to injure rather than kill in order to increase the logistical support (evacuation, medical) burden on the opposing force

(Wikipedia)

There is a treaty to ban AP landmines. Embarrassingly enough, the U.S. has decided to not sign that treaty yet, finding itself in the company of states like Syria, Lybia and North Korea. But even once every nation signs that treaty, we’re still left with the fact that there are decades worth of “leftover” landmines from previous conflicts, causing about 7000 dead and casualties a year.

Cleaning them up, however, is an expensive and dangerous undertaking. Often, there are no plans at all indicating where the mines are buried exactly. That means they need to be located, either risking lives or requiring expensive equipment.

Thankfully, humanity has just gained an ally in that fight. Rats. No, seriously.

People have figured out that rats have a keen sense of smell, and, on top of that, are not heavy enough to actually trigger mines. As a result, they can move freely in mine fields, locating all mines by just the smell of the explosives. As a result, HeroRATS was born.

Yes, training the rats still costs money – but it’s less expensive than technical equipment, and it can be done locally, even in 3rd world countries. As for the money part, you too can help by adopting a herorat.

Of course, the question with all help agencies is, are they legit? As far as I can tell, yes. They are a Belgian NGO, and PBS did a report on them.

So, what are you waiting for?

How about you fire your marketing guys who cooked that up and invest in quality control instead? Maybe the next time when you “save” a few cents by importing the cheapest supply possible, you’ll at least detect the problems before vets need to alert you to them? Is that too hard a concept to grasp?

There are a couple of things I learned from this:

• The famed hypodermic needles lying around – urban myth, at least in Westwood.
• There’s a reason people who do this for a living use a tong, and not just gloves – my back hurts from only doing this 45 minutes
• Obviously, people are not really interested in their environment at all. The only people who commented were old or homeless. Or, as one of my colleagues put it, they were able to move slowly enough to actually notice their environment. Oh, and one middle-aged guy thought we were a chain gang.

But the main thing to take away from this:

Seriously. The amount of cigarette butts on the streets is insane – probably 75% of our total trash haul. Often you find it even in close proximity to ash trays. Which jives perfectly what I see from most smokers – just blithely flinging their trash everywhere. Even out of the car while being on the highway. (I had a couple of those land in my car, thank you very much!)

So please, if you have to smoke, do pay some attention to your environment and put your trash where it belongs, OK?

That’s not my forte, though. Instead, I’d like to ask a question: Why is the environment such a politically divisive issue?

Yes, we can argue about implementation details – but in broad strokes, we should all be able to agree, or so I think.

At the core of many of our environmental woes is the dependency on fossil fuels, namely oil. But oil isn’t an issue that should only speak to tree-hugging granola munchers like me. The issue of oil deeply affects national security. Our dependency on it is the cause for thousands of American deaths in the Middle East. Oil exports finance terrorism.

So why are we not pushing to become independent of oil?

Yes, it would require a lot of money, and a lot of hard work. But in 1961, when Kennedy suggested putting a man on the moon, that seemed like an almost unachievable goal too. At that point, we sort-of knew how to build rockets, and that was it. And yet, we managed – we got a man on the moon, in less than ten years. (On the day I was born, no less!)

We can achieve the same for oil independence. The benefits for the United States and the world would be immense. It means a significant blow against terrorism. It means the creation of new technology, of new jobs, and a new age of science. In fact, if global warming is indeed caused by humanity’s emissions, it could mean saving the world. Who could not support that?

But, as Kennedy said:

New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. The could in fact, aggravate them further–unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.

I give my pledge that I will do everything in my power to move this country forward towards oil independence, and I won’t let political interests interfere. Are you in?

Instead, it’s World Vegetarian Day – followed by “Vegetarian Awareness Month”.

The idea is to get you to at least try a vegetarian diet for a day, or maybe a week, or even a month.

There are plenty of reasons to do so:

• Beef production is a top source of greenhouse gasses
• Meat production is extremely energy-intensive
• Animal Farms are incredibly inhumane
• Rampant use of antibiotics in beef production
• From time to time, you get feces in your beef. Though, to be fair, that can happen with veggies too, if maybe less frequently. Remember the spinach last year?

I have to admit though, my reasons are much simpler, and much more selfish. I’ve been a “casual vegetarian” (i.e. I don’t freak if I have to eat meat) in the past, and I was simply feeling better and had more energy. Over time, I became more and more casual, and less vegetarian. I simply felt better when I was eating more veggies and less meat.

So I’ll use this as an occasion to give it another try, and see how it goes. I’ll report back at the end of the month. Anybody willing to join me?

The answer here is, we don’t lack public transportation. We lack decent public transportation. I love taking the bus, I take it whenever I can – but it still drives me nuts. Why?

• Schedules

  To say the schedule is unreliable is the understatement of the year. There is no real schedule. There is some approximation of one on the web sites, but even that only lists times for particular stations. Take the bus inbetween? Take a guess. And plan for some wait time – plus/minus 10 minutes aberrations are the norm.

• Drivers

  Many of the drivers drive like they’re crazy – either their gas/break is in dire need of maintenance, or they didn’t get proper training. Or maybe they mistake themselves for a reincarnation of Mario Andretti… To be fair, there are many excellent drivers, too. Once you become familiar with their schedules, you can arrange your bus trips around that – being catapulted about a bus is not my idea of fun. But as somebody just trying the bus for the first time, you will inevitably be riding with one of the nutcases. Probably some law of nature…

• Metro/BlueBus split

  So we have two bus companies servicing the same area, with slightly different prices. There are some rules when you can or can’t transfer between lines, but I couldn’t tell what they are. The pricing model of the two lines is different. They don’t accept payment from the other line – if you have a Blue Bus card and need to take a Metro bus, you better hope you’ve got quarters on you.

• Bus Stop organization

  Partially, this is an outflow of the split mentioned above, and partly this is just strange. At my home adress, I have three bus stations within 300 yards. First one: Blue Bus #2, and bus #20 – which I guess is part of Metro. It has different pricing, and it’s orange, so it can’t be Blue Bus. Right? (See what I mean about the confusion?) 100 yards further a stop for the Metro Express 720. Another 200 yards, and there’s another stop for #2/#20. Why do we need three different bus stops? Combined with the schedule being what it is, I have to divine which line is going to arrive next to pick the right station. Or, alternatively, stay at the second station and break into a mad dash to station three if I was wrong.

And the list continues. Public transportation in L.A. is certainly good – for a city in the U.S. Compare with Europe, and you’ll cry. A common suggestion is that we just need to educate people, and demand will kick in. That’s simply not enough – all the education in the world doesn’t fix the problems mentioned above. We need to fix public transportation – just repeating the mantra “It’s not so bad” won’t increase usage a bit.

And we can’t just make small fixes. To get people to switch between different experiences, there needs to be a significant gap between both experiences. Public Transportation can’t only be as good as a car ride, it needs to be a good chunk better.

Educating about the environment will only help a bit. Most people don’t think about long term impact when they make everyday decisions like “car or bus?”. So we need to give them a short term effect that they see right away – i.e. “Riding the bus is much more pleasant than parking on the 405″. That’s not entirely there right now.

Tags: Environment, Los Angeles, bus, Public Transportation

First, let’s get through the objections. Most importantly, this is only true while the Avatar is alive. (I.e. if you are logged in). I have an ‘Avatar’ on Second Life since at least two years ago, and I’ve never played her -so I’m fairly certain she is mostly a bunch of bits on a hard drive.

Second, his numbers are slightly off. He over-estimated the server count by a factor of four, owing to a confusing way Second-Life counts them. Then again, he underestimated the PC power side of the equation. As later clarifications in the comments thread show, the client side power usage actually dwarves anything that happens on the server side.

But a discussion of all these objections obscures the main issue here – running a computer is quite power-intensive, and using the Internet has an additional power footprint. If you played SL 24/7, it’s the equivalent of driving an SUV for 2300 miles. At the same time, it is not as intensive as many other tasks – if I drove an SUV 24/7, you’d hardly notice if I was playing SL all the time while driving it. (Well, except for my erratic driving…)

And this is where the main mistake with this piece lies – it’s easy to assume we wouldn’t use any energy if we weren’t playing SL, but we do. So the real question we should ask is this: “Are games a net-positive or a net-negative in terms of energy use?”.

I do believe that at least gaming with a social component (i.e. online gaming) is a net positive. You stay in contact with all your friends without needing to be there physically – and seeing my friends on a regular basis, for example, would take a lot more than 2300 miles. Online worlds like SL might fare even better, since many people also use it as a business place, they conduct meetings there, etc.

But what about playing locally? Is that still a net-positive? Not if I were a TV viewer instead – gaming requires me to switch on the TV and a game console. But let’s at look at the marginal increase over TV only:

The average gamer plays around 7.6 hours a week, according to an ESA study. The XBox360 – my poison of choice, and probably the most power-hungry console around – uses 160 Watts. That’s a total of ~63 KWh per annum. Or 1/30th of the annual electricity usage of a Brazilian.

Tags: SecondLife,Environment, VideoGames

I finally got tired of non-syncing, and, at the same time, didn’t want to really buy a new phone. So I figured I might invoke the power of eBay, and buy a cheap phone. Much happiness ensued when I found a dirt-cheap Treo 650 – except I didn’t quite read the posting. It clearly said it was a defective LCD screen and had no battery, charger, or other accessories. Yes, I know, not a particularly smart move.

Anyways: Now I’ve got a Treo 650 (without battery, a potentially broken screen, etc.). At first, I thought I might just find a battery and see if I can fix this thing up. But that would’ve meant spending a lot of time on fixing and hunting down parts, plus probably some extra expenses for spare parts. And time is the one thing I really don’t have – if I had the time to fix the phone, I would probably have the time to make iSync do my bidding. In other words – I’m giving up on the project.

Except – I’ve got a phone on my hands. And I don’t like throwing things away – I’ve got sort of a green bent. (Blame Green L.A. Girl…). So here’s the question: Would anybody out there (preferrably in L.A.) like that phone, for fix-up or spare parts, or whatever else you do with old phones?

check your assumptions … save a lot of money For many of you, it certainly is. Two-hour bus commutes are certainly not a fun idea. But it might be worth checking your assumptions – it’s not only a good ecological idea, it also might save a lot of money. You’ve got monthly car insurance, gas prices are going through the roof, there’s maintenance…. I’d estimate my monthly car costs at around $500. Nothing to sneeze at.

So I gave it a go, and made a list of reasons I still have a car.

• I’ve got one regular thing right after work, once a week. The bus can’t get me there in time. Biking might be possible, but I’m not suicidal enough to bike a major LA traffic artery in rush hour….
• Shopping. About once a month, I do a big shopping run. You know, cat litter, water, canned goods – all the stuff that’s really heavy. There are online groceries like Vons to take care of that, though.
• Road Trips. My wife likes to get out of LA from time to time. Me, I’m more the stay-at-home and fiddle-with-the-web kind of guy, but I like spending quiet weekends with her from time to time. Flexcar or rentals might be a good alternative.

There’s only one (the weekly appointment) that really requires me to have a car – and some creative scheduling might get me around that. At this point, the idea seems viable enough to give it close scrutiny. So here’s the battle plan:

• Keep a car log. While the above are good guesses as to why I need a car, I might be missing reasons. There might be reasons my wife needs a car. A log will help me uncover those
• Make a more detailed cost analysis – what’s the cost of going car-less, how much is the difference?

I’ll give this about three months, and then I’ll report back. What about you?

Tags: environment, Flexcar, public transportation