Atrazine is toxic !!!

I noticed a recent study out of Berkley in California concluded that the commonly used herbicide in Canada and the US on corn crops, Atrazine, disrupts hormones in frogs and causes chemical castration in some male frogs. For the aforementioned reasons, Atrazine is banned in Europe.

There have been extinctions and population decimation's in amphibian populations throughout North America, while the quality and quantity of sperm amongst humans has been on decline.

Are these just coincidences? I hardly think so. We are dependent on the technology of chemicals and chemistry for everything to keeping the insides of our house smelling like a spring meadow, to keeping insects from consuming the crops that become our breads and frozen vegetables.

The federal government of Canada, to the best of my knowledge, wedged open the homo toxicus doors even wider by allowing the chemical industries to get new chemicals approved like herbicides and insecticides on the basis of 'acceptable risk'. In a nutshell, small amounts of chemicals that are deemed not to be all that much harmful to human beings are alright.

I personally find this notion to be ridiculous. If something is not proven to be safe, then it should not be allowed on the market! Does anyone remember the faux pas of DDT, Thalidomide, or Asbestos?

Products that were once thought to be beneficial were discovered to be harmful and were banned, though much to my personal disgust, DDT is still being sold cheaply to third world countries while a little talked about embarrassment is the fact that Canada is still exporting Asbestos to countries like India.

A warning to politicians on Parliment Hill: A maelstrom of public backlash is coming if you continue to peddle policies that cater to the whims of big business profits over public health.

I for one will not vote for any political party in the future that either does nothing to regulate the pollutants that are put in the air, ground, and water. Neither will I vote for any political party that panders to the cash lobbyists of corporations and industry.

The company that is the main purveyor of Atrazine, Syngenta, had their scientist, of course, dismiss the Berkley findings as 'fundamentally flawed.' Pardon my sardonic and cynical yawn!

Of course a company is going to defend their product! If my livelihood or ability to buy a new Porsche is being threatened by an external study or policy implementation I would be up in arms too.

We as citizens need to send a message to the chemical industry about the reckless endangerment they are engaging in. But don't worry if the current crop of politicians both in Canada and the US don't do anything, eventually what goes around comes around, and the reckless endangerment of business and industry today, become the lawsuits and litigation of the future.

Halo ..... the best video game franchise of all time?

I was looking at pictures of Halo Reach on IGN and I will admit the artwork looks impressive.

My only concern is that Bungie is potentially setting themselves up for disaster if the game is nothing short of immaculate.

I remember when Halo 2 came out for the original Xbox, and while I was totally into the game and played it more then a few times from beginning to end, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was a miss .....

In truth, I thought that Half-Life 2, released by Valve in the same year as Halo 2, 2005, was at least a slightly better game overall.

Then along came the much anticipated Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 in 2007 and the story line that started back in 2001 with the original Halo was resolved.

Again, Halo 3 was awesome, but not immaculate awesome for some reason and it seems little details, much like with Halo 2, just robbed both Halo 2 and 3 of some of its fine polish.

I have yet to try the spin off Halo Wars, which is a real time strategy game similar to Warcraft and Starcraft or the prequel Halo ODST, so I want comment on them till I get around to trying both those games out.

Halo Reach is supposed to be the final curtain on the Halo franchise and with all the hype leading up to the release date, it better be epic from beginning to end.

Convergance is coming!

It seems that very little electronics wise can't either be hooked up to the Internet and/or have a USB based plug and play aspect to it.

Right now, I have three major components on my home theater rack; a receiver, regular DVD player, and a Blu-Ray player in the form of a PlayStation 3.

I am thinking it is only a matter of time before the receiver as we know it, becomes a fully integrated hub for everything. With the ability to store HD content on something as small as an Ipod, the time will come when one piece of electronics might do everything and separate components will not be necessary.

Of course, that might be a while away, and the technology in question for such universality will be expensive at first as most new technologies tend to be, but is it a stretch to think that one day in the future home electronics and even computers will be so integrated as to be not to dissimilar from the main computer on the Enterprise from Star Trek?

I digress to say that after reading a review for a 2000 dollar Denon Blu-Ray player that separate components still have their appeal and are not about to disappear quite yet.

Mathematical anomalies

I had a thought one day about school. The program I am in lets in a cap of 75 students roughly a year.

Given that population growth is only going up still (albeit apparently slowing down in most industrialised first world countries) and not going down anytime soon, I often wonder about the nature of competition in crowded places.

If you've ever been on a bus that is packed like a can of sardines you get the feeling that civilization is best represented by the calm that people on those packed buses retain.

Eventually, the number 75 will have to be increased to accommodate more students coming and the facilities will have to be expanded somewhat to meet the demands of more students as well.

In our program, we are told, competition is fierce for jobs/careers upon graduation, which leads to another mathematical anomaly; is there potentially a tipping point in the future where the ratio of actual jobs/careers to graduates will see supply not meet demand?

In other words, will some people simply not get jobs/careers because population is to high relative to the amount of jobs/careers available and/or being created?

Death of a Small Bank .....

In the US small banks are not recovering so well as their bigger brothers and sisters who received billions in taxpayer funded bailouts.

Unfortunately, this is a symptom of a larger problem with capitalism; the distribution of wealth.

Yes, capitalism and free markets allow JUST about anyone who has a business idea to make a go of it, but when it comes to issues of inflation and cost of living increases in relation to wealth distribution, its no surprise that the lower and middle classes are paying more to get by then the wealthy.

You need to look only at years of cuts to social programs coupled with shrinking wages, salaries, and disappearing benefits to see how inflation increases hit the lower and middle classes the hardest.

It might be a cliche to say that plain old greed is the culprit, but there are individuals more responsible then others. A large portion of free market zealots believed that absolutism in free markets would manifest itself in a short period of time into a Utopian capitalist paradise in economic experiments around the world from China, to Bolivia, and the former Soviet Union.

What has instead happened is hoarding of wealth by a few percent of the populations with minimal trickle-down to the other social strata's.

And so now, even though the free market zealots core beliefs were shaken to the very foundations during the Credit Crisis of just a few years ago, the heroin addicts that are the large financial institutions that got high on their on supply of liquidity, were given sickly sweet doses of methadone via large bailouts.

Whose to say that someone won't try to pull the same high risk for short term gain economic stunts again?

Twitter to Facebook ....

I was aware of Twitter and Facebook before entering Creative Communications at Red River College, but had no desire or need to use said social media before.

I had to sign up for Twitter in my first semester Public Relations course, and then not to long afterwards, on my own, opened a Facebook account.

So far I use Facebook much more frequently then Twitter. Part of the reason is that you can create photo albums which is a quick way to get pictures out to family and friends without having to develop and physically mail pictures.

Facebook has some other interesting features as well like the birthday function and being able to simply get someones attention by 'poking' them.

To me personally, Twitter is a scaled down version of Facebook, and Facebook is winning the social media battle for myself personally in terms of features and functions that I like.

My wife has had a Facebook account for sometime before me, but she rarely uses it. I have a cousin who refuses to use Facebook because he doesn't want his personal life to mix with his business life in light of privacy issues that Facebook has had to deal with over the past year.

I do have former work colleagues and friends on Facebook which is indispensable as a means of getting a hold of people you don't see on a regular basis, or finding people you might not have seen in years.

On the other hand, I do sometimes feel frustrated when I say I have posted pictures on Facebook and someone wants to see said pictures and they indicate they don't have a Facebook account.

One side of Twitter and Facebook that I haven't really been able to get a sense of fully yet is the business potential for both forms of social media.

On Twitter I've noticed you can follow anyone from a celebrity to a scientist. Short form messages do have the potential to say a lot; potentially just as much as an elaborate Facebook page for a business or PR campaign.

The rapidity of information as well as the complexity or simplicity of information has been transformed by Facebook and Twitter. I can simply assume that whatever career in communications I have in the future, that Twitter or Facebook will be some part of it.

Let it snow ....

Record snowfalls in Washington DC, and lack of snow fall in BC. What do we make of this? Some would say it is the result of El Nino. I say it is the result of climate change! I know I don't have any actual empirical proof but neither does anyone else to the contrary.

Again, we must remember that yes, if the planet warms, overall it will get warmer, but that doesn't mean the whole of the planet will necessarily transform into the Mojave Desert!