Why This Earth Hour Di

The question of why this earth hour aroused in my mind and then i searched the net and found this article by Mike Holmes and i think it is very useful.

It’s Earth Hour tomorrow, starting at 8:30 p.m., and I want to know how many people are planning to switch off.

Not to be confused with Earth Day — which I’m also a huge fan of — Earth Hour asks us to turn off our lights for an hour.

You might be thinking, “Can an hour really make a difference?” The answer is, yes, it definitely can. How? Because it sends a message loud and clear to our government on the issue of sustainability.

Last year, we saw more than 5,000 cities and towns in 135 countries turn off their lights. The result? Earth Hour 2011 became the biggest climate campaign ever. When more than 70 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from cities, turning off the lights — even for just one hour — is a huge statement. It shows we are taking personal accountability for the impact we have on our planet and that we’re willing to make the changes we need to achieve a sustainable lifestyle. That’s huge.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Earth+Hour+deal/6385730/story.html#ixzz1qc7IEnnW

An American take on the Quran

Los Angeles artist Sandow Birk has spent a good chunk of the last six years hand-writing an English translation of the Quran and illustrating it with scenes of modern American life.

He is not Muslim. He is not even very religious.

He’s a surfer.

His search for good waves took him to the coasts of Morocco, India, Indonesia and the southern Philippines — all places with sizable Muslim populations — and he wanted to learn more, especially when Islam became such a hot topic in the early 2000s. So he started reading its sacred text.

“Given the global situation right now, the Quran may be the most important book on earth, but few Americans know anything about it,” he told the New York Times in 2009. “I’m attempting to create visual metaphors that go along with the text and hopefully make it more accessible to Americans, more relevant to American life.”

More than half of his results — 61 chapters of the Quran’s 114, neatly painted on paper — are on display through March 18 at the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College.

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Courtesy- 3 Quarks Daily

In 40 years, US could face water crisis

WASHINGTON: Global warming and climate change are likely to unfold a water crisis in the United States within the next 40 years, says a new report. 

It concluded that seven in 10 of the more than 3,100 US counties could face risk of fresh water shortages. The report includes maps that identify those places. 

Sujoy B. Roy, director for research and development (R&D), Tetra Tech Inc., Lafayette, US, and colleagues explain that population growth is expected to increase the demand for water for municipal use and for power generation beyond existing levels. 

Global climate change threatens to reduce water supplies due to decreased rainfall and other factors compared to levels in the 20th century, the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology reports. 

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Tiny lizards found in Madagascar

By Ella DaviesReporter, BBC Nature

Miniature juveniles can stand on the head of a match

One of the world's tiniest lizards has been discovered by keen-eyed researchers in Madagascar.

The miniature chameleon, Brookesia micra, reaches a maximum length of just 29mm.

German scientists also found a further three new species in the north of the island.

The lizards were limited to very small ranges and scientists are concerned they could be at risk from habitat disturbance.

Continue reading the main story

The discovery is reported in the journal PLoS ONE.

The research team, led by Dr Frank Glaw from the Zoologische Staatssammlung in Munich, have a specialist knowledge of Madagascar's dwarf chameleons having described other species in the past.

They conducted fieldwork at night during the wet season in order to find the easily overlooked animals.

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Heralding a wave of invisible computing

Imagine this. You slide a finger across your smartphone screen to copy a file on the finger, literally making the digit a human storage device. You later copy that file from the finger onto any screen—be it a laptop, liquid crystal display (LCD) screen or any surface, for that matter—by simply touching that.

This isn’t a scene from a sci-fi movie. It’s a technology that India-born Pranav Mistry, a 31-year-old computer scientist doing his PhD with the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, demonstrated on Wednesday while delivering the technology keynote address on the second day of the Nasscom India Leadership Summit in Mumbai.

Pranav Mistry. 

He has christened the technology ‘Sparsh’ (touch).

“I often wondered why I couldn’t simply elongate my arms to open the door or switch off the lights of a lamp rather than walk and do these tasks. After all, Indian mythological figures could do that,” Mistry said.
“The digital world--laptop, TV, smartphone, e-book reader--all rely upon the cloud (metaphor for the Internet) of information. Sparsh lets you transfer media from a device to your body and pass it to another device by simple touch gestures using the cloud,” said Mistry. The lamp, for instance, is connected to the Internet (similar to the ‘Internet of Things’ concept wherein gadgets talk to each other).

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Will You Laugh for Me, Please - Slavoj Zizek

On April 8, Charles R. Douglass, the inventor of "canned laughter" - the artificial laughter which accompanies comical moments in TV-series - died at 93 in Templeton, California. In the early 1950s, he developed the idea to enhance or substitute for live audience reaction on television; he then realized this idea in the guise of a keyboard machine - by pressing on different keys, it was possible to produce different kinds of laughter. First used for episodes of The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy, today, its modernized version is resent everywhere.

This overwhelming presence makes us blind for the unheard-of paradox of the "canned laughter": if we reflect a little bit upon this phenomenon, we can see that it undermines the natural presuppositions about the status of our innermost emotions. "Canned laughter" marks a true "return of the repressed," of an attitude we usually attribute to "primitives." Recall, in the traditional societies, the weird phenomenon of "weepers" (women hired to cry at funerals): a rich man can hire them to cry and mourn on his behalf while he can attend to a more lucrative business, like negotiating for the fortune of the deceased. This role can be played not only by another human being, but even by a machine, as in the case of the famous Tibetan "prayer wheels": I put a written prayer into a wheel and mechanically turn it (or, even better, link the wheel to window-mill which turns it), so that it prays for me - or, more precisely, I "objectively"pray through it, while my mind can be occupied with the dirtiest sexual thoughts...

To our surprise, Douglass' invention proved that the same "primitive" mechanism works also in our highly developed societies: when, in the evening, I come home, too exhausted to engage in a meaningful activity, I just press the TV button and watch Cheers, Friends, or another series; even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard days work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show - it is as if the TV-screen was literally laughing at my place, instead of meÉ Before one gets used to "canned laughter," there is nonetheless usually a brief period of uneasiness: the first reaction to it is one of a shock, since it is difficult to accept that the machine out there can "laugh for me," there is something inherently obscene in this phenomenon. However, with time, one grows accustomed to it and the phenomenon is experienced as "natural.") This is what is so unsettling about the "canned laughter": my most intimate feelings can be radically externalized, I can literally "laugh and cry through another."

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India's panel price crash could spark solar revolution

• 02 February 2012 by Michael Marshall

SOLAR power has always had a reputation for being expensive, but not for much longer. In India, electricity from solar is now cheaper than that from diesel generators. The news - which will boost India's "Solar Mission" to install 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022 - could have implications for other developing nations too.

Recent figures from market analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF)show that the price of solar panels fell by almost 50 per cent in 2011. They are now just one-quarter of what they were in 2008. That makes them a cost-effective option for many people in developing countries.

A quarter of people in India do not have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency's 2011 World Energy Outlook report. Those who are connected to the national grid experience frequent blackouts. To cope, many homes and factories install diesel generators. But this comes at a cost. Not only does burning diesel produce carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change, the fumes produced have been linked to health problems from respiratory and heart disease to cancer.

Now the generators could be on their way out. In India, electricity from solar supplied to the grid has fallen to just 8.78 rupees per kilowatt-hour compared with 17 rupees for diesel. The drop has little to do with improvements in thenotoriously poor efficiency of solar panels: industrial panels still only convert15 to 18 per cent of the energy they receive into electricity. But they are now much cheaper to produce, so inefficiency is no longer a major sticking point.

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