Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-8-2010

[andrewducker]

• Brilliant article on Mad Men that actually gets to grips with it in more than the superficial manner that most journalists manage.
  (tags: madmen tv)
• Psychologists identify killer dance moves for men - I saw this guy at the Fringe. He was very good.
  (tags: psychology perception dancing music dance)
• As an extreme of systemising presents as aspergers, an extreme of empathising presents as psychosis
  (tags: psychology brain psychosis emotion)
• Scots greenhouse gas emissions down 21% in decade
  (tags: ecology globalwarming scotland)
• What actually happens when time "slows down" during an accident.
  (tags: time perception brain psychology memory)
• The secret of self-control
  (tags: psychology education self-control motivation)
• Australian Olympian Tweets 'Suck on That F*ggots', Loses Sponsor
  (tags: sponsorship sports business advertising marketing homophobia lgbt)
• Meat eating not actually nearly as bad for the environment as you might have heard
  (tags: food veganism farming meat vegetarianism vegan)

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

So the article headlines with "Scots greenhouse gas emissions down 21% in decade" and then says, "Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by 21% since 1990, according to Scottish government statistics. The figures for 2008 revealed the country's emissions fell by more than a fifth when taking emissions trading within the EU into account."

Now forgive me if I'm being dumb, but isn't 1990 - 2008 the best part of TWO decades, making the cuts far less impressive.

I'm used to journalists and government agencies twisting stats to hide the facts, but they're usually more subtle than that and such a blatant contradiction in the first two sentences of an article is spectacularly sloppy. And they wonder why there's so much climate change scepticism these days....

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

The only place "decade" appears on that page is in the headline. Looks like a crap subeditor's mistake to me, and it's not fair to blame either the journalist or the government for that.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Fair point, although the quotation marks around 'down 21% in a decade' in the article headline imply it's a quote from the government report.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

The BBC journalist linked to the report itself - this is quite unusual, and very welcome. I hope this becomes standard practice.

The report does not contain the word "decade".

I agree about the implication of the quote marks. Good journalist, bad subbie.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

That last link is equivalent to "driving cars not bad for the environment, as long as we completely reinvent the car to run on something different".

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Not quite. Some of it is calling for different practices, but some of it is saying that the usual stats about how bad meat is for the environment were exaggerated.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

That last claim breaks fundamental physical laws though, and should be treated the same as those who will inevitably claim that the cool summer means "global warming" is bunk.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

From the article:

"If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don't compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain."

Which fundamental physical law does this claim violate?

[kmusser]

That's not taking the analogy far enough - it's also acknowledging that it would be possible to reinvent the car and so maybe we should participate in car design discussions. Which is an acknowledgment the vegans haven't often been willing to make. I think making the distinction between eating meat is bad for the environment vs the current livestock farming system is bad for the environment is a good one to make.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

PJ Eby has done some interesting work with increasing motivation, which is the other half (perhaps the larger half) of distracting oneself from what one doesn't want to do.

[andrewducker]

Cheers, reading that now, and there's some good stuff in there!