Well we fucked up and here we are without an episode (it would've been really great, we swear). We didn't want to leave our loyal listeners hanging, so we put something together anyway. Listen in and find out how and why we made such a big screw up, get updated on the state of the show, find out how to grab some sweet swag, and learn about a couple important apps and reports because David and Daniel can't go more than a few minutes without lecturing about things.
It's got everything a regular episode would have (except the episode) and so much more!
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(This is a machine translation and it sucks. We'll fix it soon!)
[0:00] David were here it's a beautiful Southern afternoon the wind is the breeze is blowing out we got an ice son here we're in the same city.
[0:10] I'm actually right here in person for once which is fun.
[0:14] Right exactly we're sitting across from each other. And this is this is a bonus episode because we were going to record an entire episode like normal but I kind of dropped the ball on that.
[0:29] Wasn't just you Daniel it was a team effort of ball dropping.
[0:35] So it's basically what happened is you know I had that I had this big wedding this week.
[0:40] Listen to this beautiful soundscape Bernie Krause would be very angry right now.
[0:46] But we'll see this is the thing about my neck of the woods here is and I noticed this when I was doing that soundscape recording in the park in my neighborhood is there's never a moment where you don't hear an airplane. That low Rumble of of an airplane.
[1:06] It's the same same in New York but at least you have like this nice wind chime here and the breeze and the birds.
[1:14] Yeah we said why not just sit outside I mean screw it right. But the reason why the show kind of derailed is so I had this big wedding the past weekend that I was in for my roommates you came down to Lana you were busy and I had, reached out to an author of a book that we were going to discuss for this episode, so I was busy that I spend the whole week reading this book preparing questions listening to, interviews with this author so I'll be prepared and we had agreed that we would talk at such-and-such time GMT right and I'm on Easter time there on was it Greenwich.
[1:55] London time whatever whatever that is.
[1:57] England time UK time so I just kept Googling you know what time is it in GMT right now. Alright so I'll see you not that tell me what time it is so I woke up yesterday morning set down with my cup of coffee after reviewing my notes open up Skype. Brighten early and look nice all we had an email from this author saying hey I've been waiting for you and I've got to go now and I googled what what time is it in GMT I said I'm on schedule. So then I said you know what let me Google what time is it in England right now and England was GMT plus one. So sorry everybody.
[2:47] Yeah this episode was really going to be built around that interview and we will get to it eventually but in the meantime this is what we have.
[2:57] And you initially I was thinking we could power through still do the episode but the author said you know maybe I'll be available this morning to talk. So I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. Just in case they will be available I waited at my computer for to two and a half hours and then it just didn't work out so I was a little sleep-deprived that's my fault.
[3:25] I'm a little unprepared that's my fault.
[3:29] So we're going to push that back a week and instead maybe just talk about what's going on state of the podcast kind of thing and keep it short and let y'all cute about your day.
[3:40] And I want to also before we do close out Bring up one thing that's happening right now that I think it's really important that will get you in more depth in the future but will close out with that.
[3:50] Yes okay first thing we reached out to the listeners everybody a few weeks ago a month ago or so, asking for some help with our transcripts which we still need help with we need people to help us transcribe the backlog of transcripts and potentially going forward but just want to take a moment to thank everybody who has contributed to that, we have Maggie Chandon Alexi Nick Morgan, all fall Andrew pseudo McCoy and Michael thank you so much for helping us so far and in for continuing to help us, we couldn't do it without you.
[4:32] Yeah these transcripts are huge amount of work but we really do think they're valuable both for allowing people to search through the show for people who speak other languages can you translate stuff and also for hearing impaired.
[4:46] Next up on the agenda we have launched the ashes ashes swag store not right there.
[4:54] She has this is very exciting others not much on it right now admittedly there's a couple of stickers that we sent out to our Patron subscribers, you can now find them on the store there's a link at the top of the website where it says shop or we can go to ashes ashes. Org shop, and you can buy these stickers in packs of 2 they're fun designs we will be adding more stuff to it periodically, this is not something we're putting a ton of time into but it's nice to be able to have things out there with her name on it if you want to show some support to the show we do appreciate.
[5:25] Also you know supporting or just getting other artists involved that's my favorite part.
[5:31] Yeah we do each one of these stickers going forward are designed by different artists we pay the artists upfront a flat fee for the design but then we also take a portion of the sale of each sticker and send that back to the artist so.
[5:45] And if you going to shop right now you're going to see three stickers, but we actually have a couple more that have been designed and we just got to know we just have to get them printed and in our inventory so to speak so that we can put that up on the store, what else was I going to say oh it ended is May 1st when we were recording this so.
[6:10] Happy may day everyone.
[6:12] Happy May Day also since it's the beginning of the month I'm going to send out another batch of stickers to our patreon collector supporters you'll be getting the season 2 sticker. In the mail for those of you actually this other way I do it David is.
[6:28] Very complicated.
[6:29] Right I have this elaborate Excel sheet I track all the patreon supporters, and when you sign up as a collector until we get more stickers you're going to be getting a sticker like every other month we start with a basic one that the original ashes ashes design, and then every you know when you get the next sticker you're basically be getting the next design so it kind of goes. You basically get to collect them as they came out, maybe I'll do it differently in the future I don't know we'll see collect them all that's what I say.
[7:00] Gotta catch em all.
[7:02] Speaking of Arts speaking of engaging a community, we have an idea David this is really your idea and I've kind of inserted myself into it but this is a collaborative art project where. We hope maybe we can do something special to kind of expose some of the Insidious technologies that we talked about on the show. And we're looking for someone to help us with technical experience specifically in the realm of facial tracking public cameras I don't give too much away here.
[7:39] Eating a lot of weight a lot of this is down the line a little bit we have to do some back and stuff before we're ready for that part, at some point we will need a couple people or one talented person who does have some experience, with facial recognition camera vision stuff, if this is something that sounds interesting to you and you want to do something to expose just how Insidious all this technology can be. MSN email contact at ashes ashes. Org it's going to be a little bit until we need your help but please reach out now we can walk you through some of the basic things were thinking and you can tell us sounds doable or you two are insane this is impossible sorry.
[8:23] That's really what I want to find out also on the vein of community join our Discord you can go to our website ashes ashes. Org find the link at the top of the banner for our Discord Channel join that, so you can be a part of all the discussion there and, we're looking for people who might be interested in helping us with social media we have a method for handing over some of the keys to that and.
[8:52] Yeah particularly our Twitter account for those of us who don't follow us on social media we sort of have this, divided set up right now where the Instagram is just.
[9:03] Instagram is the meme page.
[9:06] Twitter just vomits out bad news continuously all day and Facebook neighbors the Twitter, because I don't want to work on that so we're sort of interested in taking are Twitter and making it more interactive retweeting people taking what little evidence we have in the able to utilize it for something useful and we want to hand the keys over to individuals once a week, for you to run out with her for a week and see what you want and and interactive Community how you feel best fitting and pass it on to someone else.
[9:36] Yeah I'm curious to see how they would go.
[9:38] So if you're interested in that or being part of this.
[9:41] That's why I mentioned discords to join the Discord.
[9:43] Join the Discord.
[9:44] Let's create like a channel specifically for social media.
[9:47] I'll set one up it'll be the social media channel, hang out in there as soon as a message and that we can get that cranking.
[9:55] Okay so with all that out of the way what's going on in the world today David what can we mention so that we have it waste everybody's time completely.
[10:05] Well I mean there's a lot of stuff as always going on right now that's a most of it is in crate, but I want to point our attention to this report that's about to come out that's very important and when we talked in the show about reports what's almost always the ipcc report, I got big climate change policy piece of paper that told us the state that were in what we need to do if we want to stay under 2 degrees C or hit 1.5, we've analyzed that reported deaths in the past but there's a second report actually that's maybe just as important if not more important than the ipcc, and it's the ipbes general assessment in ipbes is an intergovernmental, science organization with 130 member states it stands for the intergovernmental size policy platform of biodiversity and ecosystem Services which is a man. So i p p e s in the last, big one of these reports they ran out was in 2005 and these reports are called the general assessment and it just sort of looks at the state of all life on Earth and says well how's it doing, where the problem is what is endangered where are we importing things and negative way how can we turn that around and bring things back in a positive way.
[11:19] Just like we do with the climate with the ipcc report it's a huge piece of work with thousands of scientists and researchers and diplomats and politicians, better for worse putting all this time and effort into it, how to make both not only state of the world so to speak but also policy recommendations treaties for these member states to join and try and follow in order to save the environment and ecosystem around a well, right now starting a couple days ago and going until May 4th the final edit of this paper is occurring and we are on May 6th going to see the release of the first ipbes are assessment since 2005, and there has already been a leak of this paper that came out in a French news agency called AFP and, apparently the state is not so good Daniel there are over million species right now that are facing a near-term Extinction in the next few decades that are potentially endangered at the moment, we talked in the past about this ecosystem collapse is going all around us it's terrible on the ocean it's terrible on land, putting a lot of articles about threat this report what you probably never heard of is probably going to be more important and more.
[12:36] Well it will affect what is he this is the interesting thing we say it's it's more important than climate change or or more impactful, I mean everything is interconnected right at ecosystems collapse because of climate change but also climate change has accelerated by things like ecosystems collapse but. What is our day today really impacted that like what is modern civilization interacting with the most and I think when it comes to climate change. We looked at carbon dioxide parts per million in the atmosphere is like a, as a a signal of how climate change is progressing and how this greenhouse gas effect might impact all these interconnected systems but in terms of how we how we feel that and how we are affected by that. What you saying I think it's is how these ecosystems collapsing in the services we derive from them are really the foundation of Modern Life, and we are worried about climate change and so much as it affects those things right ocean acidification is a problem because that's, where are Fisheries are located is where so much of the services that we rely on as a human civilization with its filtering pollution or what not that's.
[13:54] That's what we depend on it and so yeah I'm really interested to dig into this report and see what some of the implications are and really looking at, how do you eat the changing ecosystems around the world are going to impact our day today, Necessities the way we live our agricultural Food Systems things that we might not think about.
[14:18] Put much more eloquently than I was Daniel that's exactly right this report is so incredibly important I'm really excited about it's going to be hundreds of pages long if you want to get a jump on this comes out May 6th you can still read, but I just want to read a couple things that they mentioned on the website that that goes sort of over what this report is about. So it covers all lambaste ecosystems except for Antarctica as well as Inland water and open ocean ecosystems, it evaluates the change over the past 50 years and this is what's important the implications for our economies livelihood spewed security and our quality of life, and this is a big sort of shift in the way that we viewed environmentalism over the past few decades, I thought so much anymore about saving an individual Panda or a saving a rainforest it's about what how do we need to protect these ecosystems in order to protect the way that we live our lives and this report is really centered around that concept. It ranks the relative impacts of climate change invasive species pollution sea and land use change and a range of other challenges to Nature.
[15:23] It explores impacts of trade and other Global processes on biodiversity and ecosystem Services which is something that Daniel I know you really are interested in that ecosystem service stuff, identify as priority gaps in our available knowledge that will need to be filled, PepperJax what biodiversity could look like in decades ahead under 6 future scenarios economic optimism Regional competition Global sustainability business-as-usual Regional sustainability and reformed markets. After it goes through all of this finally it assesses policy technology governance Behavior changes, options and Pathways to reach Global goals by looking at synergies and trade-offs between food production water security energy and infrastructure expansion climate change mitigation nature conservation and economic development so this is the part that is being really written right now, as we speak literally Daniel by these these diplomats these policymakers his business owners who have come into sort of shape the final recommendation part, of this paper but the something we really want to take away with it the impact that are happening around the world what it means for a future that stuff is done and that stuff we can start digging into, May 6th and that we will absolutely at some point to vote a show entirely to this report and the concepts and ideas that it carries out and what that means for all of us whenever we get around 2, reading those hundreds of pages.
[16:45] Hell yeah I thought it was interesting so you came down and we took a walk in my neighborhood went to the park and you were showing me this app, called yeah plant net so basically you can take a photo, of a plant and then match it uses the machine learning from this unit developed by this University to match that species you can confirm that and then log you know what you seen my location and everything.
[17:14] Yeah it's it's crab Source computer vision, for identifying plants you take a picture of a leaf or fruit or bark or the entire plant it uploading to the server it Compares it against the Corpus of data they have it says all this seems to match you know this particular type of dairy plant, and it shows you a bunch of pictures in a bunch of options says are any of these right and you hit confirm or reject, and then in that process you both get the identification of that plant and then their data set gets a little bit better so they get better identify stuff in the future.
[17:45] Yeah and so in the context of what you're talking about it reminded me. He was just funny to me like now that we have this amazing machine learning algorithms at our fingertips we can finally use it use the assistance of computers at crowdsourcing and in the internet to, log species after you know 99% of them have been wiped out. But you don't crowdsourcing is really important we talked about you know that big German study that came out what was it 20-17 that kind of shook the world in terms of ecosystem collapse about all the insects that are dying off that was crowdsourced and, I think I've been seeing a little bit more of that I'm looking into volunteering and, land conservation where I'm moving to Massachusetts in a lot of the roles involve leading, citizen research you know how can we use people citizens in our community to help really track, the state of these ecosystems track what species are still around how they're doing I think that's going to be important going forward.
[18:51] Yeah I anytime we need people involved in analyzing the world around them I think we're better off because soon everybody has better understanding of their impacts on that world.
[19:01] It also put science back in in a legitimate see of science back in the hands of ordinary people that that's the one the one thing I wanted to talk about with that author that we were going to interview is. About the legitimacy of, oh my God funded research initiatives like no se military funded research on the effects of some weapon that we've developed versus. The type of data we can get from people on the ground that are witnessing things and observing things and it turns out a lot of time sometimes we get better and better data, it from these kind of D Central initiatives but because we live in this very you know institutional world where everything has been kind of siloed off into institutions. We sometimes don't respect that which doesn't come from some quote-unquote legitimate source and.
[20:02] Yeah I mean the data can be great but it was collected by just dedicated researchers who aren't, members of an institution they might not have phds some people for whatever reason now want to throw that away and the trappings of legitimacy only come when there's an academy. After somebody's name and that's I don't know how we ended up in this way and we're going to talk about the academic institutions and and what science and research has sort of evolved into over the past few decades. At some point in in a lot of dads Because it's a very. Messed up institution the citizen science is fun it's so exciting it's a great way to get involved in all this stuff and like you said a lot of times you get better data that way.
[20:49] Yet so something to think about I think we've rambled enough hear anything else we should mention. Okay I promise I promise I will be better about coordinating interviews in the future I will I will no longer Google what time is GMT I will just find out where someone lives I will Google what time it is in their City, right I'll put that world clock on my phone.
[21:16] I'm going to just buy a 24 x and you can have one for.
[21:19] Jealous in my room.
[21:24] Perfect cuckoo clock.
[21:26] All right we're closing out now.
[21:28] Thanks for tuning in bonus not an episode episode.
[21:34] Until next week this is ashes ashes bye.