Here’s Earth Hour: A Dissent by Ross McKitrick, an economics professor in Ontario who abhors the idea. It’s a single page PDF, in which he puts his ideas very succinctly.
This snippet will give you the flavor of it:
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
This presentation by Hans Rosling about his mother’s magic washing macine makes a lot of good points. He’s the same fellow who did the great 200 countries over 200 years visualization show last fall on BBC 4.
While watching, I was struck by memories of my grandmother Ida. She cooked and baked with a wood-fired stove practically all her life. She heated her wash water – for dishes, clothes and baths – on that stove too. I can recall chopping kindling for her stove and for her fireplaces (no central heat either) during our annual visits to her house.
I didn’t chop a lot of kindling but I chopped all I ever wanted to.
Grandmother had electricity. It lighted her house and it pumped the water from her cistern into her kitchen, which was the only indoor plumbing she had.
She had a washing machine, but it was an older, “tub type” that only agitated clothes. You still had to pull the clothes out and run them through a hand-cranked wringer to remove the water before hanging them to dry. But it was still better than using a washboard.
And she lived until the middle of the 1980s. It hasn’t been that long ago.
Reason.tv makes some great videos. Here’s a recent one with Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch interviewing Rand Paul of Kentucky. It’s a little long (23 minutes) but it’s worth your while.
As Matt Welch says in the interview, you have to remind yourself that Senator Paul’s a Republican. He doesn’t sound much like your typical Republican senator (with the possible exceptions of Senators Coburn and DeMint).
I’m not old enough to have ever worked with a mechanical computer but I think they’re very interesting. The closest I ever got to one was a unit on display that used to sit in Everitt Lab (the old “electrical engineering building”) in Champaign-Urbana. I don’t know if it’s still there; I’ll guess that it’s still on campus somewhere.
Here’s a set of 7 videos I came across at engadget. The 7 clips are made from a U.S. Navy training film, circa 1953, for a shipboard fire control computer.
This is part 3 of 7.
Here’s the full list:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
You are currently browsing the No Truce With Kings blog archives for March, 2011.
No Truce With Kings 