Mint Spectacles on: Gun laws and Global Warming Connection?

In case you missed the news, the Supreme Court overturned Washington DC’s ban on handguns. This naturally has been a topic of conversation all over, including the exciting (some of the time – see oakbook link) character-laden city I call home.

Over the weekend I discovered that the views, global warming ain’t happening, and that handguns should be owned by anyone who wants one can exist in the same person. So a global warming denier can also be a gun acquirer! I made me an old fashioned Venn diagram which is a most excellent visual aid to understanding this beautifully crazy world.

I wonder what proportion of those who deny global warming also happen to believe that owning handguns is great? Anyone have any guesstimates for the G & G? Please comment if you do!

All I want to know is this:
If
People believe that is it perfectly logical that one should own a gun to defend against an improbable event
Then
Why isn’t it logical for everyone to take action to prevent global warming, an event/process for which the probability is close to 1?

Of course IMHO global warming is already occurring – witness the extreme weather events all over the world, not to mention the glaciers and the poles. That said, if we make an effort, things can get better.

Now at the end, I should make my own position about guns clear. I don’t much care for guns and I don’t want one in my home because well designed studies have made it clear that there are way too many accidents in homes with guns. And the incidence of guns being used in self defense in almost the entire western world is negligible – anything under 5% is negligible for me. But policy implications of studied are apparently more difficult, at least based on the studies mentioned in all the leading newspapers.

For policy implications I’d like to see behavioral experiments with guns as well as better statistical analysis. But my gut feel is that better policing is answer to making citizens feel safe. Just like two wrongs don’t make a right, two guns in a room does not mean that the right one will stay safe.

Scrambled Quotes: Productive Business

Here is the answer to the last shout:

The players play only as well as their coach allows.

This re-affirms a fact of life. In many situations we can only do as well as the circumstances permit.  On some days even a middling player will hit the zone and play to the level of great. Often it will be on the days that they received encouragement from someone.

In business, it is often the culture encouraged by the boss that decided whether a company, be it large or small, will accomplish what it wants. A brutal culture, where everyone is always afraid of losing their jobs (remember  AT&T back in early ninties) will never permit a company to be great. A brutal culture will always keep the company from middling to below average.

But where bosses have the patience to figure out how to leverage the foibles of their players, there my friends, we have the makings of a great company, like Google and word has it, Amazon and Starbucks is on its way.

This holds true for small business too. But the problem with small business examples if you mention them by name then it hurts people and besides nobody knows the firms involved anyway.  And you don’t have to take my word for it. Organization behaviour literature is replete with studies that provide evidence about the importance of the boss and the culture in achieving organizational goal.

This next shout is about increasing your personal productivity or how to get more done in a day. The consultant who came up with this one tip earned, I believe several thousand dollars, way back in early twentieth century. Everybody may already know this tip but here it is all the same.

Nalp eht neneign fereob

Glee is me: More Creative Insults

It turns out that I am not the only one interested in being creative when insulting people. Here is another site with some G rated yet funny insults.

And here’s another creative insult from me:

It’s obvious you’ve been talking to an amoeba.

Mint Spectacles on: Spam Blogs and Sploggers

I am a new blogger and I have already been pinged several times by spam bloggers (a.k.a. sploggers). After looking up the invaluable Wikipedia and other sources, I now know that this is a problem of epidemic proportions.

So what is being done? SplogSpot is a site where one can supposedly report sploggers. I tried to report one of the pingers but could not succeed despite three tries.

Several parties suggest that genuine bloggers put copyright notices on their posts to enable splog spotting as well as to provide remedy for those who actually have time to write letters and threaten lawsuits. Here is an article that I found from a Wikipedia link which also helpfully displays the copyright messages. It also suggests letters and lawsuits as the remedy.

But instead of individuals going after these spam blogs, here is another idea. How about a central site, run by some sort of Internet body – maybe a body like ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) can be created to deal with the problem of spam blogs and blog spams. Once a URL is reported to them, they can get the IP hosts to mandatorily take down the spam blogs.

It is entirely possible that they could help with blog spam too, specially when it comes from China or Nigeria. Or help with copyright disputes between actual bloggers!

Alternately, since software is used to create spam blogs maybe some genius can dream up of software to get rid of this menace.

Google and other search engines as well as Internet bandwidth suppliers can fund such a non-profit because these splogs hurt their business. Bloggers like me would happily report such IP addresses because sploggers hurt bloggers the most.

And in the mean time is there a wordpress widget that when pinged, puts in these notices?

Mint Spectacles on: Global Warming and its Deniers Part 2

After my last global warming post, I discovered the deniers in the blogosphere and it got me thinking. About those who write that:

global warming is a left wing conspiracy or

that global warming does not exist or

the one that makes me laugh the hardest is the globe is cooling and their tag words will list global cooling. Hmm I should add that as a tag word.

All this got me to thinking why that is so. Usually I just wonder what the grandkids of global warming deniers are going to say to them. But this time I asked something more fundamental – why do they think the way they do?

Here are my top 6 reasons.

Reason No. 6
Global Warming Deniers don’t like to think. They may not know who George Bernard Shaw was (a great playwright and a Nobel Laureate) but they agree with what he said “Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.”

Reason No. 5
Global Warming Deniers hate to recycle. What, separate the paper from the food? What a funny notion.

Reason No. 4
Global Warming Deniers like to believe the advertisers. After all McDonalds does give you a 99cent burger when they advertise that special so when a coalition of big business says hey if business were to worry about global warming, your taxes will go up….they believe them.

Reason No. 3
Global Warming Deniers think to be right they have to be the opposite of left.
So they must believe the opposite of any thinking that is labeled left.

Reason No. 2
Global Warming Deniers are oil company investors. They love their dividends.

And The Top Reason
Global Warming Deniers saw lots of war movies when they were kids and they always wanted to be the guy who gets trapped and valiantly stands on his toes as water gushes into the room. The water rises, to his chin but he did not give up raising his gun above his hands.
So now they get to be the guys who will valiantly defend their right to consume without looking at or considering anything or anyone else. They know that climate scientists agree that rich countries will be hurt a lot less than the developing world as the oceans keep rising.
But if there is water in the streets and you own a large vehicle? Which brings us to the Real Reason No. 1
Global Warming Deniers want to feel good about owning their Hummers and hope one day, to look good in them

Anyone else has other reasons to add to this list?

Scrambled Quotes: Business

Here’s the answer to the last shout:

If wine is good, then vino is even better.

Manufacturers and retailers love to use this concept.  Clinique and Mac both call Estee Lauder mama.  Three different brands with the highly overlapping product lines.  Hotels are the same. Guess what is common between Mariott and Fairfield which are two distinct brands in that industry.

And notice how often high end offerings have names that sound exotic or different like Evian and Perrier.  A bit like wine and vino;)

The shout today is also related to business and is about a fundamental truth about the boss employee relationship.

het alsepry yapl lnoy sa lewl sa rehti ochac swlola

Glee is me: A Little Story

So a guest is coming over and I say, “I hope he’s not drunk this time.”

The door bell rings and lo behold, at the door, stands a perfectly sober guy.

Even before he can step in, little three year old stands in front of him and asks:

“Are you drunk again?”

Mint Spectacles on: Global Warming and its Deniers

In a phenomenon as old as global warming, the media, specially well-written journalistic jokes like The Economist, have always talked about scientists who do not agree with the science of global warming. What the media, any media, rarely mention is that most of these scientists happen to be either professors of business schools or the like, who rarely have any credentials in any aspect of global warming. A Ph.D. does not necessarily make someone an authority on something so far removed from their expertise.

Forget the professors and experts. Lets just use our common sense. We all know how different the planet has become because of human actions. We know how the rivers were and are being ravaged, plants and animals are still facing extinction, and the earth is still being scarred from the quarrying and mining. In short, planet earth certainly is not the lush paradise, teeming with all sorts of life and beauty that the ancients said it was. This has also been confirmed by studies in history, anthropology and paleontology. We all can see that earth has been impacted by human action.

I guess global warming is harder to understand because we don’t see the atmosphere. If we use our logical skills then it makes sense that the smoke plumes, the nineteenth and early twentieth century symbol of industrialization, (still seen in every continent except the poles) did affect and alter the atmosphere.

The change in the atmosphere in turn messed with the way sunlight reached the planet which affected the water and so our climate has been messed up.

Atmosphere change
↓
amount and type of sunlight received changed → temperature of earth’s crust changed
↓                                                                                           ↓
temperature of water changed →       amount of water evaporated changed

Now how hard is that to understand?

Now the global warming deniers have become organized and have an association called climate science coalition.  Let’s see – less than three dozen scientists from fields which have something to do with climate.  The rest are from business, statistics, humanities etc. So in a world populated by thousands of scientists, fewer than hundred or maybe a couple of hundred believe – are you ready for this – they believe the world is cooling!

Undoubtedly they also regard the melting of glaciers as a figment of imagination – what did you say satellite photos and actual evidence! Their explanation is that climate is not stable – Six thousand years is stable enough for me!

Scrambled Quotes: Business

Here is the answer to yesterday’s shout:

To win, you must begin

And ain’t that thetruth?

The shout for today is a strategy used by a large part of the business world.

Fi eniw si odgo, neth si neve tebret

If you have any quotes you’d like to see here, drop me a line!

Glee is Me: Casablanca in 30 seconds

They met, they loved,

Ilsa left,

Again met, again loved,

Then, Rick left

The End.

Actually it’s a beautiful movie – definitely worth watching if you can get past the fact it’s in black and white.