A radical proposal for "Green Streets"

I'm fed up with our cities. Developed nations, such as the U.S. probably have the worst cities on the planet. Why? Because they aren't built for people. They are built for automobiles. The concessions made to other forms of transportation (bicycles, pedestrians) are exactly that, concessions. Our cities are dumbly built for large, noisy, dangerous, inefficient, environmentally devastating, pervasive automobiles.

As you can tell, I am not an automobile fanatic, but I do have an appreciation for them. Some (very few) are very appropriate, well-built transportation machines, designed with purpose and with the future in mind. They have their place, but that place is not cities.

I don't want to share the road with automobiles as a bicyclist. It means that any accident is likely a fatal accident. I don't want to be a pedestrian at *any* traffic intersection.  I want green streets. I want human navigable spaces that span a city. I want most of the city to be like a university campus, where the automobile is the least efficient method of transportation. I want a city where people and bicycles and skateboards are safe from the stupidity of the automobile.

There are many reasons why I prefer taking the "scenic" route through campus instead of hitting a city street right away on my route home every day. I feel safer. It takes longer, but I don't really notice because I don't have to worry about being killed by a haphazard driver. The scenery really is better. Much better. I enjoy it so much that I sometimes go to campus on the weekends just to ride around. What if the whole city were this enjoyable for human-powered-locomotion? Do you think that we'd cut down on greenhouse gas emissions? What about fitness? How many more people would ride a bicycle to work?

So here is my radical proposal:

1. Convert 50% of navigable roadways in every city into a walk/bike/skate space with walk and ride paths and green foliage.
2. Ensure that these human-navigable-spaces span a city so that we can navigate anywhere without traveling any more than a block on asphalt-and-automobile streets.
3. Partition existing city funding such that our automobile roadways are better AND we get fabulous human navigable spaces to travel in.
4. Do this over a period of 10-20 years; saving money, ourselves, and the environment

If we need some additional evidence to support the effort, do studies concerning the total cost of automobile roadways compared to the total cost of the proposed human spaces.

For example:
Automobile roadways incur many costs:

1. Construction and maintenance
2. Accidents and hospitalization
3. Environmental cost
4. Personal health costs
1. Physical fitness
2. Psychological costs (stuck in traffic, frustration, road-rage)
5. Lost energy
1. Lost energy costs due to asphalt heat-absorption/dissipation
2. Lost energy costs due to lack of green spaces
6. Personal financial loss
1. Cost of gasoline for 1-10 mile commute
2. Cost of automobile ownership and insurance
7. ...
8. ...

Human navigable spaces have some costs as well, but most are significantly lower or actually beneficial. When compared to costs incurred to construct, maintain, and use automobile roadways it seems inane to be designing our cities in any other way.

Check out this recent graphic on fatalities and serious injuries in the UK.  Zoom into the street level and look for regions where *you* would want to live -- I guarantee that these are going to be green streets.

Fembots from Venus - Some flying, some spageti, and a noodly appendage

There are so many bad ideas and erroneous claims that none of us should be expected to take the time to validate the bullshit. If I think that there are fembots on the surface of Venus, I've got to find evidence. The evidence needs to be testable and falsifiable. The evidence must have a direct relationship with whatever that I claim (voluptuous fembots in this instance). If the evidence is insufficient or erroneous, then nobody needs to go any farther in the search for robotic female Venetians. Really. Don't bother. You would be wasting your time. I made it up.

It would be fantastic if there were fembots. I imagine that they would be sort of like the fembots from the Austin Powers film, only with real tits instead of gun-boobs. This all sounds sexist and kind of dumb, but I'm not talking about feminism, I'm talking about religion.

Nobody in their right mind should be doing the things that they are doing and believing the nonsense that they are believing based on a declared absence of evidence. It doesn't matter if it sounds good. It would be nice if a lot of other baseless, nonsensical fantasies were true, but they are not. Our whimsical fantasies have no viable evidence, cannot be 'proven' false, and should be tabled, indefinitely as anthropological remnants of early human sociology. Period.



Suggested reading for the budding contrarian or emerging atheist:

• The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
• Letters to a Young Contrarian - Christopher Hitchens
• Beginnings: The Story of Origins - of Mankind, Life, the Earth, the Universe - Isaac Asimov
• The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Conciousness, spiders, humans, machines, and anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is defined on Wikipedia to be: "the attribution of uniquely human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena." We use this term to attribute 'uniquely' human characteristics, but often mistake characteristics common to all conscious creatures as anthropomorphic features. I believe that we do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, as a species we have generally been incredibly arrogant and biased against any idea or hypothesis of consciousness or intelligence that treats humans and animals as fundamentally similar. We use the concept of anthropomorphism to artificially distinguish humans from animals. We also use it as a justification for belief in 'intelligent' design.

It is quite possible that when all is said and done, the only traits that are uniquely human are those that are solely cultural. Of course, these cultural traits are just as good as discriminants between individuals within different human cultures as they are between human beings and animals. What does this mean? We are just animals. Or removing the verbiage of human arrogance, we are biological machines just like the monkeys, the birds, and the bees.

I would guess that the only trait that distinguishes us from other biological machines in respect to fundamental mechanisms is brain complexity, but this trait is not uniquely human, just more pronounced inasmuch as we can measure or are aware. It is already well understood and accepted that we are not the most complex biological mechanisms within our own experience. We are no more complex than most of our mammalian counterparts. But far less complex than most any Earth ecosystem, even the most barren.

There is something about self-knowledge that intuitively seems particular to human activities. However, regardless of how self-aware we might be, I am pretty sure that even the simplest biological machine is self-aware. When a hand or newspaper threatens the continued existence of a spider, we consider this only to be the end of a potential nuisance. However, the spider understands at a far more fundamental and complete manner what it means to be squashed. The spider, however, considers this to mean the end of its existence. Does this make the spider conscious of its own existence? Most likely. Does this mean that it has a theory of mind? This is hard to establish without knowing spider-talk. Does it consider its existence in the same manner that I do? Probably not. However, do I consider my existence in the same manner that you do? Most likely not, although we share common biology, and aspects of culture. Depending upon the specific life-philosophies of another human, within particular domains, I might even have more in common with the spider. I am a rational, objective, and atheist. It is likely that within the simple mind of the spider, there is little spare room for the supernatural or sophism.

So, my whole point about discussing spiders and the self-awareness of such a creature is to bring to the forefront the idea that our assumptions about self-awareness are probably very incorrect. It is quite possible that any machine capable of truly independent action is also fully capable of being self-aware. Whether or not an animal, insect, or fungus is self-aware probably has less to do with whether or not we can detect it and more to do with natural selection. Does the biological machine in question have a mechanism in which knowledge of self can reside and be processed? More importantly, would the organism benefit from self-awareness?

If the mechanism of self-awareness is far more diverse or far simpler than we had ever presumed we could have easily overlooked it in our studies of anatomy and behavior. What about single-celled organisms? Organisms which are clearly driven by fixed responses can be easily modeled and understood, such as the forward motion of a protozoa. It isn't likely, but if there is a mechanism for self-awareness within such simple organisms we would probably have missed it due to using the wrong tools to attempt to observe it. And whenever self-awareness emerges within our own mechanical creations we probably won't realize it. So far, if it doesn't take the same exact form as that which we are so used to within our own minds, we simply don't know how to detect it. I think that so far, we understand these things in terms of their effects and not the ultimate causes.

Some references:
What is the Octopus Thinking?: http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/cephpod.html
Animal's Self Awareness: http://www.strato.net/~crvny/sa03002.htm
Cradle of Thought: http://books.google.com/books?id=OWzpKZwYNXkC
Animal Imagination: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=288
Not so dumbo - elephant intelligence: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/302feature2.shtml



Images:
Sponge Bob Hug - latca - Flickr.com - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en
Spider IV - SeraphimC - Flickr.com -
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en