Dave’s posterous

Some very cool tree houses.

                                                       

Click here to download:

WOW_Tree_Houses_for_Grownups.zip (2338 KB)

This gives a whole new meaning to the term ball bearings!

http://www.gamaniak.com/video/3625

Thanks to Harris Hartman for the forward.
Dave out

Good article sent in by Ray Park.  Thanks Ray.
~~~~~~~~~~

Missing the Gain But Joining the Pain

By: Sam Kornell  |  November 15, 2009  |  12:10 PM (PST)

Since the First World already mucked up the climate, animal nature toward fairness dictates that developing economies are piqued at having to clean up.

A few weeks from now representatives of all of the world's major governments will meet in the capital of Denmark to attempt to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, which regulated greenhouse gas emissions. The conference promises to be immensely complex, and many experts are pessimistic about its prospects.

But underlying every vexing political and economic consideration is a problem so obvious it's easy to overlook. Humans don't like being treated unfairly and react injudiciously to being cheated — traits destined to be severely tested by the crucible of climate change.

Since the industrial revolution, profits from the exploitation of fossil energy — coal, oil and natural gas — have not been equally distributed. America, Europe and Japan got rich off of oil and coal; now China, India and much of the rest of the developing world are attempting to do the same thing. If they succeed, climate scientists say, it will mean environmental catastrophe.

This progression has created a situation in which any solution to climate change is, to a greater or lesser extent, going to be unfair — a fact many negotiators openly acknowledge. The Danish environmental minister hosting the Copenhagen conference, Connie Hedegaard, has reportedly been "extraordinarily blunt" in insisting that China, India and the rest of the developing world shoulder a large share of the climate load.

Hedegaard recently told The New York Times, "I get it. If I were a developing country I would say, 'Why should I do this?' They are feeling the consequences of climate change first and foremost. And they didn't create the situation."

But, she said, "it's just an arithmetic fact that if China and India continue at the current rate they'll use up the whole global carbon space in a very short time." China and other emerging nations, Hedegaard concluded, "must accept [responsibility] even if it isn't fair."

How likely is such acceptance? In 2003, researchers working for the primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University conducted an experiment to see how monkeys reacted to unfair treatment. First, they taught a group of capuchin monkeys to trade pebbles for slices of cucumber. Then, one day they gave one of the monkeys a grape in exchange for his pebble. The other monkeys were incensed, and an uproar ensued.

"They would literally take the cucumber from me and then drop it on the ground or throw it on the ground, or when I offered it to them they would simply turn around and refuse to accept it," Sarah Brosnan, one of the researchers, told LiveScience.

Humans are no different than monkeys in their aversion to inequity, real or perceived. "Fairness is extremely to important people," said Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at UCLA. "They'll make huge sacrifices, pay high costs, go to a lot of trouble to make sure they're treated fairly. Fair is an ambiguous word, but there's no question that people have very strong emotions about the distribution of positive and negative things. It's enormously important. People will sacrifice their lives for fairness."

Fiske's last point is haunting. Experts agree that the developing world is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures. China, for example, has a long history of devastating agricultural droughts. It's no surprise that, as John Kerry said during a recent Senate hearing on climate change, "The Chinese are petrified by what is happening in the context of global climate change."

Will China, India and other developing nations be willing to accept unfair treatment, knowing that if they don't — if they refuse to act on climate change out of a sense injustice — they will face serious consequences? Can they overcome what cognitive psychologists call our "inequity aversion"?

The answer once again appears unpromising. In 1982, German sociologists developed an experiment that has since become the textbook example of the human sensitivity to fairness. Seeking to understand the psychological underpinnings of negotiation, they constructed a game in which a two people must split a sum of money. One of them — the "proposer" is given $10, some portion of which he must give to the "responder." If the responder accepts the proposer's offer they both get to keep the money; if he rejects they both get nothing.

The researchers found that the responders in the study regularly acted against their own self-interest. If the proposer offered any sum less than $4, they refused and both subjects were left empty handed. "Fairness" was more important to the responder than free cash.

The Ultimatum Game, as the experiment came to be called, has since been conducted around the world, with similar results everywhere. It suggests, among other things, that people are deeply averse to accepting unfair treatment, or what they perceive to be unfair treatment, even if it's in their own self-interest to do so. This phenomenon is often highly visible when countries conduct multilateral negotiations.

"Time after time we find that international environmental agreements don't get formed and become effective unless there's some general sense among the participants that the arrangement is equitable," said Oran Young, a professor of international governance and environmental institutions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"So you've got to come up with an agreement that, at least in a very general sense, people think of as a fair deal," he continued. "Otherwise, you're not likely to get an agreement, and if you do, it's not likely to get implemented in an effective way."

At the moment, prospects for a deal widely perceived as "fair" hinge, in large part, on the willingness of the U.S. Congress to acknowledge, in climate negotiations, that it holds a larger share of the world's carbon debt than do economic competitors like China.

There is a precedent for such an recognition: In 1992, when the original Kyoto Protocol was signed, then-President George H.W. Bush acknowledged America and Europe's special responsibility to combat climate change, noting that they "must go further" than other nations and offer detailed "programs and measures they will undertake to limit greenhouse gas emissions."

And yet as The New York Times reported recently, the likelihood that Congress will follow the elder Bush's lead appears unlikely. The Times framed the discussion thusly: "Poor countries say industrial powers, which have spent a century or more benefiting from fossil fuels while adding billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, owe them financial assistance in dealing with rising seas or shifting rains and a stable climate, which they say can be achieved only if rich countries commit to deep prompt cuts in their emissions.

"On the other side," the Times continued, "established industrialized powers are finding it hard to build substantial public support for programs that would send tens of billions of dollars a year abroad. In the United States, the Senate - where preserving American jobs and reviving the economy are paramount — presents a particularly strong obstacle."

Sensitivity to fairness can sound abstract and ambiguous — not to mention soft-edged — in the context of immensely complex multilateral negotiations about re-tooling the global carbon economy. And yet, as basic primate psychology shows, its centrality to the global climate crisis can't be overlooked. "These questions about equity and fairness are very close to the heart of the issue," said Young. "They have to be taken seriously."

Yesterday, a dear friend who knows me well sent me link to an NPR web page.  I'm afraid I missed all of these shows.

The listener had been invited to give impressions of the feelings evoked upon hearing a distinctive, and usually well known, voice.  I read all 622 responses and found the exercise fascinating.  You can do the same if you wish by visiting here for the opener or here for an index. of sorts.

In the beginning of the series, most comments were deeply evocative but as they progressed through the months the feedback changed for the most part.  There were more statements based upon the persona or overt attempts at humor ignoring the mission.  It's apparent that some contributors were completely unable to divorce the celebrity and their lifestyle from the qualities of their respective voices.  These listed below were some of my favorites.
Dave out

~~~~~~~~~~

Patsy Cline
    The unrequited love of a heartsick suspension bridge for the river that flows beneath it.  (My favorite. Dave)
    The voice of the moon courting a shy earth.
    Slipping back into a warm bed on a cold morning.
    The ache for the tastes of childhood forever gone.
    A red flannel shirt.

Jack Nicholson
    The bottle that told Alice, 'Drink Me'.

Cliff Edwards
    The most beautiful part of childhood wafting by on a breeze.

Barry White
    A waterfall of melted butter.
    What you'd expect to hear when you put your ear up to an empty bottle of Viagra.

Luciano Pavarotti
    The voice of every castrati crying out for heirs.

Phillis Diller
    The Vlasic Pickle's Stork's girlfriend.
    A prickly pear cactus complaining to her porcupine psychiatrist.

Bobby Short
    Sadness and beauty walking hand in hand on a cobblestone street on a foggy night.

Celine Dion
    What every mother's lullaby sounds like to an infant.

Marlon Brando
    A rustic sun that bakes the cobblestone road in the middle of Tuscany.

Paula Winslowe (Bambi's mom)
    The last voice we hear before we die.
    A mother who insists that daddy just ran down to the corner store, but it's been six years.
    The gentle fraying at the corners of your favorite blanket.

Grace Slick
    Outstretched arms, hands and fingers straining every tendon to touch some sky.

Fred Astaire
    The boyfriend you longed for before you found out about sex.
    How the holding of hands felt before you knew about heartbreak.
    A silk-gloved hand stroking a satin-covered shoulder.

Joe Cocker
    Someone trying to sing while being Tasered.  (Gets me laughing every time I read it. :-D )

Katherine Hepburn
    The blue jay at the feeder scolding the sparrows for hogging all the birdseed.

Janis Joplin
    A chainsaw with a broken heart.
    Wearing gasoline cologne to a candlelight vigil.
    The voice of my bladder as I search the interstate for a rest stop.
    The dare you really wanted to accept even though you were totally scared.
    The girl you have a crush on saying your name.
    The last scream that a trapped person yells before they realize no one will come.
    The voice of the girlfriend you left for the safe girlfriend you wound up marrying.
    The lit fuse to a stick of dynamite.
    The unbridled claim to freedom in a wildcat's cry.
    A freight train running on loose rails.

Lucile Ball
    The voice of reason on nitrous oxide.

Ray Charles
    All the hurt you have ever felt counterbalanced by the smile of a child.
    The feeling of a satin halter dress caressing your skin as your lover twirls you around the dance floor.
    Brown sugar Cream of Wheat sliding down your throat on a winter morning.

Cher
    The pulse in your head when you figured out that the hottie you were told was a transvestite really is a woman after all.
    A rookie lighthouse trying out for an opening on the foggy coast of Maine.
    The voice of a middle-age woman on a roller coaster giving birth.
    The B-52 of female voices; big, surly, smooth and packs a wallop.
    The aunt you liked much more when she was your uncle.

Harvey Fierstein
    A fire-breathing dragon whose feelings have been hurt.
    A man trying to talk with Hulk Hogan's hands wrapped around his neck.
    My bunions begging me to stop wearing stilettos.
    A big old dog growling in his sleep.

Eartha Kitt
    A whiskey lollipop.

Joni Mitchel
    Beads of mercury on a frozen river.

Mike Tyson
    A combination of fear and pity, like approaching a Rottweiler with its foot clamped in a trap.

Vince Vaughn
    Your big brother telling you it's OK with Dad if you drink the bourbon in the liquor cabinet.
    A last-minute, irreverent, but brilliant idea for the homecoming float.

Andy Divine
    A poorly cleaned chimney.
    What the fruity bits inside Jell-O salad hear when the Jell-O is vigorously jiggled.

Henry Kissinger
    The love child of Marlene Dietrich and Elmer Fudd.
    How the ticking might sound in Salvador Dali's paintings of melting clocks.

Jeanette McDonald
    Your mother asking you to make a dinner salad after you just dropped acid.
    Ethel Merman-lite.
    The collective nightmare of cats among the rocking chairs.

Hillary Clinton
    Your high school principal, trying to be a good sport after getting dunked for the 15th time at the dunking booth at the school carnival.
    A shovel hacking the ice off of the concrete steps.

Barack Obama
    A lozenge slipping down the back of the tongue just before it chokes you.
    Warm tea melting the sharp edge off of ice cubes.
    A saxophone line in a Dave Brubeck piece capable of shifting time to engage you.

John McCain
    The smooth, measured calm of expertly repressed anger.

Ella Fitzgerald
    Diamonds dipped in caramel.

This is a short well done film about living with Alzheimer's disease. It will only take a minute or two to watch and perhaps provide some insight. Why not contribute a few minutes in exchange for some insight. It was worth my time.
Thanks to Pitt Warner for the forward.

See http://act.alz.org/site/PageServer?pagename=my_name_is_lisa_video

To see it later visit either the Alzheimer's site or my blog site at http://act.alz.org/site/PageServer?pagename=my_name_is_lisa_video

Sincerely,
Dave

While I'd have a hard time calling this technology a "sixth sense", as offered, it is still quite remarkable and certainly worth your time to view.

After you've seen the talk by Pattie Maes, based on the work of Pranav Mistry, please consider taking a few more minutes to view the remarkable and surprising short video by Bruce Branit that implements some of the technology described in the talk.

Thanks to Joel Baumbaugh for being the catalyst on this blog.  Please consider spending some of your recreational time watching the TED talks.  They are always stimulating.

Feedback always welcome.  Happy Halloween.

Dave out

P.S.  I've long held the belief that a sixth sense exists.  I believe it is localized at our "nodes of Ranvier" where breaks in the myelin sheaths, on our axons, allow for electromagnetic interaction with our environment.  There is no magic or mysticism in this mechanism.  Saltatory conduction has long been understood and provides a very valuable service to neuron bearing entities.  I have neither engaged in experimentation with nor sufficiently researched this arena but now throw this idea forth in the hopes that you can either enlighten me to unknown research or to perhaps light a flame in the darkness, to stimulate your curiosity sufficiently to perform your own research.  The mind reels at the possibilities.

Pattie's talk   http://www.branitvfx.com/worldbuilder/index.html

Bruce's short video   http://www.branitvfx.com/worldbuilder/index.html

I have had several  responses to my recommendation Friday, for "Captain Abu Raed", Jordan's first major motion picture for international distribution.
From the folks who've seen it, the responses were uniformly positive.  For a first movie, from Jordan, it is excellent.  No I take that back.  What I should have said is.  For a first movie, from Jordan, it is excellent.

I've been looking for it for over a year with no luck.  I didn't realize that the person who recommended it to me initially, saw it at a film festival.  It actually did not get released until recently.
I found out last Tuesday that it was showing at the Ken Cinema, two blocks from my house.  Unfortunately, the night before I discovered this  the director, composer of the score and one other key player, were at the theater.  Rats, I missed it.  When I saw it Thursday night, I was one of 10 people in the theatre.  It was very sad that such good movie would be seen by so few.  Clearly, the lack of a big advertising budget does not necessarily indicate an inferior movie.

I thought you had missed your chance (San Diegans) when it ended it's run at the Ken Cinema, Thursday (8/13) but it has only moved a short distance to the Hillcrest Cinemas where it will be until this Thursday (8/20).  Usually, the first show of the day is discounted.

Dave out

Life is so much easier for people who don't care!

Revel regardless!

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want!

See the turtle.  He only gets ahead when he sticks his neck out.