Paying Attention

Listening to the World

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I discovered this long after the day that the world listened. World Listening Day 2020-08-18 in Portland, OR was one of many World Listening Project recordings.

The World Listening Day 2020-08-18 in Portland, OR talks about the experience of making the recording. It also has a link to the recording he did last year. If you have trouble listening to his recording, it is ambient noise, on his site you can listen here on the Internet Archives.

Or you can list to other places on the World Listening Project. It’s fascinating stuff. They describe it like this,

The Collective Field

There is something new afoot. The field itself is changing.

The creature world knows.  The creative one does too. 

So what does it mean now to listen? How do we express what we know?

Be alert.

Individually and in concert,

There is sanctity in it.

Amid new conditions, travel the field and explore

By call and response

The rhythm within. 

How does your song fit

Within the collective chorus?

Getting Local Again

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When I first heard of Amazon when Terri Gross interviewed Jeff Bezos on Fresh Air, 1994?, 1995? Books delivered and discounted. I left Powell’s Books, my local bookstore that never discounted. Those were days of $100 visits for Books! Books!

Amazon would save me a lot of money. Take that greedy Powell’s!

Now Bezos is the richest guy I hear of. The kind of guy that looks for things to spend his money on. I’ve left Amazon. I’ve quit paying the Amazon tax. Not all purchases are local. But they are closer to the person that makes it.

US State Covid Stats

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A friend of mine from Ohio asked “What are infection rates like in Oregon these days?” And immediately I thought of “What’s it like in Ohio?” I could say it was OK here. But is it? And how much better or worse is it? I DuckDuckGo‘d it to see what I could find out. Their response at the top of the list was CDC. And they had it.

What was found in early August 2020
(Images were joined together for this post.)

Looking at the last two lines, Cases and Deaths / 100k, we see that it is almost twice as high in people with Covid. And their death rate is almost four times higher. Ouch. No wonder he went on to write “‘m fairly disappointed that there’s so many people who, for whatever reasons, are not acting in the best interests of public health and safety.” Boy oh boy, I can only hope for him.

If you’d like to compare the states in US, visit this CDC site. You’ll have a map like this one.

Covid cases per 100k people

You can compare Total Cases, Cases in Last 7 Days, Cases per 100,000, Total Deaths, or Death per 100,000. Move your mouse over the map to check on different states. You’ll get something like what I used in the beginning.

As a last word: Wear A Mask. It really isn’t that hard. Make more states like Maine or Vermont and less like Arizona or Mississippi.

Anthropocene Reviewed

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It only happens once a month. It is John Green speaking about things he finds interesting. (Read more about him here.) Anthropocene Reviewed describes and rates the topic of the moment.

My favorite was Tetris and The Seed Potatoes of Leningrad. Though Hot Dog Eating Contest and Chemotherapy and You’ll Never Walk Alone and Jerzy Dudek are close contenders.

You can listed to my favorite here at this WNYC Site. Or listed to it here:

You can listed to it there on on your favorite Podcasting App.

Pick Your Sources

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Without naming names, consider these two descriptions:

Overall, we rate [redacted] Right-Center biased based on international reporting that slightly leans left and Right biased for Indian national news reporting. Therefore, on the whole, we place them Right-Center. We also rate this source mixed for factual reporting based on poor sourcing.

verses

Overall, we rate [redacted] on the left side of Least Biased based on infrequent stories that favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting based on transparency and proper sourcing of information.

Which would you rely on? Which do you trust?

This is, for the record, writing from Media Bias Fact Check. I understand that some readers may consider that source in itself biased. It is widely cited by people who need to know. However, they are described as “amateurish”. (I am troubled by them describing the source as amateurish, without looking at the work they produce.) Compare this site with Ad Fonts Media, source of The Media Bias Chart. That chart is analyzed by a team of people from a wide range of the spectrum. It is also praised. For better or worse the Media Bias Fact Check site and the two places I referred to are not rated.

If you want to know about something, look it up with a news source listed in The Media Bias Chart. There is plenty of reliable, and biased, places that cite unreliable sources.

It is the best you can do.