How green is your pet?

Should owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they compare the ecological footprints of a menagerie of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices - and the critters do not fare well.

As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution. It is time to take eco-stock of our pets.

To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.

It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year - far more for beef and lamb - and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares.

Meanwhile, an SUV - the Vales used a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser in their comparison - driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

The Vales are not alone in reaching this conclusion. When New Scientist asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, UK, to calculate eco-pawprints based on his own data, his figures tallied almost exactly. "Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat," he says...

@'New Scientist'

Bass & Treble - Make Dub To Me Mix

Low - Pissing (Live at Pukkelpop 16/08/2007)

Australia 'sorry' for child abuse

Australian PM Kevin Rudd has apologised to the hundreds of thousands of people, some British migrants, who were abused or neglected in state care as children.

Mr Rudd said he was "deeply sorry" for the pain caused to the children and their extended families.

He said he hoped the national apology would help to "heal the pain" and be a turning point in Australian history.

Some 500,000 "forgotten Australians" were abused or neglected in orphanages and children's homes from 1930 to 1970.

The Canberra ceremony was attended by hundreds of people forced to migrate to Australia when young, some 7,000 of whom still live in Australia.

Some wept openly and held each other as Mr Rudd shared stories of survivors he had spoken with - children who were beaten with belt buckles or sexually violated.

Kevin Rudd also offered an apology to child migrants taken from the UK to Australia after the war, often without their parents' consent.

On Sunday, the UK government said the British prime minister would apologise for the forced migration policy next year...

@'BBC'

Visualising sound waves with fire

Koalas may be extinct in 30 years

Australia's koalas could be wiped out within 30 years unless urgent action is taken to halt a decline in population, according to researchers.

They say development, climate change and bushfires have all combined to send the numbers of wild koalas plummeting.

The Australian Koala Foundation said a recent survey showed the population could have dropped by more than half in the past six years.

Many have been killed by the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia.

Previous estimates put the number of koalas at more than 100,000 - but the latest calculations suggest there could now be as few as 43,000.

The foundation collected field data from 1,800 sites and 80,000 trees to calculate the numbers...

@'BBC'

“The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time … and you can’t see it if you refuse to face the possibility.” – William S. Burroughs

Wikipedia sued by German killers in privacy claim

Two German men who killed an actor in 1990 are suing the charity behind the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, claiming that its inclusion of detail of their crimes infringes their right to privacy.

The case has become an instant online cause celebre – with one lawyer saying that the integrity of history itself is at stake – because it ranges the US's First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, against German privacy and criminal laws, which dictate that after a certain period a crime is "spent" and cannot be referred to. The UK has similar rules on the reporting of lesser crimes.

The two men, who cannot be named here because the Guardian is available in Germany, became infamous for the killing, for which they were sentenced to life in prison in 1993. They were released in 2007 and 2008. But Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, noted that Germany's courts allow a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once they have served a prison term and a set period has expired.

"They should be able to go on and be resocialised, and lead a life without being publicly stigmatised" for their crime, Stopp told the New York Times. "A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone."

German editors of Wikipedia, which is available in multiple languages around the world, have already removed the killers' names from the German-language version about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr. But Stopp has also filed suit in German courts to demand that the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds and runs Wikipedia, remove their names from the English-language article...

@'The Guardian'

Modeselektor & Pfadfinderei - My Mosque Is My Cathedral

Cymatics Scientist Says Sound is a Bubble, Not a Wave

John Stuart Reid proposes that sound is not actually a wave, as has been thought for centuries, but a “bubble” and that this is what creates the amazing patterns we see captured with cymatics.

In his article, The Physics of Sound, Reid says that sound has previously been thought to travel as a wave because of the graphical, wave-based representation we have used to capture sound visibly in the past…

“The graphical representation of sound ‘waves’ in the past is why the term ’sound waves’ is used, causing the false impression that sound travels as a wave.”

…but that cymatics allows us to realize that the true form of sound is actually spherical, or bubble-like, in nature:

“Sound in air is the transfer of periodic movements between adjacent colliding atoms or molecules. This sonic energy typically expands away from the site of the collisions as a spherical or bubble-shaped emanation.”

In this fascinating article he also discusses the nature of light, and why his studies in cymatics have led him to believe that in certain cases, sound could actually “create visible light.”

To read more about John Stuart Reid’s studies in cymatics, sound bubbles and the connection between sound and light, go here.

To start conducting your own cymatics experiments using 3 common household items, download your free video instructions here.

@'Journal of Cymatics' via 'Renegade Futurist'

The lies so far

Compiled by Palin's favourite blogger

HERE

Jurga - 5th Season

(Thanx Egle)

Julian Cope - Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik - 1968 Onwards, (PDF)

Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik - 1968 Onwards, written by former The Teardrop Explodes singer, Julian Cope, is a book describing the underground music scene in Germany from 1968 through the 1970s. The book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1995 by Head Heritage, and was later translated into German and French. It is now out of print with original copies exchanging hands for surprisingly large amounts.

Krautrocksampler gives a subjective and very animated account of the phenomenon of krautrock from the perspective of the author:

"I wrote this short history because of the way I feel about the music, that its supreme Magic & Power has lain Unrecognised for too long."

The book comprises a narrative of the rock and roll culture in post-WWII West Germany, along with chapters focusing on individual major artists, including Faust, Tangerine Dream, Neu!, Amon Düül I and II, Ash Ra Tempel, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and the Cosmic Jokers and advocate of psychedelic drugs Timothy Leary. It also has an annotated appendix of "50 Kosmische Classics." Some chapters appeared previously in the UK music magazine The Wire and in the German music magazine Spex.

(PDF)

See also HerrB's post of the recent BBC documentary on Krautrock
HERE

Artifact

Gerhardt Fuchs' Selbstbewusstsein (RIP)