MemeFlux

The right place for anyone striving to achieve world domination to hang out and plot the demise of their enemies.

Hatebook is an anti-social utility that disconnects you from the things you hate. In your profile you can specify such important facts as your Hate-Motto, Quotes that suck, Movies that bother, Brands you hate, Music that suck and so forth; with the map detail you can even find fellow plotters in your own city. Never has villainism been easier.

Facebook, go sleep with the fishes–or else…

Hehe

For those of us who still didn’t know that the Lord of the Rings director has changed a bit:

Then

Now

Wikipedia says: ‘According to the British Daily Telegraph he attributes his weight loss to his diet. He said, “I just got tired of being overweight and unfit, so I changed my diet from hamburgers to yogurt and muesli and it seems to work.”‘

Global warming is all the rage nowadays. No trouble finding anything to scare the bejeebers out of you in both tabloid and news-with-context-sources. The polar bears are dying, disease ridden insects will flourish and the most important thing we can do is adhere to Kyoto.

Not really topics for an up-beat conversation, but if you read the book listed on the left of this blog (at the time of posting); Bjørn Lomborg’s excellent Cool It, you can be prepared for the next cocktail party to dis polar bears(1), ridicule the Kyoto Protocol(2) or make cunning remarks about why arguing that global warming causes malaria is about 1/60 000th of an argument(3) and should hence be replaced by a very small shell script of retorts. Now, just to make it clear: I have absolutely no doubt that our dear marble is heating up, and that humanity is to blame. But with the combination of ET-syndrome and shock-therapy with a holy grail to name-drop, chances are we’ll spend a lot of energy and money on doing the exactly wrong things, so again, read the book. (It’s good.)

However, we cannot always put our faith in quoting obscure facts about how hopeless it all is; if what we are doing is wrong and things only seem to get worse anyway, then where shall we direct our efforts (and rage)? Thankfully, MemeFlux has the answer.

Cows.

All this really started (as often does) with some wine-induced debate & Wikipedia here the other day, where our all favorite source of more-or-less-correct information could disclose two interesting facts:

• There are approximately 1.3 billion cows on the planet.
• Cattle contribute to around 18% of greenhouse gas emissions- due to their greedy 4 stomachs and methane-rich flatulence.

(also, the article continues to make the points that “Cattle are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.”)So, applying the “cowboy scientific method” (combining data dubious comparability to make a cheap point) and a favorite pedagogical method (small words and visual aids), we can show two charts:

A headcount of cows and humans to get a CowMan population of 8 billion:

We can draw conclusion #1 - cows represent about 16% of the total population of polluting bastards.

Visualising the second fact of environmental impact:

We can see that this 16% of the population actually harm the environment more than all the other stuff caused by by humans; your average cow pollutes more than the average human. So if you want to make a difference, going veggie is not enough; you know what to do… (average being a point here, if you live in the western world you should probably aim for - pardon the pun - more than one cow).

So, happy hunting, but beware Cows with Guns.

Hat tip to Kim

1) most populations are in fact increasing, the ones decreasing are in places where average temperature has gone down in the last years
2) postpones effects of global warming about 5 years
3) the money spent to save one life by preventing global warming and thus the spread of malaria mosquitoes would save 60 000 by regular prevention and disease control

How would you pronounce the year number in this link?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_of_2007

“Two thousand and seven”, I guess would be most people’s choice. But all through the last decades we have used to divide years into two numbers, so when will we start using “twenty” to designate the current century? In “Twenty-ten”? And what then, when we sit down to think about the early decades of this century, how will we then refer to the first years?” I remember back in the early tens” might work, “Two thousand and one” will probably stand out due to events and other memes — but what about the years we are currently living? “The late oh-ohs” just sound silly — Wikipedia expands:

Names of the decade
In contrast to the decades from 1920 to 1999, which are called “the Twenties”, “the Sixties”, and the like, the 2000s have no universally-accepted name. Some people refer to the decade simply as the “two thousands” while others may refer to it as the “twenty hundreds”; this can be written as “the 2000s” or “the ’00s”. But simply saying “the 2000s” can cause confusion, since this could refer to the entire 21st century, or even the entire millennium. The most common format (in the English language) in referring to the individual years is to read out the full name; i.e. 2008 as “two thousand (and) eight”. Less commonly, but occasionally in the media, a shorter version such as “twenty-oh-seven” is used.

Determining a name for the decade has been problematic, especially in the United States. The term “Noughties” has been suggested by the BBC,^[1][2] but this term has not gained general currency, especially outside the United Kingdom although it is popular in Australia.

Other proposed names include:

• aughts, aughties, the Twenty-O’s, and double-aughts, from ‘aught’,^[3] which, like “naught” means “zero” (aughts was one of the more popular terms in the early 20th century)
• nils and nillies, from “nil”, meaning “nothing”
• 2Ks, from the Greek term khilioi, meaning “thousand”
• ōzies, from the practice of calling the number zero ‘O’
• zeroes, double zeroes, ohs, double ohs, and oh-ohs