From the BBC, by way of Greenpeace, I stumbled across this scary graphic:
Just looking at the graph, that’s about a 50% growth in the proportion of young ice versus older ice. The graphic doesn’t portray absolute figures, just percentages. But since we know the ice cover is shrinking overall this means that older ice is disappearing faster than young ice or that young ice is “replacing” old ice, or something like that. Whichever way the actual values point, it’s a bad sign.
A funny post on the Greenpeace blog, about their presentation at the recent CeBIT show. They reference an article in The Register talking about the show. To summarize the article in one quote, “a refreshingly frank IBM spokesman said energy consumption had been driven up the agenda because power costs had been driven up the P&L”. It’s a shameful fact, but it’s true, that our IT businesses are still businesses: motivated by money rather than altruism. This will be the case as long as the environment remains an economic externality.
Recently, President Bush vetoed the Intelligence Authorization bill because it made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding as an interrogation technique. Tomorrow the House of Representatives is expected to vote in an attempt to overturn that veto.
Please contact your Congressional Representative tonight and ask for their support overturning Bush’s veto. Below is the principle text of a letter from my wife and me, which I just faxed to my Representative Russ Carnahan. It is short and to the point. Feel free to use it in part or in its entirety.
We are writing to ask you to stand up to the Bush administration and to stand against waterboarding and other forms of torture. Please vote to overturn the President’s veto of the Intelligence Authorization bill.
For more information on waterboarding, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding and http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/index.html
We watched the movie Seraphim Falls the other night. I recommend it. The ending was a bit surreal… All I will say is that the main characters make a devil’s deal, and through it find redemption. But that’s not why you should watch Seraphim Falls.
The reason to watch Seraphim Falls is the acting of Pierce Brosnan, whom in the first 15 minutes will make you believe his pain is real, so much so that you will almost feel it yourself. From then on the story starts to come together, as you understand the loss, pain, and hatred that the characters feel. By the final scenes you will wonder how this story could possibly end well. But when it does finally end, it makes sense and feels as if justice has been served, somehow.
“Maybe netizens are too busy enjoying the new social and cultural freedoms offered by the internet to care about politics.”
-from The Economist, as quoted in this post to the Intelligent People mailing list
Quotes
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