Pic of the Day... (and workout frustration)

I have been neglecting my workout posts. In truth, I have been neglecting Bodyrock workouts in favour of hours of walking (or hiking). Gotta finish up some grading...then Bodyrock can start anew. I am happy to say that I ate really well in DC. I ate fruit, ate organic on occasion and did my best to stay away from heavily processed foods. On a different vacation I might have chowed down on fast food every night... Thank you, clean eating!

On the downside, working out frustrates me. I know it should be about how I feel, but I am pretty caught up with how I look. I am less concerned with how much I weigh (muscle weighing more than fat and all that) though I have to admit that sitting around waiting for the last six pounds to do something - anything - is annoying.

So...with all that said, I thought I'd post pics of cute chubby things, comfortable in their own skin(s), with more important things (i.e. climate change, habitat loss, species disruption etc.) to worry about.  (A day at the zoo is a workout, too!)

These pics are from my zoo, not Washington. :)

Matschie's Tree Kangaroo

Geocaching adventures!

My bf and I have been talking about giving geocaching a try for a long time now, but as is typical of us, we just never got around to it. This is partly because geocaching requires a GPS unit and as we rarely drive anywhere (we have lovely commutes!) an investment in a GPS unit seemed a little frivolous.

With the recent purchase of our (arguably unnecessary? :)) new phones however, we finally gained access to a GPS system and thought we'd give it a go. We were really surprised to find that the Nexus One has a really accurate system and that made our first adventure a lot of fun. Here are some pics of the first two caches we found - also taken with the Nexus One camera. (I have to say, after waiting ten years to buy a new phone... I think I'm going to love this!)

Geocachers typically take a lot of photos. The friends and family I've got that also geocache love to do so with a little buddy in tow. We thought it appropriate to bring along Scooby Doo...since his forte is solving mysteries! Here's Scooby with our first cache and the logbook.  A great find (and just challenging enough for first timers.)

The second cache was pretty tricky. For one thing, it's outside of a subway (so I'm pretty sure we weirded out a lot of bystanders.)  For another thing, there's a corridor of hydro electric lines pretty close by that obscures GPS readings. The person who placed this cache had to take several readings and average out the coordinates.  Nexus One pulled through though! It was "off" by less than a metre!

As you can see, this one was nicely camouflaged!   :)

For more info, check out the following:
Geocaching (wiki)
Geocaching.com (official)

Things I've shot...

A couple of other pictures from the park... (I went again today). :P

Woodpecker

Cardinal...This guy was hard to shoot he was so high up!

An unexpected sight...

I am not a birdwatcher but I want to be. I guess that's sort of an odd hobby for a twenty-seven year old cosmetic fanatic but it is what it is. :P

We happened across some interesting birds at the park today. I can't be any more specific than to say that one is a hawk and the other a woodpecker. The hawk in particular was hard to capture because it was so high up. I'm pretty happy to have spotted it at all though. :) If anybody knows what they are, please let me know!

Something more common, but I don't know what this is, either!

Earth Hour 2010: March 27th 8:30pm (Local time)

It shouldn't come as any surprise to see me posting this. Do you participate in Earth Hour? How 'green' are you the rest of the year?

The Trouble with GDP

Kurt Kleiner provides an overview of the problems associated with using the Gross Domestic Product  (GDP) as an indicator of true societal wellbeing in Is Life Getting Better? in the Winter 2010 issue of U of T Magazine.

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"What you measure affects what you do" (Joseph Stiglitz).

I am surprised it took us this long to figure it out.  Granted, asking whether or not life is getting better requires us to devise new and unique ways of measuring well-being.  After all, what is "well-being" if not measured by economic prosperity?  On what basis do we measure notions of "success" or "progress"?  How do we account for well-being at all if economics cannot be used to devise indices?

Kleiner asks much of the same questions as he recaps a recent report commissioned by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and the findings are hardly groundbreaking. The GDP, while great at establishing a basis for the comparison of world economies fails to include in its calculations goods and services which are not paid for (e.g. housework or parenting).  It also fails to account for income distribution within society as a whole, effectively allowing income disparity to exist unchecked and unabated.  This is hardly surprising since the main purpose of the GDP has simply been to measure the total (economic) value of goods and services produced within a given country with little attention to much else.

Stiglitz and Sen (and by extension, Kleiner) were demonstrating the fact that the "unhealthy obsession" with the GDP masked many of the underlying signs which would have pointed to the recent global economic weakening. The article goes on to indicate that  in response to the recognized fallibility of the GDP, several attempts have been made to measure collective societal well-being.  Indices such as the UN Human Development Index provide an analysis which combines both GDP with health and education.  Other indices of arguably questionable veracity such as The Happy Planet Index measure things like "subjective life satisfaction" or "national happiness".  (Maybe it's just the titles that are throwing me off.)

As a student working to situate my interests somewhere in the realm of (international) environmental policy, I am most interested in the ways in which the GDP fails to account for environmental "goods"  (benefits) or"bads" (disbenefits). As Kleiner states, "GDP...doesn't include value judgments about how or why money is being spent. So if a steel manufacturer creates huge amounts of pollution, the cost of the steel it makes is added to national income but the harm from the pollution  doesn't show up as a debit." In theory, these new indicators (such as the Green Gross Domestic Product) would incorporate pollution or the benefit of clean water and air in their calculation of well-being but  even this requires that we unpack the problematic term well-being.

[H]ouse M.D. "Everybody lies."

So just what is well-being?  Is it an equitable concept amongst individuals and can it be extrapolated across the spectrum of society? Kleiner asks whether well-being and happiness are terms that should be conflated.  By extension, he also asks whether well-being is a "set of good life circumstances...associated with a subjective feeling of happiness"?  How do we know when people are happy?  (Kleiner gives a nod to psychology's field of "happiness studies", but I am reminded of [H]ouse's adage: "Everyone lies".)

My own interest takes this one step further and asks how environmental indicators can be folded into measures of happiness and conversely into measures of well-being.  I would argue that NIMBYism plays a large role in our ability to tolerate (and even accept) certain types of environmental disamenities. To that end:

Are you happy?
How happy are you?
Does your environment (natural or otherwise) have an impact on your happiness?
How would you measure well-being if not through GDP?