I'm gonna say not...

Dear Option H,

Some anonymous stinky-butt posted a comment linking me to this article from The Telegraph. Entitled "Global warming rage lets global hunger grow" is perhaps a mistake. I feel "Global irresponsibility," "World blunders yet again," "Global hunger growing at exponential rates" could have all been slightly more appropriate.

Quick Disclaimer: I DO NOT AGREE WITH EVERYTHING WRITTEN IN THIS ARTICLE

Moving on...biofuels were thought to be the end all to the oil dependency of the United States. Consequently, the government encouraged farmers to transform their arable land which might have been used to grow a slew of other crops into land for corn production. Through massive subsidies the USA aims to divert 45% of its grain output to ethanol by 2015 -- it has already reached an alarming 18%. Canada, Argentina, and several Eastern European countries are aiming to follow suit.

Why is this bad? Well it can be summed up in this quote: "The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching political and moral limits."

According to the UN, it takes around 232 Kg (~550 lbs) to fill one 50L tank with ethanol. A quick search on Google revealed that there are around 250 million cars in the US alone. Doing some quick math its going to take about 62 500 000 000 Kg of corn to fuel the entirety of the USA. Even 50% of that number is monumental. Not to point out the blatantly obvious, but that's a lot of corn. And a lot of corn translates into millions of hectares of land -- which leads to the first controversy surrounding ethanol. As mentioned above a huge amount of land worldwide is being transformed into corn fields. With wheat and/or rice as the central staple in the majority of the world's citizenry, a turn-over from wheat/rice to corn production is having a devastating effect on the mouths of many populations. Bangladesh, Haiti, India, Cameroon and the Philippines are only a few of the countries that are facing severe food crises in which 60-50% of a person's income goes towards putting food on the table.

Thomas Malthus once said, "The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased." I believe is right in thinking that our reason has been distorted, and perhaps 6.5 billion people are being checked as the carrying-capacity of the world reaches its tipping point.

Not entirely relevant but interesting nonetheless.
(Know Your Rights)

PS. Tune in next week for Part II.

Creepy? Oui oui!

Dear Babies,

Its been a busy week and my brain has certainly been churning with ideas for blog posts however, that being said this is not one of those...more of an impulse thing I swear.

Anyways I was looking through my "My Pictures" file and re-discovered these photos. So cute! I think I saved them because that is what I want my spawn to look like. With all this modern day nascent technology there must be some means of choosing a sweet fro for my wee babaaay...those in the know feel free to point me in the right direction.

Which one would you choose to take? Thoughts?

The coolest thing since sliced bread...kablamo even?

Dear Confidence Intervals,

IN YOUR FACE!

Hans Rosling a genius extraordinnaire has created a program called Gapminder which compiles all the numbers from governmental and intergovernmental databases and then charts them in interactive charts! You can choose your x and y-axis (Eg. Per Capita Income (PPP) vs. Use of Contraceptives) thereby determining what you are indeed making statistically significant. Furthermore once your chart is produced the countries are plotted as colourful dots whose size is relative to the population...so China's dot is huge! So is India's! Lastly you can can see progress through time because this program gives you data all the way back from the 1950s...so you can choose a movie-like option which when viewed is comparable to watching an Aussie-rules footie game (read: tres exciting).

Cool, eh? Thought so.