Climate change?

One of the topics I think I need to understand more is the reality or otherwise of human impact on climate change. My knowledge of that to date has been limited to the overwhelming media bias towards our culpability in that regard, and our consequent responsibility to decrease CO₂ emissions.

South African Lewis Pugh astonished me by demonstrating that you can swim at the North Pole — which implies that the ice has melted to such an extent that you can no longer walk there (at least at some times of the year)!

On the other hand, I have recently stumbled on two works by climate-change skeptics:

• Prof Ian Plimer on ABC National's Ockham's Razor. (I have very little respect for Plimer having seen his abusive and disrespectful style in a live debate twenty years ago. He spoke against the Creationist Duane Gish, failed to bother about the topic of the debate but spent most of the time baiting, besmirching and belittling. As a climax, he donned gloves, connected two wires to a power point, claimed that Gish knew nothing of science and challenged him, if he was serious about experimental evidence, to come and grab hold of the wires! You can see it on YouTube, at about the 6 minute mark. Very dramatic, but not at all befitting what was supposed to be an academic debate. I was so outraged that a representative of my own University could behave so badly that I wrote a letter to him! Nevertheless, that doesn't discount what he has to say about CO₂.)
  
• Some notes by Leon Ashby, showing, among other things, that only 3.4% of atmospheric CO₂ is caused by human activities.

I'll need to find some balanced review of the science on this topic.

Communicating wth an Orchestra

Mixed with the great speeches at TED, there are plenty of duds. But this one is a wonderful description of the way conductors communicate with their orchestras. Itay Talgam compares the techniques of von Karajan, Bernstein and others. It's just a pity he didn't include Danny Kaye!

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Alain de Botton's presentation at TED 2009 has greatly inspired me. (And BTW, the podcasts that come from TED are by far the most informative and diverse thought-provokers I have come across.)

1. Snobbery: "A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. ... You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" And according to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses. ... The opposite of a snob is ... the ideal mother ... who doesn't care about your achievements."
2. Materialism: "I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want. It's the rewards we want."
3. Spirit of equality leads to the problem of envy. "If there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy." That idea that anyone is able to succeed (in terms of social status) makes us all envious of those who have succeeded. "There is a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem." -- because we all feel like failures in comparison to those who have higher social status.
   
4. Meritocracy: "A meritocratic society is one in which if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top. ... If you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing."
5. Unfortunates and Losers: "In the middle ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an 'unfortunate.' Literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may, unkindly, be described as a 'loser.' There is a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser." The result is s higher rate of suicide. "The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, and the bad at the bottom, and it's exactly done as it should be, is impossible. There are simply too many random factors. Accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc."
6. Ridicule: "When we think about failure, ... what we fear is the judgement and ridicule of others." Newspapers are the prime carrier or ridicule.
7. Tragedy: "An art form devoted to tracing how people fail." This is a more productive response to failure than ridicule. "At one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum you've got tragedy."
8. Transcendence: "The other thing about modern society, and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves."
9. Success: "You can't be successful at everything. ... A lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully, are not our own. They are sucked in from ... father ... mother ... advertising. ... So what I want to argue for, is not that we should give up on our ideas of success. But we should make sure that they are our own, ... that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions."

Differences in modern media

In a podcast from TED, Clay Shirky makes some interesting points about the distinguishing characteristics of modern media...

"The moment we are living through ... is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history"

Four media revolutions in the past 500 years:

• Printing press
• Telegraph and telephone
• Recorded media other than print: photos, sound, movies
• Radio and television, in which electromagnetic techniques were harnessed allowing to be sent through the air

In each of these, individual communication is separated from group communication. You either get to communicate 1:1 or 1:M. The Internet is the first media that facilitates M:M.

On the Internet, all forms of media exist side-by-side.

The former "audience" can now use the same medium to publish themselves.

Media is now global, social, ubiquitous and cheap.

The "really crazy change" is not that the former audience can speak back to the publishers, but that they can interact with each other.

The key role of this new media is to convene rather than to control communication.

Clay also discusses a great example of how technology usage in Nigeria inspired similar usage in the USA.