Ecology

I’m still chuckling at the seriousness with which some people treat getting onto Techmeme. It’s true, I keep stopping typing to giggle. It’s embarrassing.

I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

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Yeah I just said that it’s the wrong sort of day for numerical analysis. However I stumbled across these numbers and had to draw a graph immediately.

The world’s population reached 1 billion people in 1804. The second billion was added by 1927. And so it goes. In 1999 we hit 6 billion, and current estimates are that we’ll hit 7 billion in 2013.

You all know the drill from here…

A small proportion (us Australians, Americans, Europeans, Japanese and some others) chew up the vast majority of the world’s resources and are dumping our shit everywhere. We know we need to stop. But those other billions reckon they’ve had the rough end of the pineapple for too long and now it’s their turn.

And we’re surprised when they get stroppy about it.

Last night’s final episode of Michael Parkinson’s long-running TV chat show should have been much better, given the stellar cast. The one stand-out for me was David Attenborough. Something he said reminded me of a conversation we had 24 years ago. I’ll share that episode shortly. But first, here’s the interview we did…

Sir David Attenborough hardly needs an introduction. He was in Australia promoting the TV series and book The Living Planet when I spoke with him. His previous series Life on Earth was the UK’s highest-rating ever at that time. The Living Planet looked to be heading in the same direction.

Attenborough has been a TV producer almost as long as the medium has existed.

From 1965 to 1969 he was Controller of the then-new BBC 2, followed by four years in another executive position. After 8 years behind a desk he decided he’d had enough of computers, accounting and unions, and returned to life as a producer — a decision, he says, that wasn’t hard to make.

I had the good fortune to spend half an hour with Attenborough in his hotel room. I was his ninth interview for the day, and the greying gentleman in his fifties was visibly tired — particularly tired, he said, of being asked questions like “What’s your favourite animal”. But as I set up my equipment we chatted and, once he realised that I knew his work and knew what I was doing, his eyes began to sparkle just like on TV.

Our interview covered conservation, the making of Life On Earth and some remarkably prescient observations about the changing nature of TV programs.

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Global warming — no, I won’t cave into the Neo-Con’s re-branding of “climate change” — may be an important election issue. But, as with so many big issues, most voters wouldn’t have a clue.

Yesterday the Daily Telegraph asked people a multiple-choice question to see whether they knew what the Kyoto Protocol was. Nearly half got it right.

Respondents were asked to select a description of Kyoto from a set of multiple options: (a) A Korean car, (b) The treaty that ended WWII, (c) An agreement on carbon emissions and (d) A Japanese banquet dish.

Almost half of the people surveyed answered correctly… But close to half of those who answered correctly admitted guessing the response.

38% thought it was the treaty ending WWII.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Back when I was working for ABC Radio I did a vox pop the morning after a state cabinet re-shuffle, asking people to name any cabinet member, old or new. 80% didn’t know what a “cabinet” was, let alone any names.

Yesterday Crikey reminded me about this video. I’d seen it before, but it’s worth seeing it again — particularly during the election campaign — and showing it to as many people as possible.

The message is simple. Perhaps we can never be 100% sure that global warming is primarily caused by human activity. However the risk of this being the case and us doing nothing about it far outweighs the risk of changing our behaviour and then finding out it wasn’t necessary.

I was shocked. Early this morning every single agapanthus plant in our back yard was covered in snails. They’d climbed up onto the leaves — and they were having sex.

Hundreds and hundreds of snails engaged in a filthy hermaphroditic bisexual snail orgy!

I raced inside to get a camera. I couldn’t find The Good Camera quickly enough, so I grabbed my phone.

But the forecast is for a 34C maximum today — in October! The sun was rising, and so was the temperature. The snails were retreating.

I only had time to grab a quick, blurry image of this pair (pictured), going their separate ways after a morning of debauchery. Sluts.

I’ll just quote the source:

The term greenwashing applies when companies (or governments) spend more money or time advertising being green, than on investing in environmentally sound practices.

In business, greenwashing often means changing the name and/or label. Early warning signs that a product is probably toxic include images of trees, birds, or dew drops. If all three are on the box, the product will probably make your skin peel off in seconds…

Thanks to John Thackara at Doors of Perception, and to One Plus One Equals Three for the pointer.

I’ve been looking at this photograph for hours, scattered over the last few days.

It was apparently taken from the space shuttle Columbia. No it wasn’t, scroll down for the comments. I shouldn’t need to point out that the big lumpy thing in the foreground is called Africa, and further back there’s the thing they call Europe.

It fascinates me because it — literally! — puts things in perspective. Some of the world’s greatest cities are invisible, at least in daylight. The Low Countries are just starting to blaze in artificial light. But the brightest lights are the flares of oil wells in the deserts of Algeria and Libya, and off the coast of Nigeria.

Hey, aren’t the people there starving? That can’t be right, if they’ve got all that oil, surely?

Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer.

This isn’t new news, but it came out of comments to another post. Weight for weight, the average computer chip does more harm to the environment than the car.

A team at the United Nations University in Tokyo found that to make one 2-gram memory chip requires:

• 1.6kg of fossil fuel
• 72g of chemicals
• 32kg of water

That last one truly scares me — especially as I’m guessing the water has to be pure to wash microscopic components.

On the surface it sounds great. “A given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen,” says About Blackle. So if everyone turns Google black we’ll save heaps of energy, because it’s such a widely-used website. At least that’s the theory.

And Sydney-based Heap Media is getting attention because they’ve created Blackle (pictured right), a website which provides that black version of Google.

But as always the devil is in the detail…

• It’s only old-style CRT monitors which use less energy when displaying darker images. Modern LCD flat-panels use the same power no matter what.
• Blackle is a front-end onto Google, serving out the adverts and all. So using Blackie adds to the total power consumption. As well as whatever Google uses, you’re also adding in the overhead of routing your requests via Blackle.
• Currently the Blackle home page claims “115,486.374 Watt hours saved”, up from 113,834.304 Watt hours around this time yesterday. That’s not a lot of electricity. 2kWh is enough to run a small server computer for maybe 4 hours — perhaps 6 if it’s not fully loaded. In other words, Blackle uses 4 or 5 times more energy than it saves.

Still, it’s a great way of getting attention for your business under the banner of “saving the planet”, eh? Plus, having a black background means your site can have that oh-so-current style of having everything look like it’s reflected in some shiny black surface.