Glimpses Of The Future #2 Prosaic Teleportation

From www.nomorepencils.com

Glimpses Of The Future #2

I was thinking about Star Trek and teleportation and as and when it comes to pass for us all, I don’t see it being used to move people very much.

I mean if the idea is that you can go to a beautiful desert island in a split second, then you could well find yourself knee deep in other visitors.

No, I see a more prosaic but necessary use for teleportation – one that will get rid of toilets.

I see teleporters focused in on our bowels, neatly removing all the crap. Read more at www.nomorepencils.com

Bees Dying Inforgraphic

From ffctn.com

See more at ffctn.com

About half of the fish caught in the North Sea are thrown back dead

This follows on from the information about the damage to the world's oceans and the fish in them first brought to light by The End Of The Line - from dev.fishfight.net

Around half of the fish caught by fishermen in the North Sea are unnecessarily thrown back into the ocean dead. The problem is that in a mixed fishery where many different fish live together, fishermen cannot control the species that they catch. Fishing for one species often means catching another, and if people don’t want them or fishermen are not allowed to land them, the only option is to throw them overboard. The vast majority of these discarded fish will die.

Because discards are not monitored, it is difficult to know exactly how many fish are being thrown away. The EU estimates that in the North Sea, discards are between 40% and 60% of the total catch. Many of these fish are species that have fallen out of fashion: we can help to prevent their discard just by rediscovering our taste for them.

Others are prime cod, haddock, plaice and other popular food species that are “over-quota”. The quota system is intended to protect fish stocks by setting limits on how many fish of a certain species should be caught. Fishermen are not allowed to land any over-quota fish; if they accidentally catch them – which they can’t help but do - there is no choice but to throw them overboard before they reach the docks. Read more at dev.fishfight.net

Statement that you cannot put the FBML page first on FBook Pages

From www.hyperarts.com

Comprehensive Static FBML Troubleshooting Guide - Why You Can't Add the App or Why Your Code Isn't Working

NOTE: You can have a maximum of 6 tabs visible on your Page, and Facebook reserves the "Wall" and "Info" tabs — which can't be moved or removed! Additional tabs will appear under the ">>" in the navigation. You can select them and then drag them to where you want them to appear in your navigation AFTER "Wall" and "Info". Read more at www.hyperarts.com

Annotating Twitter

From nickhalstead.com

Nick Halstead

Twitter Annotations was for me the most exciting announcement of last year - structured data is everything - and the idea behind annotations was to allow arbitrary data to be attached to each Tweet to allow more exciting applications to be built. Currently Twitter is still limited to the kind of use cases that the data associated with a Tweet allows. With Annotations a tweet can contain the meta-data to describe the meaning of the Tweet. So for developers what could be built would be limitless - so if you want to build a Quora clone - by having the Tweet as the question with all the topic data stored in the annotation. Game developers could build who new social games by storing game status information within each Tweet - so for instance the current positions of pieces on a chess board could be stored in a Tweet. So as you play others could look at the status update and see what move you made. I viewed the announcement much in the way when Facebook released its App platform - that for me was one of the pivotal technology changes they made that allowed such growth. I hope we see Annotations in 2011 (originally posted in answer to this Quora question)

Looking forward to Twitter Annotations in 2011 Read more at nickhalstead.com

My Blog Is Carbon Neutral

I am pleased to be able to make the statement in the title to this article and I want to explain how I have done it and how I came to hear about the scheme that enables it.

The first step along the path that brought me to this happy state is that I have joined Seeded Buzz.

The idea behind Seeded Buzz is for the members to plant seeds - which means telling other bloggers about their blog posts and inviting them to continue the conversation on their blogs with a link back to the original post on their blog.

Well I have found a blog post from one of the members that covers a subject that interests me.


Seeded Buzz points out that better the Seed conversation and the more extendable / debatable it is, the more other bloggers will Buzz about it on their blogs and link to the original post.

And as we all know, links are the engine that pumps searches - and these are the lifeblood of the internet.

The seeder profile I found was from Thomas Chasm who blogs about a lot of different categories including Environment, Economy and Health & Fitness. The blog post that interests me is the post he wrote on Green Eyed View about how to make his blog - and indeed any blog - carbon neutral.

The way to do it is to post a badge from a website named Kaufda and write a blog post about their programme. In return they will plant a tree that will offset the 'carbon cost' of this blog.

So that is what I have done.

Now the amount of carbon that a blog creates varies with the number of visitors, but as Kaufa states:

According to a study by Alexander Wissner-Gross, PhD, physicist at Harvard University and environmental activist, an average website causes about 0.02g (0,0008oz.) of carbon dioxide for each visit.

Assuming an average blog gets 15,000 visits a month, it has yearly carbon dioxide emissions of 3,6kg (8lb.). This can mainly be tracked back to the immense energy usage from (mainframe) computers, servers, and their cooling systems.

Red Herring
I think it is a huge red herring to rely on carbon offsetting. This should not be used as a method to enable us to mess about with our environment in any which way we choose. We have a responsibility to keep our own back yard clean and pollution free - and in this case, our back yard is planet Earth.

Still, carbon offset is better than no offset - and if someone is offering to plant a tree, then I say a resounding YES!

Update
I reported to Kaufda the fact that I had made the blog post and was displaying the button.

Here is the email reply:

Hi David, 

thank you so much for participating in our initiative and making your blog carbon neutral! We thank you for your support! 

Here you can find some news about the reforestation: http://www.kaufda.de/umwelt/carbon-neutral/forest-update/

There are still some trees looking for a sponsor. So if you know some people who have a blog or website, pass it on and we'll make their blogs carbon neutral too! 

Best Wishes,

Magdalena

"Make it green"-team

The news link is here.

Gmail - Twitter - Facebook - Bermuda Triangle

And such a well-drawn map - from chartporn.org

The Bermuda Triangle of Productivity

See more at chartporn.org