Poetry, Security

Eggs, cubicals, and safety

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An article in the San Jose Mercury News caught my eye in a cafeteria the other day:

Google employs roughly 6,000 workers, consumes about 300,000 eggs a year and uses 7,000 pounds of liquid egg products in its baking and cooking. By year end, the company will have 12 cafes on its Mountain View campus.

Gee, that’s fifty eggs per worker per year, or roughly one egg per worker per week. Strange statistic, no, especially since Google eggs are free?

Anyway, when I read a bit further, I came to the somewhat predictable reason that egg consumption and Internet companies are in the same story:

Google officials plan to announce their employee cafeterias will no longer serve eggs that come from hens crammed into small cages.

I have to be honest. My first reaction when reading a sentence like this is to think of happy little feathered hens, clucking around in freedom instead of cooped-up in cubical-like cages. Sunny warm afternoons, green fields, blue skies…it’s all so ideal. But then my senses come back to me and I wonder if the hens are healthier and the eggs are safer without the control of a cage. For what it’s worth, on a micro level my friend forgot to put his hens back in the cage recently. He found one hiding in the compost bin a week later. A foot was all that was left of the other one — racoons, he thinks. So the cage or coop is certainly useful on a local level, what about the big guys?

At least 95 percent of the 300 million laying hens in the United States live in wire cages known as “battery cages,” because they are stacked in batteries, or arrays.

Not to be confused with the Google offices, which have employees stacked in batteries, or arrays, of cubicals. They apparently choose to work in those confined spaces. In fact, things were so tight during the boom years that inflatable tents inside the buildings were sometimes used for meetings. Some say the free food keeps them happy in these confined spaces, but I digress.

The cages allow farmers to reduce disease, and death rates are lower for birds living in cages than for birds that roam outside or on henhouse floors, Gregory [senior vice president for United Egg Producers in Atlanta, the leading trade association for egg farmers] said.

“We don’t believe it is cruel,” he said. “I grew up on a farm when everything was free roaming. But the cages provide so many more benefits for the health and welfare of the birds.”

In a 2003 study of egg farms in the United Kingdom, hens in cages had a 5 percent mortality rate compared with 8 percent for both barn-raised and free-range chickens.

Strange that the study is from the UK while all the other numbers are from the US market. Nonetheless, the cages obviously reduce costs since they introduce a number of controls and efficiencies. The question, therefore, is whether a definition of “cruelty” or “welfare” has been agreed upon between the industry and animal rights activists, and whether this has been honored. And perhaps more importantly is the efficiency and safety of the animals even worth it if the consumers are willing to pay more money for eggs of chickens that survive a free range? I mean, what cost does that extra 3 percent mortality rate really add to each egg, and what about the difference in taste or desireability? The entire article doesn’t mention anything about the actual quality of one egg versus the other, or the impact of free range chickens on the range (the ecosystem and environmental changes).

FIVE LITTLE CHICKENS

Five little chickens by the old barn door,
One saw a beetle, and then there were four.
Four little chickens under a tree;
One saw a cricket, and then there were three.
Three little chickens looked for something new:
One saw a grasshopper; then there were two.
Two little chickens said, “Oh, what fun!”
One saw a ladybug; then there was one.
One little chicken began to run,
For he saw a katydid, then there were none!

Energy

Replace concrete with petroleum waste?

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The Guardian suggests that concrete is to become such a big issue in terms of cost and environmental impact that petroleum waste will seem friendly and cheap by comparison. First you have to consider the problem:

Cement is one of the most environmentally hazardous materials in the world, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the entire weight of the global airline industry. According to the Sustainable Development Commission, 4% of Co2 is caused by aviation. Depending on how conservatively you do the sums, cement-based building materials, including concrete and asphalt, account for between 5% and 10% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

And then, here is a possible solution, proposed by UKM, a partner of Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant that holds the patent to the proposed material:

When crude oil is “cracked” into its components, the top of the refinement process produces petrol, followed by diesel, light fuel oil and then heavy fuel oil. At the bottom of the barrel lies a “fraction” of blackened waste material. It is hard and sticky and of scant economic worth.

“The standard way of dealing with this low-grade oil is to mix it with light fuel oil to make more heavy fuel oil,” says Robinson [director of UKM], sketching a diagram of the process on a notepad. “It gets burnt off and doesn’t have to be treated as a waste. But that burning causes further CO2 emissions that cause global warming. In our wildest dreams we don’t think we will replace concrete. But in certain applications where concrete isn’t as good, like in heavy industrial roads or in salt water environments, we can replace it. That would in itself be fantastic for the environment.”

Something tells me that even if this is a solution to today’s concrete problems (pun intended), it might introduce far greater problems to resolve tomorrow.

I’m no petroleum waste expert, and thus maybe I’m wrong about the future hazards. I guess if nothing else at least we can see Shell trying to solve some of the same issues as those mentioned by worldchanging.org.

History, Poetry

Letter to Laura Bush

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(From the poet Sharon Olds regarding an invitation to the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Washington, DC. This was released to the public and also ended hp here: Poets Against the War)

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents–all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women’s prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students–long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit–and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person’s unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

SHARON OLDS

Her earlier anti-war writings were far less focused, but nonetheless an interesting look at how/why she is more likely to put herself at risk today, in order to ensure a better future for her children, than dine at the table with an authority she does not recognize as legitimate:

May 1968

When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us. Lying back on the cobbles,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, chopped off–above them, the sky,
the night air over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
while we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15,
I counted again, 15, 16, one
month since the day on that deserted beach,
17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair on the street,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop’s
shoe, the gelding’s belly, its genitals–
if they took me to Women’s Detention and did
the exam on me, the speculum,
the fingers–I gazed into the horse’s tail
like a comet-train. All week, I had
thought about getting arrested, half-longed
to give myself away. On the tar–
one brain in my head, another,
in the making, near the base of my tail–
I looked at the steel arc of the horse’s
shoe, the curve of its belly, the cop’s
nightstick, the buildings streaming up
away from the earth. I knew I should get up
and leave, but I lay there looking at the space
above us, until it turned deep blue and then
ashy, colorless, Give me this one
night, I thought, and I’ll give this child
the rest of my life, the horse’s heads,
this time, drooping, dipping, until
they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter

Energy, Security

Disease clusters, radiation and cell towers

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Many years ago I worked in a research building that was located above a giant plasma generator. Everyone who had worked there for more than five years and who sat fairly near the thing (the floor above, the office next door) were said to be suffering from cancer or other illness. One woman passed away suddenly in her 50s. The generator drew so much energy that on hot days the central organization would ask the operator to turn it off so they could run the air conditioners. Who knows how much the thing emitted. Don’t think it was ever measured. Some employees were smokers, most did not exercize regularly, and so forth, but a correllation seemed too strong to be coincidence.

There aren’t many plasma generators around but what if the same effects can be documented in people who work or live near cell-towers? And what if those people happen to be important enough that a sudden deterioration of their health could cause serious financial impact to a big organization? The latest news from Australia is rather shocking:

Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said there was no proof of a connection but “if you get clusters of disease it’s sensible to investigate.”

Dr John Gall, from private health company Southern Medical Services, which has been called in to assess the sick, said last night three of those affected had tumours showing symptoms consistent with radiation.

But he said there was no causal link with the building based on preliminary observations.

A spokesman for state Health Minister Bronwyn Pike said WorkCover would investigate the matter and the Department of Human Services would provide any expertise needed.

RMIT chief operating officer Steve Somogyi said testing was carried out on the building after the first two of the seven tumours were reported in 1999 and 2001. It found radiation and air quality levels within recommended guidelines.

Hmmm, who set those guidelines again and based on what evidence? Funny how experts can sometimes use a lack of data as proof of something that doesn’t exist, rather than proof of uncertainty. In network security, it can often be worse to have false negatives than false positives. And if you ever run a honeypot system you have to be careful to never assume that a lack of bears in the honeypot (it sounds better than attackers who like honey, if you know what i mean) proves that there is not threat of bears, let alone a bear already sleeping in your bed. And from that perspective, maybe it wasn’t radiation from the towers, but something in the food, furniture or decorations…