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Firenado? Bambi Bucket? A guide to wildfire vocabulary

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Amid a hellscape of glowing coals, a fiery column recently took flight in Northern California, spinning against a red sky. The name for it? Firenado.

“I had never heard of a fire tornado until today and I really kind of hope I never see a firenado again in my life,” music video producer Robby Starbuck said in a tweet that went viral.

Yes, a firenado is a real thing. Same with Pyrocumulus, Wildland-Urban Interface, and Bambi Buckets. This month’s rash of fires brought the wildfire jargon to the masses, and the masses (myself included) were pretty confused. I wondered what other fire words and concepts people were encountering for the first time as they read about the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history.

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What does it mean, for instance, when a wildfire is 45 percent “contained”? What the heck are the “Santa Ana winds,” other than a frequent crossword answer? And is there a difference between a “firenado” and a “fire whirl”?

To understand these bewildering terms, I turned to Andrea Thode, a fire ecologist at Northern Arizona University. She acknowledged that these new words could be daunting for outsiders. “Terminology in the fire world is … there is a lot,” she told me. To illustrate, she asked if I’d seen the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s 183-page glossary of wildfire terminology — yes, that’s 183 pages, not 183 words.

With climate change making wildfires worse, you’re sure to be hearing these pyro-specific words for the rest of your life. You might as well learn them now.

Bambi Bucket

No, it’s not an oversized pail to rescue lost fawns. A Bambi Bucket is a collapsible bucket that hangs from a helicopter to collect water and dump it on wildfires. What’s with the name? The inventor, Don Arney, made it up as a joke name for the bucket he planned to planned to call SEI-Flex after his company, SEI Industries. Then a friend pressured him into making it the real name. End of story.

A helicopter pours water on fires.aapsky / Getty Images

Containment

The Camp Fire was 45 percent “contained” as of Friday, according to Cal Fire. That doesn’t mean 45 percent of the fire has been extinguished. It means that firefighters have surrounded 45 percent of the perimeter around the fire with “containment lines” — rivers, trenches, and other physical barriers that prevent fire from creeping past. The percentage is a judgment call on the part of the fire teams, Thode says. Generally, they underreport the figure until the very end, because it would be embarrassing to call it contained and then have the fire run wild again.

Defensible space

If you live in a fire-prone area, it’s a good idea to take precautions to protect yourself. You want the area around your house, called “defensible space,” to be free of dead plants, wood piles, and anything that could turn into tinder so that wildfires bearing down on your belongings don’t get any help.

Jan van Rooyen

Firenado

A fire tornado — a spinning column of whirling, red-hot air — is nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term to 1871, shortly after the Great Chicago Fire. It’s also known as a “fire whirl,” though some experts maintain there’s a difference between the two, reserving “firenado” for a vortex so big and strong that it’s comparable to a typical, fire-free tornado. During the Carr Fire in California this summer, one of these twisters packed 143-mph winds — the equivalent of an EF-3 rating on the tornado-damage scale. Thode, for one, doesn’t make a distinction: “I wouldn’t say a fire tornado is different from a fire whirl.”

Fuel

Will it burn? If the answer is yes, it’s fuel. Anything flammable counts. So not just gasoline and trees, but also houses, hand towels, and non-dairy creamer.

Inversion

An inversion is an atmospheric imbalance that occurs when a belt of warm air sits over cold air. That’s the reverse of normal, stable conditions, in which it gets colder as you go up in elevation. Like a lid on a pan, an inversion can trap smoke. “It can make it really smoky for people underneath the inversion, because the smoke can’t punch out and get away,” Thode says.

Rising smoke is stopped by an overlying layer of warmer air due to a temperature inversion.S / V Moonrise

Prescribed fires

It’s a common forest-management practice to set fires on purpose — in a careful, planned way, of course. Indigenous groups did this for thousands of years. But until recently (like 1995), the U.S. actively suppressed any and all wildfires, leading to a buildup of fuel in our forests. Prescribed burns take out overgrown brush, encourage the growth of native plants, and reduce the risk of catastrophic fires.

Pyrocumulus

Evil-looking mushroom clouds sometimes form over a really hot wildfire. The name says it all. Cumulus clouds are those puffy, cotton-like clouds that people lying in the grass like to imagine are animals floating in the sky. Add fire (pyro) and you get the sinister name. As flames burn the moisture out of vegetation, they release water vapor and hot air that rise up and form a cumulus cloud. On rare occasions, rain falls from these clouds, snuffing out the flames below. Also known by the name “flammagenitus,” pyrocumulous clouds sometimes form over volcanic eruptions too.

A pyrocumulus cloud forms above a wildfire.Skyhobo / Getty Images

Red flag warning

Growing up near the Great Lakes, I thought red flags warned of dangerous currents in the water. But no. It’s fire lingo for when warm temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds lead to a high risk of fire.

Santa Ana winds

Speaking of strong winds … the infamous Santa Ana winds fanned the flames of the Camp Fire. These hot, dry winds roll from the Great Basin into Southern California in the fall, gusting over already-dry terrain and getting warmer as they go. They’re part of a larger category of pressure-based winds called “foehn” winds, which flow from high-pressure areas in the mountains down into low-pressure areas. “Typically you would see these Santa Ana winds, but you wouldn’t see fuels this dry,” Thode says. “Climate is definitely playing a role in this.”

Wildland-urban interface

This is the zone where the natural environment meets the built environment. Wherever you have homes, corrals, and powerlines butting up against undeveloped forests or grasslands, it could mean trouble for nearby towns and cities. That’s because fire can easily spread from vegetation to grandma’s house.

One final fire-tangential term to keep in mind: the “new abnormal.” A few months ago, California Governor Jerry Brown called the increase in destructive fires ‘the new normal,’ but he recently tweaked the term.

“This is the new abnormal,” he said at a press conference on Sunday. “Unfortunately, the best science is telling us that dryness, warmth, drought, all those things, they’re going to intensify.”

Seven of the 10 biggest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last decade. If we want to escape a future filled with firenadoes and pyrocumlous clouds, we’ve gotta get our act together on climate change.

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Firenado? Bambi Bucket? A guide to wildfire vocabulary

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Six Degrees – Mark Lynas

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Six Degrees

Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Mark Lynas

Genre: Nature

Price: $5.99

Publish Date: April 3, 2009

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


An eye-opening and vital account of the future of our earth and our civilisation if current rates of global warming persist, by the highly acclaimed author of ‘High Tide’. Picture yourself a few decades from now, in a world in which average temperatures are three degrees higher than they are now. On the edge of Greenland, rivers ten times the size of the Amazon are gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic. Displaced victims of North Africa's drought establish a new colony on Greenland's southern tip, one of the few inhabitable areas not already crowded with environmental refugees. Vast pumping systems keep the water out of most of Holland, but the residents of Bangladesh and the Nile Delta enjoy no such protection. Meanwhile, in New York, a Category 5-plus superstorm pushes through the narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, devastating waterside areas from Long Island to Manhattan. Pakistan, crippled by drought brought on by disappearing Himalayan glaciers, sees 27 million farmers flee to refugee camps in neighbouring India. Its desperate government prepares a last-ditch attempt to increase the flow of the Indus river by bombing half-constructed Indian dams in Kashmir. The Pakistani president authorises the use of nuclear weapons in the case of an Indian military counter-strike. But the biggest story of all comes from South America, where a conflagration of truly epic proportions has begun to consume the Amazon… Alien as it all sounds, Mark Lynas's incredible new book is not science-fiction; nor is it sensationalist. The six degrees of the title refer to the terrifying possibility that average temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. This is the first time we have had a reliable picture of how the collapse of our civilisation will unfold unless urgent action is taken. Most vitally, Lynas's book serves to highlight the fact that the world of 2100 doesn't have to be one of horror and chaos. With a little foresight, some intelligent strategic planning, and a reasonable dose of good luck, we can at least halt the catastrophic trend into which we have fallen. But the time to act is now. Reviews ‘Scientists predict that global temperatures will rise by between one and six degrees over the course of this century and Mark Lynas paints a chilling, degree-by-degree picture of the devastation likely to ensue unless we act now…“Six Degrees” is a rousing and vivid plea to choose a different future.' Daily Mail 'Buy this book for everyone you know: if it makes them join the fight to stop the seemingly inexorable six degrees of warming and mass death, it might just save their lives.' New Statesman 'An apocalyptic primer of what to expect as the world heats up…it's sobering stuff and shaming too. Despite its sound scientific background, the book resembles one of those vivid medieval paintings depicting sinners getting their just desserts.' Financial Times 'The saga of how, in the world as imagined by thousands of computer-modelling studies, global warming kicks in degree by degree. “Six Degrees”, I tell you now, is terrifying.' The Sunday Times 'A chilling read.’ Socialist Review About the author Mark Lynas is an activist, journalist and traveller. He was editor of the website www.oneworld.net and has made many appearances in the press and TV as a commentator on environmental issues. He also throws custard pies at lunatics who pronounce global warming a fantasy. He is the author of ‘High Tide: News from a Warming World’. He lives in Oxford.

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Six Degrees – Mark Lynas

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The planet wants you to stop eating so much meat and dairy

A new, comprehensive analysis came to a regrettable conclusion for all you cheeseburger lovers out there: The earth has a beef with your meat and dairy consumption.

A vegan diet is “probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth,” the University of Oxford’s Joseph Poore, the lead researcher, told the Guardian. He says that giving up meat and dairy makes a “far bigger” difference than cutting down on flying or getting an electric vehicle.

The researchers found that meat and dairy production is responsible for 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. The study, published in the journal Science, represents the most comprehensive analysis of farming’s environmental impact to date. It assessed the production of 40 different foods (representing 90 percent of all that we eat) at 40,000 farms across the world, analyzing their impact on land use, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and air and water pollution.

If we gave up meat and dairy, we could reduce farmland by more than 75 percent worldwide and have enough food for everyone to eat, the analysis shows.

The results support what the science had already been telling us, even though the researchers took a new approach of gathering data farm by farm. Previous work had used national data to quantify farming’s impact. “It is very reassuring to see they yield essentially the same results,” Gidon Eshel, a Bard College food researcher who wasn’t involved in the Science analysis, told the Guardian.

While this is a confirmation of what we’ve been hearing for years, we also know that getting the entire world to switch to veganism is a hard sell. And in fact, after a few years of decline, meat eating is on the rise again: Americans are predicted to eat a record-shattering amount of red meat and poultry this year. It’s never too late to join the reducetarian movement, meat lovers.

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The planet wants you to stop eating so much meat and dairy

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This Idea Is Brilliant – John Brockman

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This Idea Is Brilliant

Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know

John Brockman

Genre: Essays

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 16, 2018

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Seller: HarperCollins


Brilliant but overlooked ideas you must know, as revealed by today’s most innovative minds  What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? That is the question John Brockman, publisher of the acclaimed science salon Edge.org (“The world’s smartest website”—The Guardian), presented to 205 of the world’s most influential thinkers from across the intellectual spectrum—award-winning physicists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, novelists, artists, and more. From the origins of the universe to the order of everyday life, This Idea Is Brilliant takes readers on a tour of the bold, exciting, and underappreciated scientific concepts that will enrich every mind.  Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel JARED DIAMOND on the lost brilliance of common sense * Oxford evolutionary biologist RICHARD DAWKINS on how The Genetic Book of the Dead could reconstruct ecological history * philosopher REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN on how to extend our grasp of reality beyond what we can see and touch * author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics CARLO ROVELLI on the interconnected fabric of information * Booker Prize–winning novelist IAN McEWAN on the Navier-Stokes equations, which govern everything from weather prediction to aircraft design and blood flow * cosmologist LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS on the hidden blessings of uncertainty * psychologist STEVEN PINKER on the fight against entropy * Nobel Prize–winning economist RICHARD THALER on the visionary power of the “premortem” * Grammy Award–winning musician BRIAN ENO on confirmation bias in the Internet age * advertising guru RORY SUTHERLAND on the world-changing power of sex appeal * Harvard physicist LISA RANDALL on the power of the obvious * Wired founding editor KEVIN KELLY on how to optimize your chances at success * Nobel Prize winner FRANK WILCZEK on the creative potential of complementarity * Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter JOHN MARKOFF on the synthetic metamaterials that soon will transform industry and technology * euroscientist SAM HARRIS on the lost art of intellectual honesty *Berkeley psychologist ALISON GOPNIK on the role of life history in the human story, and many others.

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This Idea Is Brilliant – John Brockman

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Does Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Believe the Constitution Is God’s Law?

Mother Jones

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During his confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin March 20, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will face a thorough grilling about his legal philosophy. Among the topics likely to come up are his views on “natural law” and his relationship with John Finnis, the Oxford University professor who advised Gorsuch on his Ph.D. thesis and one the world’s leading proponents of this arcane legal theory.

Natural law is a loosely defined term, but to many of its conservative US adherents it is essentially seen as God’s law—a set of moral absolutes underpinning society itself. In recent years, natural law believers have invoked this legal theory to defend a range of anti-gay policies.

Natural law has been a source of controversy for at least two previous Supreme Court nominees in recent decades—for dramatically different reasons. In 1991, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote a New York Times op-ed opposing the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas because he would be the “first Supreme Court nominee in 50 years to maintain that natural law should be readily consulted in constitutional interpretation.” Reagan nominee Robert Bork, on the other hand, was criticized for not believing in natural law by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), no less. Biden told Bork at his confirmation hearing, “As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution…They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator.”

Bork, who was ultimately rejected by the Senate, had scoffed at the idea that judges could know God’s law and implement it. Later, in a 1992 essay, he warned that if natural law proponents “persuade judges that natural law is their domain, the theorists will find that they have merely given judges rein to lay down their own moral and political predilections as the law of the Constitution. Once that happens, the moral reasoning of the rest of us is made irrelevant.”

Natural law theory dates back to Thomas Aquinas and the Greeks before him. It isn’t necessarily liberal or conservative. Lawyers from the natural-law legal camp helped formulate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a seminal document in which 48 countries committed to pursuing progressive measures that would protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.

In the United States, natural law has taken on a variety of interpretations. One proponent was David Lane, a white supremacist implicated in the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host in Gorsuch’s hometown of Denver. Lane’s followers gunned down Berg in his driveway in 1984. Lane, who died in 2007, claimed that natural law justified any act, however heinous, that preserved the perpetuation of a race—in his case, the white race.

American conservatives, including Justice Thomas, use the term “natural law” to suggest that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired. Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), now the president of the conservative Heritage Institute think tank, explained in an essay last summer, “Our rights as Americans are considered unalienable only because they were inherent in the natural order of life established by the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

Where does Gorsuch fit into all this? In the 1990s, he studied legal philosophy at Oxford under Finnis. Gorsuch, who received his doctorate in 2004, has remained close to his former mentor, whom he credits in the 2006 book that grew out of his Oxford thesis, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. In a 2011 speech at Notre Dame law school honoring the Australian-born academic, Gorsuch fondly recalled the “red ink he poured so carefully—and generously—over the papers we produced.” He declared, “I have encountered few such patient, kind and generous teachers in my life.” (Finnis did not respond for a request for comment. He has publicly declined to discuss Gorsuch, telling the Guardian earlier this month, “I have resolved not to say anything to anyone at all.”)

Finnis, who is 76, is considered a brilliant and influential legal philosopher. In 1980, he published a definitive text on natural-law legal theory, Natural Law and Natural Rights, in which he identified seven “basic goods” that are central to human well-being: life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability of friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion. From there, he sought to outline an ethical framework for viewing law and justice. He believes all human life is innately valuable and intrinsically good, and not because it might be useful to others, as some utilitarian philosophers might argue.

Melissa Moschella, an assistant professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America who knows Finnis, says natural law is “a theory about what’s right and wrong, and it’s based on what, through reason, we can know about what’s good and bad for human beings, so that we act in ways that are always respectful of the well being of ourselves and others.”

On many levels, Finnis’ philosophy is profoundly humane. It led him to oppose the death penalty and to become an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. He believed that even threatening to use nuclear weapons was immoral because it indicated a willingness to kill innocent civilians indiscriminately. Natural law also made him a foe of abortion and assisted suicide. While his work doesn’t invoke the divine, as DeMint and others have, Finnis’ views square with his Catholic faith: He converted to Catholicism in 1962 and has advised the Vatican on Catholic social teaching.

Not long after his conversion, Finnis discovered Germain Grisez, a French American natural-law philosopher and a prominent defender of the Church’s opposition to contraception. Griesz and Finnis began to collaborate, and Finnis’ work grew both more conservative and more focused on sex, particularly gay sex.

In 1993, Finnis testified for the state of Colorado in a case challenging Amendment 2, a ballot initiative that would have banned local governments from passing human rights ordinances or other anti-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people. State Solicitor General Timothy Tymkovich, who now serves alongside Gorsuch on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, brought Finnis in to explain the allegedly classical roots of anti-gay prohibitions going back to Socrates. In his trial testimony, Finnis compared gay sex to bestiality “because it is divorced from the expressing of an intelligible common good,” according to part of his deposition published by The New Republic.

Martha Nussbaum, a prominent professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, served as an expert for the other side, suggesting that Finnis was misinterpreting the Greeks, who clearly had some acceptance of homosexuality in their culture. Nussbaum’s side ultimately prevailed at trial and at the US Supreme Court in its landmark decision in Romer v. Evans.

Nussbaum says Finnis “is a very fine moral philosopher” and “author of important books that I admire.” But she notes that his work on sexual orientation has less going for it. “Finnis’s book Natural Law and Natural Rights is entirely different from the ‘new natural law’ work inspired by Germain Grisez that he got into later,” Nussbaum writes in an email. “The former is excellent philosophy, the latter arcane and strange conservative argument. In England Finnis on the whole focused on philosophy, and people were shocked by some of the things he published beginning in 1994.”

That year, he authored an article titled “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation.'” In it, Finnis insisted that “homosexual orientation” was a “deliberate willingness to promote and engage in homosexual acts—a state of mind, will, and character whose self-interpretation came to be expressed in the deplorable but helpfully revealing name ‘gay.'”

Finnis’ students have deployed his legal theories to battle same-sex marriage in the United States. Among his best-known acolytes is Princeton professor Robert George, who co-founded the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage. George filed a brief in the 2013 Supreme Court case over the same-sex marriage ballot initiative in California, Proposition 8, and he also testified for the state of Colorado in the 1993 anti-discrimination case along with his former teacher.

Gorsuch’s long relationship with Finnis has put him in close company with George and other anti-gay figures. When Gorsuch spoke at Notre Dame in 2011, he shared the stage with anti-gay theorists including George and Germain Grisez. Gorsuch has also worked with George on academic projects, including his tome on assisted suicide, which was part of a series of books George edited at Princeton University Press. George recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post supporting Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination.

Whether Gorsuch adheres to the same natural law philosophy as George and Finnis about the alleged societal harm of homosexuality is hard to know. His book on assisted suicide mentions Supreme Court cases involving gay rights, but only as reference points for analyzing the court’s thinking, not his own, and its relevance to euthanasia. He’s hired openly gay clerks and attends a liberal Episcopal church in very liberal Boulder, Colorado, and gay friends attested to his openness in a recent New York Times story.

But he also voted in favor of Hobby Lobby, the craft store whose owners sued the Obama administration, alleging that the company’s religious freedom rights were violated by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers provide health insurance that covers contraception. That decision might square with a natural-law view respecting the exercise of religion as a critical human right, but it also may have led to more persecution of LGBT people. The Supreme Court decision upholding that ruling has since been used to defend businesses that have discriminated against LGBT people—a view some lower courts have upheld. The Hobby Lobby case was brought by the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious nonprofit law firm on whose board George serves.

Catholic University’s Moschella says Finnis makes a distinction in his work between morality and the law. He believes that what a judge does on the bench is not determined by natural law but rather by the laws of that nation. So if Gorsuch really does endorse Finnis’ philosophy, Moschella says, his moral views on abortion, gay rights, and other hot-button issues and what natural law says about them is irrelevant. She says, “What is relevant to his work as a judge is his commitment, which is also a moral commitment, to upholding the law of the land.”

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Does Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Believe the Constitution Is God’s Law?

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Stop Freaking Out About How Much Protein You’re Getting

Mother Jones

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Stroll through the aisles of your supermarket and you’ll see advertisements left and right for snacks packed with the new magical nutrient: protein. Wheyhey ice cream—”20 grams of protein per pot”—promises to help you with “losing weight” and “skin anti aging,” while P28 high protein sliced bread wants to be “part of your journey to a healthy lifestyle.” Lenny & Larry’s protein-packed cookies supposedly help “chase away hunger.” Artisanal bison jerky bars line the Whole Foods’ checkout aisle, and everyone at work is on a Paleo diet.

Do we really need this much protein? To maintain normal health, the average sedentary adult woman needs a daily dose of 60 grams and a man needs around 70. Yet data show that Americans may consume around 120 grams daily. That means we’re consuming twice as much as what’s needed, likely without even trying. “If you have enough calories in your diet, not getting enough protein would be very, very hard,” journalist and author Marta Zaraska told me in an interview for our latest episode of Bite, “Zebra Meat and Vegan Butchers.”

In her new book Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession With Meat, Zaraska digs deep into the reasons behind this protein hunger. According to Zaraska’s research, the craze goes much further back than the rise of the Paleo and other protein-focused diets. In fact, one of myths fueling this protein fixation has roots in a shaky finding from the 1800s. That’s when German scientist Carl von Voit determined how much protein soldiers and hard laborers consumed each day, and then extrapolated that the average body required 150 grams a day. “The problem with his methodology is obvious,” writes Zaraska: “it’s a bit like observing children stuffing themselves with cookies and concluding that young humans require tons of sugar to grow.” By 1944, the USDA had halved that recommendation, but the idea that we need lots of protein to be healthy lived on.

Most of the protein we consume comes from animals: Americans eat roughly 270 pounds of meat a year. For years, many people thought that without animal flesh, our bodies don’t get all of the essential amino acids they need. (Meat is considered a “complete” protein because it contains all of the acids.) Zaraska traces some of this misunderstanding back to, ironically, Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet. In her seminal 1971 manual for embracing a low-impact life, Lappé suggested that vegetarians should chart the amino acids in their plant foods and eat the foods together at the right times to make sure they could “complete” their plant-based proteins through the right combinations of amino acids from different sources, a task that required laborious planning and analysis.

True, plant foods can lack enough essential amino acids; beans, for instance, are low in methionine. (Grains are high in methionine, hence the advice to enjoy rice and beans together.) But since the 1970s, we’ve learned that the body actually completes proteins—fills in the missing elements —on its own. “Now we know that the liver can store amino acids so we don’t have to combine the acids in one meal,” states the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. In the 20th anniversary edition of her book, Lappé acknowledged that when it came to amino acids, she had “reinforced another myth.” Not only does the body complete proteins, there are several plant foods that have all of the essential amino acids that a person needs, writes Zaraska, such as buckwheat, quinoa, soy, and potatoes.

The consensus among many doctors and dietitians these days seems to be that if you are eating a diverse array of foods, you don’t need to stress about protein. The Institute of Medicine’s recommended daily allowance of protein is 0.36 grams per pound of body weight (adjusted slightly if you’re active, ill, or pregnant). I’d need about 42 grams to meet my requirement; when I added up everything I ate earlier this week, I was startled to discover that I had eaten 66 grams without thinking twice—and I don’t eat meat. Considering a single serving of chicken breast clocks in at 31 grams and a piece of skirt steak at 22, it’s easy to see why Americans frequently double-dip on their protein allowances. (Calculate your own daily allowance here.)

On its own, eating a lot of protein isn’t actually that unhealthy. As Stanford medicine professor Christopher Gardner told me, for the most part our bodies can tolerate extra helpings of the nutrient, though excessive amounts have the potential to wreak havoc on the kidneys. It’s what comes with the protein that puts us at risk, explains Gardner. When General Mills came out with its more expensive “Cheerios Protein,” the brand boasted that the new cereal would provide the whole family with “long-lasting energy.” But that energy likely had more to do with the nutty O’s sugar content; as the Center for Science in the Public Interest pointed out in a November class action lawsuit, Cheerios Protein contains 17 times the amount of added sugar as the original, and only a touch more of the protein. (General Mills tried to get the suit thrown out in January, to no avail so far.)

Gardner also worries that in our hunger for protein, we’ve begun skipping real foods. We’re saying, “‘I’m not going to eat food, I’m going to have a bar as a meal’—which means that it’s coming with fewer of the natural nutrients of food,” he says.

But Gardner’s real concern has to do with the planet’s health. Around 80 percent of the protein we consume comes from animals, he says, in the form of meat, eggs, or dairy. And those creatures need a lot of resources to become food. A third a pound of hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce, if you include the irrigation needed for the feed. Raising animals for people contributes to a bevy of environmental plagues, including deforestation, water contamination, loss of biodiversity, and desertification. Of the more than 25 percent of all greenhouse gases attributed to the food system, 80 percent come from producing livestock.

In early 2015, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a body of scientists who review nutrition advice for the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, advised the government to encourage a shift to a more plant-based diet: “Consistent evidence indicates that, in general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods…and lower in animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact than is the current average US diet,” the committee wrote. Ultimately, this recommendation was left out of the 2016 Dietary Guidelines. But others are sounding a similar alarm. Earlier this week, Oxford researchers published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arguing that a global shift to a more plant-based diet could reduce global food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29-70 percent by 2050 and save the planet up to $31 trillion US dollars, or 13 percent of the world’s GDP.

Protein-cramming probably won’t hurt you, but it likely won’t do you much good, either. And as the aforementioned Oxford researchers note, the choices we make about food “have major ramifications for the state of the environment.” For the sake of our crowded planet, maybe it’s time to relax and stop trying to make protein part of every item on your plate.

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Stop Freaking Out About How Much Protein You’re Getting

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Oxford’s Halley Professor on How the Climate Challenge Could Derail a Brilliant Human Destiny

The Halley Professor of Physics at Oxford asks whether humanity is capable of applying the patient and creative investment of brain power and money to curtailing climate change that it invested in finding ripples in spacetime. Continued: Oxford’s Halley Professor on How the Climate Challenge Could Derail a Brilliant Human Destiny ; ; ;

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Oxford’s Halley Professor on How the Climate Challenge Could Derail a Brilliant Human Destiny

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4 Years Ago Scott Walker Promised This Woman He’d Bust Wisconsin’s Unions

Mother Jones

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The super-PAC backing Scott Walker has many wealthy backers, but its single biggest contributor is Diane Hendricks, who ponied up $5 million. A billionaire through the roofing supply business she and her late husband founded, Hendricks has been one of Walker’s top benefactors since he first ran for governor. In 2012, Hendricks was the biggest donor to Walker’s campaign to stave off a union-led recall effort, and now she’s stepped up for him again. Out of the $20 million raised by the pro-Walker group Unintimidated PAC, 25 percent came from Hendricks.

If there was any question that Walker and Hendricks are on the same page, here’s a video of the two chatting in 2011 shortly after he took office.

“Good to see you!” Walker says, dashing through the door and hugging Hendricks and kissing her on the cheek.

Hendricks asks Walker about the possibility of turning Wisconsin into a “completely red state”.

“Oh, yeah,” Walker responds, going on to lay out his “divide and conquer” strategy for attacking public sector unions.

Despite her massive contribution, Hendricks still has some close competition as the group’s biggest funder. Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder and Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, gave $4.9 million. And Joe Ricketts himself tossed in another $100,000.

Richard Uihlein and his wife Elizabeth, the founder and president of Illinois box company Uline, respectively, gave $2.5 million to the super-PAC as well.

Rounding out the list of seven-figure donors was Access Industries, a New York City holding company run by Len Blavatnik. Blavatnik is a Ukranian-born businessman who in April was named the “richest man in Britain” with an estimated net worth of $20.1 billion. Blavatnik, who is a US citizen, is also known for his lavish donations to universities including Oxford and Tel Aviv University. On Thursday, the super-PAC supporting Lindsey Graham reported receiving $500,000 from Blavatnik’s company.

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4 Years Ago Scott Walker Promised This Woman He’d Bust Wisconsin’s Unions

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Watch Sepp Blatter Lash Out Against FIFA’s Critics in 2013

Mother Jones

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In October 2013, at the Oxford Union, FIFA president Sepp Blatter took aim at critics who viewed soccer’s international governing body as “a faceless machine printing money at the expense of the beautiful game.” (He also mocked Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo for how much he spends on his hair.) Blatter told the crowd:

There are those who will tell you that football is just a heartless, money-spinning game or just a pointless kick about on the grass. There are those who will tell you that FIFA is just a conspiracy, a scam, accountable to nobody and too powerful for anyone to resist. There are those who will tell you of the supposed sordid secrets that lie deep in our Bond villain headquarters in the hills above Zurich, where we apparently plot to exploit the unfortunate and the weak. They would have you believe that I sit in my office with a sinister grin, gently stroking the chin of an expensive, white Persian cat as my terrible sidekicks scour the earth to force countries to host the World Cup and to hand over all of their money. You might laugh. It is strange how fantasy so easily becomes confused with fact. And it feels almost absurd to have to say this. But that is not who we are. Not FIFA. Not me.

(You can watch the whole speech below—It’s very long! He talks very slowly!—but the key bits are in the video up top.)

These words resonate now, as Blatter sets his sights on a fifth term at the head of the organization amid pressure and criticism following a series of corruption-related charges on senior FIFA officials that have roiled the sport.

But remember that “Bond villain headquarters in the hills above Zurich” Blatter was talking about? Well, Swiss photographer Luca Zanier snapped a photo of FIFA executive committee’s boardroom in Zurich, and it looks villain-esque. John Oliver even likened it to the war room in Dr. Strangelove.

Here is Blatter’s full speech, courtesy of the Oxford Union:

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Watch Sepp Blatter Lash Out Against FIFA’s Critics in 2013

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How Humans Can Keep Superintelligent Robots From Murdering Us All

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today, we’re honored to present a post from Bill Gardner, a health services researcher in Ottawa, Ontario, and a blogger at The Incidental Economist.

This weekend, you, I, and about 100 million other people will see Avengers: Age of Ultron. The story is that Tony Stark builds Ultron, an artificially intelligent robot, to protect Earth. But Ultron decides that the best way to fulfill his mission is to exterminate humanity. Violence ensues.

You will likely dismiss the premise of the story. But in a book I highly recommend, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that sometime in the future a machine will achieve “general intelligence,” that is, the ability to solve problems in virtually all domains of interest. Because one such domain is research in artificial intelligence, the machine would be able to rapidly improve itself.

The abilities of such a machine would quickly transcend our abilities. The difference, Bostrom believes, would not be like that between Einstein and a cognitively disabled person. The difference would be like that between Einstein and a beetle. When this happens, machines can and likely would displace humans as the dominant life form. Humans may be trapped in a dystopia, if they survive at all.

Competent people—Elon Musk, Bill Gates—take this risk seriously. Stephen Hawking and physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek worry that we are not thinking hard enough about the future of artificial intelligence.

So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, “We’ll arrive in a few decades,” would we just reply, “OK, call us when you get here—we’ll leave the lights on”? Probably not—but this is more or less what is happening with AI…little serious research is devoted to these issues…All of us…should ask ourselves what can we do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.

There are also competent people who dismiss these concerns. University of California-Berkeley philosopher John Searle argues that intelligence requires qualities that computers lack, including consciousness and motivation. This doesn’t mean that we are safe from artificially intelligent machines. Perhaps in the future killer drones will hunt all humans, not just Al Qaeda. But Searle claims that if this happens, it won’t be because the drones reflected on their goals and decided that they needed to kill us. It will be because human beings have programmed drones to kill us.

Searle has made this argument for years, but has never offered a reason why it will always be impossible to engineer machines with autonomy and general intelligence. If it’s not impossible, we need to look for possible paths of human evolution in which we safely benefit from the enormous potential of artificial intelligence.

What can we do? I’m a wild optimist. In my lifetime I have seen an extraordinary expansion of human capabilities for creation and community. Perhaps there is a future in which individual and collective human intelligence can grow rapidly enough that we keep our place as free beings. Perhaps humans can acquire cognitive superpowers.

But the greatest challenge of the future will not be the engineering of this commonwealth, but rather its governance. So we have to think big, think long-term, and live in hope. We need to cooperate as a species and steer our technological development so that we do not create machines that displace us. At the same time, we need to protect ourselves from the expanding surveillance of our current governments (such as China’s Great Firewall or the NSA). I doubt we can achieve this enhanced community unless we also find a way to make sure the superpowers of enhanced cognition are available to everyone. Maybe the only alternative to dystopia will be utopia.

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How Humans Can Keep Superintelligent Robots From Murdering Us All

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