Rants – Page 46 – a sibilant intake of breath

Bacteria-fuelled imagination

I can understand the intuitive bodily response “we seem to have a cold -> sleep until 6:00pm.” More difficult to understand is the addendum: “And make sure the time is filled with a never-ending string of insane dreams.” The bits where I could rollerblade using just my feet were pretty entertaining; the bits where the bulk of the mass of my teeth fell off, leaving shark teeth behind, a lot less so. The number of cameo appearances made by acquaintances from decades past gave the sense of a deranged reunion.

Soup-filled and re-vitamined, I am returning to the experience.

Powershot A570 IS dead in three days

Three days after purchase, the battery hatch on my new camera broke during the course of ordinary use. I opened it to change the batteries and, when I tried to close it again, found that a little plastic bit was bent outwards. Afterwards, it would not close.

Future Shop refused to exchange it for a working one because they said the breakage was my fault. It was a reminder of just how poor their customer service is. The agent doing the return insisted that it had been dropped, even though it looked absolutely perfect aside from the bit that was bent.

The camera is being sent back to Canon for repair under the manufacturer’s warranty. Hopefully, they will simply repair or replace the hinge assembly. Irksomely, it can only be sent back to the store that did the original sale. When it comes back in a few weeks, it will therefore need to be mailed out to me in Ottawa.

[Update: 16 January 2008] More than two weeks after turning in my camera for repair, it remains ‘unprocessed.’ Perhaps, they say, they will be able to tell me the cost of repair within a week.

[Update: 23 January 2007] Apparently, the A570 has been repaired. My mother has kindly offered to pick it up and mail it to me tomorrow.

[Update: 31 January 2007] Oh, trumph and celebration! My camera has been returned and seems to be functioning properly. No more photos of the day from weeks past!

Shopping season

Stepping into any shop these days is a simultaneous reminder of many things: the insipidness of holiday music, our society’s unfettered embrace of mass consumerism, and the deadweight losses associated with gift-giving (as discussed previously). In many cases, gifts cost more to the giver than they are worth to the receiver. Even in cases where that isn’t true, the products received are often unnecessary. Arguably, the expectation of gift giving perpetuates harmful expectations about the nature of friendship, romance, and family.

Anyone feeling inclined to give me a gift is encouraged to make a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières or Amnesty International. In my own life, I focus primarily on efforts to improve the world through incremental regulatory change. It is also good to support the people doing good work actively and immediately, addressing suffering and injustice at the point where they exist.

On watching empty vans roll by

In most cities, there are corridors through in which virtually every vehicle that enters at one specific point leaves at another. Examples include:

Vancouver: the causeway through Stanley Park and across the Lions Gate Bridge
Ottawa: Booth street between LeBreton and Eddy

In both of these places, I have spent long periods of time with large groups of people waiting for buses. Meanwhile, thousands of cars containing single invididuals have streamed past.Is there any way spontaneous mass hitchhiking could be made to arise in such circumstances? What are the barriers to that happening? Are there any places in the world where it would happen already?

It just seems spectacularly inefficient for thousands of empty seats – powered by powerful engines and emitting fumes for the enjoyment of those waiting – would stream pass crowds of cold, or wet, or even perfectly comfortable people waiting to pay for a spot (probably standing) in a publicly owned vehicle.

Mocking the Bali conference logo

Substantive commentary on the concluded Bali conference can wait a while. Digging through UN pages in search of news, I came upon the terrible official logo:

A blue planet, in front of an ambiguous gray shape, with freakish hands of different hews clasped in front. On top of the sphere, some time of weird, viscous, milky fluid is spreading downwards. Somehow, the logo manages to denigrate both the inspiring unity embodied in photos of the Earth from space and the spirit of cooperation represented by clasped hands. The hands are especially objectionable: drawn with no regard for human anatomy and clearly engaged in arm wrestling rather than a respectful handshake.

Hopefully, the members of the UNFCCC will prove more capable at climatic negotiation over the next few years than they have proved at graphic design, in relation to this conference.

Salmon farming and sea lice

Recent work by Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta has demonstrated strong links between the practice of salmon aquaculture and the incidence of sea lice infestations that threaten wild populations. One study used mathematically coupled datasets on the transmission of sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) on migratory pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and chum (Oncorhynchus keta) salmon. They concluded that:

Farm-origin lice induced 9–95% mortality in several sympatric wild juvenile pink and chum salmon populations. The epizootics arise through a mechanism that is new to our understanding of emerging infectious diseases: fish farms undermine a functional role of host migration in protecting juvenile hosts from parasites associated with adult hosts. Although the migratory life cycles of Pacific salmon naturally separate adults from juveniles, fish farms provide L. salmonis novel access to juvenile hosts, in this case raising infection rates for at least the first 2.5 months of the salmon’s marine life (80 km of the migration route).

Packing fish together in pens that are open to the sea is an almost ideal mechanism for breeding and distributing parasites and disease. In nature, you would never find salmon packed 25,000 to an acre. Keeping them in such conditions – and making them grow as quickly as possible – generally requires chemical manipulation. The earlier discussion here about antibiotic use and its role in the emergence of resistant bacteria is relevant.

These concerns also exist in addition to the fundamental reason for which fish farming cannot be sustainable: it relies on catching smaller and less tasty fish to feed to the tastier carnivorous fish that people enjoy. It thus lets us strip the sea bare of salmon or cod or trout and compensate for some period of time by using cheaper fish as a factor for their intensive production. Given that those cheaper fish are caught unsustainably, however, fish farming simply delays the emergence of truly empty oceans. And the industry is trying to have farmed salmon labelled ‘organic.’ Ludicrous.

Source: Krkosek, Martin et al. “Epizootics of wild fish induced by farm fish.” Proceedings of the National Association of Sciences. October 17, 2006, vol. 103, no. 42, 15506-15510.

P.S. Shifting Baselines also has some commentary on sea lice and salmon farming.

Statements with no content whatsoever

There may be nothing more frustrating in the world than being unable to convince somebody that something is a tautology. You try as hard as you can to convince them that something is true by definition, but they persist in failing to see how you have designed the terms of the statement to be indistinguishable from the conclusion. Saying “Dogs are dogs therefore dogs are dogs” and having someone say, “Ah, but there are many kinds of dogs” is enough to drive one batty, if it happens often enough. Essentially, this is because the supposed point of contention is nothing of the kind – it is just a non sequitur that the other conversant thinks is some kind of rebuttal.

For some reason, training courses seem to spawn these sorts of logically agonizing discussions.

My dislike of taxis

I need to be deep in Gatineau relatively early tomorrow morning for a training session. Given that I do not want to walk ten kilometres through unfamiliar terrain and the first bus that goes to this place arrives after the session begins, it seems I have no choice but to take a cab – something I generally only do in situations where it is essentially unavoidable.

I dislike almost everything about taxis: the fact that they are cars, the ‘back of a police car’ feeling of riding in one, the fact they that so sharply privilege convenience over efficiency or cost, and the barbershop awkwardness of having to share a vehicle with a stranger from whom you are buying a necessary service that makes you anxious and unhappy.

At least I will be able to take the bus home in the evening.

Meat and antibiotics

Quite a while ago, I wrote about connections between human disease and the factory farming of animals. Recently, some new observational data has supported the link between the two. In the Netherlands, a new form of the superbug MRSA has emerged. It is strongly resistant to treatment with tetracycline antibiotics: a variety heavily used on livestock. The animals need the drugs because they are kept in such appalling conditions (unhygienic and constrained) that they would get infections too easily otherwise.

Xander Huijsdens and Albert de Neeling found that 39% of pigs and 81% of pig farms in the Netherlands were hosts to the potentially lethal antibiotic resistant bacteria. People who came into contact with pigs were 12 times more likely to contract this form of MRSA than members of the ordinary population; those who come into contact with cattle are 20 times more susceptible. The strain has since been found in Denmark, France, and Singapore. A study conducted by the University of Guelph found the strain in 25% of local pigs and 20% of pig farmers.

Maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of people is highly important for human welfare. Antibiotics are one of the major reasons why modern medicine is valuable: they help people die dramatically less often after childbirth and surgery than was the case before their development. They have also helped to make diseases that would formerly have been probable death sentences treatable. The fact that we are allowing farms to deplete their value so that they can produce meat more cheaply (by forcing more animals closer together in less clean conditions) seems profoundly unwise. In Pennsylvania, legislators have even banned farmers who produce hormone and antibiotic milk from saying so on their packaging – on the grounds that it would make consumers unduly worried about the other milk on offer.

Clearing Indonesian rainforests for biofuel

I have already mentioned how important rainforests are to climatic stability. Likewise, the acute danger that biofuel production will lead to increased deforestation, either directly – through the madness that is palm oil biofuel – or indirectly – by increasing the price of crops like corn, the value of agricultural land, and the profits to be made from cutting down rainforest and growing cheaper things like soy there instead.

This video – found via Grist – does a good job of attaching some visuals to the argument. Unhappily enough, this crazy conversion of rainforest into palm oil biofuels is taking place in the very state where the UNFCCC is meeting right now, in order to try to tackle the problem of climate change.