Don Fitz, the editor of the Green Party’s magazine, provides ten ways in which “green” building is often not actually environmentally friendly: 1. It ain’t green to ignore perfectly good homes. 2. It ain’t green to build massive homes. 3. It ain’t green to encourage urban sprawl. 4. It ain’t green to build as if …
Category Archives: Science
Humans get 384 MPG.
A gallon of gasoline contains 31,584 calories. An average human, walking 3 mph, requires 246 calories per hour. Ergo, humans get 384 miles to the gallon, David Archer calculates. Thus we can see that my Volvo requires gets 0.37 miles per Big Mac. (Via Kottke)
Pi is exactly three!
The Bible says so.
Carbon tax works out to $43/ton.
The social cost of carbon emissions, averaging the conclusions of peer-reviewed economic studies, is $43/ton. Which is what makes that a good starting point for a carbon tax. For example, driving from Norfolk to San Francisco in a car that gets 25mpg would emit 0.3 tons of CO2, and would be taxed at $13.26 to …
Creationist museum admits to evolution.
While flipping through photos of the new Creation Museum in Kentucky, I came across a picture of a sign explaining the origins of the many species of rhinos: “Diversified into perhaps 300-400 species?” That, of course, is just another way of saying they evolved. Silly creationists!
Supermajority of Republicans are creationists.
Gallup’s latest poll on the topic of evolution is fascinating. The important bit is that 68% of Republicans doubt that evolution exists, but the internals are all the better. For instance, 24% of people believe both in creationism and evolution. In other news, one in four Americans don’t know their ass from their elbow.
Unreasonable expectations for energy savings.
Political science assumes that all states are “rational actors.” My degree wasn’t in economics, but I hope that science doesn’t make the same assumption. Further to my thoughts on recouping investments in solar panels, Matthew Wald writes in today’s New York Times: At a recent conference on energy efficiency and investment strategy, Pedro Haas, an …
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An Alaskan village melts into the permafrost.
NYT: The tiny town of Newtok, Alaska is being sucked into the earth as their permafrost proves to be less than permanent in the face of climate change. The Yup’ik Inuk were nomadic up until the 20th century, and spent 2,000 years ranging throughout Alaska’s west coast, protected from the ocean’s waves by the ice …
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Debunking creationism.
Scientific American offers 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. The difficulty being that people who reject science must inherently reject logic, and people who reject logic cannot be reasoned with.
Wind turbines and widdle birdies, BFF!
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has completed a study o’ studies and found that the average wind turbine will kill a single bird every thirty years, making my house hundreds of times more dangerous than a turbine. All of the turbines in the U.S. combined kill 40k birds per year, while cats kill hundreds …