Burgers are Made of WHAT?!

Cow - Disconnection From Nature

Our modern existence revolves around technology. It’s not like technology is a new thing. In some form or another, tools and implements of various kinds have helped us in our development from the beginning of time. But sometime in our history, on the way to industrialisation, this technological progress came at the expense of older instincts and memories. In a pre-technological world human beings lived in a state of complete awareness of nature — they had little choice because they were very much a part of the greater ecology and were at the mercy of its vagaries. It might have started as fear of the natural elements, but at some point it had certainly reached a stage of respect. Human beings respected nature and learnt of its intricacies and nuances so that they might survive and thrive in this system. We have now come to the stage over the millennia, when our technology allows us the luxury of ignoring nature and natural forces in our daily lives. We don’t think about it because we don’t consider ourselves to be part of it anymore. In this state of imagined independence, it is little wonder that the environmental movement doesn’t have a wide spread, grass-roots acceptance. How do we think of the greater scheme of things when our only thoughts of nature is a sense of disconnection?

This disconnection is a complicated issue. It is not simply something that can be switched on and off at will. So if we want to understand the current state of the environmental movement, and why it hasn’t caught on in the minds of the masses to the required degree, we need to understand this sense of disconnection from nature. Not just in terms of casual buzzwords like “urban sprawl” and “concrete jungle”, but rather in terms of fundamental human attitudes. In my reckoning these are some of the major human thought processes and the elements of our recent culture that have disconnected us from our environment:

  1. Branding & Packaging
  2. Added Value
  3. Isolationism
  4. Delusions of Grandeur

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Best of “Tips & Tricks” from DailyBlogTips

I recently stumbled upon the Blog Writing Project over at DailyBlogTips when there was less than a day to go for the deadline to submit a post on the theme of “Tips & Tricks”. The final list of entries was put up and my entry on taking sharp photos without a tripod was included.

It now falls on me, as part of the prescribed process, to select my favourites from the pack. I tried looking through these and selecting a “top 5”, a “top 10”, or something similar, but being the diverse articles that these are I find that impossible, and a bit unfair. So I have simply browsed through the entire 122 articles in the list, and selected those that stood out and displayed some excellence that attracted my attention:

Good job everyone! And best of luck with the competition.

Samir

I Don’t Believe in Global Warming

Winter - Cynicism about Environmental Problems

In spite of all the seemingly irrefutable evidence and the never ceasing campaign to increase awareness, I am sure any comprehensive survey of the views of every last human being on Earth about the environmental problem would result in the following majority response: “What environmental problem?”. This is not simply me trying to be cynical about the issue. In fact, what I’m trying to point out is that one of the major stumbling blocks preventing the true acceptance of our planet’s environmental degradation by the population at large is cynicism.

Like all complex human issues, when we talk of the environmental movement one answer often leads to more questions. The question here is that if cynicism is one of the main reasons why the environmental movement is not working, what causes this mass state of disbelief? I would attribute it to these:

  1. A Lack of Knowledge
  2. A Lack of Understanding
  3. A Lack of Observation
  4. A Lack of Trust

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Carnivale! September 19, 2007

Blog CarnivalIt is blog carnival time again and the celebrations have now officially begun. Sit down with your favourite soothing drink and browse through these at leisure. There’s a lot of good people here with plenty of great content to showcase. So, without further ado, I hand over the stage to our stars:

And that brings us to the end of another boisterous carnival listing. I hope you stumbled upon some interesting sites through these links. Thank you all for the attention and the links.
Until next time, viva carnivale!

Samir

Go Steady With Your Camera & Take Shake-free Photos Without a Tripod

Kiss - Going Steady With Your Camera

One of the most common problems faced by photographers of all levels of expertise is shaky, blurry, fuzzy pictures caused by your hand shaking the camera at the wrong moment. This becomes worse when you’re taking photos in a dark setting and the camera needs to use a longer exposure. The longer the exposure, the more likely you are to have an unsteady hand. “Use a Tripod!”, is the easy answer, but what do you do when a tripod is not at hand or simply not an option? That’s where these tips come in.

The language associated with cameras is the language of guns: “shooting”, “reloading”, you get the picture. But if you really want to get the best out of your camera in a shaky situation you are going to have to learn to treat it right. In my book, photography is nothing as violent and barbaric as a hunt, it would be better served by the caring, sensual, and sometimes colourful language of love and romance. Keeping that in mind here are some tips you can use to take crisp and sharp photographs without a tripod:

  1. A Firm Embrace
  2. The Stationary Position
  3. Pushing the Right Buttons
  4. A Shoulder to Lean On
  5. A Little Action on the Side
  6. Cheek to Cheek
  7. The Midnight Rendezvous
  8. Indecent Exposure
  9. Let’s Do Some Heavy Breathing

If that has wet your appetite enough for some hot photography tips, let’s move on to the details …

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BlogRush Brings Free Website Traffic to WordPress

Free Website Traffic - BlogRush

Yet another blogging widget thingie to experiment with. BlogRush promises to increase traffic to your blog by syndicating your post links across a network of other sites that also display the same widget. This way, blogs of similar subject matter exchange links of the latest content and exchange traffic. Sounds like a good idea, and it is free, so I thought I’d give it a try. I figure It’s all in the name of science, and also the deeper reason: why not?

Once you sign up your blog you will be given some javascript code to use on your site, just like Adsense, Kontera and many others. The best way to include this into your WordPress blog is to use a text widget. Add a new Text Widget into your sidebar and insert the BlogRush code into the box provided as shown below. Save the changes and you should be in business.

BlogRush Code in WordPress

Free Website Traffic - BlogRush WidgetIf everything worked out ok, your blog sidebar should now have a new widget that looks like the one here. Since this is new and “hot” at the moment, I foresee it spreading like wildfire at least for the immediate future. Many of the big names in blogging have been talking about this already with varying degrees of scepticism and/or hype, but at the end of the day, no one really knows how effective this thing will be BlogRush is a solid and viable idea for a above-board traffic exchange system. How it pans out over the coming months remains to be seen.

As far as I’m concerned, its a good enough concept to try out, so here it is on my blog. All in the name of science, of course. Try it out yourself see if the whole free website traffic claims work out for you. And, feel free to exchange notes about your results in the comments below.

Samir

The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working

Earth - Environmental Movement

Ever since I signed up for Blog Action Day, 2007, I have been pondering over what I can do about it. There are now over 4000 blogs and sites signed up for this event. With all that attention I’ve been thinking it is my responsibility to put out some significant content on the topic. In spite of the possible broad interpretations of the topic of Environment which I mentioned in my initial post about the event, you and I both know what most of the entries will be like. They will either be essays warning we will all suffer for our environmental sins, or they will be cute little lists of things we can all do to save the world from destruction in “7 easy steps”. While I do not discount the importance or the validity of these approaches, I just don’t feel like I would do justice to this task if I chose that route. After all, the organizers of this event have given it the very dramatic and forceful name of Blog Action Day. It’s not “Group Blogging Day”, or “We Can Make a Difference Online Day”, or “Can’t we all Just Blog Along? Day”, it’s Blog Action Day, a title that deserves to have an exclamation mark punctuating it at the end. Writing one perfunctory post on the designated date just doesn’t seem very action oriented to me.

Then there is the issue of what my “angle” is on the topic. Being a designer, I have always been interested in the communication aspect of the environmental movement. Not only as an academic interest, but also on a practical level. Like most designers I’ve looked forward to the challenge of one day taking on the communication of an environmental message. This seems to be an ideal occasion to take action in that direction, but first I must define the problem.

All design ultimately involves the solving of some human problem. The core problem here is that of the various environmental issues, but the communication problem is to convey to the larger population that these issues exist, and then convince them to change their behaviour to bring about a solution. Easier said than done, obviously, because the Environmental Movement is not exactly a new pup, yet all that communication doesn’t seem to have changed much of the damaging human behaviour. “Why?”, is the question I ask myself, with a month to go for Blog Action Day. But to answer that question I first need to accept the fact that …

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