The sandwich: a global warming culprit?

Sure ya do. You have unloved trees in the yard and you are busy unloving them.

 

#39, don’t get too down on yourself here on PriusChat. I like to think of you as the “professor” on these boards. Hey, fancy that, same as your day job!

I doubt your posts fall on deaf ears. The science-minded grow their science universe and the less science-minded (I think) learn a few things and maybe look a little deeper than otherwise.

Now if you could just do something with the public interest in science in the U.S....top 30 shows having nothing to do with science or the thirst for knowledge...our top role models are celebrities, entertainers, ?politicians?...not saying we shouldnt enjoy such things but it would be refreshing to have a large part of the population have a similar appetite for exploring the curiosities of things science.

 

Their heads would probably have exploded if they had seen a Dagwood.

 

Well gosh. There now are telegenic science communicators in astronomy, physics and medicine. Plus chemistry maybe. As close as it gets to ecology involves boo-hoo about extinctions. All that is to the good I reckon.

But the weird, cool 'celestial' thing about ecology is that everything living thing relates to everything else, in ways that we routinely misinterpret, and that occur on scales on time and space that poorly fit human senses. This fail ( I consider it a fail) would matter little if our human enterprise could possibly succeed, absent some degree of attention to interactions.

So, yeah, something is missing. I would hope that someone could communicate this in a telegenic way. I don't suppose that person would be me. In undergraduate and graduate classes I appeal to 'pee poo and sex' to reawaken the 'inner preteens' in students, but now with serious thinking. Must start with giggly fun, or else students' other classes will drag their brains elsewhere. There is just a limited amount of brains to drag.

Such a focus does not play well on Puritanical TV. Perhaps it could not even be said that orchids (those attractive flowers) are named after testicles.

So, no, I find myself not to be that messenger needed. At great risk I'd suggest a comely 30-something (or 40-something; hey why not?) female ecologist would be better suited to the task. They are not in short supply. She could be supported by appealing CGI (money) and back-story research (more money, but less).

She might start by describing how early Earth life changed this planet's skin. How Biology, once it got going, made interactions important. Skipping here many steps, how humans arose over several glacial cycles to Bing! fire and Bing! agriculture and Bing! burn fossils and Bing! industry and Bing! information transfer.

Each of those Bings! has separated us from ecology of this place. Maybe we can make a go of it despite those separations, but I doubt it. The supposed role of such a communicator would be to reconnect with ecology. To stimulate consideration of how 9+ billion humans can later manage here.

iplug, most kindly but I feel wrongly supposes that your humble reporter could be a substantial part of that. Here now I say why not.

Because this stuff means so much to me, and because I am too proud about knowing some of it, I just tell y'all. It leaves you with little motive to learn, and comfort of your sofas prevails.

People (not just PriusChat people) need to detect that not knowing is sub optimal and to act on that. I have not demonstrated myself to be an apt catalyst.

 

A Unitarian, this is one of our principles and part of the Gestalt.

I don't know that there is a magic moment when insight arrives. Some of us are lucky to learn how to learn. Others, well you have to let God sort the sparrows.

Bob Wilson

 

Mercaptan

 

That's because some sulfurous gases are fast acting, deadly poisons.

 

It was a deadly gas in British coal mines, where miners were frequently killed by explosions ignited by the candies they use for illumination. Canaries in cages we taken down with them as live detectors of methane, because the succumbed to the gas faster than humans and the fall from their perch was indicative it's presence.
Eventually, an enterprising engineer, Humphrey Davy, invented a flame lamp contained in a fine metal mesh cage which spared the the poor canaries from further harm. A Knighthood for him and the Davy Lamp for miners followed shortly.

 

IIRC carbon monoxide was also a big player and another reason for the canary in the coal mine.

 

Maybe the mine owners' motives in adopting the explosion proof lamp were selfish? No clue, but I'm thinking:

Now the miners don't blow themselves up, well not as often, say until a spark from a steel tool provides ignition, with methane levels even higher?

Or if the risk of explosion is effectively quelled, what then are the health consequences of breathing the stuff?

Maybe aggressive advances in mine ventilation trumps all of the above?

 

It's old history now, we can't edit it or re-edited it.