Right now, just as UNFCC COP 26 session is to start in Scotland...

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without. - early American saying -

I am just tired – sometimes too long and disturbingly too often. 

in CORONA TIMES© Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without. - early American saying -

Hi! I'm just reviving this old blogspot. It being Tuesday, April 28, 2020 you should know more about what you're doing than I could possibly know.

So, farewell.

PSA 4 colonoscopies by Gregg Kravitz

PSA 4 colonoscopies by Gregg Kravitz
_____
Good man Gregg! As a political guy you know how important a well crafted Public Service Announcement is.
[And everyone should note that cancer isn't the only thing they look for during a colonoscopy.]

This is my story, Gregg, reflecting well on the value of your earlier post.

I'm 65 now, first colonoscopy was around 50, then 56, but my third was the "one that saved my life". No indication of any problem previously, but this time each clean out never was complete, never enough to adequately see the (amazing! complex!) inside surface of the colon. I had to do it again every few weeks, each w an increased aspect to the prep — the final, successful one resulted in a "gold strike"; the tiny slim flexible 'scope w camera and light bumped into what had been giving me toilet troubles over prior weeks: something blocking the way! They took a sample (for biopsy) of it, told me about it being confirmed as a typ colorectal cancer and explained options (essentially none).

So I was operated on after pre-surgery lab tests & a big meeting w 3 onco docs + 3 others (social services, etc.). i.e. URGENT.

In between I learned of the free services from the Fairmount Park "Cancer Support Community of Philadelphia". You can get & customize a brief yet broad template of questions & matters to help you through that meeting!
Two years after diagnosis, and 11 months after the end of my excellent and thorough multi-modal treatment, I feel good and as yet have zero measurements or symptoms of any kind of cancer!!

If my colonoscopy hadn't been done, this little PSA (Public Service Anncmt) would have been written by me after I was painfully dead…

Any questions on WHY a regular series of colonoscopies is important to YOU?
______



Bill Marston LEED AP via iPhone 3GS
209 S. 24th St. Phila
267.304.4193
WMarston@verizon. net

What we did on summer vacation from school...

The New Yorker magazine

July 23, 2012 issue

WJM: Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without. - early American saying -

This is republished without permission except for personal information

(i.e. exactly as you would do when browsing the internet)

120723 NEW YORKER KOLBERT - The Big Heat - summer 2012 larger, hotter, longer than in the past

COMMENT

THE BIG HEAT

by Elizabeth Kolbert JULY 23, 2012

Corn sex is complicated. As Michael Pollan observes in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” the whole affair is so freakishly difficult it’s hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place. Corn’s female organs are sheathed in a sort of vegetable chastity belt—surrounded by a tough, virtually impenetrable husk. The only way in is by means of a silk thread that each flower extends, Rapunzel-like, through a small opening. For fertilization to take place, a grain of pollen must land on the tip of the silk, then shimmy its way six to eight inches through a microscopic tube, a journey that requires several hours. The result of a successfully completed passage is a single kernel. When everything is going well, the process is repeated something like eight hundred times per ear, or roughly eighty thousand times per bushel.

It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well. High commodity prices spurred farmers to sow more acres this year, and unseasonable warmth in March prompted many to plant corn early. Just a few months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture was projecting a record corn crop of 14.79 billion bushels. But then, in June and July, came broilingly high temperatures, combined with a persistent drought across much of the midsection of the country.

“You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination,” Fred Below, a crop biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Bloomberg News recently. “It’s like farming in Hell.” Last week, the U.S.D.A. officially cut its yield forecast by twelve per cent, citing a “rapid decline in crop conditions since early June and the latest weather data.” Also last week, because of the dryness, the U.S.D.A. declared more than a thousand counties in twenty-six states to be natural disaster areas. This was by far the largest such designation the agency has ever made. In the past month, as the severity of the situation has become apparent, corn prices have risen by more than forty per cent. Since so much corn is used to feed livestock, it’s likely that the increase will translate into higher prices for dairy products and beef—although, as many have pointed out, beef prices were already rising, owing to last year’s devastating drought in Texas.

Up until fairly recently, it was possible—which, of course, is not the same as advisable—to see climate change as a phenomenon that was happening somewhere else. In the Arctic, Americans were told (again and again and again), the effects were particularly dramatic. The sea ice was melting. This was bad for native Alaskans, and even worse for polar bears, who rely on the ice for survival. But in the Lower Forty-eight there always seemed to be more pressing concerns, like Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Similarly, the Antarctic Peninsula was reported to be warming fast, with unfortunate consequences for penguins and sea levels. But penguins live far away and sea-level rise is prospective, so again the issue seemed to lack “the fierce urgency of now.”

The summer of 2012 offers Americans the best chance yet to get their minds around the problem. In late June, just as a sizzling heat wave was settling across much of the country—in Evansville, Indiana, temperatures rose into the triple digits for ten days, reaching as high as a hundred and seven degrees—wildfires raged in Colorado. Hot and extremely dry conditions promoted the flames’ spread. “It’s no exaggeration to say Colorado is burning,” KDVR, the Fox station in Denver, reported. By the time the most destructive blaze was fully contained, almost three weeks later, it had scorched nearly twenty-nine square miles. Meanwhile, a “super derecho”—a long line of thunderstorms—swept from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, killing at least thirteen people and leaving millions without power.

Referring to the fires, the drought, and the storms, Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press, “This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.” He also noted, “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level.”

Or, at least, what it looks like right now. One of the most salient—but also, unfortunately, most counterintuitive—aspects of global warming is that it operates on what amounts to a time delay. Behind this summer’s heat are greenhouse gases emitted decades ago. Before many effects of today’s emissions are felt, it will be time for the Summer Olympics of 2048. (Scientists refer to this as the “commitment to warming.”) What’s at stake is where things go from there. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we could, without even really trying, engineer the return of the sort of climate that hasn’t been seen on earth since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

Along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, the words “climate change” have barely been uttered. This is not an oversight. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have chosen to remain silent on the issue, presumably because they see it as just too big a bummer.

And so, while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious. •

NEW TOOL is coming to Bill Marston's website

This is from Ira Flatow's famous NPR weekly program  SCIENCE friday !!



Be well,

   Bill Marston
- Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without. - early American saying -

"GREEN" EXPANDS! Hooray!

Ecological perspective keeps expanding in the mainstream media... as never before items in the general news are framed in an ecological, wholistic, interdependent fashion.


An extreme example: US military and diplomatic leaders are consistently framing the positions that they support, and which they advise American & foreign policy-makers to embrace, within a perspective of interdependent forces & facts. No longer do we hear "We must defeat the evil-doers" [ex-president Geo W Bush] but rather we are hearing "What serves the Libyan people best? What do THEY really want from us and from our allies (NATO)?" [president Obama's cabinet].


The head-in-the-sand "Know-Nothings" on the conservative side are mostly not participating in this emerging widespread public conversation. For example, here in the state of Pennsylvania, the new governor Corbett [elected by the majority of voters who wanted a new governor who could just make them feel better] refuses to collaborate with ANYONE on the famous Marcellus Shale gas industry. Corbett instead dumps this matter in with EVERYTHING else and treats them all the same, and in the same exceedingly narrow context he acts publicly with such public positions: taxes bad, business good; 'growth' good, balance however is backward.


Single-mindedness in an era of new learning... sigh. And especially while we are provided with an increasing wealth of appropriate field data as well as new understandings which derive from it. Alas.

Strengthen the EPA and Clean Air Act [P.S. for St. Patrick's day I wore my GREEN - my green 350.org t-shirt!!]

Gotta get over to PennFuture Philly to bid my good wishes to Christine Knapp. She is moving on to help run the massive, new federally funded innovation center — the GPIC at the Navy Yard.

CONGRATULATIONS, Christine!

[next reason: fight to strengthen the Clean Air Act *and* the EPA as a watchdog and protector of the environment in which everything happens & on which everything depends.

Bill

March 18, 2011

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without. - early American saying -

Choose how you prefer civic dialogue to occur.

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without. - early American saying -

Bill

Puma's 'Clever Little Bag' Slashes Sneaker Packaging | Design | GreenBiz.com

Puma's 'Clever Little Bag' Slashes Sneaker Packaging | Design | GreenBiz.com

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.
- early American saying -

BOSTON HERALD 091111 Study: ‘Green’ jobs surge limited

Study: ‘Green’ jobs surge limited

posted by Wm Marston, LEED-AP - Philly

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.
- early American saying -

Streetsblog: Daily News: Is There a Person in Your Parking Spot? Kill Them.

"Make my day" in the New York Daily News style.

Daily News: Is There a Person in Your Parking Spot? Kill Them.

Ke Hai Du. Photo: Daily News

Checkmate.

In the unofficial battle for the most irresponsible, over-the-top media endorsement of motorist entitlement, the Daily News took the trophy this morning, declaring that drivers are within their rights to run down human beings who stand between their vehicles and on-street parking.

Under an arguably racist headline, News editors claim that sushi chef Ke Hai Du got what he deserved when motorist Paul Todd hit him with his car during a dispute over a Lower Manhattan parking spot on October 9. According to reports, as Du stood in a space to hold it for his boss, Todd nudged his Lincoln into Du's knees, then ran over his foot, breaking it.

To many people accustomed to the norms of civilized society, this would seem a clear case of assault, if not something more serious. But to the News it's a game, which the victim rightfully lost when he challenged the "finders keepers" rule -- or, as News editors put it, "a basic and inviolable tenet of the universe."

What Du did is right up there with stealing a taxi from the person who hailed it, or bringing 15 items to the "10 items or less" register, or stopping at the top of a subway stairway to read e-mail, or backing up in an E-ZPass lane.

The lesson is clear: Park your carcass in a parking space, and you may end up as road kill.

Somehow Todd -- who at the scene reportedly said he "would do it again" -- escaped charges, though Du is suing him for $5 million. "I guess vehicular assaults are okay these days," Du's attorney told the News.

Indeed they are. And as for the rest of us, the next time someone annoys you with a social faux pas -- exiting a bus from the front door, say, or letting their dog's leash stretch across the sidewalk in front of you -- express your outrage through the use of deadly force. The Daily News will have your back.

Posted by Brad Aaron on October 22, 2009 (12:16 pm)

Link: http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/10/22/daily-news-is-there-a-person-in-your-parking-spot-kill-them/

HealthCare4ALLPA - Welcome!

HealthCare4ALLPA - Welcome!

Have you gotten tired of Congress' failure to listen to common sense (instead of to the jingle of re-election money in the phone calls from healthcare insurance giant lobbyists)?

As of today Pennsylvania is one of eleven states considering or enacting single-payer health insurance for a large percentage of state residents who qualify and/or who choose such a plan. Aiming for universal coverage and affordable subscriber rates in sensible plans that are also limiting the growth in the costs and charges for health care. Pennsylvanians intend to lead the nation.

Worth learning about? Listen to state director (and former candidate for the US Senate Democratic Primary) Chuck Pennacchio at HealthCare4allPA.org

Semester Master of Science in Sustainable Design

I have had the honor of teaching the Design Studio at Philadelphia University for the Fall 2008 Semester.  There are 8 candidates in my studio, which meets from 5:15 pm to 9:45 pm twice a week.

This is not part of the architectural education accrediting board's schools of architecture — it is broader and deeper than just "architecture" of buildings. In that regard one might characterize it as a "deep green" curriculum, at least for this semester if not across the board.

For example: all 15 students in both of the two studios were given a 6-week assignment: design a new fast-food chain restaurant prototype. They researched current and historic businesses, not all of them "successful" to learn about business models, product selections, market demand patterns, name and product branding and graphics, among other characteristics. This background part of the Project thus covered a range of types: from automat Horn and Hardart to Q'doba, from Boston Market to Subway.

They formed into teams of 4, conceptualized a few ideas and selected one of them to develop. Each team created a schematic business idea: a product, a market, a set of business principles and a scalable enterprise model. Remember that this is a prototype for a chain of retail restaurants.

In my studio the candidates created "Toss!" as a plate or edible "dish" of customer-chosen foods. All foods and nearly all serviceware were compostable on site, where some of the food products could also be grown. The form of the building was a modular assemblage of shipping container-like "rooms" which were pre-constructed and placed on a minimally prepared site infrastructure. Of course it generated nearly all of its power through solar harvesting, efficiency of envelope & equipment, and energy recovery-recycling systems.

The other team created "Brew" as a small scaled microbrewery and cold snack food pub. It was enhanced through selling the bulk of its beer as "take-out" via reusable growler bottles, thus minimizing needed interior dining space. It was situated in an existing 3-story rowhouse in anytown. Site selection criteria for a local franchise required a building able to harvest sunlight enough to support growth of hops and generation of hot water and electrical power.

Amazing work, in an incredibly short time.

My studio: Ari Barkan, Wendy Byar, Nicole Howard, Nora Lober, Chris Minnich, Andrew Richards, Lauren Schaefer and Tiffany Tabeek.

POSTED by blogger Prof. Marston, LEED AP

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.
- early American saying -

Language Frames the Topic and the Discussion

Choice of words, phrases, verbal images, and so on form the language of a position. Read George Lakoff, linguistics professor at UCal Berkeley. He wrote "Don't Think of An Elephant" (published by Chelsea Books September 2004)  concerning the upset among the losing Democratic Party concerning the  United States presidential & congressional elections of 2004.

This taught a lot of us about use of language to frame an argument, to sway people, to tell more truth than merely using facts.