Remember how we've been hearing lately that scientists believe global warming is occurring much faster than even the worst-case predictions of a few years ago? Well, those crazy scientists are always getting things wrong. It turns out global warming is occurring even faster than that. Greenland's glaciers are melting more than twice as fast as they were in 1996.
You know what? This just doesn't even bother me anymore. I think I've reached the limit of bad news I can assimilate into my brain; it couldn't possibly get any worse than it already had been. Either that, or I've already made peace with the fact that we've got about 50 years of relative normalcy before this starts causing worldwide social upheaval (forget about learning Chinese; if you want to live in a place with a reasonable climate 50 years from now, start learning Inuktitut!) Either way, I just sort of shrug my shoulders and say, "oh, more impending doom. How 'bout that."
Hey boys and girls! Remember back in the late 90's when your friends were talking about the free internet service from NetZero? You know, back when everyone was on dialup? What, you don't remember you used to have your phone line pluggged into your computer, and you'd have to make it dial... oh, phone line, you ask? See, back then, we had these things called "landlines"... well, we didn't actually call them landlines, because we just called them phones, but... oh never mind.
Anyway, if you're still living pre-Y2K and need a cheap way to get internet acces, you'll be happy to know that in NetZero, you have an ISP that is also living in the 90's. I'm talking, of course about their server-side browser detection. You get a completely different page if you visit their home page in Opera vs. Firefox. This practice has long been considered deprecated by the new generation of CSS/object-detection snobs, but it just can't be beat when it comes to re-creating that feel of those heady, not-so-early days of the Internet.
God bless the Japanese. They, along with possibly the Brits, seem to be the only country in the world that is taking the threat of global warming seriously as a nation. If everyone in the whole world were to take it as seriously as they do, we might have a snowball's chance in hell of avoiding the end of civilization as we know it. Here in the good ol' U.S. of A., I think most people are kinda-sorta concerned -- the importance seems to rank somewhere between the progress on the search for Natalee Holloway and how good of a hunter Dick Cheney is -- but not enough for anyone to make any sacrifices over it. That's someone else's job.
The WP article is relentlessly upbeat about what a bang-up job the Japs are doing, while some of the data points are of dubious significance: take the fact that motorists in Kamiita shut their engines off at stoplights (stupid, IMHO), or that Tokyo's "cool biz" campaign saved enough electricity in the summer months to power a city of 250,000 for one month. What does this really mean? For it to mean anything, well, meaningful, I need to see what the percentage reduction is, not some irrelevant illustrations I can't get into my head, but I suspect that such reductions amount to 10% or less, at the cost of a whole lot of discomfort (though at least they're losing the ties, which is a good thing in itself).
But alongside these questionable things come some very impressive, meaningful numbers and facts. Japan accounts for 48% of the world's solar power generation. That's about half, folks. That means that for every kW/h generated in California, Arizona, Israel, England, Italy, Mexico, Brazil or anywhere else, one is generated in Japan. The U.S. produces 15% of the world's total -- under par compared to our share of global energy consumption. Japanese steel factories make steel with 20% less fuel than U.S. factories (and 50% less than Chinese ones).
Incidentally, I was going to post about the Lovelock article when it came out, but I think it just depresssed me too much to even have the energy to blog about it.
Required linguistics humor reading: A Roguish Chrestomathy - The Wrathful Dispersion controversy: A Canadian perspective.
I was just investigating the Opera Web Browser for work purposes, trying to find the latest version available for Linux. Their download link detects your OS, and offers the matching version of their browser. And, yes, they have a version for Linux on PowerPC!
I always assume any piece of commercial software that claims to support Linux doesn't support PowerPC unless it's from IBM, so I never bother to check. But I've made that mistake before.
To bad I only have 77 MB of space free on the ext3 partition on my iBook.
From: Bob
To: $BOBS_BOSS
Subject: Re: FW: Bob Schmertz
On Feb 1, 2006, $BOBS_BOSS wrote:
>On Feb 1, 2006, $HR_CHICK wrote:
>> Hi $BOBS_BOSS,
>>
>> Is Bob leaving $COMPANY? Just a rumor. I know you'll tell me. Thanks!
>>
>
> Bob?
>
Yes, but I should be back in about 25 minutes with my sandwich.
I am very excited that there are finally some rumors about me.
[Editor's note: no, my company doesn't do bottom/interspersed posting; message has been reformatted to read better in the blog entry. Also, some of the names have been changed.]
