SemiAntics

Carbofuran, also known as 2,3-dihyrdro-2,2-dimethyl-7-benzofuranyl methylcarbamate, is a highly toxic pesticide that is used on field crops–especially soy beans.

Carbofuran is made to kill insects, mites, and nematodes, but unfortunately, it also kills just about every other animal on the planet.

In Kenya, people have been using carbofuran to kill off the predators that prey on their livestock. They lace carcasses with carbofuran, and the predators feed on the carcass and soon die. I learned about this from a BBC article that includes some rather disturbing footage of about fifty dead vultures surrounding a poisoned carcass. The article is here if you wish to take a look.

Carbofuran acts very quickly, and only small doses are needed. It takes only one grain to kill a small bird. All forms of carbofuran are banned in Europe, and the United States has banned the granular form in order to protect birds, who often mistake poison grains for seeds. According to the BBC, carbofuran is readily available in Kenya, and I would be willing to bet that this is also the case in many other developing nations.

It’s also probably safe to say that most ordinary people in Kenya and other developing countries do not know as much as they should about the dire ecological damage chemicals like carbofuran can wreak on the ecosystem. The bottles of carbofuran obtained by the BBC in Kenya had no warnings about the danger the chemical posed to wildlife or to humans.

Carbofuran presents a formidable threat to the environment even when it is used only on crops as it is supposed to be. Pesticide concentration grows higher each step up the food chain. If a herbivore nibbles on carbofuran treated crops and doesn’t die, it might be eaten by a predator, which might be eaten by another predator. Eventually humans are going to be negatively affected by high concentrations of pesticides in their prey. Carbofuran is also highly soluble in water, and it’s use carries a high risk of groundwater contamination.

In nature, there certain species called “keystone species.” Keystone species are species that, despite their low biomass, exert strong effects on the structure of the communities they inhabit. In other words, a keystone species is a group of creatures that may not be particularly glamorous, and may be small in number, but has a tremendous role in the ecosystem. The role that keystone species play in the ecosystem might not be noticed until the species is gone and the whole ecosystem falls apart. A pesticide as toxic as carbofuran kills indiscriminately, and with so many animals dying, it’s only a matter of time before a keystone species is affected. Once a keystone species is gone, it’s usually gone forever.

So, what should we do about things like toxic pesticide use? Do developed nations have any right to tell developing nations what they can and can’t do with their land? Should national sovereignty and personal property rights be respected at the cost of irreversible damage to the earth? I also wonder about the companies that make chemicals like carbofuran. Should they be allowed to produce and sell something that is so dangerous? And, if they should be, what ethical reasoning justifies this decision?

It’s much easier to ask these questions than to answer them.

At any rate, it is best to remember that….

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

–from Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Yes, there are 1243 pages in the Penguin paperback, unabridged edition. About a strong week of reading for me. I’m a bit slower at reading than Grace is, so maybe it would be 5 days for her.

I have to say, I was delighted with the entire read; it is much, much more interesting than the movie (which was decent), and obviously the book follows the story better than the movie

I was glad to see the last 50 pages go – I had been letting other things go so I could finish the book, and now that I’m finished I can move on and read some Dawkins, as Tony suggested.

In conclusion, I highly recommend this book (unabridged edition only!), and I suggest you try it over vacation sometime.

“Alexandre Dumas is making me a widow!”

~ Grace (2008 – 6 – 13)

Skype is only one of many services that offer voice over the internet – essentially, it is just “free” telephone if you have a fast connection. Telecommunications are probably all going to be moving to some sort of high speed digital connection in the future, but hopefully it will be a more graceful solution than Skype.

Skype is two things – it is a protocol and it is software. A protocol describes a task; it is a set of rules governing communication between electronic devices in this case. Software can implement a protocol. For example, the browser you are using knows exactly how to display this webpage because of the HTML standard. While HTML is not a communications protocol, the concept is similar, and it serves as a good example. More complicated examples are readily available – in fact, this is how a lot of things are done in the computing field.

Alternatives

Wikipedia has a list of alternatives for voice over IP. You should look for something that is well-developed, runs on your operating system, and something that is implementing an open protocol and is Free Software. Another thing that may be important is having encryption available.

Why not Skype?

Skype is its own protocol, and it is not published publicly. Nobody can implement it, comment on it or change it. Skype is not Free Software; you cannot change it, examine it for errors and security holes, or use it except with their permission and on their terms. It is bad software.

You can’t trust your communications to Skype, even if it is convenient and popular.

Last reason: be cool – use something else that other people haven’t heard of so you can tell them about it!

Disclaimer

I have never used any VoIP software. I have just read enough to know I don’t want to use Skype.

If you use LaTeX to create professional documents, and if you use GNU/Linux with Gnome, you are in the minority. I can’t possibly overrate this setup, and I encourage you to invest some time in it – it will be worth the gains to you, especially if you are a researcher and write papers a lot. I used LaTeX for my English papers in my college composition class. LaTeX is useful for writing books as well, in fact it is the de facto standard for publishing anything you want to look really awesome, especially math books and papers.

So, how do you set it up and begin using LaTeX? First things first. You have to learn about LaTeX. There are a bunch of tutorials, but a very nice one is by Andy Roberts -  Getting to Grips with LaTeX.

Next, you’ll want to get some sort of editor for LaTeX. For KDE (which is not Gnome, obviously) you would simply use Texmaker. The problem with installing this on Gnome is that you get a ton of new libraries for QT and it’s a lot of stuff to install for one program. There is an easier way – use Vim. Well, most people aren’t going to do that! How about using Gedit? It’s got a nice extension for LaTeX (and a lot of other nice extensions too). There is a nice website set up for this plugin to Gedit, and installing is a breeze. You’ll also need the rubber package which includes the TeX libraries and all.

The Gedit plugin is in beta, so not everything works just perfectly. Hey, if you like it, donate to the people who are writing it – Free Software doesn’t have to be gratis. You might encourage them to finish your favorite missing feature sooner.

Life in the new apartment is quite different. It feels rather odd to have rooms. I feel like I’m wandering around someone else’s house. I’m also still getting used to the fact that, as our apartment no longer spans only one room, Nathaniel usually can’t hear my hollering at him unless I actually go into the room where he is located.

With the exception of the kitchen and the bathrooms, our entire apartment is carpeted. What a luxury! Since moving here, I’ve discovered that I have a propensity for laying on the floor. Why sit on the furniture to do anything when you can sit on the floor and do it? Maybe it’s just that I’ve lived in tile-floored places for the past 4 years, and my carpet sitting and laying needs have built up and are just now being fulfilled. Interestingly enough, I haven’t felt the urge to sleep on the floor. I guess I’ve done enough sleeping on the floor (or near to it) in the past few years that the urge to forgo my comfy bed hasn’t built up as much.

We found a cockroach in our dishwasher. Nathaniel decided to let him stay in the dishwasher and drown with the next load, but of course, he got out somehow. The next day we saw him scurrying behind the washer and dryer. Fortunately, we were able to dispatch Mr. Cockroach with our lightening fast broom skills. We are hoping that there aren’t any more cockroaches lurking in the shadows. We asked our neighbors, who have lived here a couple of years, about the cockroaches. They said that they have had very few cockroaches. Instead, they occasionally get Palmetto Bugs. In fact, they said, our creature was most likely a Palmetto Bug. The Palmetto Bugs like the pine trees you see….they also like damp things like the dish washer. They aren’t that much of a menace. It’s not the Palmetto Bug’s fault that apartment complex was built in a pine forest. The Palmetto Bug is an innocent invader–it is merely a grieving, little-ish insect wandering in search of its lost territory. And, although the neighbors had seen some Palmetto Bugs as big as two inches, they assured us that this was a rare occurrence. We felt somewhat reassured that our guest was only a Palmetto Bug.  The Palmetto Bug didn’t sound nearly as disgusting as a Roach. When we got home, I decided to do some research on Palmetto Bugs….alas, it turns out that “Palmetto Bug” is what southerners call Roaches…I don’t want to create the impression that the place is roach infested…we’ve only seen one, and we killed it..

We do have a healthy population of those tiny black ants that like to eat sweet things. I don’t view this as a bad thing though. It serves as a motivation not to leave dirty dishes out on the counter over night. They only bother sweet things like the dirty ice cream scoop. I left some biscuits I made out on the counter last night, and the ants didn’t bother them at all. I was a little bit offended. Those little ants don’t know what they are missing.

To see pictures of the new place, check out our gallery at Picasa.