And I sat in the Eames Rocker
And that has made all the diffference.
White Noise
Maybe music with lots of distortion (electric rock, lots of the time) is filling what otherwise would be silence with noise.
In this way the background is inverted… with more rather than less…. Higher background radiation as it were. It’s all blueshifted.
Can’t say I particularly enjoy the simplistic interpretation, but I often love uncommon inversions.
The World Vision Garden by FlemonsWarlandDesign
One dome represents the prosperous nations that have, whilst the other is indicative of the half of the world that have not.
Allow me a mission or allow me space.
Only hope of wilderness sees me through
the narrows. For now, it’s window-gazing.
What kind of crap is this?
So, I’m doing the laundry today. And in checking the pockets of a pair of dress pants that belong to my girlfriend, I discover that the ‘pockets’ are not even real.
Now, I know that girl pockets are significantly smaller than guy pockets. I presume this is to prevent anything from ruining any girlish curves the wearer might possess. Also, I know that these pockets are almost, but not quite completely, useless. However, these particular dress pants have just-flat-out-fake pockets.
Something strikes me as wrong about these particular pants. I think it is the fact that they are meant to be worn at the office. You know what style I am talking about. Business slacks that just happen to follow every curve of the business woman’s backside.
The appearance of utility and function has been substituted for actual function. So, does the business woman benefit more from showing off her ass or being able to carry around a billfold? Apparently, someone out there believes that her ass is her most important luggage even in the office.
I there is a contradiction here that the designers are exploiting. Because the designers bothered putting in the fake pockets at all, they are playing to some sort of social conception that the business woman deserves business pants (i.e. functional pants). Yet, because there are no pockets, they are betting that she wants, or will otherwise be better served by, the unmolested presentation of her ass to the rest of the office.
Am I wrong to be upset by this? I know, I know. There are all kinds of social factors at play that I am not touching. I think I wanted to just express my gut feeling more than go into any real analysis.
New EPA coal rules
The EPA finally got around to issuing a rewrite of an older coal pollution rule that dealt with toxins that cross state lines. This rule was previously scrapped by courts and the EPA essentially went back to the drawing board to find a solution. Hopefully they have found it.
What I find interesting, however, is the response of the coal industry rep:
“The E.P.A. is ignoring the cumulative economic damage new regulations will cause,” said Steve Miller, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a group of coal-burning utilities.
Cumulative economic damage is a funny thing. I would wager that Mr. Miller views the term ‘cumulative’ as something decidedly less encompassing than I do. I even imagine that his bubble of economic effects extends only to industry and only in the short term.
Even if we set aside the effects of anthropogenic global warming, we can look to health costs. I would imagine that the savings in health costs alone justify the move. However, we can even ignore the direct hospital bills and insurance payouts caused by the ruined lungs, hearts, and brains of those most victimized by coal emissions. Instead of these people being an economic burden on the rest of society (which, despite what Republican governors will argue to SCOTUS,is a shared social cost), their restored health will instead result in an increased workforce, and increased productivity in general.
It’s the same economic argument against imprisoning non-violent offenders—release the people and let them help the rest of us.
Yet, the venerable Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, called the new rule an impediment to economic growth and job creation. I wonder if he is as ignorant about the effects of breathing coal pollution as he is about swimming in algal blooms.
This sounds about right to me:
Supporters of the new rule said that any costs would be more than offset by health and other benefits. The E.P.A. estimates the annual benefits of the cross-state pollution rule at between $120 billion and $280 billion a year by 2014.
Passive Learning
I’ve recently noticed a pattern. I’m putting art or commentary on art in places where I always have the option of soaking in information about it, without devoting true attention to it.
Examples: my desktop background: 
The higher resolution image (100 MB jpg), I have chopped into 100 pieces that rotate as my desktop background every five minutes.
Yet another example: playing academic lectures in the background as I do my internetting. http://oyc.yale.edu/ Right now, I’m listening to/watching a lecture about Nabokov and Lolita.
