Archive for the 'environment' Category

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

Need A Christmas Gift For That Special Left-Leaning Chick? Try Ethical Underwear

You can absolutely bet when a marketing department uses the word “ethical” - about its lingerie - someone is out to make a buck at your expense. And they think you will believe anything, my environmental friends.

But French designer Sophie Young’s g=9.8 company is doing it with a straight face. In yet another blatant product placement on treehugger.com they claim the kinds of things only the well-meaning but gullible among us will believe; namely that the company is producing a line of lingerie which will make your hippy chick girlfriend quiver with environmentally friendly delight.

Fabric made from white pine tree clippings!

No water used!

The comfort of silk!

The feel of cashmere!

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Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

As a younger man, I was a big fan of Greenpeace.

As time went on, I thought they lost their focus by branching out from protesting nuclear weapons to whaling and trees and basically hanging out a shingle that said, “If you send us money, we will protest for you.”

I watched them change from instilling their people with scientific literacy to educating their people on political activism. Then I watched them turn on me because I was a scientist who didn’t much like exaggerated evidence in the name of fundraising and because I was a sportsman and because I was a businessman.

I’ve always believed that sportsmen - hunters, hikers, mountain climbers - are natural allies of the environmental movement.

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I watched them turn on hunters because of the gun issue. I watched them turn on businesspeople because of the logging issue. I watched them devolve into silliness … hijacking ships, funnelling money to political groups, ramming a French sailboat competing in the 2003 America’s Cup and finally, in the absolute depths of their Klondike Kop level incompetence, running aground on Tubbataha Reef Marine Park off the coast of Manila last year, which they were supposedly visiting because they were worried about global warming. They paid a $7,000 fine and said it was an accident and the millions of dollars in damage done are still not fixed. I imagine the environmental movement wouldn’t have been so lenient if, after the Exxon Valdez accident, Exxon paid a token fine and left the damage.

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Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

The Other Supermodels

Sexy? Ummm, yeah, a little. But only to scientists.

Nah, not sexy at all. This article is by UK writer Henry Nicholls on mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. This technique allows ‘virtual epidemics’ to be run, testing the effects of different assumptions or possible interventions.

Obviously this is important to the British, since their farmers have made careers out of feeding cow brains to their bovine friends, thus driving the big buggers insane and making Brits the butt of jokes even in places like Canada - where they really have no reason to be making fun of other people.

Enjoy the rest of the article on how science is making the world safe from idiot farmers here.



Thursday, August 31st, 2006

End Global Warming By Stopping The Burning Man Festival

End Global Warming By Stopping The Burning Man Festival

Sacred flaming temples, gas-guzzling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed - The Exxon-Mobil National Convention, you are thinking?

Not at all. It’s the Burning Man Art Festival in Nevada and it causes global warming. For 21 years this ecological disaster has been using gas-powered generators, up to 37,000 of them, so that smelly hippies can gorge themselves on wasteful fossil-fuel consumption. San Francisco scientists are unsure how much this contributes to global warming but they intend to find out.

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They created Cooling Man, an online calculator that determines how many tons of greenhouse gases each of the “burners” will produce with their art projects and community camps.

Once you know how much global warming you are causing, you can either trade for or buy ‘credits’ to offset your consumption. That’s right, so the richest, most wasteful companies can continue to wreak havoc on the environment, completely unchecked, by exploiting the “have-nots” at Burning Man.

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Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

Making Scientific Sense Of The News

This study says obesity harms more women than men while this study says hungry men like fat women.

Do I need to spell that out for you? No, it isn’t that hungry men like to eat fat women, it’s that hungry men know fat women have food in the house.

Claire Forlani, on the other hand, isn’t worried about being too thin or not having a man, she lays awake at night worrying about water. She says there isn’t enough of it and she can’t sleep because she thinks about it too much. Says Claire, “I have this daily moment of imagining life without water and it terrifies me.”

I am with you, Claire. I lay awake terrified about a world without actresses saying dumb things. Then I wouldn’t have anything funny to write about.

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Al Gore, on the other hand, thinks more water would be bad so he is against global warming that would melt any ice. Scientists that are employed outside government or schools and thus have to work for a living don’t really like what Al Gore is doing with science. If Al Gore had been tribal leader 3,000 years ago and the tribe got big and we started running out of animals to hunt, Al Gore would have said we need to hunt fewer animals.

Scientists would have said we should grow our own livestock and forget hunting. Then every hungry man could find the fat woman of his dreams and we wouldn’t need politicians. Thus, scientists don’t believe that smarmy know-it-alls flying fuel-guzzling jets all over the world to tell us we should be riding bicycles is a good thing.

Not all women lie awake at night thinking about Al Gore in a fur loincloth circa 1000 BC or Claire Forlani’s water issues - some think about other things. Carnie Wilson lies awake at night thinking about donuts. But they don’t make her afraid, they make her horny.

We already answered why hungry men like obese women and I think Carnie Wilson answers how obesity harms women more than men. If Carnie Wilson keeps thinking about those donuts, she will never date a scientist. We refuse to rank second to pastries on the horniness scale.