Letters to the Editor
bonerici
Published Letters: 27 Editor's Choice: 2
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what good is an article about honeybees that doesn't explain where they come from
[Read the article: Who killed the honeybees?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]this entire artcle not one mention is made of the destructive force that the honeybee has. This is an invasive species that has been displacing native american pollinators. Now, don't get me wrong, I love honey as much as the next guy, but the honeybee is not pure good, it is as much a domesticated and artificial part of our agriculture as corn, wheat and beef, and the loss of the honeybee isn't all bad, because the decline of the honeybee allows native american pollinators to thrive, and this can be a good thing because honeybees while well suited to pollinating european trees and flowers are not as good at pollinating native american plants, so a decline in honeybees can mean a regrowth of native american plants.
the honeybee is the white man's fly, and for hundreds of years it has outcompeted and displaced native american bees.
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missing the point
[Read the article: Their terrifying sounds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All this mass of analysis on classical music and the point of why classical is losing popularity is completely missed. All art has to change and grow or it dies, and when it dies and becomes stagnant, it slowly loses audience. You want to look at broadway musicals, it's not that tastes have changed, it's that the musical form was stagnant, and because of that it died as an art form. You want to look at modern rock and roll, it has become an art form with exact boundaries and as such is constantly losing ground to hip-hop which is fluid and able to change and grow.
Audiences need this stimulation, they need the new. Classical music is wedded to the violin the piano, you can't use a James Brown sample in classical music, you can't use a heavy metal riff in classical and that is the real reason that classical continually lost relevance. Not Schoenberg!
The same problem is true for all art, it's true for movies, for music for everything. It doesn't matter how good the television series "The Simpsons" is, after a while it gets old because of the limitations and boundaries imposed on itself by how that particular show has been defined.
Nothing else matters really. Art needs to be constantly redefined. If an art form like classical music allows itself to have set boundaries, it inevitably will fossilize, which is what has happened. No composer can save classical music. The only thing that can save classical is for classical to give up the old forms, hire some hip hop rappers, some metal guitarist, play at raves with Armand Van Helden. Give up on Beethovan, Bach, Wagner, Schoenberg and embrace the new. Now this will never happen, because those that support classical music like it the way it is. They don't want hip hop music contaminating their pristine classical music, that's why they listen to it in the first place, they don't want samples and scratches invading their Beethovan. So there's really no hope for classical music as a popular form of music with any kind of meaning in our time. It still has some value though. It's still good musical training for musicians who later decide to make relevant music in the studio for the real music stars of our age.
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anorexia has mortality rate of under 1% per year
[Read the article: The diet that's too good to be true]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]annual rate of mortality for anorexia is 5.6 per decade, not 5.6 per year, which is under 1% per year, also bulimia is more than twice as deadly as anorexia alone. get the statistics right thanks.
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my calculations
[Read the article: Public bathroom dilemma: Paper or air?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it costs around 11,000 kwh of energy to produce a ton or 200,000 paper towels, so that's around 20 wh per towel, recycled paper is is 60% of that or 12 wh per towel, the driers 2300 watts for 30 seconds, is 20 wh, but you know what I only hit the drier one time, not because my hands are dry (they never are) but who can spend an entire minute drying their hands, forget it, towels on the other hand I use 2 most of the time, sometimes 1, so the towels will be at pretty close to 20 watt-hours, and the electric drier will be pretty close to 20 watt-hours. Almost exactly equal . . . except . . .
Towels lose when you add up the energy costs for the labor for hiring some dork to empty the towel bin, for his car to drive to work, all the other energy costs for him.
A pretty good rule of thumb is if it is cheaper, then it's using less energy and producing less greenhouse gases.
Hot air driers are cheaper that's why businesses want to use them. They are definitely greener, once you add on the additional labor costs for taking care of paper towel garbage.
But they suck. You can't use a hot air drier to wipe up a mess on your conference table, but you can with paper towels, you can't run into the bathroom and grab a drier off the wall, and then use it to wipe the mustard off your shirt, it's just plain worse than some paper towels.
It's clear to me that it's silly to use hot air driers because they are "greener" when you have both a hot air drier and some paper towels for an option, use the paper towels, they work so much better, and since they are already paying for a janitor to take up the garbage they are just as green as the air drier.