Got too much red algae? Feed it to the cows. It reduces methane by 40%.
Category: culture
-
AI Whistleblower Dead
US media is not following this development in AI. A whistleblower from OpenAI who recently left the company is found dead. Police say it is suicide, but it is not revealed for more than a week. And it takes the BBC to report on it before it makes news in the US.
NYTimes interviewed him a few weeks ago, but has not printed anything about his death yet. Mysterious.
-
From the mouths of babes
I’ve never seen a 7-year-old give a TED talk, but Molly does a great job. She even has an assistant Airi, with HIS assistant father, help out. This video has important lessons for child development, presented in a clear way that is easy to understand. So put away those iPads and phones, and PAY ATTENTION.
-
Clothing for Boys and Girls
Can you guess which President of the United States is in this picture? Go to this article to find the answer.
Clothing for children in the US has changed a lot in the last 150 years. Pink was thought to be a strong color, and blue a softer color. All children wore dresses until age six or so. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that things changed, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that our current thinking about children’s clothing colors became popular.
I was a kid in the 1950’s and they still used white for both boys and girls. Here is a picture of my grandmother holding me. I still have those white boots!
What about Japan or other countries? What colors are “normal” for kids and when did that start?
-
Moral Decay
The family is writing about politics again. Reacting to David Brooks’ new book The Second Mountain. He writes mostly about moral decay. Here is what I added to the mix.
It does seem odd, from a perspective far away, across a big ocean, that the richest country in the history of the world, with a matching military budget, with no significant opposition, feels so bad.
Do note that overall happiness here in Japan is much lower than in the US. (Japan at 58th/156 just beats out Honduras and Khazakstan, the US is 19th and trails countries like Israel and Costa Rica.) They don’t advertise it, though. You might think the US is all about “buck it up”, but they (we) look like a bunch of whiny kids from outside the US.
We are squandering huge social and technological advances. Let’s hope the pendulum swings back before it is too late.
I was talking yesterday to a programmer from South Africa and a Trump supporter in the park. I walk there to get my 10,000 steps, and to read*. He started out our conversation by saying he liked to talk about politics. He had some unusual perspectives but we agreed on the fact that we (he and I) lived in a country only Trump could dream about. Voter apathy here, control by one party over almost all of the last 60 years, common white-collar graft that is overlooked, absolutely locked-down immigration (30 Syrian refugees were thought to be too many), rampant discrimination, with objectification and exploitation of foreigners (the new guest worker program) all are on the conservative list. The only real difference here is that individuality has a much lower place in the hierarchy of values.
It is all relative. (We here in Japan do have a lot less income disparity, an administration that takes care of its people, and national health care, so there is that.)
*Reading Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Talk about a real downer! New kind of capitalism that uses society as a resource for building income. Just finished Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff who proposes ways to fight it.
Happy Sunday and a happy 4/20, y’all.
