Mom & Dad

Finally got some film developed & found this great shot of my mom, dad, and my dog lucky in Tofino.

My Tenacious Nephew

Check this out. My nephew Thoran - a year & half old - look at how intensely he's clinging to the toboggan. This little guy enjoyed the snowy end of November we had here on Vancouver Island. He hung on through a whole bunch of runs through the deep powder before he had enough!

Are Tea-Lights Green/Eco-friendly?

At the check-out the other day, someone pointed out to me that - as I put my shopping in my cloth grocery bag - that the 100 tea lights I was buying weren't very enviro-friendly. I haven't previously been a huge consumer of tea lights, but I am starting to use them much more lately.

At any rate, I had to concede that there are some drawbacks - the most obvious to me being the metal holder that is not burned during use. Each candle has a metal holder that must be discarded.

Naturally Reduce is the first word of the three R's (Reduce. Re-use. Recycle.) This is a given in my mind, and behaviourally I reduce all consumption in my life as much as I can while still feeling balanced (ie that i am not being unfair to myself).

Given that, this leaves Re-use and Recycle. Re-use i'm working on, but for now I'll concentrate on Recycle. Is the metal part of a tea-light recyclable? It's metal, so it's a good candidate in theory. Ultimately it will depend on one's local recycling service, and i have not yet phoned my service to inquire, but I will.

Information on the web is surprisingly sparse. Have so few others cottoned on to the eco-unfriendliness of tea-lights as yet? One reason for this post is to put more material out there on the subject. Frighteningly I was able to find only one relevant link as I write this, it is:

http://www.waverley.gov.uk/recycling/

So apparently in Waverley (UK) - "The metal bases from tea lights can also be recycled in the [metal] bank." Phewf. Someone recycles them.

I was a little concerned that the inevitably unconsumed wax remaining the in metal holder might disqualify these bases from being recycled, but then most metal recycling processes will use a lot of heat already and would presumably burn off the excess wax as a matter of course.


As a final thought: Standards can be good. In fact they can be quite green in many cases. The tea light is a standard candle format for which there are a great many modular tea-light candle-holders, and it sure is convenient. It would be nice to find tea-lights without the metal bases - please let me know if you come across any & if so where I can find some...

Jan 2011: Edited to replace the photo which had gone offline since the original post.

Adversarial Model of Government

Someone something out to me the other day. Something fundamental about the Canadian system of government and how the "House of Commons"/Legislatures work. The current party system, where one party forms "a government" and the other parties form "the opposition" operates in a fundamentally adversarial fashion.

She contrasted this model with a "co-operative model." I thought I would pontificate briefly on this thought. Personally, I like the term "collaborative" and I'm going to throw out the terms competitive & conflict-based while I'm at it.

Collaborative in my book is the process of working together towards a common goal. It brings to mind co-operation for me, but strictly speaking I think I wouldn't exclude conflict/adversarial based collaboration, and I would definitely include competitive collaboration.

I can actually see each of these types of collaboration at work in the current system. Election is a competitive model, where candidates compete for the most votes in a given constituency. The House itself definitely operates in a conflict/adversarial way. I think that's related to the party system - this arbitrary definition of "a government" and "an opposition" - terms which are meaningless to me in a non-majority situation. Perhaps if all candidates were independent, there would be more co-operation (and competition) in order to build enough support to pass legislation. Such a model might move more slowly than a majority government, but then again - what's the rush?

[CR] Displaying Stats on your Blog

Subtitle: : Making StatCounter.com work on Blogger/Blogspot

Google doesn't offer any built in stats for blogger/blogspot, but it does offer a few recommendations in the help section. The coolest of these in my opinion is StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) The best feature is the world map that it generates with markers where different people who have accessed your blog are from.

I had a bit of difficulty getting it to work for me here on blogspot so it thought i would write up a few notes on what challenges i had & how i solved them for - as they say - posterity.

_________

First of all - go to statcounter & sign up for an account & all that. I didn't find any of that too difficult, other than slightly tiresome.

When it comes to the generate html code phase - in the "StatCounter Code Setup Wizard" I chose the following:

a) Visible Counter
b) Unique Visits only
c) Counter Image
d) Choose your own colours. I did opt for the "View My Stats" Link
e) I did choose "Yes my website uses frames" but i doubt it matters. I tried "html only" code, but in the end it didn't matter much. In the end i used the default javascript-containing code.
f) I went for the "Default Install Guide"


I got as far as that without any difficulty - where i had some trouble was "Where do I paste this code to?"

After quite a bit of trial and error, I went to the "Template" section of my blog and found i could put it in there. At the bottom of my template there was a commented section that said:

"!--This is an optional footer. If you want text here, place it inside these tags, and remove this comment. --"

Actually i didn't remove the tags as intructed, but pasted the code in between this tag & the /footer tag and Voila - my stat counter is up & running.


It's at the bottom of the blog - scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page to have a look. If you click the "Detailed Stats" link, you can actually see the up-to-date stats for this blog. The "Recent Visitor Map" link at the left of that screen is the cool map I mentioned that will show you where your visitors are from.

At any rate - I hope that works for you & Happy Statcounting.

Carbon Sequestration

Another great article from the Economist - on climate change.

http://economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7884738

It's nice to see a rightist magazine seeing the value in being green.

My only beef is "Carbon Sequestration" - it seems to have seized the approval of a lot of otherwise smart thinkers out there, but I just can't get my gut behind it. It feels wrong to me. Maybe it's that it is new & a bit of a fantasy, so people are latching on to it as a saviour. My gut tells me it's a band-aid & an unsustainable option. I'll have to do some more research into it to see how much i trust it.

It just seems to me that if you stick all that CO2 underground - not only is it an energy intensive task that is effectively a tax on already inefficient electrical generation technologies, but it seems a little too buck rogers, with risks of leaks & escapes. I guess it's creating "CO2 dumps" underground - much too much like chemical dumping in rivers, and trash dumping in landfills.

I don't like it!

Crazy-but-Good Movie: "Paradise Now"

Wow. Just saw "Paradise Now" a movie about two palestinian men who are suicide bombers.

A heavy, but ultimately good movie. Interesting on so many levels & topical to my "Pity for Suicide Bombers" post in June. The story is of two friends who live in Palestine & who are called upon to perform a suicide mission. It basically recounts their lives from just before they are notified, to - well i don't want to give the whole plot line away, so i'll stop there. The film is extremely well done - the actors are so convincing you can taste their emotions. The cinematography was beautiful, the plot was superb too. Not sure if it was a particular true story, or if it was just a representative dramatization, but I am sure that it was excellent.

A terrible subject, not to mention depressing, but so well done & so worth seeing - particularly for us North American/Western World types.

Switching from a "Consumer Driven" to a "Conservation Driven" Economy

I was contemplating the modern "Consumer-Driven" Economy the other day & had to ask myself - what would happen (and how we could switch) from an economy that is driven by Consumption, to an economy that is driven by Conservation.

I think we could perhaps term it an "Efficiency-Driven Economy" because that has a more conventional ring to it, but is almost as effective in concept. Hmm - now that I write it I do notice that they are different.

At any rate - What would a Conservation Driven Economy look like? How could we achieve it?

What do I mean by a conservation driven economy? Well, in the Western Free-Market style economy (which works well for a lot of things! ) the greater the rate of consumption, the greater the growth of the economy. We usually measure this with figures like GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for a given region or country. So in a conservation driven economy, the greater the rate of the conservation, the greater the “growth” of the economy.

If calling it "Growth" in a Conservation Driven Economy seems like a contradiction, note that I am effectively redefining the meaning of "economic growth" from an increasing quantity of something, to a more general concept of "increasing goodness" where goodness (in my book) means conservation of something worthwile conserving. (And a host of other things too, but all summarized by "increasing goodness.")

If you're starting to wonder what I am talking about with this "increasing goodness" thing, try looking at the David Suzuki Foundation's definition of "Genuine Wealth" in the first Chapter of their report "Sustainablity within a Generation" for a bit more concrete enlightenment.


I think this contemplation was inspired by my brother's bumper sticker that reads:

"Question Consumption"

Sound Advice.

Live Like your Grandpa

Living like you're grandpa (or grandma) is a good model, when one is trying to be green. Between WWII & the depression era, people from that generation knew how to be thrifty, which was often in sync with being green.

[CR] The Googiverse

Someone at Google has probably already coined this term, but Googiverse is the only term I can think of for Google's insane expansion/proliferation into all aspects of the internet. Everytime i think of some information or service i need, i find that google has already built it, has it online, & is offering it for free.

Either they will be the internet soon, or they will go bust trying. I wonder which it will be? I'd be interested in your thoughts, since you are reading this.

I think they have "got it" in terms of the internet, collaborative models, and ethics - the 21st century business.