Green Options

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1. You care about wellbeing, but you still smoke. Give yourself 1 point.

Over 40% of Korean men smoke. And this is the good news. Before the recent wellbeing trend, the number was almost 60%. Smoking seems less common among Korean women.

2. When you eat cow you call it cow. Give yourself 1 point.

Koreans love meat and the don’t mince words when talking about it. You’re not eating “steak” and “prosciutto;” you’re eating “cow” and “pig.” Especially popular are variations on galbi, which ranges from Korean BBQ to stir-fried meat and hot peppers. There are, however, a modicum of vegetarian and even vegan restaurants in Korea.

3. You ride the bus and the train, but you still love Hyundai. Give yourself 2 points.

This week, we’ve explored public transportation around the world. To wrap up, we searched the world for the funniest and most unusual public transportation. This is what we found.

Levitating Monorail, Germany. An electric car? Cool. An electric train? Awesome. An upside down electric monorail?? Now that qualifies as unusual public transportation. Believe it or not, this transit system was built over 100 years ago. While Ford was fidgeting with his “quadricycle,” the city of Wuppertal built this transportation marvel that still appears ahead of its time today.

It’s a zero emissions, all electric transit system, and it floats through Wuppertal (the self-styled “German San Francisco”) with over 20 million passengers a year. Photo: Flickr

Mae Klong Train Market, Thailand. Yes, those are train tracks running through that market. One of the shortest train routes in Thailand is also one of the most bizarre. Ambling past windmills and salt flats, the train stops halfway through its route at a river. Right, no bridge. So, people get out and ferry across to a second train, which picks up where the first left off. But wait, it gets better…

In order to arrive at the Mae Klong station, the train must pass right through the middle of a crowded street market. Vendors quickly pull in their stalls several times a day as the train goes by. For an excellent account of the journey, read Steve Van Beek’s article on the Tourism Authority of Thailand website or this article at 2Bangkok.com, or see this video. Photo: Thai-Blogs.

I couldn’t pass this one up. That ugly little fellow in the Reuters photo is an electric eel, and it’s powering lights for a Christmas tree in a Japanese Aquarium.

In a video from Reuters Television, which is available at the bottom of this story, two aluminum panels inside the eel’s tank act as electrodes, capturing the power needed to light the tree. Kazuhiko Minawa, who thought up the idea, spent two months devising [...]

This is another of those “I thought I’d heard everything” articles, and it comes to us from Australia. Medical expert Associate Professor Barry Walters has proposed a $5000-plus levy on each new baby born, and an annual carbon tax of $800 for each child in the family. His proposal, according to the article on News.com.au, says Walters idea would tax every family with more than two children to pay for trees that [...]

Well, the residents of that Swedish community have been fighting with the National Heritage Board for a new name, or at least a return to the old name. Globalization has apparently led to rude English-language associations that residents of this small community could live without.

The whole thing apparently started in the 1930’s when the spelling of the name changed from Fjukeby. Embarrassed and finally tired of all the jocularity, a committee of [...]

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes a new study that finds yet one more way in which we humans can screw up the environment: get divorced.

Actually, as weird as it might sound at first, the discovery — published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – makes perfect sense once you consider the typical result of divorce: two people and, possibly, [...]

Well, I’ve read it all, and just after I thought every possible dumb thing had been reported, along comes an article in this week’s TIME Magazine that made my jaw drop.

Community and homeowners associations across the country are trying to ban the use of clotheslines in their communities. According to the article, they seem to think clothes drying in the sun are an eyesore, and could well affect property values. Hello? [...]

Daylight savings is one of the bane’s of my existence. Granted, I’m not the sunniest person around to begin with, so my ability to acquire further “banes” is possibly a negating factor in describing my dislike of DST. But I want to stress this; daylight savings is simply not worth it.

Luckily for me, I’m not alone in my views. And additionally, I’m backed up not only by science, but by environmentalists as well.

Now, granted, it isn’t as if I actually make use of the daylight savings. I work from 1am to 9am each day, and have about an hour or two on either side. But there are those who encounter daylight savings as it was originally intended, and many of those – at least in the UK – are causing an increase in unnecessary greenhouse emissions.

Dr Elizabeth Garnsey of the Department’s Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) and Brendan Cronin a student in the Department on the MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development are the brainchildren behind the most recent study (pdf) to discuss daylight savings.

What they are positing, through their research, is that unless you live in Scotland, there is virtually no reason why you should put your clocks forward (or back… or forward… whatever). Putting the clocks back results in “more traffic accidents and higher, more costly, evening peaks in electricity consumption than would occur on British Summer Time, also known as GMT+1.”

Consider the logic behind your daily routine. You wake up, and unless you’re a super morning person, you’re pretty much drowsy until your morning-tea/coffee. Due to the current system in the UK though, you get an extra hour of daylight to be drowsy in.

By the time you are a little more alive and finish work, you’re still more likely to go for a walk, hit the gym, and play with the kids. But that is put out of the question because the light has disappeared, because you already had it in the morning.

Looking further and environmentally in to the equation, you see how this impacts the environment. Winter is freezing the door down, you’ve gotten home from work, and the sun’s gone. What’s your first instinct? It is, naturally, to put the heater on, put the lights on. This causes a surge in the power requirements that force the companies to revert to their back up power stations, that are inherently less environmentally friendly; the oil-fired power plants for example.

How far would you go to stop Global Warming? Or does that question not make sense — for one would go to the ends of the earth to save…the earth. It’s for the future generations, right? Our children’s children we proclaim and thus we compost and recycle and wear organic hoodies. However, there is a point where technology may go too far, as it is bound to do. The future we seek to protect could be a horrible one at best. Enter artificial life to protect the environment, move to designer babies and Gattaca becomes a reality. The technological imperative: if we can do it, we will.

From the article:

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

Sperm Donors R. U.S.
By: Anthony J. Gerst

Vladimir Putin, Russia today has more money than sense. Your nation is besieged with problems. For example, the average life expectancy for men in your nation is 59, compared to the women at 72. Apparently this is caused by a discrepancy in personal habits, as Russian men suffer extensively from the hair of the dog, Vodka.

Just last week you came out with the ‘father of all bombs.’ Really, can’t you be more creative than that, and stop the juvenile, bullying activity of international one upmanship. Russia is not a world power, deal with it. Sorry, I can’t help but wonder about all the money spent on developing this toy, and the good applications it could’ve been applied too. You have the largest nation on the face of the planet. Yet, you only have a population of 143 million and that is rapidly declining. I heard today where you are going to have a national “GET BUSY,” holiday. Any couple who has a baby nine months later will receive a car as a prize. Your birthrate is 10 per 1000. You have a fertility rate of 1.3 births per woman and in order to maintain a stable population you would need 2.1, somewhere along the way you lost .8 of a child. Your death rate is outrageous at 15 per 1000, due primarily to the alcoholism that runs rampant throughout the men in your society. Your nation’s death rate is expedited by an inadequate health care system, which suffers because of misplaced spending on a military engine. Wow, does that sound familiar.

So here, let me help you out. We need to create a company, ‘Sperm Donors R U.S.’ Send over a fancy Lear jet and pick up ten highly screened men and fly them back to Russia for two weeks. Volunteers, I repeat, Russian women who volunteer and would like to have a child without the annoyance of a husband to raise, will participate in this program. Set it up so two women a day spend twelve hours with each man, of course you had better have a supply of enhancements on hand. Make a competition out of it, better yet a reality T.V. show, you could run several episodes a year. At the end of two weeks the team with the most confirmed pregnancy’s wins, give the lucky ladies three years of tax exemption, providing your citizens pay taxes. When the babies are born, provide two years of baby food and diapers, or a new car. In case of a tie you can have a pay-per-view showdown. In one day, twenty-fours, one woman per hour and the men will ‘get busy.’ You can run a nationally sanctioned gambling event on who will impregnate the most women. Who will last and how long, etc. etc.? At the conclusion send the boys home on a cruise ship, as they will need plenty of rest.

Considering however that you average 13 abortions for every 10 live births, you could simply make it more difficult to obtain an abortion. Not to mention you could offer better benefits for having a second child. Really, a national day for an orgy, the men will be falling down drunk, the women frustrated and the next day, nothing is going to get done accept lying about the great lays of the day before. The inept actions of governments the world over never fails to amaze me.

Our once prudent enemy of the cold war successfully tested “the dad of all bombs” - the world’s most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered weapon. However, this bomb is very special, it doesn’t hurt the environment. Rest in peace, that body parts will now lay among intact shrubbery. Isn’t that wonderful! If global warming doesn’t completely wipe us out, at least we have the military industrial complex of the rich and powerful to guide us toward impending doom. In the end, the world is made up of men with big toys and small…brains.

Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech: Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war — as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years — I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

From the CNN article:

It was the latest show of Russia’s military muscle amid chilly relations with the United States.

Channel One television said the new weapon, nicknamed the “dad of all bombs” is four times more powerful than the U.S. “mother of all bombs.”

“The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability,” said Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, a deputy chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, said in televised remarks. VideoWatch Russian bomb test »

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn’t hurt the environment, he added.