resistance to persistence

D300…I can’t wait to own you

Nikon announced their new D3 and D300 cameras today. The D3($5000 USD) is a high end, almost full frame pro photographers camera. The D300 ($1800 USD) is the less advanced version, yet surprisingly still packed with a lot of the same features as the more expensive D3. 12.3 MP, 51-point auto focus system, LiveView shooting, 3″ LCD, advanced scene recognition, 6-8 frames per second and even a self-cleaning image sensor.

Read and see some images of the new D300

I read this article below on Boing Boing…and it makes me very sick. Months ago, we stopped using plastic bags from grocery stores and bought plastic bins and reusable cloth bags. It’s really made a difference in the amount of bags that pile up at home. I also refuse plastic bags at many stores and just put anything I buy in another bag I already have. The thought that every single plastic bag I’ve ever touched in my entire life is still out there floating around somewhere is horrifying. Out of sight, out of mind. But soon they won’t be out of sight for much longer. I’d like to see photos of this mass of plastic floating in the ocean. Leave me a comment if you’ve seen photos.

Salon has a heart-rending feature on the ubiquitous, eternal plastic bag. These things last forever, and they’re piling up so fast, they’re choking us. Americans throw away 12 bmillion oil barrels’ worth of plastic bags every year.

Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there’s now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that’s twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There’s six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. “It’s an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look,” says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which studies plastics in the marine environment. “Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there.”…

The problem with plastic bags isn’t just where they end up, it’s that they never seem to end. “All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces,” says Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation, which has undertaken a Campaign Against the Plastic Plague. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade. That means unless they’ve been incinerated — a noxious proposition — every plastic bag you’ve ever used in your entire life, including all those bags that the newspaper arrives in on your doorstep, even on cloudless days when there isn’t a sliver of a chance of rain, still exists in some form, even fragmented bits, and will exist long after you’re dead.

Read the article…

I went to the dentist this morning for a routine cleaning. I’m back in tomorrow for a rescheduled jaw appointment that just coincidentally happened to be the day after I was just in there. Whatever, it’s on my way to work and I’ll at least get to watch another movie while laid back in the chair.

But this morning got me thinking. I spend so much time every year at the dentist either getting checkups or doing maintenance on existing dental work. I’m not in there that much… probably 5 hours a year. But compare that time spent on such a small area of your body with how much time you spend getting the rest of your entire body checked out. At my general doctor, I likely spend 45 minutes a year at the very most with my doctor. And that’s for my entire body! A yearly checkup takes about 20 minutes which consists of checking my height and weight, checking flexibility (I’m not kidding) and a couple of coughs out loud. “You can touch your toes, you must be fine”.

What’s the number one killer in North America? I believe it’s cancer. Possibly heart disease. How come even a fraction of the yearly time you spend making sure your chompers are their pearly whitest, we as a society aren’t doing the same for cancer? Why aren’t there doctors or clinics you visit every 6 months to make sure you don’t have skin cancer or a tumour growing that you don’t find out about until it’s too late?

Personally, I’d trade my teeth over having cancer anyday.