Last week, Lissa heard a sound in our chimney. Faint flapping. A bird had somehow become stuck. For days, she tried figure out how to free it, tortured by its grim fate. She tried using a broom to shoo it down into the living room, banishing Sadie so she wouldn’t eat the poor creature if …
The Financial Times is reporting pressure at the G8 meeting from what the British call “campaigners” for the West to restrict its production of biofuels because of the effect it’s having on on food supplies: ActionAid, a charity, blamed G8 countries in a report for what it said was a halving of agricultural aid since …
The Economist Food Price Index is at 280.6, up 11.3 percent on the month and a frankly astonishing 66.2 percent over the last year. Elasticity in this case is a measure of people going hungry, I think.
In which I discuss the perennial question: Has the Monsoon Started? print video
Troopin’ on over with the cool kids to identi.ca – kinda like Twitter, but with open source cool.
Happy 61st anniversary of nothing terribly interesting happening down in the deserts of southeastern New Mexico, and let me take this opportunity to reprise one of my all time greatest hits: Roswell Myths Crash Into Reality: In conventional historical research or journalistic exposé, says Brandeis University anthropologist Benson Saler, successive investigations fill in details and …
If you think oil’s going to hit $300 a barrel, there’s apparently money to be made. And someone thinks that is a real possibility: Nymex statistics show that investors for the first time placed a small bet this week that West Texas Intermediate oil futures would hit $300 a barrel – more than double yesterday’s …
The folks at the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre have a paper in the June 17 EOS (sorry, couldn’t find it on line) about their use of web traffic spikes to quickly locate and learn about earthquakes. Swarms of web users quickly turn to the web after a quake, they write, and the location information gleaned from …
The Economist questions organic farming: But as global food prices soar, hurting the poor in particular, environmentalists may find organic farming trickier to promote. Organic farming produces far less than conventional intensive methods, and so more land must be farmed for the same yield.
This hardly seems sustainable (“tankers” in this case contain water): Every day for the next six months two tankers will leave the port of Elefsina near Athens, bound for Cyprus. After four years with no substantial winter rainfall, Cypriot water reserves are at their lowest since 1908. h/t Adam in the comments