AM Radio

While driving in the Bay Area late this morning, I thought I'd spin through the AM stations. Normally I just have KCBS ready on the AM dial for my "Traffic and Weather together every 10 minutes". I came across a national talk radio station advertising an upcoming special they are going to have on the "Global Warming Myth". The guy told me (and, I suppose, everyone else listening) that this wasn't going to be a balanced report, because we already hear too much of the "propaganda" of the left. They also let me know that this was their second investigative report following the wildly successful piece on Muslim Extremists. Indeed.

This is about when I thought it would be good to cruise the dial a little. Next up was Dennis Miller. I remember liking him as a teenager watching SNL, but had heard he was a full on "loyal Bushie" now. Odd. Anyway, he had a guest on to discuss how lopsided the "debate" on Global Warming was and how so many network news stories on the subject don't even mention alternate points of view. I love when pundits grab onto one piece of information and use it as the most indicative point of the "other side's" position. In this case Dennis Miller must have heard that one thing we could do to help the environment was to use less toilet paper. So now the whole conservation movement is absurd because all those greenies have as a solution is to use one sheet of T.P. per bathroom visit. His guest was saying he didn't think the bad ol' liberals tell everyone the whole story--in particular how they don't discuss the cost of some unnamed initiative, which the pundit put at $400 billion dollars. He also noted that he hadn't decided one way or the other if global warming was real and wanted to debate the topic more. Are you convinced that molecules are real? Are you convinced that laparoscopic surgery is the best option for removal of a gall bladder? Are you convinced that multiple, slower CPU cores are a better option than larger, faster single cores? (I would ask about the Big Bang and evolution, but know better). We live in a world of vast knowledge. So much knowledge, that people can't be experts in many fields like they used to. We allow those who are experts to advise the rest of us who don't have the time to learn about their field. If the vast majority of recognized climatologists say global warming is real and we are accelerating it, I will believe them. And if the cost of profiting off of the exploitation of the environment has forced us into a situation where we need to spend lots of cash to fix it, then so be it.

OK, back to the task at hand: touring the AM dial. I listened to Dennis Miller until my last ounce of respect for him dissipated. I found that there were 4 or 5 Asian language stations and 4 or 5 Spanish language stations (I can't know for certain, but I don't think these stations were spewing right-wing claptrap) to go with 2 news station and 2 sports stations. To round out the trip there were TWO stations with the same Rush Limbaugh broadcast. Yikes. That whole "liberal media" conspiracy that the right has passed off as real was done very well the last 10 years.

Visualizing our consumption

Found this story via a CNET post. It is one of those neat, scary, weird, sad kind of things. Trying to visualize how much we consume as a country is a pretty monumental task. As a mathematician, I would always try to describe things with numbers. The problem is that when numbers get too large, many people have no reference point for them and the numbers become meaningless. That's why people come up with ways to describe things based on how high of a stack they might make or how many times they could circle the earth if put end-to-end. Anyway, Chris Jordan has tried to actually show us what those numbers look like. I mean, 60,000 plastic bags every 5 seconds, sheesh.

A monumental task pulled off quite well. Worth the 30 seconds of computer energy to see (you could, of course, install BOINC for some of those unused computer cycles, but that is another story for another blog entry on another day)....

photo downloaded from Chris Jordan's site, http://www.chrisjordan.com/