199. Experimental Interview with Kamron Sockolov: Environmental Psychology, Perception, Aesthetics, and Human Decision-making w/ Non-Profit Marketing

First of all, I am very proud of myself to state that I took BOTH pictures above. The cute little fuzzy snowy plover by Coal Oil Point (Santa Barbara), and this Very Cute But Less Fuzzy and Super Adorable Rock Crab at the Harbor in Ventura. Okay. Fine. One has a little more Cuteness and Sex Appeal than the other. No! It's not black and white! It's not Uma Thurman on the left and George [Ape] Bush Junior on the right! Hey, hey, HEY!!!

Maybe one of my points here is that beauty can be an acquired taste. And appearances can be deceiving. Humans and non-humans. I adore my rock crab so much I could kiss it on the carapace! Okay, in the name of tree-hugging! You know I'm just being biologically incorrect!

Kamron works for a non-profit in downtown Santa Barbara, and I was able to incorporate a component of the interview about non-profit groups, non-profit marketing, and the notion of aesthetics, "poster children" of the environment, and how much aesthetics drive human decision making in terms of what we care about... and whether that is really a problem or not. And then the mentality, the discrepancy between idealisms of non-profit groups (runned by independent individuals with shared collective values to solve real-world problems) versus the harsh, hypocritical realities of most non-profits (very little citizen support, receive donations from big megacorporations with agendas and desires for tax write-offs, most of the time is toward fund-raising and maintaining bureaucracy, rather than energy directly toward the problem itself, true agendas are pushed off as side projects as megacorporate well-funded agendas are put to the forefront). So much for non-profits. The crux of system inefficiency. *Sigh* It seems like this society is so huge and so disorganized, we are making jobs that don't really seem to need to exist, and all jobs that NEED to exist DON'T exist. *Sigh*

Kamron had made some amazing comments on the issue. I will be writing more on this later.

All I can say is that the last remaining frontier of research of "the environment" comes down to a systematic investigation of the Absurdity of Human Behavior... relative to the Environment, that is.... This seems to transcend all arbitrary classifications of the social sciences--race, class, politics, religion... all artificial constructs that don't really seem to exist when it comes to re-defining humans in relation to their environment....

129. Blue Horizons Continued: Second Blog of the Summer, June 27, 2007

The pdf file for my second blog of the summer is below, here:

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/blog2june27ish2007.pdf

List of Key Words ** being in debt ** apartment full of distractions ** "Welcome to being in debt, just like the rest of America." ** numericism, numbers and pins ** numerical identity in the Matrix ** one day planet Earth itself will have its own zip code? ** credit card companies ** have fun, buy now, suffer later ** manufactured emotions ** EEMB 94 ** Ben Halpern ** Meg ** yellow mongoose bike (stolen) ** UCSB is not a university, it's a playground so adults can stay kids ** return to UCSB on a new baseline ** cycling out old graduate students and TAs, dissolving old authoritative relationships ** Bruce Tiffney asked me what I thought CCS was ** Bruce Tiffney helped Victoria a couple of times in undergrad ** the protocol is students are to chase professors, not professors chasing after students ** large human bureaucracy and the jeopardy of human psychology ** large human bureaucracies destroying individual human psychology ** "At this moment, let's just say I really am intellectually bulimic" ** from intellectual consumption to intellectual production ** intellectual barfing ** joke location comparing Los Angeles, Davis, Riverside, and Santa Barbara ** joke Riverside global warming kicked in, real estate goes up ** THE INDIVIDUAL HABITABILITY INDEX OF LOCALITIES ** description of the classroom ** stiff and cold, initial molecular tension ** Ben Halpern ** Bob Warner, shifting baselines ** multi-scale multi-media research ** "Science is the individua's personal choice of scale of a system, personal choice of defining a system, and personal choice of level of precision on how to measure and twaek and collect data about a system." ** degree of order, degree of chaos in every system, and I accept all of it! ** Maria de Oca ** university "outreach" is just an idealistic illusion in professors' minds ** benefits of massive bureacracies: return policies ** Dave Panitz ** evolution primality "just shut up" ** over time, become desensitized ** mathematical golden-rule perspective of biological aesthetics ** thank evolution, thank your parents ** "living works of art" ** "Image is beside the point. It is the story beind the surface that matters." ** Logan, CCS biology ** Nicole, left-handed aquatic bio major ** "creatively stunted" by biology education ** the class is well-balanced: 5 guys, 5 girls, film, environment, and political science degrees ** little kids aggregate based on self-similarity in size ** Theodore Roosevelt swings his big stick, science and policy ** Please be kind, do rewind ** "Our education system does not promote the study of a student's individual Truth and Reality, but a grade in a course is only the measure of how well the student can psycho-analyze the mind of the professor, whether the professor's mind actually equates to any degree of universal human Reality... or not." ** Blue Horizons guinea pig experiment ** hesitant to return to school ** www.ratemyprofessors.com ** Milton Love ** "Thanks for the first amendment, babe" ** "We get paid to think, so you don't have to!" ** "Commited to good science and self aggrandizement." ** "So you want to be a marine biologist: the revenge." ** "you can go to small colleges where you are treated like a long-lost child, you can go to huge universities where professors spit on your for fun" ** that is the CCS/UCSB dichotomy right there! ** story with Dr. Steve Gaines ** made up, all is good! ** Steve Gaines and Richard Minnich on the same boat ** PISCO ** Dr. Brian Gaylord ** "What's the point of science?" practical or knowledge for the sake of knowledge? ** purpose, survival ** university as a form of mental warfare, battle of ideas, battle of words "war of the words" ** guarding intellectual territory ** the "Sustainability Experiment" ** "it's not a matter of "saving" the earth, it's a matter of how to optimally manage it" ** collective mental, physical, biological, technological, ecological metabolism ** shifting baseline understanding of science ** lag time effect ** THE THREE QUESTIONS YOU NEVER ASK A PROFESSOR OR GRAD STUDENT, OTHERWISE YOU WILL PISS THEM OFF (YOU WILL PISS OFF PROFESSORS, MAKE GRAD STUDENTS MORE LIKELY DEPRESSED) ** looking up scientific articles on web of science is like looking up the "science gossip circle" oh, what's armand been up to lately? ** national enquirer undercover investigations of science gossip ** hippocampus, overstimulated emotional center ** felt like a failure ** beat-up Shiloh beagle ** in the end, scientific research is all about trial and error ** COMPASS ** Time buries memories very well. Especially memories that are very trivial in others' minds which are hyper-exaggerated in mine, mental taphonomy shall work to my advantage ** 7 years since my time of idiocy and naivety ** THE ONLY STUPID QUESTION IS THE QUESTION NOT ASKED ** stupidity is inevitable ** science reporting (1) playing devils advocate--critiquing and challenging (2) informing people of circus ivory towers entertaining intellectualism ** hate when my ideas keep repeating ** broken record ** learning how to throw things away again ** mental management ** environ-mental management ** your mind is as clean as your room, your office, your environment...