I’ve been thinking about money lately. No, not just because I need more of it, but that haunts all of us from time to time. I’ve been thinking about how the various attempts at making our US currency more colorful and difficult to slap into a copier and come up with a decent counterfeit have only highlighted how incredibly lame our currency is compared with other nations.
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Yearly Archives: 2009
Quality
I’ve long been a believer in the power of Citizen Journalism, but I’ve never seen myself as any kind of expert or leader in the field. One of the things missing in the field has been a definitive primer on quality in Citizen Journalism. No one has written one yet, so I’ve decided to write one myself even without credentials. Given the topic, why not?
First Job
Think back for a moment to your first summer job. You may have landed an unpaid internship, or if you were as lucky as I was a grunt job doing all the things no one else wanted to in a power plant. It probably wasn’t glamorous or particularly exciting, but the odds are you learned a lot. If you can remember your first summer job, I can peg you as probably being over 25 years old and getting on in your “real” career. Summer jobs like you had don’t tend to happen anymore.
Retelling the Reality
The subject came up, as so many of these things do, while trying to explain things to my daughter. She understands that ordinary people banding together made great history happen. But there are so many holes that don’t entirely make sense until we get into it a bit deeper, such as Women’s Suffrage. A bunch of women organized, marched, made a lot of fuss, and eventually embarrassed the establishment into giving in. Great. But then the bigger issue comes up – why are the details of this story not very well known?
The stories of history are one thing. The stories that are hard to find have stories of their own.
Demographic Destiny
When Norman Borlaug died recently at the age of 95, his obituary included one of the most extraordinary claims that any human could ever possibly make. Because of the “Green Revolution” that he pioneered, the ability of this planet to produce food to support the human population was dramatically increased. The use of fertilizers and pesticides and simple changes in practices taken together probably meant that at least a billion people were alive because of Prof. Borlaug that would not have otherwise been.
It sounds great, unless you start to think about the resources that all those people consume. But what if, in the end, it all worked itself out and we didn’t devour this planet like a giant swarm of very smart locusts? That may actually be what winds up happening, if just a bit beyond the lifespan of the brilliant Prof. Borlaug.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 