case – Page 4

What is wrong with society today?

April 26, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I was writing an e-mail today regarding a new illustration commission I received from the biodiversity alliance. I got a little side-tracked and this article is what came of it, although the illustration below is one I prepared earlier.

Illustration by Leslie Dean Brown. © 2015. All rights reserved. — Illustration by Leslie Dean Brown. © 2016. All rights reserved.

Yes we dance around and laugh and joke… at our peril. That is what we are doing as a civilisation. I do not think we should even have fireworks and such wasteful things unless we are meeting our targets for global emissions reductions (for example).

I’m not saying that it’s not worth talking about on your website, I just think that people have no choice left but to try to be happy and not get too sad about the state of the world… otherwise look at you and me… I suffer from chronic depression. I am sure that many other clever people suffer from clinical depression too. It is only by working at what we know is right in our hearts that we can feel better about what we are doing for the world. So I believe we must “be the change we want to see in the world”, be a part of the solution, not be a part of the problem. And to make it so that what we think, what we believe and what we do are all aligned. Otherwise, we are only fooling ourselves…

So yes unfortunately people are definitely “having fun while we roast ourselves.” But do we really want people to be miserable about our situation instead of ‘happy’? Miserable & depressed people probably cannot adjust and react to challenges as fast as happy people.

I think many older people are just “making the best of it” in the face of so many daunting challenges (and they really are and it is enough to make me not want to have children). I think a lot of young people are massively depressed because half of the older generation is still telling them what to do the old way based on the industrial model of business (sell more stuff, buy stuff because it is good for the economy, and money = happiness) and they are being simultaneously bombarded with mixed messages about the climate but I think many of them are feeling completely helpless. They are getting mixed messages (consumerism vs environment) and we are mostly stuck.

I think one of the reasons that the adolescent suicide rate has gone up is because of this (my sister who is a secondary high school teacher has told me so directly). I don’t think young people do all these ‘bad’ things intentionally; they behave how they were taught to behave, how society brought them up. I never questioned or considered the environment until year 9 general studies class. And then I heard about all these problems the world was facing essentially all at once…

One other problem is that the older generation is half-expecting that the younger generation will somehow come to the rescue and “save the planet”. How is that going to happen when the exact same mentality is being passed on? How is that going to happen when older politicians and wealthy people are essentially in charge? I think it is us older people who need to change first because all children naturally learn from role models. [Read more…]

Proof that Tripadvisor does not take whaling seriously

April 15, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I have started a new petition against Tripadvisor to demand that they stop supporting restauarnts that serve whale meat.

As some of you know, I recently started a petition to put some pressure on 3 Frakkar restaurant in Iceland. To cut a long story short, 25,000 people signed the petition ask 3 Frakkar restaurant to stop serving whale meat. What happened next? Over twenty people left reviews on their tripadvisor page. ALL of those reviews were promptly deleted by Tripadvisor staff members. When questioned about that move, here is Tripadvisor’s response:

Dear Dr Brown,

We understand you reached out to a colleague of ours requesting information about why a number of reviews for a restaurant in Reykjavik were rejected.

We wanted to provide an explanation as to why our team made this decision. [Read more…]

The consequences of scale.

March 22, 2016 — leslie dean brown

One thing that I don’t think many people reaslise on a day-to-day basis is that changes happen at all scales and their effects can be felt across all scales. The macro scale affect the micro scale, and in turn, the micro scale can affect the macro scale.

For example, an entire field of wheat can be killed at the cellular or molecular level by spraying it with chemical toxins. This results in the disappearance of a visible thing on a bigger scale. The dead wheat then decomposes, a result which later manifests itself as changes in the soil chemistry. When wholey other different large-scale changes subsequently occur, replacing the field of wheat with something else, that again then affects the visible scale. These micro- and macro-scale responses and consequences can continue to alter themselves in this manner until reaching equilibrium. All events are related together and caused either directly or indirectly by each other.

These perterbations continually fluctuate and influence each other across vast differences in scale.

Although what I am saying is that things like gravity may well be a particle (I don’t even know, not my area). Atoms are composed of sub-atomic particles. So cause and effect always works both ways. ;-) large cause —> small effect small cause —> large effect I am not arguing for the butterfly here causing any significant observable phenomena. I’m just pointing it out that it’s not always “top down”.

Since understanding the Navier–Stokes equations is considered to be the first step to understanding the elusive phenomenon of turbulence, the Clay Mathematics Institute in May 2000 made this problem one of its seven Millennium Prize problems in mathematics. It offered a US$1,000,000 prize to the first person providing a solution for a specific statement of the problem:

Prove or give a counter-example of the following statement: In three space dimensions and time, given an initial velocity field, there exists a vector velocity and a scalar pressure field, which are both smooth and globally defined, that solve the Navier–Stokes equations.

Furthermore, I also think that large-scale effects are always caused initially by small perturbences. What I mean by that is that every event in history is caused by a smaller, prior event. Some of us like to think that this is not the case, and that only large-scale changes can only ever be the result of even larger scale effects. But I think if you have read about chaos theory and the term “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, then you’d probably agree with me. Say I hit something with a hammer. You might think that the hammer causes large scale changes in whatever it is that I destroy. But what made me decide to strike the hammer in the first place? Wasn’t it really caused by some of my neurons? Perhaps if time went backwards, then it might be the other way around, but I’d rather not get into that, because the last time I read about about that, I thought the author was a bit loopy.

Petition to ban the publication of unethical lethal whale research

January 26, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I have started a petition to ban the publication of unethical lethal whale research.

I have attached a transcript of my letters to SpringerLink regarding this issue in chronological order because it makes for more interesting reading. It’s interesting to see Springer’s official stance change completely when they are called out.
Maybe this will make interesting reading for someone… in about 300 years time when people realise that some animals are more important than humans:

From: Dr. Leslie Dean Brown [mailto:info@lesliedeanbrown.com]
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2016 9:56 AM
To: Onlineservice, SCSC
Subject: TN606818 “I speak for whales” [petition: banning lethal whale research] FS

Hello,

I’ll get straight to the point.
As I’m sure you’re aware, people all around the world are getting more and more annoyed with the Japanese that continue to kill whales and do unnecessary scientific research on them. Many people thought the research was all lies. The really scary part is that it is actually true. Yes, they are in fact researching whales… :-(

I am writing to you because some of these papers have been published in the Journal “Polar Biology” with the latest appearing in 2014:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00300-013-1424-3

I have started a petition to ban lethal whale research:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/en-gb/656/717/561/ban-japanese-%22research%22-that-is-lethal-to-whales/

I hope you take notice of this petition and reject all publications by the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO), the International Whaling Commission (IWC) or any other organisations that are involved in the slaughter of whales and the whale meat industry.

Did you know that the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research openly sells whale meat in exchange for financial support from the public? [Read more…]

Blue Moon of Josephine.

November 15, 2015 — leslie dean brown

We estimate that 3.4 billion individuals – or 71% of adults worldwide – have wealth below USD 10,000, while the group of millionaires, who comprise less than 1% of the global population, account for 45% of total wealth.[source]

SO. It seems the rich are indeed getting much richer. There is a truly massive gap in the distribution of wealth and it just keeps getting wider and wider and wider.

I’ve had most of this post sitting in draft format for quite a while. But just today, I learned that Joseph Lau, the billionaire Hong Kong real-estate tycoon, paid a record-breaking US$48.4 million for a cushion-shaped internally-flawless fancy vivid blue-coloured diamond, called the “Blue Moon”. He named it “Blue Moon of Josephine”. And he bought it for his seven year old daughter.

For his seven year old daughter! [Read more…]