and build a cabin". And now, like more than six years later, I've built a 45 square foot cobwood hut. It's going to be maybe two or three more years before I build a cabin. It's a huge job. So, the land has taught me that it's easy to idealize about all these things you're going to do when you get land, but a lot of these things are very difficult. Another thing it's taught me is to not idealize the whole back to the land thing so much. I go up there for a six day stay, and I go a little nutty in the head. And I'm an introvert. What would happen to an extrovert if they go up there, right? I don't really don't want to spend more than a week up there alone. I want to go back to the city and hang out with other people and get back on the Internet. I suppose maybe if I had a community of like 50 people up there, that might be enough to keep me from going nutty. But I've given up on the whole isolated, back to the woods kind of thing. Now I'm not thinking of my land as a homestead. I use the Russian term "Dacha". Dacha is like you have a place in the city and then you have a little piece of land in the country with a little cabin on it where you grow some extra food and you can go there to stay. I'm calling it a dacha now rather than a homestead.
Avi: How do you conceive of collapse? Ran: I call myself a softcore doomer. Maybe 10, 12 years ago I was more a hardcore doomer and I expected big, sudden, global catastrophe. And then year after year, I see people predict that and they're wrong. The system just keeps muddling along. I had a shift in my thinking after Katrina because I thought, OK, suppose you'd asked all the doomers "What would happen if New Orleans, America's largest port city, got completely flooded and no economic activity in there at all for months?" And they said, "Oh that would be the first domino in the chain. That would knock down the whole house of cards". And then, unless you actually lived in New Orleans, it was a mild disaster. Gas prices went up a bit and life went on about the same. That was part of what turned me into a softcore doomer. Now, I do not believe there's going to be a fast, global collapse. There's going to be, there will be local hard crashes, and globally, it's just going to muddle along and decline. There are going to be some regions that do really bad, and other regions that thrive. I don't think the human population can continue to be as high, and it's going to get really ugly in a lot of places. Hopefully I'll try to be in a place that's pretty good to go through the ongoing collapse. I call it the ongoing collapse. It's not something in the future. I like what John Michael Greer of the Archdruid Report said. He said the collapse we're now in started in the mid-70s when American oil peaked. Ever since then we've been in like a stair step decline where things get a little bit worse, then a little bit better, then a little bit worse, then a little bit better, then over the long term, worse. But worse isn't just that the money economy is getting worse, worse is that the big systems are cracking. Every collapse is an opportunity for something else. Every time a door closes, another door opens. And the metaphor I like is grass growing through pavement. How does pavement turn into grass? The pavement does not physically transform into grass. The pavement cracks and grass comes up through it. That's what I see happening throughout my lifetime and throughout this century.
Avi: Does history keep on repeating in cycles? Ran: Yes. It has kept on repeating in cycles and I think we're entering towards the end of a pretty big cycle now. The cycle is driven by oil but I do not think this is the last collapse. People always want to think they're at the end of history. Like, "this is it". That everything is coming to a head right now, and after we're through this great crisis, it's just going to be smooth forever. Even the most pessimistic people think it's going to be smooth forever because it's all going to be extinct. And then the optimists think we're going to be in eternal utopia. But I think it's going to keep on repeating in cycles maybe forever. At least for a long time. I often say that it's going to take humans 10,000 years to figure out how to live. I want to be careful with the word "evolution". If you use evolution to mean progress in an absolute sense, you're using it in the wrong sense, in an unscientific sense. But the correct way to use "evolution" is "adaptation." But, adaptation doesn't necessarily mean we can't get better. There has to be something you're adapting to, and what we're adapting to, what we're not yet finished adapting to I think, is our own human intelligence. At some point 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, we got so smart that we were able to make these huge mistakes with our intelligence. We can see all the technologies that are coming out right now. Many of them are going to turn out to be tragic mistakes. The way that our civilizations have destroyed nature and made all these short sighted decisions, we have not yet evolved to use our own intelligence and power wisely. And I don't think we're going to do that in another 30 years if we've only come this far in 10,000 years. We're still making many of the same mistakes that the ancient civilizations made. So, I think it's going to be a long time before we figure that out, how to use our power wisely. By then, we might have developed even new powers that we have not yet even imagined.
Avi: What advice would you give to a smart kid in high school right now? Ran: My first advice would be: Whatever you do, don't go into debt for college. This is a point about college that some people don't understand. And that is, the main thing you learn in college is how to think and act like an educated person. If your parents both went to college, then they raised you, then you already know how to think and act like an educated person. You don't need to go to college to learn that. If you come from a lower class family and your parents did not go to college, then college is much more beneficial to you. People who've been to college and learn to think and act that way get a lot more respect in the dominant society. Just the way you say words, the way you carry yourself. So that's a big benefit of college. You don't necessarily have to pay tuition to do that. You could learn that by osmosis. Hanging out in a college campus. When I was in high school, I was completely unmotivated. I did not know how to motivate myself at all. I was just going through the motions. So I went to college because college was the thing to do. It was a lot cheaper back then in the late 80's when I went to college. My parents had some money saved up so I didn't have to go on debt for college. But, boy, I would not want to be a smart kid in high school right now because unless you're tremendously good at self motivating, it can be hard for you to quit high school and not go to college and find something to do and not just crash and burn. Maybe I would say go to community college to get your basic stuff out of the way or hang out at a college campus. If you could get a staff job at a college campus, then you can kind of get the college experience, and even take a few classes. I don't know. I would not want to be a kid in high school right now. The generation that is coming up now is going to have a really tough time. Be adaptable, that's the advice I'd give.
"How to Drop Out," read by Ran Prieur:   |
| Star Wars meets Withnail and I Posted: 27 May 2011 05:19 AM PDT |
, from the private collection of actress 
Killing off bacteria might seem like a good thing. "Your immediate thought is, 'well, that's good, because they're not supposed to be there anyways," said Mercyhurst College microbiologist Steve Mauro, whose team found fluoxetine in low doses in water near Lake Erie's beaches. "But what about all the other bacteria that are supposed to be there and part of that ecosystem?" 
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