Pinging Whales

[the situation: The House passed a resolution congratulating the N.Y. Giants on winning the Super Bowl. A fellow student sent out and email to the school informing us of the House Resolution. He received an email in response that asked why he would waste people's time with such an email. This is my response...]

I think the question may be "why would the U.S. House of Representatives waste time with this."

But that is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that there are several people at this school who are Giants fans who may be interested to know that the U.S. House of Representatives formally recognized their teams' ascension to the pinnacle of their profession. Add to those Giants fans people who are football fans in general, and you have a small group of people that are very interested in the information Mr. Naumiec and Mr. Davis had to disseminate.

Are these people a small portion of VLS students? Yes. But is there a minimum percentage of people that need to be interested in information in order for it to be transmitted? 30%, 25%? If we could get these hard numbers in the next email policy, that would be great, those of us who are in the minority would like to know when it is proper to share our interests with the community as a whole.

Maybe it is a level of importance that is required in order for news to be deemed "everyone email worthy?" I humbly submit that the NFL is a billions of dollars a year industry, employing tens of thousands of people, and that the news in question was an act of Congress. I think that on both these counts the information presented is much more important than "free doughnuts in Chase."

For every email that gets sent out, there is going to be somebody that doesn't like it and/or doesn't care. Recently, an article was sent out concerning sonar activity of the U.S. Navy, specifically the tactic of "pinging," and it's effect on whales. Not only do I not care about whales, I find it hilarious that the U.S. Navy had been accidentally killing whales with their sonar. In fact, I think "whale pinging" should be a sport. (Although I did think of this idea myself, and I'd like to take credit for it, I find it hard to imagine a world where Dick Cheney has not already thought of this.) I didn't send the well-intentioned sender of information that was useless to me an email asking how intelligent, talented people could be wasting their time with whales while wholesale murder is happening on the streets of our nation's poorest neighborhoods. I scratched my head in wonder about how much some care about whales, and continued to use the internet as is was meant to be used; to find pornography.

Also, we need more parking.

(P.S. Seriously, what's the deal with whales?)

Here is the story