- Fashion Lollies
- Forever blowing bubbles
- Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny
- Sticky
- Contraception
- Corner Frame
- 8-Bit Hippity-Hop (Gold Digger’s the best IMO)
- Memento Mori
- Domo arigato
- Holi
Categories
Month: March 2009
Snapped by the Hubble telescope this is a pretty rare thing to be able to see. From left to right we have:
- Enceladus – named after one of the Gigantes, Enceladus has water ice on its surface and could have liquid water too which raises the possibility of it supporting life
- Dione – is apparently named after an archaic Greek goddess/Titan who might be Aphrodite’s mother (though I was fairly sure Aphrodite was born from Uranus’s genitals and not much else), Dione also has surface ice and ‘wispy terrain’
- Titan – named for the Titans is the only body in the solar system (apart from Earth) that appears to have stable bodies of surface liquid (methane)
- Mimas – named after another Gigante, Mimas kinda looks a bit like the Death Star
Categories
Undersea Eruptions
Photos of an undersea volcano eruption near Tonga:
In a happy instance of pareidolia it’s quite easy (at least for me) to anthropomorphise these into some sort of vengeful Polynesian sea god, or Typhon rearing out of the sea.
Or you can ignore my mumbo jumbo and just enjoy the power of nature.
Categories
“But you can’t keep it up that long anyway”
Not really want you want a co-worker to say to you (luckily it was about masking tape rather than my sexual prowess) but it did bring this to mind:
After this week’s earlier revelation that making an organic cotton t-shirt requires 10,000 litres of water, you can now get a better idea of how much water you really use each day with a graphic GOOD have published giving an idea of part of an average person’s daily water footprint and how it can be reduced.
The ones that leap out at me are:
- A bottle of soft drink (half a litre) uses 165 litres of water in its production, as does a single egg
- Tea requires a quarter of the water that coffee does
- And beef weighs in at 15000 litres of water per kilo
To put some of the information in context, Wikipedia’s article on Water Footprints tells us that:
The global average Water Footprint is 1240 m³ water/person/year. The Chinese average is 700 m³ water/person/year one of the smallest in the world and the United States’s 2480 m³ water/person/year is the largest in the world… The water footprint of the UK is 1695 m³ water/person/year.
A cubic metre is equal to 1000 litres so the average person in the UK uses 1.7 million litres of water a year.
The term Water Crisis refers to, “the status of the world’s water resources relative to human demand.” And I think the fact that it’s called the water crisis gives us an indication that we don’t have fresh water in abundance. The entry lists some of the consequences of the lack of (and uneven distribution of) fresh water including the inadequate access to safe drinking water and water for sanitation and waste disposal, its effect on agricultural yields, the harm to biodiversity caused by overuse and pollution and warfare caused by scarcity of water, but for a scary statistic how about:
At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from waterborne diseases. According to the World Bank, 88 percent of all diseases are caused by unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
Categories
What’s Next?
A series of articles from TIME looking at where the world’s going – the entry on Africa has some good info on trade vs aid:
In 2006, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign investment in Africa reached $48 billion, overtaking foreign aid for the first time. That gap has only widened, reflecting a quadrupling of foreign investment since 2000… War is down. Democracy is up. Inflation and interest rates are in single digits. Terms of trade have improved. Crucially, said Nellor, “growth is taking off.” The IMF puts Africa’s average annual growth for 2004 to ’08 at more than 6% — better than any developed economy — and predicts the continent will buck the global recessionary trend to grow nearly 3.3% this year.
I think the Ecological Intelligence entry is probably the most important though:
But ecological intelligence is ultimately about more than what we buy. It’s also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Goleman highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. “We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts,” says Goleman. “Not anymore.”
Also slightly scarily:
[Coke] uses 5% of the world’s total sugar crop
That’s something like 7 million tonnes of sugar.
(via kottke)