Southwest Virginia Blogs

I posted this about Bud missing meetings. The Coalfield Progress has this:

• Phillips, D-Sandy Ridge, has missed 97 percent of the Appropriations committee interim meetings since 1998.
  According to the Appropriations committee attendance record, Phillips attended four out of seven interim meetings in 1997 and only two since then. He has missed 91 percent of interim meetings overall.

He has only attended 2 meetings since 1997. That is a shame for Bud and the folks here in SWVA. I dont care how you try to spin it, this sucks eggs.

• It is important for Southwest Virginia to have a representative at the interim meetings, Griffith said, comparing the meetings with football practice. Those who do not go to practice "will fumble the ball," he said. "When it comes to shaping the entire budget, he is handicapped." Griffith is not a member of the Appropriations committee, but attends the interim meetings. He said he does not know of any other members who have an attendance record of under 50 percent since he started attending the meetings in 2000. Phillips' absences affect other districts in Southwest Virginia that do not have a representative on the committee, said Griffith.

Ole Bud said this:

• Rather than spending $200 of the taxpayers' money to drive to Richmond for each meeting, Phillips said, he can receive information from those meetings through reports and other means.
  At that rate, the tab for having attended 70 meetings since 1997 could have been as much as $14,000. Tiller said it would not have been a wasted investment compared to the gains in getting funds for Southwest Virginia.
  Phillips, however, believes his participation and votes during the legislative session are more important than attending interim meetings, he said.
  
  Phillips could not be reached for further comment after Tiller's press conference.

Phillips could not be reached?? Indeed.

MIT's $100 dollar computer is beginning to take shape. The idea is to create a computer that is affordable for virtually everyone in the world, and does not have the power-hogging and environmental requirements that work fine in air conditioned homes and businesses but that are entirely unsuitable for use in rural villages without reliable electric power.

What baffles me is why this was not developed years ago by a major computer manufacturer. Those companies, with the exception of Apple, don't seem capable of thinking beyond the ends of their noses. They have decided consistently to ignore a market of several billion computer users to chase after a much smaller market of just a few hundred million users.

The $100 computer will unleash tremendous creativity, and will create incredible opportunities for developing and marketing software. Users of $100 computers will jump on Open Source software, but there will be plenty of room for commercial software as well, but priced quite differently than software is now. Instead of trying to sell, say, 50,000 copies of a piece of software for $100 (grossing $5,000,000), imagine selling 300 million copies of software for twenty-five cents (do the math). If there are, say, 3 billion computer users, going after 10% market share is not unreasonable.

One more thing....I wrote out the specs for this $100 computer almost eight years ago, and published it in the BEV Briefing Book. MIT's computer is eerily similar; perhaps great minds think alike. The original article is below as a PDF.

With movie attendance down this year, it has apparently forced the studios to think outside the box a bit. Universal Studios has been offering free previews of the movie Serenity to bloggers around the country. The idea is that the bloggers, will, um, blog about it, and create buzz.

It appears to be working. Serenity is a science fiction film based on an obscure cable TV show called Firefly that lasted only seven episodes. But tech-oriented Web sites and blogs are abuzz with discussions of the movie, most of them positive.

While the film will probably not be a monster hit, the strategy of consciously using the 'net in a new way to market a traditional product like a movie is a good thing.

I work mostly with small towns and cities on broadband and economic development issues, and one of the things that comes up over and over again is, basically, fear of the future. No one ever comes right out and says, "I'm afraid of the future." Instead, concerns are telegraphed in other ways, like "We've never done that before," or "Prove that it works and then we might try it." And of course, it is difficult to "prove" something works if it is new and untried.

Life does change. History is one long story of change, and I often think we simply don't study history enough. We all seem to long for some mtyhical "good old days" about thirty or forty years ago that did not really ever exist. Was life really better without community water and sewer systems? Was the community a better place without rec centers, libraries, and public parks?

And even newfangled inventions like cars, which have had a mixed history of positive and negative impacts have enabled lots of things families half a century ago were not able to do, like drive to the beach in half a day or less for a family vacation. Or visit relatives and friends more often.

The marketing of Serenity is an example of the new blending with the old in interesting ways, and hints at the kinds of opportunities the 'net offers for civic life and economic development.

I missed this commentary about Philip K. Dick back in July. Good read, lots of linkagery to explore too.

With pictures! Scientists to peep on panda sex with satellite.

On a clear, crisp afternoon in the first week in September, I spotted my first Monarch of the year over a meadow of white boneset and goldenrod at its peak. The butterfly's presence prompted me to search for its favorite food, milkweed, and sure enough, we found it growing nearby. In my biology classroom a few days before, I had talked about the relationship between this very insect and plant, and so this sighting was a well-timed. Twenty of my students were with me in the field at just that moment to see these creatures together first hand-and for my students, to give these creatures names for the first time. Over the course of that hour outdoors, I held up, pointed out, and indentified a couple of dozen flowering plants and trees. One young lady afterwards asked if we were going to be doing this kind of hands-on outdoor study again. "This is the way I learn best" she said, a fact about herself as a student it seemed she had only that hour discovered.

Only two of a hundred and twenty students had raised their hands on the first day of class when asked who would be able to name a single wildflower in bloom in the nearest forest or pasture. For too many young Americans, back yards and woodlots have become an amorphous tangle of undistinguishable green-a sea of anonymous plants sheltering equally nameless animals. It is as if the greater part of the living world has become invisible and irrelevant. My students, like most, don't see very deeply into nature because they've not had much encouragement to look there. So many electronic and virtual distractions compete far too successfully for their attention. They have grown up in an era when our language in the digital world has grown rich while our vocabulary in the real world of nature has become sadly impoverished.

Beyond the shrink-wrapped plants and animals in our grocery store taxonomies, many of us no longer can call our fellow creatures by name, and there are costs to our ignorance. The naming of things contributes to our understanding of them and to knowing our place among them. Maybe it is significant that God set man the task of naming the creatures early on in Genesis. It was the first and necessary part of assuming our responsibility as stewards. What we have names for we are less likely to ignore, abuse or take for granted. It makes me sad that the eastern hemlock trees are dying. For my students, who have never distinguished hemlock from tulip poplar, this is an irrelevant abstraction. We know our friends by name, and attend to them better than we do rank strangers. We'd be better stewards if we knew nature's citizens on a first name basis, and knew more about their families and their kin.

But we've gradually neglected the memory of the names by which our grandparents knew their world. We don't know nuts or herbs or medicinals. We don't recognize forest trees or know how to use or enjoy their wood or fruits. None of my students could name wild grape, wild lettuce, walnut or cherry. Not a one knew what locust wood is 'good for' and only one recognized poison ivy climbing up a sycamore by the river. Nature-awareness once carried a high value, both for survival and toward an appreciation of personal ecology in the larger world. I think that certainly it still does--or could--if we'd make it an important part of a holistic education again.

I wish that, in our grade schools, we'd take imaginations and curiosity outdoors at recess, and take field trips to actual fields. Computers have their place in our classrooms, but let's use them to identify insects, leaves and flowers only after students have touched and smelled them with the sun on their shoulders. We should resist substituting the counterfeit experience of visiting Charlotte's Webpage for touching Charlotte's actual web in real barns, with real pigs and rats, and grappling with real relationships. I'd like to see a return to the education of naturalists in our colleges and universities where the study of life is too often reduced now to a mathematical model or a sequencing of the DNA mailed in from real creatures from disappearing rain forests. One can get a PhD in biology these days without getting his hands dirty with actual nature. And for our own parts, as touring nature consumers, let's not be content to stop at scenic overlooks and see the forest, but miss the trees entirely. We buy a few postcards of waterfalls or orchids to show the folks back home, not even knowing we've walked right past an endangered twayblade by the visitors' center sidewalk.

But what can a parent, a teacher or a newly-enlightened field trip student do to reclaim the names of the things we've forgotten and ignored from the places just beyond our classrooms, shopping malls and speeding cars? Can we learn to be at home in meadow or forest where our children are so sadly out of touch? Yes, I think we can. Let me suggest this as a first step: teach yourself to see by nurturing intentional vision.

Go slowly in nature and stop often. Look for the particulars. Take notes and draw sketches. Learn a dozen trees and recognize them in leaf, fruit and branch in every season. Learn a dozen wildflowers from spring, from summer and from autumn. And rekindle curiosity and wonder. Each insect or flower holds its own mystery and unique design. Be able to name a dozen birds, first by sight, then by their call alone. Know some salamanders-while they last-and a few dragonflies and even some common spiders and snakes.

Then, teach your children to see deeply. On regular walks around your back yard, pasture or woods show them your own attention to detail and watch how quickly they come to see the small world at their feet and call its creatures by name. Pick twigs from plants like spicebush, sassafras, and teaberry; scratch and sniff them and resurrect the neglected sense of smell that so powerfully builds memories in the out-of-doors. Turn rocks, and pluck blooms (not entire plants.) Use a hand lens to see more detail, and after seeing, find the names for the things you see. This has never been easier to do. The computer is a quick and convenient tool, but my first advice would be over time to accumulate a library of field guides you can carry with you and hold in your hands over the years. Study what you have found while sitting in the grass under the trees and ask for help from your children. Even the smallest can compare pictures.

Never before has the natural world needed each of us to know it, care for it and act on its behalf in such a way as it does in our times. We cannot be responsible stewards of a threatened planet if its creatures are distant, anonymous and irrelevant strangers. Be more aware than you've ever been in this cathedral made without hands, as John Muir called our world. Make friends of its inhabitants and know them by name.

This is a snipped from the Global Warming module to which I pointed some few weeks ago. And from it, you have an assignment. (If my students have to suffer the fear of public speaking, so should you; so here's their task by tomorrow's class--rhetorically speaking. Don't feel obliged to solve these worldwide dilemmas here in comments. Save your wisdom for real forums.) Be prepared to describe three conundrums (I'm thinking they'll look that one up) in the present and future conflict between rich and poor nations with regard to global warming and energy use. I will call on several of you in class to discuss your answers.

It is no secret that the less-developed nations wish for the industrial nations to cut back on (CO2) emissions, with the argument that "you caused the problem, you bear the consequences." To a neutral observer (such as a scientist is supposed to be) this stance would not seem entirely unreasonable. On the other hand, it is also no secret that few (perhaps none) of those using this argument wish to relinquish their own hopes for increasing energy use, including the right to increased emission of greenhouse gases. So, the developing world’s argument is perhaps better described as "it is our turn now."

Thus is the dilemma for the advanced nations. Any cut they might make, at some expense and possible risk to their economies, might quickly be neutralized (as far as the common good) by increases of emissions by the less-developed nations eager to improve their own economic well-being. Again, a neutral observer might see this as not entirely out of line. Others might point to the fact that the less-developed nations, by and large, have taken a path of extraordinary population growth, which makes it that much more difficult to bring people up to a higher standard of living. In what sense are the industrial nations responsible for the well-being of the rapidly growing number of people elsewhere?

These questions go well beyond science and economics and touch the core of what it means to share a planet as a community. Given the complexity of the problem, a sense of urgency must prevail before a consensus can be found. As it stands, the urgency of the matter is not clear since the extent of the downside to greenhouse gas emissions is uncertain. It is quite probable that problems are created by global warming, but it is impossible to prove in a court of law that man-made emissions caused a given problem, such as a crop failure, a drought, a flood or a hurricane. Thus, the people who sustain most of the damage cannot sue the people who are mostly responsible. Distributed responsibility is not a prod for action...

It is good to appreciate, when observing the discussion among nations, that not all nations are equally at risk from the changes anticipated from global warming. A large country has many options for moving people into more favorable areas if it gets too hot or too dry for comfort in some places, or if sea level rises. Small, less developed, and unluckily-situated nations tend to have greater risks from climate change. In many cases they do not contribute much to the emissions anyway, so their promise to restrain use of energy would have little value in a setting of bargaining about future restraints on emissions.

The rich nations tend to be in favor of the status quo, since that has worked well so far (for them). The poor nations want change and restraint, but without risk to their own aspirations for a better economy. A bargain where "some are supposed to cease to fish so others can fish more" is going to be difficult to strike.