Blue Gold Commentary

I didn't know Los Angeles was such a barren desert--I know we live in a desert, but it never occurred to me before that our "prosperity" came from such a long way. I certainly learned a lot about the pipelines and dams that provide humans water, but also a lot about the disadvantage of trapping that water.
I have known for my whole life that water is an unstoppable, always moving force. That humans have learned how to contain it seemed like a good thing, but then I learned from the movie Blue Gold: World Water Wars that there is a reason that water is not supposed to be inert. Chemicals, bacteria, and nutrients are moved and dispersed through the water as it flows, so keeping it still kills the nutrients and gives chemicals like mercury and other things like bacteria the chance to grow. It also creates oxygen bubbles, so the water is no longer good anymore.
Dams were built to stop water so industries, who use it most and pollute it most, can bottle it up and sell it back to us. They take a lot of water and don't put it back, so the water sources are depleting quickly--this isn't the way nature meant for it to be. Water was meant to go in a cycle--to return to the place it came from eventually. But because of the way our cities are built, the water can't be returned in a natural way. It goes through the sewers, polluted by trash and other human waste, to go to the ocean, where it pollutes the ocean too.
It's sad that not only do we destroy our water, we destroy ourselves and we don't even realize it. The privatization of water is causing us our lives--we literally have to pay money to live. And those who don't have money, like in developing third world countries, can't pay that money. So they cannot live. Is this what the world has come to?

Annotated Bibliography

My Essay Topic: Why we buy aesthetically appealing food and food packaging.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Dangerous-Food-Additives
It's a list of chemicals and additives found in food and on food packaging that could be dangerous to you. But it seems we still buy these things just because they are appealing. I think  it's helpful since if we do look on food packaging, we can find these chemicals on there and this article links them to dangerous effects.

http://undergroundwellness.com/why-we-buy-unhealthy-foods-part-one/
This is about a psychoanalysis of why people buy more appealing things. It says that companies market their products to attract out subconscious mind, so that we'd feel better about ourselves if we buy this product. One of the things I'd definitely add to my essay would probably be a little social science and psychoanalysis, not only of the consumer but of the marketer.

http://www.examiner.com/food-in-new-orleans/why-we-eat-unhealthy-foods
This talks about why we buy cheaper and easier food, and how advertising and conditioning has made people get used to doing so. It talks briefly about how we'd go for a cheaper, nearer, easier, more efficient and most available choice and get obese. It also talks about how we get little exercise with today's technology as compared to the past when most people didn't have cars so they had to walk or something. This is a little bit of psychoanalyzing, with all the reasons why we buy the brand stuff or the cheap stuff or the most marketed stuff.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/how-about-them-wrapped-apples/
This is an interesting article about how food packaging is important. It explains the effects of packaging, how it prolongs shelf life, so that food wouldn't be thrown out and cause more methane gas emissions, which is more potent than CO2. It might be a good point to include in my article.

http://www.truth-it.net/packaged_food_industry.html
Talks about the convenience of packaged foods' affects on our health. It goes over how the chemicals in packaging are hazardous to human health.

http://quazen.com/recreation/food/reasons-we-buy-packaged-bread-buns-or-rolls/
A list of reasons of why we might buy things (in this case, bread from a store). It might account for some of the psychoanalysis stuff.

QQC

"Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible."

This quote was interesting because I remember Robert Kuhl saying something similar about corn, about how we only buy things that are aesthetically appealing and if they aren't, we don't buy them. Why is that? Why do we care so much that our food looks perfect?


That in itself can be an essay topic, exploring why people like things that look perfect rather than taste better, or buy things that were sprayed with chemicals to be preserved rather than something local even if it's not pretty. It works especially here in San Diego, where it seems a lot of our food and water supplies are imported from elsewhere.

Six Degrees of Separation

A photo of my presentation board on graphics tablets.

The flow chart I made of my product, its components, the components of its components, and where everything came from.

Write Up

For this project, I researched the components of a tool I use for drawing every weekend or so: my tablet. The model I use is a Wacom Intuos3 Pen Tablet, which uses a USB cord to connect to the computer and comes with a mouse (called a puck), a battery-less pen and its stand, and some extra pen nibs for when the older plastic ones get worn down. The research I did was based around this model, though for my presentation I used a generic model since taking apart a Wacom to find out what it was made out of would be costly, not to mention illegal since Wacom’s designs are patented and protected.

Wacom is a Japan-based company, but their products are manufactured in China and shipped all over the world. I explored many of the components that make up the tablet, the pen, the puck, and the packaging. I also looked into where the tablet goes after it has reached the end of its lifespan.

First, I’ll talk about the packaging. Like most things you buy, it comes in a cardboard box. That cardboard box has been printed with inks, made out of pigments and dyes, using the flexographic process. The flexographic printing process is what makes it look shiny and high-quality, since cardboard usually absorbs ink and makes it spongy and dull. The cardboard itself is made out of various types of paper, glued together using a starch-based adhesive. The paper comes from woody trees and plants, things with cellulose in general, which use a lot of water and sunlight to grow. These trees and plants are cut down and made into paper by a factory, of course, and there are numerous costs involved in making it—like electricity, gas, delivery, packaging, and much more.

Moving on, plastics are a common product in almost everything, and tablets are no exception. My Wacom Intuos3 has a sleek resin coating on top and plastic buttons—its whole shell is pretty much plastic. Seeing as tablets, as well as most other technologies, are made in China, the materials to make it are probably mined or manufactured there too. It’s made of rubber, celluloid, heat and radiation, and thermosetting polymers or thermoplastics, which in itself is made by celluloid and rubber as well. Resin is also a component in plastic, and those come from trees, particularly coniferous ones like pine trees.

The pen and puck are made of plastic too, and both of them also include rubber. The most common type of rubber used in technology industries is silicone rubber, since it’s easy to obtain and mold. It’s made of an elastomer or elastic polymer, and is a saturated rubber, meaning it can’t be cured by sulfur vulcanization—in other words, can’t be made into something more hard and durable. This too is produced in China.

The puck has other components besides plastic and rubber, of course. It’s also got a felt material on the bottom to keep it from scratching the tablet surface, similar to the pen stand which is also made of plastic and felt. It also has its own printed circuit board (PCB), which is what makes it function internally. But I’ll get into PCBs more in depth later. Since I’ve talked a little about the puck, I’ll talk about the pen too.

The pen, also called a stylus, for a Wacom Tablet is unique in the sense that it is a cordless, battery-free pen, which makes it slender for ease of use. Tablet pens are able to connect and function with the tablet easily because it has an LC coil and capacitor circuit inside. An LC coil, also known as a resonant circuit or tuned circuit, has an inductor (represented by the letter L) that stores energy in a magnetic field created by an electrical current, and a capacitor (represented by the C) that is composed of a pair of conductors separated by a dialectric insulator. When a voltage passes over the capacitor, it creates a static electric field which is stored in the dialectric. The LC circuit receives an electromagnetic signal from the graphics tablet, which is what allows tablets to sense pressure and if the stylus is touching the drawing surface or not.

The most research I could do on any component of a tablet, however, was on the printed circuit board. The PCB is the main reason a tablet can function—everything else was just a shell to protect it from damage and such. The PCB is a series of conducted pathways that connect it to other electronic components, such as a USB cord which can be connected to a computer. It tracks signals etched from copper sheets that were laminated to a non-conductive substrate such as fiberglass. There are many components to a PCB, as well as methods of making them and their individual parts. Silk-screening, photoengraving methods, through-hole construction, and surface-mount construction are all methods used in the construction of a PCB. It also uses many metals, such as heavy copper in sheets or foil, tin and lead, anti-corrosion materials such as gold or nickel or soder to mask it, and tungsten and carbon for the drill bits to make holes in the PCB to mount it. There are various elements involved as well, like ammonium persulfate, hydrochloric acid, and ferric chloride, and it has other materials for packaging and protection like antistatic bags, conformal coating, conductive ink, and dialectric.

PCB is made with fiberglass, which is made of plastic and glass, which is made using heat and sand. It’s also kept together using epoxy cement or adhesive, which is made of resin and polyamine. Copper sheets are etched onto it using electroplating techniques, which include the use of electric currents, water, and metal. It goes through oxidation as well, using chemicals like SO4, which is a sulfate, or salt or sulfuric acid.

Because of these metals and plastics that go into making a PCB, the tablet, the pen, and puck in general, it can’t be thrown away when it becomes useless. It has to be taken to a recycling center to be “properly disposed of”, which then ships it across the country and to China to be taken apart. They use boats, planes, trucks, and all sorts of vehicles to move it around. That in itself takes a lot of fuel, which contributes to pollution.

When the tablet is dismantled in China, the only parts that are saved and recycled are the precious metals, like gold and nickel and such, but the other things like plastic are trashed. The bad working conditions means that workers will have health issues, such as malnutrition and exposure to toxins in the plastics they are working with. The poison also contributes to pollution and contamination, both of which lead to lowered fertility rates and birth defects, and, often, death. Due to these effects, the population of China is altered in a negative manner.

Despite its small size and seemingly simple construction, the tablet is a complex thing comprised of multiple parts, which are comprised of even more parts. These impact the environment and economy through the numerous methods of creation and transportation, as well as the toxins and gases the products release as they are manufactured, so it’s a large contributor to pollution. Its production is the source of poor working conditions, low labor cost and income, health issues and lack of help, and indefinitely, the death of hundreds and maybe even thousands of people who live in the electronic wastelands of China.

The Cove Commentary

            This documentary The Cove was definitely made to bring awareness to the dolphin slaughters in Taiji. It proves its argument, that it is inhumane and cruel, through various shots of the actual slaughter. It focuses on the techniques used to kill the dolphins as well as the town’s resistance to let the knowledge of it get public. There are many instances of the fishermen provoking the camera men and such as well.

            The “protagonists” of the movie are trying to stop this injustice, and they make it clear on why. Some of the reasons are that dolphins are intelligent creatures that are dying every year by the thousands, that it’s unhealthy for people to eat dolphin meat since it’s laced with so much mercury, and that dolphins shouldn’t be held in captivity since they will die from so much sound surrounding them. Experts and activists are filmed explaining why they die, why there’s so much mercury, and why they were hunted so fervently. They are talking mostly when idyllic images of jumping and swimming dolphins in shining blue seas are filling the screen, trying to show something worth saving.

            The movie was meant to make the audience watch intently as the secret operations took the screen and gasp and cringe in horror when they see the waters turn red. They chose the shots they did specifically to make an impact. They wanted to show how dangerous it was in Japan to try to gather the evidence that they did, how they were watched every moment so they couldn’t do much, how it really was possible for a sea of blood to exist, how heartbreaking it was to hear the dolphins cry. They explored the effects of it, the foreshadowing of bad outcomes like a plague of Minamata disease that had happened before in the past. They showed grotesque images of deformed and sick and dying people. They showed dolphins floating with their bellies up in aquariums because they metaphorically bled through their ears and to their death.

            It tries to show the fishermen and town officials’ points of views, but they show them as people who make up excuses to continue the dolphin slaughter practice because it makes good money. It probably doesn’t show that the fishermen are poor or not doing well and they need jobs like this to survive. There are other points of views that should have been explored more, like the people in Tokyo and the other big cities in Japan who knew nothing about the dolphin slaughter. Did so few really know about it? They should have interviewed more people and found statistics.

            However, the film certainly educates about how dolphins act and react to humans naturally, and it reveals the practice in Taiji that most of its audience probably didn’t know about before. It brings light to a dark matter that most would rather remain ignorant to, but it certainly got a lot of limelight and now it seldom can be ignored. What people have changed their lifestyles because of this, or become active?

Weed pictures

Reading Questions

How exactly can eating locally not be better than eating globally? I saw something about the cost of production, how trucks use more gas than trains, but I don't quite understand.