Out of curiousity I checked out how much it would cost to offset a Perth to Sydney return flight. Qantas listed it as $7.86 for 0.38 tonnes of CO2.
Really, if it’s that cheap they should automatically include it in all ticket purchases and allow people to opt out if they’d rather not pay to clean up after themselves.
I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:
With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.
I don’t often seem to see rainbows (maybe I just don’t look at the sky enough anymore). But today there was a glorious one out my office, and even cooler, little rainbows in the rain splashed up by the rear wheels of the ute driving in front of me.
Random places in the US are lamenting that petrol has now reached US$4 per gallon. To put that in a more local perspective, it’s 99 Australian cents per litre.
From the folks who brought you the Ambient Orb comes the Ambient Umbrella, whose handle glows to indicate whether you’re going to need it because rain is forecast!
For 4 people:
Gas - 5.79 units/day
Water - 0.75 kL/day
Electricity - 11 units/day
The RAC are running a car battery recycling day on the 3rd of May 2008, just drop your battery off at an RAC Auto Service Centre.
So, individuals with solar panels don’t get a great rate when selling back to the grid (ie the Renewable Energy Buyback Scheme pays you less than what Synergy energy would charge for green power). What if they formed a co-op that sold the total sum of their contributions back to the grid? Would have more negotiating power for a better price, presumably.
This site lists some of the electric vehicles converted by members of the Perth branch of the Australian Electric Vehicles Association. The next meeting is 6:30pm Wednesday in the Billings Room at UWA’s Electrical Engineering department.
I was thinking today that if there was one thing that I’d like my kids (and really, pretty much everyone) to be able to do it would be to be able to wonder at the beauty in and of things. Pretty much anything really. Trees, rocks, whatever. Illuminated by light from a nearby star(!) (itself powered by nuclear fusion) that makes its way out from the core of the sun, streams through space, the atmosphere, hits the object and is reflected into the (improbably evolved) eye where it’s interpreted by an equally fantastic thing called a brain that exists, and is here and able to wonder about everything. And that’s ignoring the subatomic level, time, and lots of other cool stuff. Pretty much the more you know the more levels you can appreciate things on, and whatever way you cut it, existence is cool.
