Christopher Mackay’s Blog

VIDEO: Are Plastic Water Bottles Safe? : DivineCaroline: “Are Plastic Water Bottles Safe?”

I threw out three expensive water bottles late last year — models which the manufacturer has since replaced with bottles featuring a different plastic — and switched to metal bottles by SIGG.

The thing that annoys me most about this sort of threat — however small it may be — is that manufacturers are automatically given a pass until something is proven, at someone else’s great expense, to be harmful.

Don’t look for this to change soon. And kudos to NBC for showing some of their sponsors’ products in this piece: I’ll bet someone took some heat for that.

YouTube - ZENN on the Rick Mercer Report: Zero Emissions, No Noise. Of course, there are emissions, they come from the power plant, not the car’s tailpipe (it doesn’t have one).

According to Who Killed The Electric Car?, though, even coal-fired power plants are radically more efficient than gasoline-powered cars, so it’s still a major net-benefit (6 fewer tonnes of carbon emissions a year per car, according to the president of Zenn).

5min - How Evolution Happens - Video: an interesting visualization of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

(Via Digg.)

Gwynne Dyer (channelling Prof. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University):

A major human food source — the principal source of protein for one-fifth of the human race — is going to collapse in the next generation unless drastic measures are taken. The world’s fishing fleet needs to be reduced by at least two-thirds, bottom-trawling must be banned outright, and widespread fishing moratoriums for endangered species and even for whole areas need to be imposed for periods of five or even ten years.

Unfortunately, the minimum measures needed to prevent ecocide in the oceans would cause major short-term disruption and throw millions out of work, so they probably won’t be taken. It will be much easier politically to ignore what is happening now and let the collapse happen later, on somebody else’s watch.

And governments worry about terrorism.

First of all, who knew there were organic bees? (Then again, why wouldn’t there be organic bees?)

This story (out of PEI), which was #1 on Reddit today, “No Organic Bee Losses“, proposes some very simple causes for the Bee Colony Collapse issue.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party has released TV spots attacking St?ɬ

Zeldman thinks it’s cold in New York. That’s funny. I temporarily switched my Widget from Celcius for easier comparison:

And this is in southern Canada.

I’m not sure that one more link will make that much difference, but please donate what you can to the Canadian Red Cross.

One-tonne challenge. What a great idea.

This is truly thinking outside the box. It might work in Australia, but I’m not sure how it would stack up against a Canadian winter…