Brian.Carnell.Com

PR Week ran a short profile in September of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Bruce Friedrich. As PETA’s director of vegan outreach, Friedrich is responsible for many of PETA’s more outrageous public relations campaigns.

The article by Anita Chabria was generally favorable to Friedrich, nothing that, “No matter where you fall on the political scale, most people are aware of PETA’s efforts, due in large part to its innovative and relentless public relations.”

On the other hand, PETA does not usually receive the sort of publicity that most organizations would like to receive. Yes, people are aware that PETA thinks there is no qualitative difference between the Holocaust and animal agriculture, but PETA’s “Holocaust On Your Plate” campaign has hardly turned out a new wave of vegans.

Which doesn’t bother Friedrich at all. He tells Chabria,

I believe that how we present animal rights and veganism to journalists or civic leaders should not differ in any substantial way from how we would present it to our friends. I try to apply the golden rule beyond the species barrier. I think the chickens would want us to not worry about winning popularity contests, but rather to worry about what we can do to alleviate their suffering. We at PETA have an attitude that we would rather go too far than not far enough.

Certainly you will not find any criticism of that strategy here. The more PETA spends on campaigns likening animal agriculture to the Holocaust or meat eaters to serial killers, the more it will remain marginal and help ensure the animal rights movement remains marginalized.

Source:

PETA PR man Friedrich practices what he preaches. Anita Chabria, PR Week, September 22, 2003.

In September, the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for vandalizing a laboratory at the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine.

Animal rights extremists broke into the Inhalation Toxicology Research Facility and destroyed computers and other equipment in the lab as well as splashing red paint throughout the lab. Damage estimates put the cost of the vandalism at several hundred thousand dollars.

The lab conducts research on cigarette smoke and other toxins that can contribute to cardiovascular and respiratory disease. An e-mail from the ALF taking responsibility for the destruction said, “It should be clear that animals do not deserve to be tortured and die in this pointless research.”

Sources:

Vet school lab at LSU damages by vandals. Associated Press, September 25, 2003.

Sabotaging lab wrong approach. The Advocate (Baton Route, Louisiana), October 1, 2003.

Animal rights group claims it trashed LSU lab. Michelle Millhollon, The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), September 25, 2003.
FBI investigates Vet School break-in. Samantha Sieber, The Reveille (Lousiana), September 25, 2003.

In September, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled that a Utah hate crimes law challenged by an animal rights activist was constitutional.

Animal rights activist Eric Ward challenged the constitutionality of the law after he was charged with violating it back in November 1999. Ward set fire to a mink stole outside the home of the owners of a Salt Lake City, Utah, fur store.

Ward was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct which would normally be misdemeanors. Prosecutors, however, used the hate crimes law to bump the charges up to felonies. Both felony charges were later dropped and Ward was sentenced to 2 days in jail, 250 hours of community service and ordered to pay a fine of $1,850.

Passed in 1992, Utah’s hate crimes statue has generally been viewed by Utah courts as unconstitutionally broad since it does not define any specific classes of victims, but rather allows hate crime prosecutions to be brought whenever an person attempts to intimidate or terrorize an another in order to prevent the victim from exercising his or her constitutional or civil rights. Ward and his lawyer argued that this unconstitutionally impinged on Ward’s First Amendment rights.

Judge Kimball rejected that line of reasoning, writing,

There is no substantial overbreadth given the penalty enhancement nature of the statute. Under the statute, not only must the person commit an underlying offense during the protest or demonstration, but he must commit that offense and commit an act which causes the victim to fear for his physical safety or which damages the property of that person or another.

Sources:

Utah hate-crime law constitutional, judge rules. Angie Welling, Deseret Morning News, September 25, 2003.

Hate Crime Law Ruled Constitutional. Associated Press, September 27, 2003.

A lot of people seem to be discussing this post speculating about how much storage space would be required to store every word spoken by every human being who has ever lived.

Apparently the standard answer repeated in a number of publications is that it can be done with a mere 5 exabytes. Mark Liberman points out that this is off by a factor of about 32 million. But Liberman’s calculations are also off due to an inaccurate assumption,

Second, the storage requirements for all human speech. There are said to have been 1 billion people in 1800, 1.6 billion people in 1900, and 6.1 billion people in 2000. So let’s assume that 10 billion people have lived an average of 50 years, speaking for 2 hours a day on average throughout their lives.

That is not a very good assumption for a number of reason. First, it assumes that the majority of human beings who have ever lived are alive today. Like the 5 exabyte claim, this is a commonly repeated myth.

Estimating the total number of human beings who have ever lived is obviously an inexact science, but the Population Reference Bureau estimates that the actual total is likely to be in excess of 100 billion. The problem is that people tend to think (as Liberman does) in terms of relatively recent history.

Homo sapiens probably goes back to about 50,000 BCE, but population doesn’t really take off until the agricultural revolution around 8,000 BCE. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that between 8,000 BCE and 1 AD, more than 46 billion human beings were born. From 1 AD to about 1200 AD, about another 26 billion people were born.

Another factor that would have to be included here, however, would be average life span — especially given infant and childhood mortality rates that are still high in some parts of the world. Fifty is probably a bit too high (it’s not that people didn’t live to be 50 in the 19th or 12th or even 1st century, but that so many people died before reaching their fifth birthday).

But suffice it to say that the total storage space is significantly higher than even Liberman’s estimates.

Source:

How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? Carl Haub, Population Reference Bureau, November/December 2002.

PC Magazine’s Bill Howard has a short article about digital archiving of personal records, photographs, etc. The past few months I’ve been working on a personal project to digitize and get rid of as much physical material as I can.

It occurred to me back in August that today I spend about 60 to 70 percent of my waking hours on my laptop. When it comes to books, photographs, etc., for the most part if it isn’t on my laptop or external hard drive, it doesn’t exist.

The first thing I did was something that previously had been close to unimaginable — I got rid of most of my book collection. I’ve gone from about 1,500 books to about 150 books. For books that I really wanted to keep but hadn’t opened in awhile, I simply created high resolution scanned PDF copies with OCRed text so I can include them in searches with DTSearch.

Next, I used a sheet-fed scanner to convert tens of thousands of pages personal papers to high quality scans and then destroyed the physical copies. There were a few things like birth certificates that I really needed to have physical copies, but for most of this stuff it’s much more useful on my hard drive than in some box in my basement.

I’ve made a couple of attempts over the years to digitize all of my non-digital photographs, but I’ve just got too many to do on my own efficiently. In 2004 I’ll be paying someone else to digitize my images (despite what Howard claims in his article, if you do it in bulk you can get high -quality scans at significantly less than $1/frame).

One of the things that had me screaming in horror at Howard’s article was this tidbit about photographs,

You can help future generations by culling your digital photos now. If you can’t cut this year’s 2,500 digital images to 500, then create a 2003 Favorites folder and copy over your favorite 100 photos. A CD with those 100 photos makes a nice holiday gift for the in-laws. Make sure to annotate each picture, either in the filename or in the JPEG file information field: year, place, and people in the picture. Before culling, it’s probably best to make one full backup, in case you mess up and delete the photos you meant to save. Have I ever messed up like that? No comment.

Okay, I didn’t take 2,500 digital images in 2003 — it was more like 8,000 digital images. And the thought of deleting any of them is just ghastly, especially given how cheap storage is these days. Buy a decent photo management package like Photoshop Album 2.0 rather than permanently destroying information.

As far as analog video, I’m probably a bit extreme on this. I converted all of my analog video to DV and then imported the DV onto my laptop and then archived it on to several DVDs using RAR. I then converted all of the DV video to MPEG-2 movies then burned those to DVD-R. And then, just so I can have a local copy that is high quality but still clocks in at a decent size, I converted the MPEG-2 to DivX.