Friday, October 15, 2004

Environmental Self-Test

Rate your environmental footprint. You get brownie points for being Vegetarian, taking public transit, recycling, etc.

link

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Locally Based Economic Model in Sri Lanka

Audio article about a local bottom-up ethical economic development in Sri Lanka. NPR : Sri Lanka's Village-Based Alternative to Globalization. link

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Social Consumerism

The reality is that only about 5% of consumers make ethical decisions in their purchasing habits. Innovation by business alone will not be enough to tackle the overwhelming problems of our time, from climate change to global poverty. If we were to wait patiently for business to deliver the goods, we would all be underwater before long.

Deborah Doane
New Economics Foundation
London
In a world where consumerism is the underlying social and economic force, yet most people orient purchases detached from effects of production, unless it is factored into the price. (Examples: European governments factor in overall cost for using gasoline, as oppose to indirect subsidized gas prices in the US). Here's a Database to check up on your favorite Coporation. Responsible Shopper Database on Companies: link

Map Geek: Traditional Map Overlay on Satellite Photos

Cool interface with Map overlay of satellite photo over London. Multimap.com features Aerial pictures that covers England and also features regular maps for rest of Western Europe. link

On Hatred


From Jacob Holdt's photo essay on the KKK. Insightful writing on hatred, love, abuse, despair, and social status. link

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Parallel Universe


Science American's supplement to the Parallel Universe article.
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Scientific Rigor

How to be a Skeptic. How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, Part II. Part I is no longer available. link

The State of Big Bang

From Scientific American:

The big bang is often described as an event that occurred long ago, a great explosion that created the universe. In actuality, the theory says nothing about the moment of creation, which is a job for quantum physics (or metaphysics). It simply states that as far back as we can extrapolate, the cosmos has been expanding, thinning out and cooling down. The big bang is best thought of not as a singular event but as an ongoing process, a gradual molding of order out of chaos. The recent observations have given this picture a coherence it never had before.

From the perspective of life on Earth, cosmic history started with inflation--a celestial reboot that wiped out whatever came before and left the cosmos a featureless place. The universe was without form, and void. Inflation then filled it with an almost completely uniform brew of radiation. The radiation varied from place to place in an utterly random way; mathematically, it was as random as random could be.

Gradually the universe imposed order on itself. The familiar particles of matter, such as electrons and protons, condensed out of the radiation like water droplets in a cloud of steam. Sound waves coursed through the amorphous mix, giving it shape. Matter steadily wrested control of the cosmos away from radiation. Several hundred thousand years after inflation, matter declared final victory and cut itself loose from radiation.

Scientific American: Four Keys to Cosmology. Some additional proofs needed to explain the full out the big bang theory. link

Non-Uniformity, Light Faster in the Past?


Scientific American: Was Light Faster in the Past?
If matter in motion is too slow for light, why not make the speed of light faster and faster into the past? Throwing out heavyweight Einstein and his near constant speed of light is no easy task. Yet that is the burden of the new iconoclasts. Maybe they can make a cosmos with wildly varying speeds of light, and maybe they can keep the gas uniform, but they give no clear reward for so denying our well-tested Einstein on this theorist's journey into the past. Their strongest argument is the very flatness of space: it turns out that a cosmos with a changing speed of light must be a flat one and a uniform one as well, if energy is to be conserved. There is much more to be said about the untested physics of these variable vacuum light speeds. More than one form of theory is out there, to say nothing of the myriad options opened by multiple dimensions.
link

Before the Beginning of Time

Scientific American: The Myth of the Beginning of Time

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense--that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective. The pre-bang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology.

The new willingness to consider what might have happened before the bang is the latest swing of an intellectual pendulum that has rocked back and forth for millennia. In one form or another, the issue of the ultimate beginning has engaged philosophers and theologians in nearly every culture. It is entwined with a grand set of concerns, one famously encapsulated in an 1897 painting by Paul Gauguin: D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" The piece depicts the cycle of birth, life and death--origin, identity and destiny for each individual--and these personal concerns connect directly to cosmic ones. We can trace our lineage back through the generations, back through our animal ancestors, to early forms of life and protolife, to the elements synthesized in the primordial universe, to the amorphous energy deposited in space before that. Does our family tree extend forever backward? Or do its roots terminate? Is the cosmos as impermanent as we are?
link