Electric Cars (in Europe)

French plan green postal service [BBC] - the French postal service is going to start using electric cars to deliver mail.

Warming 'very likely' human-made

While flipping channels, I noticed that a Republic Congressman from the Denial Machine was on Larry King last night, but wasn't rebuked.

Today, the BBC says [Global] Warming 'very likely' human-made.

No More Fish?

...this century is the last century of wild seafood... The BBC has an article about the rapid decline of fisheries: 'Only 50 years left' for sea fish.

It reminds of Collapse, by Jared Diamond, which I just finished reading. It talked a lot of over fishing, over logging, soil erosion, pollution, over populating, etc. It's a good book.

Interesting Articles

A few interesting articles:

• Google's unknown artist has huge following [CNN] via Slashdot


• This cabbie needs no map [Toronto Star] via Funkaoshi


• Tut's gem hints at space impact [BBC]

West African Black Rhino Extinct.

Extinction fear for black rhino [BBC] - one of the six species of rhino in Africa is now extinct.

Assorted Interesting Articles

• I finished reading The World Is Flat this weekend. I thought it was good book. So I found BBC's brief comparison of China and India (as well as the US), which shows things like GDP, population, literacy, etc. with projections out to 2050, interesting.


• The Chess Olympiad started this weekend in Turin. I can't find any results on the "offical" website, but an Austrian site has a good level of detail - Team Canada Results shows them at 1-1 after 2 rounds and the individual results are given for each round.


• New York Times: Slim Margin Seems to Signal Montenegro's Independence. The EU and Serbia & Montenegro decided to use 55% as their threshold for separation. This reminded me about the whole debate surrounding 50% + 1 during Quebec's last referendum.


• Slashdot has an article Bloggers are the New Plagiarism complaining about bloggers who quote large blocks of text and don't add value. Sometimes I do that [1], but most of the time I do not [2 and 3]. My thinking is that I only quote blocks from the original article, when I think it's an valuable article, but it's from a news article that is likely to disappear (i.e. Checkout all the broken links to the LA Times in [1]). Without a copy of the pertinent parts of the article the post has no context or value. Is that a reasonable rationale?

An Inconvenient Truth

The documentary An Inconvenient Truth comes out in a couple weeks. I want to go see it. It's about lectures Al Gore has given about climate change and the enviornment. The BBC has a short article about it: Politician Gore appears at Cannes.

Dolphins Have Names

BBC: Dolphins 'have their own names'

Dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by name, scientists in Fife have found.

Cool.

Climate Change

Kyoto accord won't hurt economies: Clinton [CTV]:
...

...the U.S. isn't one of the 157 countries that have signed onto the Kyoto accord...

But Clinton encouraged the delegates to press on.

"There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities. We are uncertain about how deep and time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear that they will not be good," said Clinton.

He put down the main U.S. fear about Kyoto -- that it would hurt the economy by chaining it to greenhouse gas reductions that were not achievable.

That claim, he said, "was flat wrong."

"And we know with every passing year we get more and more objective data (that) if we had a serious disciplined effort to apply on a large-scale, existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies -- we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economy," said Clinton to applause from the delegates.

...

Inuit sue US over climate policy [BBC]:
...

Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at about twice the global average.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a vast scientific study which took four years to compile, found that the region will warm by four to seven degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with summer sea ice disappearing within 60 years.

...

"The United States is the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter; it has turned its back on the Kyoto Protocol and has not put in place measures to limit its emissions," said CIEL's senior attorney Donald Goldberg.

...

The petition asks the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate the harm caused to Inuit by global warming, and to declare the US "...in violation of rights affirmed in the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and other instruments of international law."

...

The End Of The Jungle Book Too?

From the BBC's Apes 'extinct in a generation':

...

"All of the great apes are listed as either endangered or critically endangered," co-author [of 'The World Atlas of Great Apes and their Conservation'] Lera Miles from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre near Cambridge told the BBC News website.

...

"The great apes are our kin," [UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan] writes. "Like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools, politics, and medicines; they can learn to use sign language, and have conversations with people and with each other.

"Sadly, however, we have not treated them with the respect they deserve."

...

London

What We Still Don't Know

The BBC has made a list of What we still don't know (in response to the identity of Deep Throat being revealed). It's an interesting idea to ponder. However, the list is somewhat British (and a few items are fickle, such as the HP6 reference).

What do you think they left out from their list? (I'd go with the alleged 1947 Roswell UFO crash...)

Random

Canada won 3-1. :-)

100 things we didn't know this time last year is an interesting article from the BBC. Some highlights:

2. Farmers plant their crops up to three weeks earlier than 15 years ago. In the 1960s, temperatures from January to March averaged 4.2C; it rose to 5.6C in the 1990s.

This is a little distrubing. Especially since some people (e.g. George Bush) are Global Warming deniers.

19. The collective noun for rhinos is "crash".

Better store that one away for future use during Trivial Pursuit.

62. The founder of the Natural History Museum, Sir Richard Owen, was the man we have to thank for the word "dinosaur", literally meaning "terrible lizard".

The Natural History Museum is cool. I was there in May.

68. Bill Clinton revealed in his autobiography that he didn't learn to ride a bike properly until he was 22.

That's just plain funny.

70. And reports of UFOs have dwindled since the late 1990s. In the UK, sightings have gone from about 30 a week to almost zero; it's a trend echoed in the US and Norway.

Whom do you report a UFO siting to, exactly?