The Invasion has Begun

Once every 17 year, these little critters emerge for a very short lifespan: their sole objective: procreation.

Question: Why do they stay underground for 17 years? (5/2004)Answer: There are a number of theories. Most likely they've developed this rhythm to avoid predators. Climate events -- perhaps the Ice Age -- are also factor.

More info here

Populations of the periodical cicada species are synchronized, so that almost all of them mature into adults in the same year. The fact that periodical cicadas remain locked together in time is made even more amazing by their extremely long life-cycles of 13 or 17 years.
Periodical cicadas are found in eastern North America and belong to the genus Magicicada. There are seven species -- four with 13-year life cycles (including one new species described in 2000), and three with 17-year cycles.

WHAT TO DO IF A NUCLEAR DISASTER IS IMMINENT!

Begin storing water IMMEDIATELY! and more useful tips in case of nuclear disaster

Lack of clean water will devastate your family much more quickly and more severely than any lack of food. Without water for both drinking and continued good sanitary practices in food preparation and for bathroom excursions (which will inevitably be much less sanitary than normal), debilitating sickness could rampage through your household with little hope of prompt medical attention. That is a highly likely but, avoidable, disaster, ONLY IF you have enough water.
Source: http://www.ki4u.com/guide.htm
Note: remember to print the guide as, in the case of this scenario, your computer will no longer work...

West Antartica - NASA Finds Vast Regions Melted in Recent Past

NASA - NASA Finds Vast Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past: "NASA Finds Vast Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past"

For those of you who've seen "An Inconvenient Truth", there's a scene in the documentary where A.Gore talks about a big chunk of Antartica that's melting: here's the proof by NASA...

Where have U been?

Optimum Population Trust - a British charity wants you to have no more than 2 kids!

pic source
Being a young proud father of 2 kids and planning for #3, I found myself dumbfounded by the latest communqué from these creepy Brits - the Optimum Population Trust : on the news last night was the statement that choosing to have a 3rd kid was the equivalent of pumping additional greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere of approx. 620 round-trip transatlantic plainrides!

These creeps base their theories on Luddite, Club of Rome & Club of Lisbon post-Malhtusian freakonomics...

For more guestimates on current population size: see the US Census at http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html (it stood at 6,593,737,707 at the time of this post)

• should we feel guilty?
• should we feel guilty that we do not live in a 3rd world country?
• should we feel guilty that we're able to get up in the morning?
  

Sarkozy wins landslide French elections

Presidential elections in France have a tendency to be a high-octane political thriller with last-minute landslides - see notably our post on the 2002 elections, and especially the 2nd tour which positioned outgoing Chirac against right-wing Le Pen. This 2007 Sarko-Ségo race turned into a spectacular fight between 2 highly-coached expert communicators: the right one have the advantage/disadvantage of coming out of an outgoing government, the other being a very eye-candy camera-pleasing socialist woman who happens to be married to France 1st Secretary of the Socialist Party.

A part from the very interesting televised debate and the spitting confrontations over the last months; commentators agree that the Socialists went too far in diabolizing Mr.Sarkozy and even menacing that there would be riots if he was elected...

One should, in politics, always try to master his temper and this is exactly what Mrs. Royal lost, thinking she could outrace Mr.Sarkozy with her image of "Mariane saving the republic"...

In the end, Mr. Sarkozy on La Concorde last nigt reiterated his campaign goals:
- work work work
- pas de droits sans devoirs
- la France m'a tout donné, il est maintenant temps que je lui rende tout.

Sidenote: as a son of immigrants, Sarkozy can permit himself to adopt staunch measures on criminality etc... In this position, he is much harder to critizise than e.g. Le Pen.

Climate Change: "Six steps to hell"

"Six steps to hell"
April 30, 2007

By the end of this century, Earth could be hotter by 6 degrees centigrade than it is today, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Just how bad would that be? Mark Lynas sifted through thousands of scientific papers for some answers, by degrees.

summary of the article found here

• 1° warmer: new dust bowls in the USA, a Greener Sahara (?), Alpine melt-off in Europe
• 2° warmer: plankton wiped out; increased old-age die-offs in Europe's heatwaves (remember 2003 with 30.000 surplus deaths?); Greenland icecap meltoff resulting in global sealevels rise by 7 (!) meters; Alpine meltoffs in South & North America resulting in huge water shortages and ultimately: mass deaths
• 3° warmer: tipping point where we would no longer be able to control climate warming: possible Amazon forest burndown in massive firestorm which would tip the world right away into the 4,5° warmer scenario. Sub-tropic population will migrate to mid-latitudes due to extreme wheather events that threathen foodsupply. Sub-Sahara Africa and Australia become inhabitable.
• 4° warmer: worldwide permafrost meltdown unlocking massive carbon storages to be released in the atmosphere; no more North Pole Ice; Antartica partial melt-off will result in another +5 meters increase in worldwide sea-levels. Great Trek North in Europe due to 45+° temperatures in the Southern parts
• 5° warmer: Ocean Blurp and Massive Tsunamis: methane (a more powerfull greenhouse gas) is no longer trapped in the oceans and is released into the atmosphere.
• 6° warmer: ref to the end-Permian wipeout of 251 million years ago. By the end of this calamity, up to 95% of species were extinct. The end-Permian wipeout is the nearest this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock drifting through space. major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Obesitas has reach global epidemic proportions (WHO

While a staggering number of people are living on less than 1 dollar per day, an increasingly large number of large people is sufferin from obesitas... According to the World Health Organization, the obesity problem has reached epidemic proportions. The statistics are alarming:

• Globally, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, at least 300 million of them obese.
• Worldwide, 22 million children under age 5 are estimated to be overweight
• Obesity and overweight pose a major risk for chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer. (World Health Organization)
• Although many think of obesity as affecting only industrialized societies, over 115 million people in developing countries are estimated to suffer from obesity-related problems. Among the affluent and the impoverished alike, the obesity epidemic is an extreme manifestation of the problem of malnutrition.

Plant a Billion Trees Campaign 2007 (UNEP)

Happy to announce that we've completed our pledge of planting 10 trees (salix alba - knotwilg)in 2007. Camille proved to be very resourcefull: we know enjoy our weekly "aperitieverkes" near them, come rain or shine !

“The symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.” Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign. Under the Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign, people, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments are encouraged to enter tree planting pledges online with the objective of planting at least one billion trees worldwide during 2007.

Facts & figures: Forests cover 30% of land

World Environment Day 2007

World Environment Day 2007, June 5

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II has released its Summary for Policymakers

Extract for EUROPE from the IPCC WG II Report (April 2007)
Nearly all European regions are anticipated to be negatively affected by some future impacts of climate change and these will pose challenges to many economic sectors. Climate change is expected to magnify regional differences in Europe’s natural resources and assets. Negative impacts will include increased risk of inland flash floods, and more frequent coastal flooding and increased erosion (due to storminess and sealevel rise). The great majority of organisms and ecosystems will have difficulties adapting to climate change. Mountainous areas will face glacier retreat, reduced snow cover and winter tourism, and extensive species losses (in some areas up to 60% under high emission scenarios by 2080).

Earth Day Special: stepchange!

April 22, 2007 is EARTH DAY
Find out what you can do on http://www.sierraclub.org/earthday/

What We Will Do next Sunday (and the rest of the year)

• turn off electrical equipment and kill the "sleep" modus on a number of appliances
• share rides (amazingly, this morning again, the proportion of the vehicles that I've spotted in my usual traffic jams that had a sole occupant was +85%)
• buy a new bike soon for every member of the family
• eat more "local" food
• recycle more

Schwarzenegger to enviros: Make the environment SEXY !

at a recent meeting in Washington, Austrian-Californian Gubernator Schwarzenegger told a gathering of environmental activists: "stop nagging, make it sexy... just like bodybuilding"...

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told environmentalists Wednesday they
needed to stop nagging and make their cause sexy, likening it to bodybuilding's
evolution from a weird pursuit to mainstream.

"Bodybuilding used to have a very sketchy image," the former bodybuilding
champion told an environmental forum at Georgetown University. "... It had
fanatics and it had weird people. ...But we changed that. ... It became sexy,
attractive."

"Like bodybuilders, environmentalists were thought of as kind of weird and
fanatics also, you know, the serious tree huggers," Schwarzenegger said.

Ipod FM Transmitter: no longer illegal in Belgium!

Net binnen: het BIPT heeft een aantal maatregelen genomen waardoor het niet langer onwettig is om een fm-transmitter op uw IPOD te installeren zodanig dat je je autoradio erop kan afstemmen... Dit was dus regelrecht illegaal!!! en nu niet meer. voor de geïnteresseerden, op 88,5 FM kan je in Brussel nog rustig zenden, enkel wat storing in de buurt van het Madou-plein, maar voor de rest picobello ontvangst...

P.S. Het BIPT zou er beter iets aan doen om de ontvangst van radio's in de Brusselse tunnels te verbeteren, of in elk geval de verkeersinformatie wat beter te laten doorstromen. (Enfin, die zou eigenlijk beter ook eens deftig geregulariseerd moeten worden...maar dat is stof voor een volgend artikel)

I thank you for challenging me

M.Manson gets "challenged" in this Fox news story. Quite interesting video interview of a shock artist getting his morals questioned by modern-day crusaders

Dialects, Languages...dialectics

One of the tests people use to differentiate "language" from "dialect" is
mutual intelligibility. You can say that people speak the same language -- or a
dialect of the same language -- if they understand each other. If they don't
understand one another, they must be speaking different languages. That seems
like a good rule. So why, in a case like the Cologne and Bavarian dialects,
which aren't mutually intelligible, don't the Germans call them separate
languages? Or why are Swedish and Norwegian separate languages, when Swedes and
Norwegians have no trouble understanding one another? It's really pretty
confusing.

source: The 5minute Linguist

(B)rain man

Meet Daniel Tammet, a 27 year-old math and memory wizard. He can do things
with numbers that will truly amaze you. He is a savant. . . with a difference.
Unlike most savants, he shows no obvious mental disability, and most
importantly, he can describe his own thought process.

The Canary Database: animals as sentinels against biohazards

There was never a logo as beautiful as this, and an even prettier endeavour...

Can animals - like canaries in coal mines - warn humans about chemical, infectious, and physical environmental hazards? Find out more on the Canary Database - a joint undertaking by Yale and the USGS.

Legaal bloggen - juridische valkuilen voor weblogs (in Maatschappij > Juridische zaken @ iusmentis.com)

Op deze site krijg je meer info "Legaal bloggen - juridische valkuilen voor weblogs": http://www.iusmentis.com/maatschappij/juridisch/bloggen/:

Link via een mede Brussel Blogt Redacteur (http://www.rewinder.be/2007/02/mea-maxima-culpa.html)

Zo krijg je er een duidelijk antwoord ivm:

Ben ik aansprakelijk voor wat ik op mijn weblog zet? ==> JAZEKER!

How to go green: Reuters Renewables weblinks

Source: http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12287

February 26, 2007 — By Sylvia Westall, ReutersLONDON --

The idea of renewable energy at home is no longer as distant as an offshore wind farm. More companies are waking up to the popularity of green energy and the Web hosts many sites showing steps people can take -- or gadgets they can buy -- to use renewable technology, from renting a solar panel to burning calories with a pedal-powered washing machine.

CLEAN LIVING
- To make the case for energy efficiency, the European Commission provides a carbon calculator and suggestions on how to cut down on energy use, including tips from celebrities. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/index_en.htm
- In Australia, the government provides an informative site on green suppliers, appliances and eco-friendly lifestyle options. http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/education/tips/consumers.html
- Going one step further, the Web sites of international charities Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are home to definitive green guides and feature daily tips from members of the public. http://www.greenpeace.org, http://www.foe.co.uk/living/tips/index.html

POWER HOUSE
- For homeowners wanting to make a serious commitment to green power, the U.S. Department of Energy provides useful calculators to add up the savings from devices like solar heaters: http://www.eere.energy.gov
- If buying a solar panel sounds daunting, customers can rent one at http://renu.citizenre.com/ The company says on its Web site that over 5,000 people have already signed up for the scheme in the United States and the manufacturing plant has not even been completed.
- British home improvement store B&Q launched a range of roof-top wind turbines and solar panels in September. The devices, which are available from around 1,500 pounds ($2,923), can be bought at http://www.diy.com
- Customers across the globe can visit http://www.surfacepower.com and find out about total renewable energy systems in the home.
- Even people on online auction site eBay are in on the act, offering solar panels and wind turbines to bidders: http://www.ebay.com

HANDBAGS AT DAWN
- It may not be Prada, but the solar-panelled handbag can recharge mobile phones and music players on the go. Designed by Joe Hynek, the 'power purse' comes with a designer price tag of $300, but is an unusual accessory for the environmentally conscious: http://www.solarjo.com
- Backpackers can also tap into the trend for a fraction of the price thanks to Unison Light, a company which offers solar panel backpacks from around $35: http://www.globalsources.com
- The wind-up radio is still going strong after its invention 12 years ago. The Web site http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com offers wind-up phone chargers and radios from 30 pounds.
- In the home, ambitious environmentalists and health fans can eliminate two chores in one with a pedal-powered washing machine. Details are available at http://cyclean.biz

GREEN HOUSE
Energy suppliers are falling over themselves to flag up their green credentials, but switching to a supplier which invests in renewable technology does not always mean customers receive green energy.
- The Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S provides consumers with detailed information on green power investment at http://www.epa.gov/greenpower and encourages companies to show non-renewable energy the door.
- In Europe, www.greenprices.com lists green suppliers and their credentials, making choosing a supplier a breeze. The Web site says that often a simple phone call is enough to switch to eco-friendly power.

POLITICAL POWER
Governments can provide backing to green consumers who may be worried about burning a hole in their pocket bigger than the one in the ozone layer.
- State-by-state cash incentives in the United States feature on a database at http://www.dsireusa.org, while in Britain the low-carbon buildings programme offers grants for devices like solar panels and turbines. http://www.lowcarbonbuildings.org.uk
- On a wider scale, http://www.climatecare.org gives details of how to offset carbon emissions and funding for renewable devices in countries including India.

Links to the Web sites featured in this article, and to other renewable-friendly pages, are available on the social bookmark site http://del.icio.us/reutersrenewables

Celebrity Environmentalists

February 26, 2007 — By Jill Serjeant, Reuters LOS ANGELES --
Source: http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12288

Whether it's forsaking a gas guzzling limo in favor of driving a hybrid car to the Oscars, or fitting their homes with solar panels, many celebrities embraced green causes long before they became fashionable. Just as a famous face can sell a perfume, stars of stage and screen can sell a cause and scores of them are doing more than merely putting their money where their mouth is.

"Whether it's fashion or cultural trends, the entertainment industry has the ability to communicate to a global audience ideas that set forth actions and create change," said Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association which promotes green issues through the entertainment industry. "Early adopters, like Cameron Diaz, led the way and now with everyone from Kirsten Dunst to Maroon 5 to Will Ferrell driving hybrid cars, (it) sends the message that it's cool to think and buy green," Levin said.

Following is a list of some of the leading green celebrity players:

- ROBERT REDFORD: 30 years on board of Natural Resources Defense Council, founder of Sundance Preserve, winner of 1993 Earth Day award, 1987 United Nations Global 500 award. In April 2007, launches weekly three-hour slot called "The Green", dedicated entirely to the environment, on his Sundance TV channel.
- LEONARDO DICAPRIO: started the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998 to promote environmental issues, drives a hybrid car, currently writing and producing a feature length documentary on global warming called "11th Hour".
- BRAD PITT: co-creator of design competition to build 20 affordable, reduced energy, environmentally friendly homes in New Orleans.
- STING: founder in 1989 of Rainforest Foundation to protect rain forests and their indigenous peoples.
- HARRISON FORD: vice chairman of Conservation International, has a Central American ant named after him, won the Global Environmental Citizen Award in 2002.
- DAVE MATTHEWS BAND: offsets CO2 emissions produced by their multi-city tours by funding projects such as tree plantings and wind turbine construction.
- AL GORE: former U.S. vice president whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" was Oscar-nominated, also nominated for 2007 Nobel Peace prize.
- PIERCE BROSNAN: focuses on marine mammal and wetland protection, headlined Natural Resources Defense Council campaign against effects of Navy sonar on whales, awarded 1997 Green Cross International Environmental Leadership Award.
- CATE BLANCHETT: plans to equip Sydney Theatre Company building with solar panels, rainwater collection systems to make it completely eco-friendly. Sydney home is fully powered by solar energy, donates to Forest Guardians.
- EDWARD NORTON: launched the BP Solar Neighbors Program in 2003 which matches each celebrity purchase of a solar energy home system with a solar installation in a low-income family home in Los Angeles.
- DARYL HANNAH: arrested in June 2006 for staging a 23-day tree sit-in during a bid to preserve an urban community garden in Los Angeles, traveled across America in 2005 in a biofuel car, home is entirely off-grid.
- RICHARD BRANSON: Virgin Group chairman, a former global warming skeptic, who in Sept. 2006 pledged to spend all profits from his airline and rail businesses (estimated $3 billion over 10 years) on investments in biofuel research and projects to tackle emissions.
- ALANIS MORISSETTE: given 2003 Environmental Media Association Missions in Music Award; campaigns against oil drilling in Alaska; has solar panels on home.
- KT TUNSTALL: ran her US tour bus on biodiesel fuel, performed at eco-friendly "Golden Green" at the 2007 Golden Globe awards in Los Angeles.
- JOSH HARTNETT, ORLANDO BLOOM, MAROON 5, KT TUNSTALL: promoting 2007 Global Cool initiative to cut carbon emissions by encouraging people to turn off TVs, mobile-phone chargers and other energy-draining gadgets.
- JAMIE OLIVER: celebrity chef, plans to power his Cornwall, England, restaurant by wind turbines.
- NEIL YOUNG: 2004 North American tour fueled entirely with biodiesel.
- WILLIE NELSON: singer, co-partner in the Willie Nelson Biodiesel Company.
- BARENAKED LADIES: run their tour buses and trucks on biodiesel fuel.

Drivers of hybrid cars include: Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron, Carole King, Kirsten Dunst, Billy Joel, Tom Hanks, Will Ferrell, Julia Roberts, Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Alanis Morissette, David Duchovny, Patricia Arquette, Jackson Browne, Larry David, Danny DeVito and Bill Maher.