Flashes: June 19, 2013

• One of the problems with sports' impact on our culture is that inherently, we examine issues through the lens of offensive performance in sports.  In baseball, a batter is great if they have a success rate of about 35%.  In basketball, 50% is pretty darn good.  Last year's best quarterback in American football completed 2/3 of his passes.

         Last year, we as a country consumed only 60% of the food grown...wasting 40%!!

         And no one seems to be really batting an eye about this!

         Meanwhile, 3% of our fellow citizens are underfed.  

         Not hard to imagine we could solve both problems at no cost...

         Stop paying tipping fees at landfills to throw out wasted food and use 

         the savings to transport food to those who need it.

• The use of energy to power "modern conveniences" was supposed to revolutionize our lives and give us more freedom.  In 1950, we used 95.1 million Btu per person to power our homes and move us and our goods around, and worked - on average - 4.06 hours per day.  In 2010, we used 160.7 million Btu per person for living and transportation, and worked - on average -......4.06 hour per day.  At the same time, we spend 2.5 fewer hours per day socializing with people and volunteering than we used to.   Is this supposed to be progress?

• Is there anyone else out there who reads up on 3-D printing technology, especially as it relates to food, and can't help but think of Star Trek?  Once they have a Keurig that can make "Tea.  Earl Grey.  Hot." at my beck and call, I'm signing up for Starfleet.

• Good environmental practices may not be the solution for every problem in society, but consider this: every study of 20th century that looked at the impact of lead in the atmosphere on crime rate,  has displayed a significant correlation between the presence of lead and the rate of crime.  As we continue to remove a poison that interrupts brain development, we get citizens who have better judgement.  We also learned in this "experiment", that our original acceptable level of lead in the body was at best six times higher than was actually safe (and likely infinitely higher since now we see almost no level as acceptable).  So when industry tells us that we can tolerate an acceptable amount of radiation, or benzene in the water, or mercury in the ground, etc., etc., etc., are we supposed to assume that industry has gotten smarter in the last 90 years, or that industry assumes that we are still getting dumber?