As a follow up to yesterday’s comment about organic ag, I came across this article. Basically, free range and organically grown eggs are less healthy than factory farm eggs. Free range chickens are allowed to eat things that the farmers can’t control, and these things end up in the final product.
Yet, I will still prefer to purchase free range eggs (if practical, money is a little tight) just because I don’t like the idea of chickens spending their entire lives enclosed in cases. I just won’t be telling people that it’s healthier.
–Dave
This may seem a contradiction to some people, but yes, organic farms are allowed to use pesticides. Farmers have been spreading chemicals on their crops for thousands of years, and we consider these to be organic. Recently though, we have divided farm chemicals into the categories of “organic” and “conventional”.
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A couple of months ago, I was shopping for children’s pain reliever at 3:00am. One bottle I looked at boldly exclaimed “Designed by a Teacher!” I immediately put this back.
This is my kid we’re talking about here. I want medicine designed by doctors, pharmacists, and other medical experts. And yet someone, somewhere, decided that “Designed by a Teacher” was good marketing for a medicine, and it is probably successful.
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I’ve always liked Rachel Maddow. She is often labeled a “liberal” to scare people, but she is a very harsh critic of the administration. I’ve noticed a very skeptical theme amongst in her reporting. Today, June 25th, was an extraordinary.
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The latest cell phone “radiation” study really irked me. I wrote up something, but before it was polished, a ton of other places wrote up nice articles exposing the information for what it was. For example Dr. Steven Novella wrote an excellent piece. I did a similar job in disseminating the information, but I think he did a better job, and he has a lot more authority. There are two things I would like to add which I have not seen yet, then I will explain why I am now dusting electrons of that original blog post.
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I learned something the other day.
Something I say a lot is “there is no such thing as green energy”. This is one of the reasons I created this blog. When I first learned about wind power, I had heard that they were real bird killers. The article I read oh-so-many years ago, was referring to one of the first experimental wind farms. “Hundreds of birds” were scattered around the base of the wind mills, including many large raptors. Since then, I have heard about windmills becoming “bird friendly”, and now that they are mainstream, I haven’t heard a peep about the birds.
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
In that order.
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So the NBC nightly news has a very quick scare article tonight. Watch. Basically the story was about cigarette butts, the most common form of litter, leaching toxic chemicals into the ground, possibly into someones water supply and affecting your pets. I burst out laughing.
If someone dumped a bunch of used tea bags on the side of the road, would people complain as much? Yes, tobacco does contain thousands of chemicals, but like tea— it’s just leaves. Apple seeds and almonds contain trace amount of cyanide, but who would complain about a few of these lying around?
Just because Brian Williams said it in an ominous tone, does not mean its anything more than just trace amounts of burned leaves.
As it turns out, the Earth and I are the same age. I’m actually 6 months older. (I’m writing this on 4/22/2010, Earth Day.)
I don’t subscribe to cable, satellite, or even broadcast television. I know that it’s Earth day, but I am unaware of what most people are doing on this day. It’s not a holiday I’ve ever really celebrated. For me, there are so many similar themed holidays that I’m often confused. Walk to Work Day, Bike to Work Day, Buy Nothing Day, No Smoking Day, Buy Local Day, Don’t Buy Gas Day, Plant a Tree day, and even Nude Bike Day.
How else would you celebrate Earth Day? We could exchange gifts, but they should to be hand made ones. After all, consumerism is generally not an environmentalist theme. We could all go to a park or hike in the woods, except we don’t have the day off.
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A long time ago, laptop computers were black and white. I had read a paper about the principle of making them color. It worked the same as black and white, but each pixel was divided up into three pieces, with a red, green, or blue filter on each third of a pixel. There were a lot of troubles manufacturing such a beast though. It was reported that a 256 by 256 color LCD screen had been developed, but making larger ones was not possible. The author theorized that future screens would need to tile several of these together.
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