Skip to main content

GreenPeace did, um... what?

Quoth the poster:

Greenpeace activists have started construction on a replica of Noah’s Ark,

“Spung!” goes my brain.

8,200 feet above sea level, in one of the most dramatic ever pleas to world leaders to take far-reaching and urgent action to avoid catastrophic global warming. Many people believe that Mount Ararat is the place where Noah’s Ark landed after the floods.

OK... can anyone else spot the contrasts? (-:

Noah’s ark...

  • was an artefact
  • was very large
    • & quite rigid
    • those bathtub toys don’t even start to expose a historical story
    • It would have to last about a year
  • was pretty much the antithesis of naturalism
  • was driven by a religious bloke for religeous reasons
  • almost certainly didn’t land at a spot we’d call “Mt Ararat”

GreenPeace, OTOH...

  • are into natural things
  • are building a small one
  • have reasoning driven by naturalism
  • are driven by — in essence — materialists
  • don’t seem to have a special lifespan for their project

Bit of a head-scratcher, that. Some considerable differences in organisation & technology. GreenPeace are using very simple technology (horses to lug stuff, what looks like pine for structure, builder’s fasteners etc) whereas to build a seriously large boat to survive kilometer-sized waves etc for around about a year & carry/feed/clean thousands of kinds of animals (bet he was glad fish weren’t on the list!) this Noah dude would have had to rely on some serious ship-building techniques in a world that essentially had no ships at the time.

However... there are some similarities!

  • the problem is a very large one
  • the lives of everyone are (in principle, anyway) involved
  • the action is aimed at the better interests of the public
  • they’re building it out of wood (but not, I see, laminated)

Now, back at the differences...

  • no animals involved here
  • it’s not going anywhere
  • more than one family involved in making it
  • it doesn’t seriously float, or sail
  • builders & operators all seem to speak European languages & all seem to be light-skinned

Ah, well, some entertainment to watch. (-:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.
Post a Comment
Read more

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...
1 comment
Read more

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.
Post a Comment
Read more