Month: March 2017

Some of you will remember the criticism a few years ago about chicken parts

being used to produce chicken nuggets.  Well, we have now reached a new technical high in this regard.

Watch the Wall Street Journal video here.

Technology moves on … but listen carefully … there is a bit of a problem.  The cost is $9,000 a pound right now against a market proxy of about $3 a pound.  Sure, some of you will tell me the first ball point pen cost $1 million, but the second cost just a few pennies.

Then, we have the other issues that have still to be determined.  What are the health side effects?  Remember the fat-free potato chip cooked in oil that simply went through your digestive tract and was not absorbed?  Do you remember all the rage about olestra…and all the unpleasant side effects?

Think about the side effects mentioned in all the ads you see every day on TV.

Nope, I think our conventional chickens are going to remain the mainstay of our diets

Wow many of us got a rude awakening this last week, didn’t we?  Burrrr!

Some of course, use this to chide others about global warming … oh … excuse me … we now talk about this as climate change.

I was scanning another scathing article about climate change today, and after looking through the reference documents found something that I did feel was balanced and truly helpful to the discussion.  I am sharing it here for your consideration: Clive Best Blog

The earth is a very complex environment with huge transfers of energy through winds that seem frustratingly unpredictable.  Here in the US, one of the big actors is the Jet Stream… which of course, acts in response to a whole series of underlying factors.  Yet, despite all this uncertainty and complexity we have the audacity to state that the average temperature on planet earth is rising.

Sure, we can have the hottest this or that on record in any one place … which then seems to be followed by the coldest this or that.  Gee … could this increased variation be a result of new patterns in the Jet Stream?

Personally, I have often wondered what the real net impact is of paving the planet and putting so many warehouses in the areas in which we do track temperatures – airports.  Once upon a time, those areas were largely trees and grassland.  Now, just look at Google Earth you will see they are entirely paved over and have huge buildings.  Could this cause the temperature there to rise?  Hmmm….

 

One of my favorite shows years ago was Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Funniest Things.  I guess I should not be surprised that our son, Stephen, brings us new insights every day with his perspective on politics, college classes, programming, and the list goes on.

We were catching up with him last week about an article on the Internet, and he responded, “TL;DR.”  When I asked what that stood for, he said it was Internet slang for “too long; didn’t read.”

I told him that was going to be the basis of a blog for sure as I researched it.  The implication is that some online text being replied to has been ignored due to its length. The abbreviation is based on the principle that, if the writer does not invest the time to convey their message concisely, the reader is justified not investing the time to read it. Alternatively, it might mean that there is insufficient material of value or interest to justify the time required to read it.  He let me know it was not a new term…

As I found, the phrase dates to 2003 and was added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in 2013.  But even before that, in the late 1800s, Mark Twain made famous the quote referencing a related concept, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Well there you go … if you needed more proof that today’s youth simply do not read and would rather watch videos, you now have it.  It does take a lot of time to make a short, punchy, relevant, personalized message.  This is precisely why we are seeing such universally positive reactions to our proactive, personalized video messaging.

No doubt you have been hearing that NASA has discovered what could be other “Earth-like” planets … and in astronomical terms, they are just 40 light-years away.  On a cosmic scale, that’s right next door. Of course, practically speaking, it would still take us hundreds of millions of years to get there with today’s technology – but again, it is notable in that the find speaks volumes about the potential for life-as-we-know-it beyond Earth.

Now, let’s see how many news articles point out that these planets are irrelevant to us.  They may in fact be gone, if their demise occurred any time in the last 40 years.  But, don’t get me wrong.  This is still interesting, but just not important or relevant today.

Meanwhile, here on planet earth we are trying to decide how we persist for the next forty years or more.  We have energy choices to make, lifestyle decisions about how and where we live, and of course how we use energy as a result.  We certainly have enough fossil fuel to get through this time span, but we are not making any more … so we will eventually run out.  Thinking this way means we need a long-term portfolio that will include a full range of technologies far beyond wind and solar alone.

But, a news article on this very real and relevant challenge will not get air time.  Watch how much air time the NASA discovery gets.

We all can be thrown off by our environment.  What we rehearse perfectly may not happen when we are “in the moment” or run into unexpected conditions.  And, sometimes we set ourselves up for the fall when we fail to consider the actual environmental conditions.

Take a look at this attempt to film a commercial

I remember a field audit at a fertilizer processing plant where I showed up wearing dress shoes.  Bad idea.  They were covered in muck and grime in no time … I looked pretty stupid.  But, no one laughed at me.  Nice of them.

Pitty the poor individual stuck in the costume … but you have to admire the persistence!