| I'm annoyed that the Project Runway judges cut Epperson last week, and Shirin this week, for having what they described as merely boring designs, while Christopher has skated by in the bottom three both times after sending utter catastrophes down the runway. Indeed, he's been in the bottom three for the last three shows and seems to be inspired by Hefty bags, but continues to escape as they punish more talented designers for misfires. Also, the Phillies beat the Dodgers, which is conflicting because while Chris is happy, my grandmother is bummed. Oh well. Now to the news ...
- China's prosecutors have gotten very creative in bringing charges against polluters, and are now having hauled to court on charges of spreading poison. The occasional executions are regrettable, but I think we'd be way better off if we could get a few of these plutocratic bastiches in jail for wrecking things for everyone else.
- Speaking of our plutocrats, they're still rolling in it, taking home the big, banking bonuses.
- Chronic fatigue syndrome may be caused by a virus.
- Iceland is planning for recovery and hoping to corner the market in server farms based on the much lower carbon footprint of storing hot servers in a cold country with an excess of carbon-neutral geothermal energy. It turns out that an additional 40-60 percent of the energy needed to run a server is needed to cool it, so the carbon footprint reduction of shifting data storage to Iceland could be immense.
- Naomi Klein makes the case that Obama's effect on international relations has been corrupting of progressive values by giving other wealthy nations a free pass to follow negligent US policies because of the president's personal popularity.
- "But the polysemic champion must be 'set'. Superficially it looks like a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words - the length of a short novel - to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know 'set' is to know English." -- Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue.
- So, there's this justice of the peace in Louisiana who's refusing to issue marriage certificates to interracial couples and ... what? No. No, sadly, that was neither the set up to a joke nor the prelude to an historical anecdote.
- The head of Des Moines, Iowa's NAACP chapter has endorsed a Republican gubernatorial candidate over his anti-gay marriage stance. This is a sharp break with the organization's national leadership, which supports marriage equality.
- Interesting news out of Arkansas, with Sen. Mark Pryor saying that he'll vote for cloture on health reform, and a Blue Dog proposing that we open up Medicare to under-65s instead of having a separate bureaucracy to run a public option. Guess we can't blame the great state of Arkansas for Blanche Lincoln's suckitude.
- The Pew Center reports on the clean energy economy (pdf):
... Driven by growing consumer demand, public policy decisions and public- and private-sector investments, America's clean energy economy today comprises more than three quarters of a million jobs. By 2007, the last year for which data are available, 68,203 businesses across all 50 states and the District of Columbia had created 770,385 jobs in the clean energy economy. While this represents half a percent of all jobs in the United States, Pew's research shows that between 1998 and 2007, jobs in the clean energy economy grew by 9.1 percent, while total jobs grew by just 3.7 percent. And although we expect the national recession to have caused a decline in jobs that are part of the clean energy economy in 2008, experts predict it will be less severe than the drop in overall U.S. jobs.
To put these numbers in perspective, consider the following. Biotechnology, which has developed applications for agriculture, consumer products, the environment and health care and has been the focus of significant public policy24 and private investment,25 employed fewer than 200,000 workers, or about a tenth of a percent of total U.S. jobs in 2007.26 And the well-established traditional energy sector-including utilities, coal mining and oil and gas extraction, industries that have received significant government investment-comprised about 1.27 million workers in 2007, or about 1 percent of total employment. ... |
