A Friday night undermybed.dk

The world population is somewhere around 6,700,000,000 individuals. Is there an upper limit to how many people the planet/environment can accommodate when everyone needs ~2000-2500 calories/day, a car, heeting, and airplane travel?

Polar Bear from Plane Stupid on Vimeo.

Do we need to talk about population control? As in China? Or as birth control in Africa? And what difference does that make, when the greenhouse gases are being omitted from the chimneys of the developed world.Malthus was wrong, but is he still wrong?

 …And speaking of him:

“The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else – including society, progress and discovery – stays roughly the same. That is why Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated planet would run out of food because he could not foresee how the industrial revolution would massively transform society and have an historic impact on how we produce and transport food and many other things. Population is not the only variable – mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle problems: they are variables, too.

 

The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognise that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced society is. That is why the Christian Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he said ‘the resources are scarcely adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much the only resources were animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not imagine that, in the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, too. The nature of resources changes as society changes – what we consider to be a resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, more easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. Today’s cult of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of scarce resources that human beings are using up, really speaks to finite thinking, to a lack of future-oriented imagination.

And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate the genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians insultingly refer to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real world another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to be met.“

Photoblog on how an U.S. soldier is created, but it is just as much an account of life in contemporary America. A bit sad, actually, but take a look for yourself.

Information.dk har en fin artikel om Melodi Grand Prix og det Russisk-Georgiske, Russisk-Svenske, Israelsk-Arabiske forhold. Her et citat fra den Russisk-Georgiske del af historien:

“Ironisk nok deltog Georgien sidste år, blot et par måneder før Ruslands invasion af landet, i det Internationale Melodi Grand Prix med sangen “Peace will come”.

Sangerinden var blind, hvilket måske kan forklare det nu noget åbenlyse fejlskud.”

An interesting viewpoint from a nurse and researcher from Princeton University:

“Our interconnected global community will certainly confront another disease crisis; therefore, we must learn from the response to the current H1N1 crisis to do a better job in the future. During the initial stages of any outbreak, public health professionals and the media must be cautious when providing numbers on how many people are infected and how many have died. A country’s disease reporting capability is only as good as its medical and public health infrastructures. Therefore, we must assume that the numbers from countries with poorly integrated medical and public health infrastructures and large numbers of uninsured will be inaccurate.

And we must not forget that the name of the disease matters. By using the name “swine flu,” health officials inadvertently tied the disease to pigs even though there was no evidence that pigs were involved. The name led to some countries inappropriately slaughtering their healthy swine herds or banning pork products. They should have used the name “influenza A (H1N1)” from the start. In future outbreaks, health officials should only refer to a pathogen by its scientific name, taking care to avoid naming the causative pathogen after an animal, location, or subgroup of people to avoid inadvertently placing blame or scapegoating.”

At first it seems hard to disagree, but from a precautionary point-of-view, it is probably a good idea to exaggerate the risk initially, when little information is available, and then adjust the risk-level accordingly as more information becomes available. To me, it does not seem sensible to reject initial information based on the country of origin, but rather to judge the information by the quality of the accompanying documentation.

A second point is that Egypt might have ordered the slaughter of the 300,000 pigs anyway, purely because of religious reasons. The authorities were just waiting for an excuse…

There has been talk about it in the Danish newspapers for a long time, but I’ve always considered it gossip: the Danish prime mimster Anders Fogh Rasmussen as secretary general for NATO. However, now IHT.com is writing that the Canadian minister of defence has dropped out of the race. But the Turks are blocking for Mr. Fogh Rasmussen:

“The Turks have objected to Mr. Rasmussen, citing these larger concerns. The Danish problem dates back to the publication in some Danish newspapers of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Denmark also allows supporters of the P.K.K., a Kurdish separatist group outlawed in Turkey, to operate a television station there.“

Instead the post might go to the Norwegian foreign minister: 

“If Turkey did not go along, another senior European official said, there was the possibility of turning to the Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Store, 49, who has studied both in the United States and in Paris.

“So in the end the cartoon-crisis may hit Mr. Fogh Rasmussen in the head once again, which he probably deserves…  

As you’ve might have heard, Amsterdam is an exceptionally dull and boring city so what is there to do apart from work, eat and sleep? :-) Watch DVDs, off course. So I’ve bought BBCs “The Michael Palin Collection” box containing 16 discs.

My main expectation was perhaps a good laugh - you know why! or perhaps not? - and I was not disappointed in that regard either, but…

These DVDs simply hold the most fantastic travel programs I’ve ever seen! Can’t exactly tell you why - perhaps, it is the scenery he sees, the people he meet, the histories he tells, or simply the narrators British style. If you’re into travel programs, buy these!

In a secret letter, Obama is said to have offered a deal to Russia, I read at the iht.com. The letter supposedly suggests that the president would back off on Bush’s missile system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons.

Like perhaps most of the world (excluding Iran, since their nuclear missiles seem be the fulcrum of the deal), I have been hoping that something like this was going to happen with the new US president. For now, we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the meeting between Mrs. Clinton and the Russian Foreign Minister next weekend.

Update: It seems that they got off of the wrong foot. Read “Lost in translation.”