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More ideas needed

Here's a recent story of how two poachers, while posing as tourists, managed to slip away just long enough to kill a couple of rhinos and cut their horns off.

National Geographic has this story about the discovery of a critically endangered male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia. Problem is, that horn sure would make a nice dagger handle. It is just a matter of time now before the locals find out one is there.

This problem has been discussed a few times in letters to Science magazine: Biologists report finding an endangered species only to lose it again to collectors and poachers who learned of its whereabouts from the same report. This profit motive thing is powerful. Maybe we should be looking harder for ways to use it to protect what remains.

Why canvassing no longer works

A while back, Nathan Wyeth wrote a Soapbox for Grist about the crappiness of green-group canvassing operations. It kicked off quite a discussion.

If you're interested in the subject, Dana Fisher has a good piece on it at The American Prospect:

You Can’t Always Nyet What You Want

Russia plans enormous sports complex near pristine national park Hoping to strengthen its bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics, the Russian government has approved an $11.3 billion project to turn areas of Sochi National Park into a ginormous winter-sports complex. The park is home to 300 endemic plant species and a variety of endangered flora […]

You are now entering science fiction land …

Sometimes life in the 21st century feels like a weird science fiction movie -- one so unnerving it's difficult to distinguish reality from nightmare.

Here are some science fiction-y nightmares well-known scientists, writers, and bloggers brought forward this week:

And why is it still around?

Why isn't it the 21st century's spray-on deodorant?

Let me explain, and meet me after the jump.

And it’s OK to support Cali’s Prop 87

Prop 87 is a California ballot initiative that would tax oil drilling in the state, and use the money to reduce petroleum usage. Passage is by no means assured, as the opposition is incredibly well-funded.

Here, sometime Gristblogger Ana Unruh Cohen writes a rebuttal to Robert Rapier, one of the measure's critics.

To her many fine points, I would also add one more.

Canadian climate change challenger taking it to court

Rather than, you know, letting science decide this sort of stuff, Canada's most well-known climate-change skeptic is taking opponents to court.

The case revolves around a letter to the editor that he claims was a "malicious attack" on his credibility.

Tim Ball has made a name for himself as an outspoken challenger to the overwhelmingly accepted (especially in Canada) consensus that humans are causing global climate change. He authored an opinion piece on global warming for the Calgary Herald last April which drew at least one letter to the editor questioning his credentials.

Interview with J. Matthew Sleeth

It's a bit late to ask, but tomorrow morning early I'll be speaking with J. Matthew Sleeth, author of Serve God, Save the Planet, a book calling on Christians to renew their responsibility as stewards of the earth.

What should I ask him?

Rumblings have started.

What's this all about?

Lessons on how to live from the NYT food section

Lots of people in this lamentable world are up to no good. In a diabolic cubicle somewhere, someone is busily conjuring up next-generation bomb technology. Somewhere else, a cynic is figuring out where to tap the next huge store of crude oil, to be sold at great profit by an oil company that won't be responsible for the carbon it releases.

Right now, someone is mindlessly sidling up to a car-dealership counter, about to pay big bucks for a monstrous SUV -- perhaps a hokey E85 one. Or plotting some unspeakable -- and no doubt quite profitable -- betrayal.

Then there's the folks who get up and go to work and do ... what all day? Those mid-level types in giant corporate and government cube farms, not the ones making or executing the evil decisions, but the ones who sit around all day pecking at their keyboards -- what is it that they do, again?

Seems insane to me, this vast effort and energy spent going to and fro, all to such ambiguous end.

The obsessives portrayed in Wednesday's New York Times Dining in/Dining Out section -- New York espresso nerds and a mad-genuis Catalan chef -- seem much more benign to me. Perhaps we have something to learn from them.