The Slurry

   This was a surprise to me, for I always have used the word "slurry" to describe a jumbled mix of things, as in a variety of fruits tossed into a blender would become a slurry.  In true definition, the word is quite specific according to one online dictionary: a thin mixture of an insoluble substance, as cement, clay, or coal, with a liquid, as water or oil; granted that other dictionaries are a bit more generous to basically say that it's a watery mixture blended with a powdery or gravelly substance, so my fruit blend just might qualify.  But I wasn't ready for this definition from the Urban Dictionary for the word, slurry: A meretricious woman.  A dirty little slutbag moll.  A whore.  A slut.  A woman of ill-repute.  A ho.  Okay, what happened?  Certainly I won't pretend to keep up with the most recent trends of those much younger than me but really??  Can a slurry of emotions or feelings be turned into something so negative that it takes the person right out of the person-ality?...have we really come to that?  Well, maybe.

    In a recent piece asking Is The American Idea Doomed (from a series in The Atlantic), it was said: Recent reports rank the U.S. 28th out of 35 developed countries in the percentage of adults who vote in national elections, and 32nd in income equality.  Its rates of intergenerational economic mobility are among the lowest in the developed world...It is no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promise -- and yet, the degree of their disillusionment is stunning.  Nearly three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War assign the highest value --10 out of 10-- to living in a democracy; less than a third of those born since 1980 do the same.  A quarter of the latter group say its unimportant to choose leaders in free elections; just shy of a third think civil rights are needed to protect people's liberties.  Americans are not alone; much of western Europe is similarly disillusioned.  As to civil rights, the 50th anniversary of the life and subsequent assassination of Martin Luther King is just now winding down; and before long the city of Montgomery, Alabama (where much of this movement began as marked by close to 60 Confederate memorials and an equal number of civil rights markers) will become home to the world's first monument honoring those black people who were "hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, beaten, or otherwise murdered by white mobs from 1877 to 1950."  And exactly how large will this monument be?  So far, the number of recorded killings by such methods is listed at 4,384 black men and women.  Eerily, as visitors walk past 816 columns of Corten steel (representing each county where such incidents have been documented) "the rust-colored columns will hang above them, a frank suggestion of dangling corpses." (the site is currently under construction, says the article).

    Anyway, perhaps I am out of touch with such moods and the meanings of words changing; but my definition of the word slurry remains as that mixture, a jumble of things so random and unrelated that soon you are unable to separate the pieces...recycled paper becoming pulp, fruits and veggies becoming juice, ants and humans becoming an unrecognizable blob when viewed from above.  In this case however, I was again thinking of my desk (or desks as my wife says since I do tend to scattered bits and pieces of reading onto whatever table is near).  Oooo, that sounds interesting I would think as I tear out the page and add it to a pile. Then once a month or so, I'll sort through it all and discover that some pieces are just too scattereed, not really trivial but not really ready for prime time.  Some people put all of this together into a cohesive blend (Bill Bryson comes to mind as he tackles At Home or the more expansive A Short History of Nearly Everything; and wow, what a treat it must be to not only get rid of all that miscellaneous information in an interesting and carefully-written way, but to get paid for it and to realize that others have actually enjoyed reading those little tidbits, carefully researched tidbits but still, tidbits).  I don't hope for that level of writing (sorry) and am a bit too lazy to blend it all together into a book since today's information changes so quickly.  Look into the past and voila it's successful; but try and get relevant information out there quickly enough and boy, you'd best be one fast writer with one fast publisher and one fast marketer or you're soon just old news.  So bear with me (yes, I did this before ) as the next few posts will bring a slurry of information  (and my sigh of relief).  Here's a couple to begin...

The ant-eating pangolin; photo from LRB

   Remember that piece on those scaly but lovable pangolins, the creature likely destined to be the next animal that we send into the nether world of extinction?  Here's what the London Review of Books had to say about them from an observer in the field: In Zimbabwe, folklore initially forbade the hunting of pangolin; latterly, though, the expansion of the Chinese market into Africa as Asian pangolins became increasingly endangered meant that rural communities have been offered an alternative (illegal) source of income.  A 2007 report in the Guardian quoted a chef in Guangdong on the means of preparation: We keep them alive in cages until the customer makes an order.  Then we hammer them unconscious, cut their throats and drain their blood.  It is a slow death.  We then boil them to remove the scales.  We cut the meat into small pieces and use it to make a number of dishes, including braised meat and soup.  Usually the customers take the blood home with them afterwards...Beijing customs have seized more than a tonne of scales being shipped into China; each tonne the equivalent of 1660 animals.  It is a fact so exhausting, so dreary and grotesque, that it’s difficult to fathom.  We consume beautiful things...Pangolins are more beautiful than seems plausible in this fallen old world; they look as though they should be strictly prelapsarian.  And they are in fact prehistoric; they are 80 million years old, in contrast to our eight million.

    Or jump back to my router and modem and all that jazz.  Our world is becoming (or already is) so connected that one of the newest hogs of both space and electricity are our servers (they run so constantly and so hot that they need vast amounts of cooling).  So how much power do these servers use?  Said a piece in The Week:  U.S. data centers consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014, representing 2 percent of the country's total energy consumption.  That's equivalent to the power consumed by about 6.4 million average American homes...There are thousands of data centers all over the world, though the powerhouses of the $250 billion cloud industry...run a few hundred truly massive centers themselves.  These centers, which can contain tens of thousands of servers each, account for a majority of cloud storage and traffic...Some estimates project data-center electricity demand could reach 13 percent of global electricity consumption by 2030.  Bitcoin alone is estimated to use about the same amount of power as the entire country of Ireland, says Forbes (more on the Bitcoin frenzy in that slurry to come).

   Phew, it's all a bit much isn't it?  Why it's enough to create a slurry of feelings and thoughts and emotions in one's head (and that was only a few things mentioned).  Sometimes you have to just hit erase and clear your head for a bit which is what my wife and I are doing, off to again to lose ourselves in the tall cliffs of the red rocks and to lose connectivity with it all (much as we love streaming, adding to those servers burning off more heat).  Mind the gap, as they say, that gap being a chasm in the U.S. and a step in the U.K.  Either way, we're going to mind the gap and somehow try to vanish for a week.  You should as well...unclick, unplug, recharge.  Help those servers cool down...like ourselves.