Bloglet series #2 - the one where I dream of plastic

Why do all voice assistants have female voices?

I was setting up a new Google Home device when it struck me that it's very sexist to have women voicing over the Siris, Alexas, and Google Homes of the world (with the former two even getting female names). Quick googling shows that many have analyzed this problematic issue (one example article here). Research says customers prefer female voices for chores. Well just because there is latent sexism everywhere shouldn't mean companies just pander to it. And meanwhile IBM Watson apparently got a male voice because 'he' will answer technical queries where listeners prefer male voices that convey 'competence'. Grrr

When will phone makers go back to prioritizing function over form?

I have written about glass phone backs and other dumb decisions before. Today my ire is towards Face ID and it's peers. I recently got the Google Pixel 4. Great device but the Face ID (with Radar / laser dot technology and what not) is still not as reliable as a good old fingerprint scanner. Same issue with iPhones. And it's even worse with in-screen fingerprints that Samsungs and others have moved to. A fingerprint recess is always there where you expect it to be, so you quickly build muscle memory and it's near 100% reliable. Tech and ergonomics that were perfected in, what, 2014? But here we are in 2019, still having to do 'lean-over' and 'lay-down' tests to check whose Face ID is less shittier (here). 

I dream of plastic

A few months back I had this day dream where I imagined a world where scientists somehow never invented plastic (at least the polythene kind). Can you imagine how our world would have been? No single use carry bags clogging up sewers, showing up in choked whales' bellies, creating the great Pacific garbage patch, sending microplastics everywhere into the air and oceans. And what would giant plastic-reliant industries have looked like? Fresh food would have maybe gotten packed in leaf wraps or food grade paper / foil? The disposable cutlery industry wouldn't have existed. Maybe we would have a lot more scullery space and staff in fast food restaurants. Amazon and UPS would have relied on cardboard and paper protectors instead of blithely tossing in bubble wrap all over packages. I keep going back to that fantasy and building on it. Perhaps the scientists did invent polythene but it was a super toxic substance. Maybe it was so expensive to make that it never reached mass production. Maybe the environmental ills were co-discovered and acknowledged so that the cost of landfilling / recycling polythene was baked into the cost of production (who am I kidding with this last one). Anyway, I am thinking there is a full book idea in there. After all, I thoroughly enjoyed 'The World Without Us', a non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared. Go 'environment fantasy' as a genre!!

Bloglet series 1 - the one about animal rights, books, and groceries

My previous model was that full length ideas would come here, and quick thoughts would go to Twitter (@rukeshr), but Twitter has now just become my medium to complain to companies when I get a bad experience. Plus the idea fragmentation isn't nice. So let me try posting quick thoughts here from now on. Will call them bloglets. Yes I know, super imaginative. Somewhere someone must be turning in their graves.

Thought 1: Did you know, 70 billion animals now exist as objects for human consumption, including 60 percent of all mammals on Earth. We find it easy to throw stones at people who lived in the 1700s, saying how could they have permitted slavery. We are no less guilty with what we do with factory farming of animals in this age. The conditions are HORRIBLE, and the numbers are STAGGERING (see 70 billion data point above). Racist, sexist...these are bad terms now. Speciesist needs to get there into the zeitgeist as well (discriminating on the basis of species, by allowing only humans to have rights). This is why I am turning vegetarian again, hoping to go vegan. Will be slightly flexible, but not a lot (e.g. if I am super confident that something is free range, then I might have it)

Thought 2: Human beings are the only animals capable of dramatically changing their software (believe I caught this idea from 'Sapiens'?). Your ideas, thoughts, beliefs...everything is upgradable. And reading books is the most efficient way to upgrade your mental software. Felt the full force of this when I recently read this mind altering book 'Being mortal' by Atul Gawande. Most great books do that. Haven't had that type of experience with TV / movies (even documentaries) / podcasts. And only rarely do interpersonal debates drive that type of software upgrade

Thought 3: For carrying groceries, use backpacks instead of purpose built reusable bags. Apparently reusable bags are making the problem worse (read here). My personal experience was that those totes / bags were darn inconvenient. Very little carrying capacity, poor ergonomics, and easy to forget. After some trial and error I landed on using my trusted backpack for groceries. Never played tennis to the extent I thought I would when I bought the backpack, but now it's super helpful. Carries twice or thrice what a tote would, is not a net new manufacture since I am reusing what I already had, and is easy to sling over my shoulders so I can do multiple chores while still having carrying capacity for groceries in the end. Can this become mainstream please?

 

Eating cheetahs

Sailfish. Faster than cheetahs, predators just like cheetahs. Apex predators both. Yet cheetah killing is obnoxious, but sailfish are casually slaughtered and eaten (euphemism: they are 'fished'). No guilt. When will we stop treating ocean dwellers like food, and instead start protecting them? When will a tuna burger be frowned upon the way we frown upon a lion meat burger?

Here is a compelling way of looking at it (Sea Shepherd Conservation Society):

A boat full of dead pandas is alarming right, but we turn a blind eye to a boat full of dead tuna.

Of Droughts And Men

Revisited Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath after a while. Epic as ever. However my thinking has changed in the intervening years, and in some aspects I don't quite agree with Steinbeck anymore.

The machines are shown to be heartless while the farmers are connected with the land. He who tills the land with his blood and sweat is the rightful owner of the land - not some large corporation. Steinbeck pretty much proposes that we stop the march of modernization. Go against the natural scheme of things in a way.

However, the Dust Bowl of the 1920s was a human tragedy caused by overpopulation.The implications on human life were tragic, but fact remains that we ended up over populating an area which couldn't sustain the human density. Natural balance had to occur. Maybe I appear radical because most droughts or famines could then be explained away as 'natural corrections'. What about the eyes of helplessness, the starving children, etc? As an answer, I think we just need to expand our lens a bit.

We as a species have taken over forests and converted them into farmlands. Sent several species into extinction in the process. There could have been a similar impassioned appeal by nature against man. But the fact is, it was in the natural course of things. About 20,000 years ago, we became at last the one species in the history of the earth which could control master our environment. And in the race of life (survival of the fittest), we did what we had to do - took as much control of our environment as possible. In the process, if we over-stretch ourselves at some places, we just need to realize the implications.

Grasslands are by definition areas where denser vegetation is unable to survive (due to difficult climate). Instead, they sustain a delicate ecosystem comprising grasses, birds, small rodents, etc. However we humans have time and again converted grasslands into farms. The result? These farms may run fine for 10 or 20 years, and then boom, one day nature catches up via a large drought. Steinbeck himself talks about this sequence of events (rampant agricultural-ization of Oklahoma wildlands) as the precursor to the dustbowl events of the 1920s. So when the drought did hit, population was bound to rebalance. Then why blame the machines?

I believe that the same issue holds true for semi-arid areas of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of Vidarbha, Telangana, perhaps Orissa...they probably can't sustain the level of farming we have today (where every square inch of non-hilly terrain is under farms). Absolute recipe for disaster. Agricultural advances in the 60s (Green Revolution) mean that at least the farmers in these regions wont die for lack of food, but it becomes difficult for them to sustain anything but the most basic, haphazard lives. Perhaps that is the reason why tragic farmer suicides are so common here. But while this human tragedy has been unfolding over the last few decades, an equally tragic consequence has been the extermination of grassland species. The Great Indian Bustard is of course the poster-boy of grassland species. Nearly extinct. So too are dozens of other, smaller species. How is one to say which is the greater tragedy?

All because we don't connect with fish...

The Bluefin Tuna. As numerous once as the American bison. As majestic as the bison. Today it faces the same fate as the bison - complete annihilation. Time article here. Below is a para from an old but eye-opening NatGeo feature on Bluefin:

Do we countenance such loss because fish live in a world we cannot see? Would it be different if, as one conservationist fantasized, the fish wailed as we lifted them out of the water in nets? If the giant bluefin lived on land, its size, speed, and epic migrations would ensure its legendary status, with tourists flocking to photograph it in national parks. But because it lives in the sea, its majesty—comparable to that of a lion—lies largely beyond comprehension.

And another excellent portion...

...all agree that the fundamental reform that must precede all others is not a change in regulations but a change in people's minds. The world must begin viewing the creatures that inhabit the sea much as it looks at wildlife on land. Only when fish are seen as wild things deserving of protection, only when the Mediterranean bluefin is thought to be as magnificent as the Alaska grizzly or the African leopard, will depletion of the world's oceans come to an end.

Full read here: Still Waters, The Global Fish Crisis

But you know, the rot is deeper. Man will not rest till he exploits and ruins every single natural resource at his disposal. The Anthropocene (Age of Man) is truly here, and we have already permanently disfigured a great planet in an unprecedented fashion. Decimated its biodiversity. Read more about our age here:

Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man

Are you sure you are more intelligent than a dolphin?

Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists
Do read the above BBC article if you want to alter your perspective even slightly.

The great tragedy of our times is that, while we have (after centuries of slavery) accorded all human beings equal rights ('human' rights), we are not able to protect even the most bare basic of animal rights (the right to survival). Many animal species are emotionally complex and extremely intelligent. Its just that we humans, in our minuscule understanding of the world, never took the hints (see my previous article here). Its only now that we realize that several species have highly advanced languages. Blurs the line between man and animal, does it not? God knows how many more amazing things about other creatures will we get the chance to discover, before we banish them forever into extinction.

Being Human

These are pictures of Prairie Dogs. Cute creatures, aren't they? Well, humans are responsible for *deliberately* decimating their population by 99% over the last century.

Prairie Dogs are among the world's best animal communicators, with one of the most sophisticated languages in the nonhuman world. Their yips and cries (from which they got the name "dog," although they are actually rodents) represent complex statements containing information they want to impart to each other: like the differences between the colors of clothes worn by passersby, or whether a human carrying a weapon had one on a previous visit. Just a hundred years back, these intelligent beings used to cover huge swathes of land all across North America. In August 1841 George Wilkins Kendall came upon a "commonwealth" of prairie dogs whose "mercurial and excitable denizens" provided some sustenance for the famished and disoriented members of the Texan Santa Fe expedition. He admired the "wild, frolicsome, madcap set of fellows...ever on the move...chattering away the time, and visiting from hole to hole to gossip and talk over each others affairs." Kendall was referring to the socially integrated activities of these animals, which include mutual nuzzling, grooming, and "barking" to express territorial claims.

These animals used to live in colonies which were so organized and so massive they would be called 'towns'. Stretching across hundreds of acres, these 'towns' would be divided into 'wards' by physical features such as ridges and gullies, and further subdivided into coteries or family groups of up to 8 individuals. One particularly massive 'town' in the Texas of the 1890s measured 100 miles by 250 miles, and contained an estimated 400 million Prairie Dogs.

Over the course of just 60 years (1901-1960), all these towns were utterly destroyed, billions of Prairie Dogs poisoned or shot, because they were considered 'varmint' and a threat to human cultivation. Apparently the poisons would take hours or days to take effect, causing the creatures immense pain before killing them.

So these intelligent, social animals had been around and thriving for millions of years, but man comes along one day and decides to kill them all to make space for himself? Wow. But the worse part is, it is now understood that these creatures don't really compete with livestock for food. In fact, they are an integral part of the prairie ecosystem - Prairie Dogs are a 'keystone' species upon which many other species of plants and animals depend for survival. But we had to come along and with our half-baked knowledge, kill them all and decimate the entire ecological balance, didn't we?

It doesn't end there. Today, 'Varmint Hunting' is a sport which is legally permitted in many states of the US (since the Prairie Dog continues to be classified as a 'pest'). Here is a description:

A particularly sadistic method of eliminating prairie dogs is by blowing them away at private "recreational" shooting contests, where shooters sit at tables near or within a colony and aim high-powered rifles at the animals as they emerge from their burrows. These "sportsmen" don't like to waste their bullets, so if they just injure a prairie dog, they consider it entertaining to watch him die slowly rather than waste another bullet. The National Rifle Association calls this cruel, bizarre event "varmint-hunting." Shooters have their own charming terminology for the various maneuvers they perform. A "triple" is one bullet that hits three dogs on a mound who are hugging each other in fear. In the "flipper," the force of the shot flips the animal backward. A "red mist" refers to the explosion of a prairie dog from a direct hit. This "sport" is accompanied by cheers from onlookers and participants, and, of course, prizes for the best shots.

The death tally at the eighth Annual Prairie Dog Extravaganza in North Dakota was 4,912, shot in a six-hour competition by 70 participants. A hunter's annual take in Utah can reach 6,000 Prairie Dogs. Just for comparison, imagine an alien coming down and killing 6,000 human beings in one season - 'for kicks'.

The shocking stories of the American Bison and the Passenger Pigeon run parallel to that of the Prairie Dog. Just like Prairie Dogs, millions of bison used to roam inner North America till the 1800s. Early settlers remarked on "plains that were black and appeared as if in motion" with the herds of bison. Then they were shot en masse - just for their skin, while the carcass of the 2,000 pound animal would be left to rot. The bison almost went extinct by the 1880s, but thankfully some have survived. Today some descendants of the mighty bison remain in protected reserves, living relatively solitary lives, instead of being tiny specks in mighty black herds stretching miles across. Passenger Pigeons weren't so lucky. These birds used to live in enormous migratory flocks. One sighting in 1866 in southern Ontario was described as being 1 mile wide, 300 miles long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point with number estimates in excess of 3.5 billion birds in the flock. By 1905, the birds were extinct, mindlessly murdered by humans.

That's a pile of Bison skulls. Just skulls, not the whole skeletons. Link

But its not just 'them yankees'. Humans have been experts at wiping out other species for thousands of years - across the world. India had some of the thickest jungles in the world uptil just over 100-200 years ago. Then man became 'civilized' and wiped out almost all of India's forest cover. Now the Indian hinterland comprises just millions and millions of acres of farmland with impoverished farmers and their malnourished children trying to eke out livelihoods from laughably small patches of land. All jungles have been cleared out, all wildlife wiped out. Tiger population has fallen from 100,000+ to 4,000 in just 100 years, their range decimated by 93%. While we humans have, you might say, 'swarmed and infested' the Indian peninsula to the point of breakdown (our population quadrupled to 1.1 billion in the time that the tiger's fell by 25 times).

Everything that is not grey used to be tiger territory ( = almost all of India)

Human Population across centuries. Note the unbridled explosion since 1950. And yet not enough people think we are out of control (Source: BBC)

Unfortunately this is not just a feature of modern man. The arrival of man on North America 12,000 years ago is believed to have caused the almost immediate extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Saber-toothed Tiger, and many more species. 2/3rd of the large mammals on North American disappeared in a short period after man's arrival. I can imagine and even defend a prehistoric man fighting it out for territory with mammoths and saber-tooths, and winning - but what of the one-sided decimation of all other species in today's world? What gives us the right to exterminate other intelligent species in the name of our own 'progress'? To close, I will just quote Agent Smith's classic dialogue in the Matrix:

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure. 

Some References 

http://www.emagazine.com/archive/1868
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/279358/prairie_dogs_dont_have_much_of_a_prairie.html
http://www.prairiewildlife.org/prairiedogs.html
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/tcp01
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison#19th_century_bison_hunts
http://www.worldwildlife.org/species/finder/tigers/maps.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100701072732.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

Crowing away to glory

I wonder why people dislike crows. Ok, their cawing isnt exactly melodious, but still, whats there to hate about them? Some people even think of them as bad omens right (think The Omen)? But here is a very interesting piece of research on crows...

The crow knows your nose