Blog
Disposable is NOT Environmental
I was perusing Kickstarter when I happened upon a solution to a problem that I didn't know was that big of a deal: spices going bad. As it turns out, it's not that big of a deal, it's what could easily be classified as a "first world problem." Spices, because we live...
Thoughts and Prayers and Regulations
There is an epidemic of thoughts and prayers in America. It seems the more politicians think and pray, the more school shootings happen, the more places of worship get gunned and burned down, and the more people die. Maybe to reverse this trend, politicians need to...
New Article in Biosemiotics: I am a Fake Loop
My article, "I Am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection," just appeared in the journal Biosemiotics. You can read it here for free. In this piece, I explore Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz's ethological understandings of the human animal,...
E-cigarette e-waste litter is an environmental health harm that can be stopped before it metastasizes
My op-ed in the American Journal of Public Health that appeared this week discusses the new tobacco waste stream of electronic cigarette waste. Electronic waste is already the fastest growing waste stream globally. Creating a new product that has no current...
UCSF Chemical Industry Documents
A couple weeks ago, UCSF launched our newest collection of industry documents. The UCSF Industry Documents archive is a repository of almost one hundred million pages of previously secret industry documents now searchable for the public due to discovery and legal...
Whither the Relevance of Print Media?
The great American newspapers have shot themselves in the foot. In the race against online media and decentralized user-based content, when they haven’t been bought up by conglomerates with the intention to destroy them or use them as organs of ideology, newspapers...
The Elon Musk of E-waste
My new article, "Is This Man the Elon Musk of E-Waste?" in my favorite popular science online magazine Nautilus, describes the Right to Repair movement, and the necessity to move from a linear manufacturing process built on planned and perceived obsolescence to a...
New Article: Environmental Justice as a Potentially Hegemonic Concept
As part of my project on land rights in Latin America, a recent paper titled "Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil" appears in Local Environment. Local...
Biosemiotics Gathering Schedule
The 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering at UC Berkeley organized by myself and Terry Deacon takes place June 17-20 at the International House. Please see www.biosemiotics.life for more information. The Biosemiotics schedule can be found here.
New PLOS Medicine Article on Addiction
PLOS Medicine just published an article I wrote with Jesse Elias and Pam Ling at UCSF on "Public versus internal conceptions of addiction: An analysis of internal Philip Morris documents." This article discusses previously secret industry documents pointing at the...
Euphemisms and Dysphemisms
Here I will attempt to gather and decode euphemisms (saccharine words covering up the dismal reality, e.g., climate change for global warming) and dysphemisms (derogatory terms for neutral ones, e.g., warmist for people who acknowledge the facts of global warming) of...
Fungi Ethics
My new lexicon entry in the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics on "Fungi Ethics" is online. It can be accessed here. Fungi ethics, which is closely allied to plant ethics, describes how fungi--both for better and worse--are forever imbricated in our food...
Electronics reuse or recycle?
I am inspired by recycled electronics. IT Asset Partners (ITAP) recently posted a video about it's ragtag recycled electronic car surpassing in range the major three manufacturers' (Tesla, Chevy Volt, and Nissan Leaf) top vehicles. ITAP director Eric Lundgren stresses...
Party Foul: The semiotics of advertising and subliminal messaging
In the Bay Area, and probably all around California, I have been seen at bus stops and on buses a very disturbing ad. What is disturbing about this advertisement, is that whoever made it failed to understand adolescent psychology. The ad says: Underage drinking and...
Electric Cars are Not Enough for Life
As the New York Times recently reported, State SenatorScott Weiner's California Legislature bill to increase density allotments along transit corridors is a much-needed method to solve both housing and environmental burdens. Driving, no matter how you slice it, takes...
The Berkeley Shellmound
Out of the almost 500 shellmounds that existed in the greater bay area, over the last few centuries, these have been systematically destroyed. The Berkeley Shellmound is the earliest of those shellmounds established in the greater Bay Area region by the people...
Totalitarian Hyperbole
One of the great things about empire is it doesn't attempt to hide its monstrosity. The latest "Military Parade" stunt, normally reserved in Western cultural imaginations for Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, and North Korea, has now come home to roost. The spiritual...
Try this in your next meeting
I just came upon a great little app/website Are Men Talking Too Much? that is a simple and humorous counter that allows tracking the gender of the person speaking in a meeting. I like this because I am prone to talk too much, and over the years, through great effort,...
The need for hermeneutics in science communication
There's this popular pro-science YouTube video. I like it--it's bold, brash, and has good knock-down arguments. It also espouses a defensive attitude against stances which I too find abhorrent. There's only one problem with it. It's wrong. Even though I like the...
Designed to Fail–Industrial Design and Cuteness
The Washington Post's alarming story about teenagers intentionally imbibing Tide detergent "pods" (or "pacs") due to dares by other teenagers, is not a story about teenagers being dumb, but really one about faulty design. The increasing one-use bite-sized...
Airplanes and Death: A Study in Sound Pollution
I recently published an article in Berkeley's newspaper, Berkeleyside, about the incessant overhead air traffic, and how this likely is causing significant public health effects. Here’s the evidence base: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25332277...
Eighteenth Annual Biosemiotics Gathering at UC Berkeley
I am very pleased to announce that the Eighteenth Annual Biosemiotics Gathering will take place at the University of California Berkeley's elegant International House grand auditorium June 17-20, 2018. On behalf of the Organizing Committee, Terry Deacon and myself...
Interspecies Vision Design Lab at the California Academy of Sciences’ NightLife series
This Thursday, November 2, 2017, from 6-10pm, I'm very pleased to be presenting my work on interspecies seeing at the California Academy of Sciences. Their NightLife series, where the CAS becomes a 21+ venue for cocktail-fueled science, exhibits cutting-edge hands-on...
A Systems Approach to Dysfunction
One of the things that resonates the most about systems theory, is that it focuses on how different pieces of large puzzles interrelate and interlock. For, it is the inter aspect that gives phenomena movement, gusto, dynamism, spark. Speaking of things, essences,...
A new review for our edited volume, The Greening of Everyday Life
The 2016 Oxford University Press book The Greening of Everyday Life: Challenging Practices, Imagining Possibilities I contributed a chapter to on "Bicycling and the Politics of Recognition," has received a kind review from environmental philosopher Robert Paehlke....
Database of Industry Documents Databases
In an ongoing effort to compile the corruption of science and politics by short-sighted, manipulative industries, I am beginning to list the sites that document industrial epidemics. Enjoy! CLIMATE http://climateinvestigations.org http://www.climatefiles.com MONSANTO...
Irma
A good friend of mine, from Austria of all places, found herself in Miami amongst the evacuations. She posted to Facebook: Thank you everyone for your sweet messages! Yes - I am still in Miami and not sure if I have a chance to leave before the hurricane hits...
Upcoming UCSF Cancer Center talk
CANCER CENTER TOBACCO CONTROL PROGRAM SEMINAR Does the Tobacco Industry have its own Endgame? The pharmaceuticalization of the tobacco industry and implications for public health Yogi Hale Hendlin, PhD Tuesday, September 26, 2017, 3:00 – 4:30 pm CTCRE, Kalmanovitz...
Owning Life versus Thwarting the Hygiene Hypothesis
With such a provocative title as "Pet Ownership Protects Us Against Allergies," UCSF's Dr. Homer Boushey makes the claim that children brought up with pets inherit some of their protective microbes that mitigate against developing allergies. ...
Zero-Waste
Because we currently live in a throw-away economy, with devastating impacts on our psychology, social relationships, health, and environment, evolving away from this paradigm is paramount for our survival. The invention of cheap plastics in the 1950s seemed like a...
ExxonMobile Responds to Hurricane Harvey
Cognitive dissonance is a phenomena common amongst human beings who want to have their cake and eat it too. It comes from a willing ignorance to repress and suppress the world's inconvenient truths and hold onto the frame (or fairytale) one inhabits (or chooses) with...
Everybody loves postdocs
Although many young academics rightfully complain of being used for their expertise while failing to receive either the remuneration or job security fitting to their contribution, it is always humorous to hear statements that openly admit this unspoken condition. Upon...
Charlottesville is just around the corner
In wake of the recent racially-motivated and anti-woman murder and maimings in Charlottesville, I've written a Medium article "Charlottesville is just around the corner" about the projected invasion of San Francisco and Berkeley this weekend by neo-Nazis and their...
US Misinformation Translation Guide
To cut through the very successful and rhetorically effective branding by fascists, I've developed a handy guide (to be expanded): (Alt-Fact) vs. (Brutal Reality) "Alt-Right" = NeoNazi "Snowflake" = Not interested in dehumanizing people; not completely numbed yet...
New paper published in Annals of Internal Medicine picked up by Reuters
Today, with co-authors Pamela M. Ling and Jesse Elias, our paper "The Pharmaceuticalization of the Tobacco Industry" appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Our interview with Reuters is available here. This work contributes to the study of industrial epidemics,...
The Philosophical Salon
A recent article I wrote for The Philosophical Salon can be found here. Titled "Not an Era for Apologetics," it looks at the systematic bullying of university students by alt-right pseudo-intellectuals, and the reinforcement of hegemonic discourse in the university...