This is not a tag line!
environment
Don’t mess with my Beaufort!
Sep 6th
Global warming might alter the taste of cheese as the flora is evolving because of warmer conditions, affecting the cows diet. First, less snow (or at least, it isn’t sticking as long as it used to), now different tasting cheese! Is it going to impact everything I like >_<?
And, yes, I am well aware there are a lot more important consequences (too numerous to list her) to global warming than my selfish little desire of being able to snowboard in deep powder and eat good Alpine cheese afterwards… but it just keeps adding up and getting more personal. Maybe, people will eventually start to care when they feel the impact more directly. And let’s face it, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better soon…
Catching up…
Apr 13th
I’ve been spending some time tonight catching up on articles/blog entries that I flagged for that proverbial later, “when-I-have-more-time” time during my daily passes at blogs I read. Unfortunately some of these articles have been waiting for quite a bit (though the ones presented here are still relatively recent) that I am afraid I won’t be able to properly acknowledge where I originally saw a mention to said article…
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New Lessons from the Old World : The European Model for Falling in Love with Your Hometown by Jay Walljasper (possibly via WorldChanging): a very neat article that puts in words things I had been thinking about US cities, how lifeless most of them appear compared to European cities I have been to. Sprawl must disappear for people to enjoy cities once again, for them to be able to shop and do everyday stuff without having to take the car…
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Information Overload by Scott White, which echoes many of my everyday concerns (see above
) about how to deal with the ever increasing amount of information that asks for my attention…
It’s good to finally be able to close some tabs in NetNewsWire, cause of much of my information overload since it remembers tabs across application restarts and rarely crashes, despite still being beta, something that is both a gift and a curse!
About Energy Conversion
Apr 12th
Imagine if exercise equipments in your local gym were retrofitted to convert the kilos/pounds you’re trying to loose into energy that can then put to good use somewhere else (preferably locally as well). That’s exactly the goal of Notions of Expenditure, a project for speculative proposals to re-design exercise equipment to generate and store energy; and/or to retrofit gyms to function as local power sources linked to the grid
.
Enormous amounts of energy are currently expended in gyms all over, while people are trying to improve their fitness/image. Why not use that energy instead of letting it go to waste, unused? Get in shape while alleviating your energy bill and the environment! What a great idea!
Endangering the future for today’s sake
Oct 19th
Lawrence Lessig recently said that our kids are in big trouble. And indeed, they are: we live in a society where profit now is more important than suffer later. Who wants to think about what’s involved in sustaining the comfort of our current way of life?
Technology shelters us from what’s required to make stuff work or what happens after we use and discard something. We want everything now and without effort. Everything is mostly transparent: things just seem to happen without us realizing our actions’ footprint be it ecological, economical or whatever.
I am as guilty as the next guy: it’s so much easier not to think about the consequences, live in the present and hope I won’t have to face the potential issues of my acts. Not thinking about how to make things better instead of just living in the present and hoping everything will be alright. Not thinking about the consequences to avoid being crushed by guilt…
The Optimist from the album The Optimist LP by Turin Brakes (ironic, isn’t it?)
Europe to be affected by global warming more that the rest of the world
Sep 9th
Wired, in a recent article, explains that global warming is most likely going to affect Europe more that the rest of the world.
I don’t have strong data but empirical evidence (i.e. my own experience) suggests as much. I have had the chance of going skiing/snowboarding in the French Alps since a young age at least a week every year. I’ve seen first hand the decrease in snow fall. I have also spent most of my life in Paris suburbs and summers are becoming less and less bearable, especially when using public transportation. I was in Paris as the beginning of June and experienced a bunch of unusually hot days. Commuting from Paris during rush hour in the R.E.R. was not the most pleasant experience due to the fact that the system is not air-conditioned.
As mentioned in the Wired article, since no-one argues (anymore) that temperature is globally rising, Europe needs to get ready for warmer and warmer climate. This is something I’ve talked about with my friends here and there in relation to my recent experience in Paris: hot summers are becoming the norm, not the exception they used to be and Paris is definitely not suited for warmer summers.
Hopefully, it’s not too late to try and reverse this trend (though climate changes have strong inertia): very selfishly, I would like to enjoy nice runs down the French Alps mountains for as long as I’ll be physically able to and enjoy nice summers in Paris… More, if I ever have kids, I would like them to be able to enjoy these same things. Shouldn’t we try to leave the world in better shape than we received it from our elders for the next generations to enjoy? Is is even possible with all the short-term, R.O.I.-oriented thinking? An approach adapted to profit-oriented society, such as the one presented by Scott Barrett (via worldchanging), is probably needed. Making money while helping the environment is not necessarily incompatible…
Feels Like Home (Featuring Meshell Ndgeocello) from the album Kish Kash by Basement Jaxx
In case you were feeling cheerful today…
May 14th
Kurt Vonnegut wrote an article about the sad state of the world we live in… I have been nursing similar thoughts for some time now but I usually lull myself in whatever I can find to avoid being too depressed too much of the time. It’s so difficult not to feel helpless sometimes.
Then again, that’s what happens when you don’t have the guts to go with your ideals: it’s easy for me to feel sorry about myself and then go back to watching animes or cycling or whatever and just forget about everything so that I don’t have to feel too guilty about driving by myself in my car to work everyday or just generally do nothing (or so little) to improve the situation…
Not to worry about me though, I’ll be back to ignoring the facts just about… now!
Betalogue and Mr. Barrett.
Earth Day
Apr 22nd
Today is Earth Day. A day to give Earth a break… like a day is going to be enough. For one thing, I haven’t seen it advertised that much to the point that I almost didn’t know it was today, which says something about its efficiency. Sorry if I’m being cynical… but I am not the only one who thinks that it’s time to shake up Earth Day (via WorldChanging).
On the same topic, I found interesting links on sustainability via IDFuel.
It’s Earth Day today!
Earth and Mars
Mar 9th
Wired has an article on scientists in the US complaining about the attention Mars gets when so much research and work needs to be accomplished on Earth. To quote one of them:
Real oceans need scientific attention more than the dried-up remnants on Mars, Earle contends.
I have been thinking the exact same thing. While I understand the fascination and future importance of space exploration, we might never get enough time to really start exploring our universe if we can’t take care of our own planet well enough to sustain us while we do so.
To criticize even further: what is the point of space exploration? Knowledge? Anything that increases knowledge is good. However, when resources are limited, you need to prioritize what you want to study first and one would think that our planet is most important. Finding new inhabitable/terraformable planets? What for? So that we can go there and pollute another environment? If we had the means to re-create an habitable environment on another planet, wouldn’t it be more worth it to try and fix what’s wrong with ours (assuming we understand it well enough to not make things worse)? And how about the 3/4 of the population who couldn’t care less about Mars when the next lunch/dinner seems so far away?
Another approach on the same problem (resources, especially financial ones, are scarce and we need to prioritize their use): the (controversial) Copenhagen Consensus (currently down) project initiated by Bjorn Lomberg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. The idea makes sense but is there really a way to assess cost/benefits when so much is a stake (in particular, millions of people lives) and so much more is to be understood about our environment’s complexity?
Black Letter Days from the album Black Letter Days by Frank Black & The Catholics
