The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields,” played instrumentally by Andy Timmons:
The Andy Timmons Band’s newest CD, Andy Timmons Band Plays Sgt. Pepper, came out this Tuesday and is available here.
Published October 28, 2011
Marc F. Bellemare Posts
Published October 28, 2011
The Meaning of Hockey
I know it’s a little bit late for National Coming Out Day, but I have a coming out of my own to make.
I am Canadian, and I don’t like hockey.
I don’t dislike the sport. It just leaves me completely indifferent. In elementary school, I would remain silent while my friends would discuss the previous night’s game during our morning walk to school. In secondary school, the annual hockey module in our PE classes was always the least interesting to me. And since I moved to the US ten years ago, I must have left many a would-be acquaintance scrambling for new topics after I replied in the negative to their “You’re Canadian? You must like hockey!” or “You’re from Montreal? Patrick Roy, man…”
All of which really means that this article from by Stephen Marche in The Walrus — the closest thing to The New Yorker in my home and native land — deserves all the accolades it can get. Indeed, although I have no interest in its subject matter, I read it with considerable interest from beginning to end:
Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering
The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.