You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2014.
Fairly well this year, as long as we keep up with watering!
Le jardin chez Arbourist et Intransigentia
I was excited. I was hopeful. I very much wanted it to be true. But I’m not at all surprised (a bit depressed though) that solar roadways are a bad idea. Three main categories of problems have been illustrated by many.
One is cost. This one is tough as the solar roadway people haven’t been all that forthcoming on how much each panel might be, but estimates based on what little we do know show roadways costing somewhere between 20 and 56 trillion dollars.
Two is solar efficiency. Solar panels are angled to best capture sunlight, the really good ones tilt to follow the sun. Lying flat on the road is just a bad place to collect solar energy. And as everything these roads are supposed to do is based on them collecting massive amounts of solar energy, this is a huge problem.
Three is durability. Rock erodes glass. Rock being ground in by untold tonnes of traffic erode glass fast. Those super expensive modules wouldn’t last too long.
And these are only very brief summations of entire categories of problems that have been pointed out about the roadways.
Now, if the solar roadway people are earnest in their efforts (and I have no reason to suspect they aren’t) they now have over 2 million dollars to get this idea as far as it can possibly go. While that won’t be a fraction of how far they envisioned or how far I had hoped, they should be able to learn something. Whatever they find, doubtless there is an easier and cheaper way we could be learning it, but as is so often the case, we’re doing it the hard way. Salvage what we can and move on.
If nothing else, more people are thinking about roadway improvements, which is a good thing. Someone will look back at this and think, “Boy, that was a horrible idea, the REAL way to improve roads is by…” and they will probably be wrong too. But they will be slightly less wrong. So plods on progress.
Susan Brownmiller has a remarkable talent for framing slippery sociological concepts. This quote is from the introduction to her book “Femininity” and it lucidly describes the nature of the viscous catch-22 women experience for the crime of being born female.
“Femininity always demands more.
It must constantly reassures its audience by a willing demonstration of difference, even when one does not exist in nature, or it must seize and embrace a natural variation and compose a rhapsodic symphony upon the notes. Suppose one doesn’t care to, has other things on her mind, is clumsy or tone-deaf despite the best instruction and training? To fail at the feminine difference is to appear not to care about men, and to risk the loss of their attention and approval. To be insufficiently feminine is viewed as a failure in core sexual identify, or as a failure to care sufficiently about oneself, for a woman found wanting will be appraised (and will appraise herself) as mannish or neutered or simply unattractive, as men have defined these terms.
We are talking, admittedly, about an exquisite esthetic [sic]. Enormous pleasure can be extracted from feminine pursuits as a creative outlet or purely as relaxation; indeed, indulgence for the sake of fun, or art, or attention, is among femininity’s great joys. But the chief attraction (and the central paradox, as well) is the competitive edge that femininty seems to promise in the unending struggle to survive, and perhaps to triumph. The world smiles favorably on the feminine woman: it extends little courtesies and minor privilege. Yet the nature of the competitive edge is ironic, as beset, for one works at femininity by accepting restrictions, by limiting one’s sights, by choosing an indirect route, by scattering concentration and not giving one’s all as a man would to his own, certifiably masculine, interests. It does not require a great deal of imagination for a woman to understand the feminine principle as a grand collection of compromises, large and small, that she simply must make in order to render herself a successful woman. If she has difficulty in satisfying femininity’s demands, if its illusions go against her grain, or if she is criticized for her shortcomings and imperfections, the more she will see femininity as a desperate strategy of appeasement, a strategy she may noe have the wish of the courage to abandon, for failure looms in either direction.”
-Susan Brownmiller. Femininity p. 15-16
Never say we don’t care about your intellectual development here at DWR:
See, you’re more knowledgeable already. You’re welcome. :)
Hi everybody, just a random update from your friendly Intransigent blogger, to lighten the mood around here. I have a tale of a happy convergence of circumstances.
One day, I’m at the horse rescue and another volunteer invites me to come to a different horse-establishment to meet her horse. Of course I said yes! So we made a date, and I met up with her and her horse, and as we’re fussing over her horse and giving him treats, she asks me, have you ever thought of starting to ride again. I (as cheerfully as I can manage) say “nope, I’m too fat.”
We carry on pampering her horse, and the owner of the barn stops by to chat. “So,” she asks, quite innocently like there was no ulterior motive in getting me to visit, “Have you ever considered starting to ride again?”
I do my little nope too fat, shrug, self-deprecating laugh thing.
The barn owner looks me up and down, and says, “We have a couple lesson horses who could handle youno problem. Email me if you’d like to have a lesson sometime!”
I emailed her as soon as I got home, and lessons started the week after singing lessons ended for the summer!
A few observations upon getting back in the saddle after eighteen years on the ground:
- Everything is still there mentally, but the balance and fitness to do what I remember, has left the building
- Riding, especially posting trot, is way more exercise than I remember
- Horses are still very silly, unpredictable animals
- Falling off hurts about the same amount as ever
Christianity and its various sects harm women.
In the early 1960’s, in response to the call of many millions of Catholic women, especially in the US, who wanted to limit the size of their families through the use of contraception, a papal commission was set up to look at Catholic teaching on birth control in light of the current scientific knowledge. If found that there was no scriptural, theological, philosophical reason, or basis in natural law for the Church’s prohibition on birth control.
[…]
However, in 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encyclical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical reaffirmed the Church’s rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God’s law. Ten years later, Pope John Paul declared that Humanae Vitae was ‘a matter of fundamental Catholic belief’.
In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban. For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue. Unfortunately for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is. There, the right to choose weather or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman’s prospectsfor freeing herself and her family from poverty. It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women. Pope John Paul II spent a considerable port of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells poor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ’s sacrifice on the cross ‘in vain’. He said:’No personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.
Underlying this attitude is the assumption that when it comes to having a baby, a woman’s consent is not necessary and that once made pregnant, accidentally or not, her own will is rendered irrelevant. The moral implications of this are interesting when compared with those governing our attitudes to rape. All civilized societies accept that a woman’s consent is necessary in order to have intercourse with her. Not to seek that consent and to coerce her into intercourse is to commit rape, which is a serious crime. But yet according to the Church, in the vital matter of pregnancy, a woman’s consent is beside the point.
She can be made pregnant against her wishes, and without her consent. The inexorable law of God overrides her will and the fact that she is pregnant determines her fate. Her personal autonomy is denied to her.
To deny the need for her consent in this the most important aspect of a woman’s life is surely the moral equivalent of justifying rape. It reminds us once more of the profound contempt that has underpinned Catholic attitudes towards women and that has been responsible for so much suffering down through the centuries.
– Jack Holland. A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. p. 241 – 243
Religion, centuries of practice keeping women in their place…
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