Posts Tagged: world

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13
Nov 09

Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

Wired writes An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All:

“The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” [...] Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.”

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6
Oct 09

Did You Know 4.0

The latest update on the Did you Know video. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if it’s all just a numbers game, these numbers tell a rather compelling story.

Picture 2

Here’s the full video:

And here’s the older 2.0 version.

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12
Sep 09

New Jobs by Building Broadband

Bill Gillies writes:

“… for every $5 billion invested in broadband infrastructure to create [high-speed internet] networks, 97,500 new jobs in the telecommunications, computer and IT sectors will be created.”

Turns out the U.S. now “ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed and is not making significant progress in building a faster network.”  I’m hopeful that we will turn this around soon.

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20
Aug 09

Veggie first, local second

According to the Worldwatch Institute, to best way to improve the environmental impacts of your diet is to eat vegetarian foods first before eating local.
“As it turns out, when we look at life-cycle analysis, a “cradle-to-grave perspective” on food products, food miles are “a relatively small slice of the greenhouse-gas pie,” says DeWeerdt. In fact, according to a comprehensive analysis last year by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University, final delivery from the producer or processor to the retailer accounts for only 4% of the U.S. food system’s greenhouse-gas emissions!”
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14
Apr 09

Broadband Speeds

Saul Hansell at the NYTimes.com Bits Blog: The Broadband Gap: Why is Theirs Faster?

I don’t know about manners, but it’s easy to find examples that American’s broadband is second-rate:

In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month.

In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service.

At London’s rate, I should be paying less that $2/month for my pawltry 1.5 Mbps.  If only. I pay a full $37 each and every month.

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