Tristan Friedrich Schmid’s take on the brave new world: news, music, technology, film, culture, activism, politics, reviews, the environment, etc…
Could plastic be the worst kind of petroleum-related disaster, even worse than the oil spills we’ve all grown to know and love?
Take a trip with VBS.tv in the video above to visit the North Pacific Gyre, an area bigger than Texas where much of our trash ends up floating around, where it kills wildlife and likely makes its way back to us. Nothing like a little Bisphenol A in our systems!
I received an order of business cards for Adopt An Animal the other day from Natural Printing, and they look great! (Check out the design below.) This is the first time I’ve designed and ordered business cards for myself, and I’m quite pleased with the final product. I originally thought about using a service such as VistaPrint to get free cards, but they didn’t offer 100% recycled (as far as I could tell), and I couldn’t quickly figure out a way to simply upload the custom card I designed myself instead of using their templates (such was the case with similar free-business-card sites.) I found a few other places online offering recycled cards, but most required huge orders and were considerably expensive. Natural Printing allowed me to order a relatively small number of 100% recycled cards (don’t be fooled by the rather unattractive example) for a relatively cheap price ($60.) Sure, it was more expensive than VistaPrint’s free cards, obviously, but with Natural Printing, I got exactly what I wanted, quickly, and supported a small business at the same time.
This being my first business card design, I was a bit apprehensive that I may have set up the printing layout incorrectly. Natural Printing’s website gives guidelines on how to set up your design’s layout so it prints correctly, and though the directions are easy to follow, Mark from Natural Printing let me know of a minor problem shortly after I submitted my order - the version of Adobe Illustrator I was using (CS2 12.0.1) was too high, even though it’s a few years old. So I saved the design as a PDF, sent him the update, and quickly heard back from that my design was good to go. About a week and a half later, the little box showed up, stuffed with perfectly aligned little cards.
I chose to use a one-sided design. I originally thought about including Adopt An Animal’s services on the back of the card, but I realized that many times when people give me business cards, I write notes on the blank side about the organization or the person I met. I could’ve used lighter ink on the card’s backside had I used it, but chose to go the simpler one-sided route. I also figure that it’s a good idea to use matte printing, because glossy cards are virtually impossible to write on.
The one minor issue I have with my order is that the heavy-duty, pure-white cards say nothing about being 100% recycled, which I think would be a nice feature and selling point for Natural Printing. I’ll probably let Mark know about this and see what he says, but in the meantime, if I order more cards, I might just put a small watermark on the bottom mentioning this fact. It might look a little self-congratulatory (”Hey, I use recycled products!”), but with so many business cards floating around out there, people may as well start printing them on recycled paper!
I just received a free Home Energy Efficiency Kit from my local electricity provider, Indianapolis Power & Light (IPL.) As Napoleon Dynamite would say, it’s flippin’ sweet!
After I found out about it from Shawndra (whom I met once at the only Irvington Green Initiative meeting I’ve been to 
), I ordered a kit online at IPL’s website (click here to order one ASAP if you’re an IPL customer) less than two weeks ago, and it was on my doorstep when I got home today. I pretended I wasn’t excited about it and let it sit on my kitchen counter for awhile, but couldn’t resist the urge to open it before my wife got home. Continue reading ‘Indianapolis Power and Light: Hiding behind a green mask?’
Care about climate change/the environment/our national energy policy? If you drive a car, eat food that travels via a gas-fueled vehicle, use electricity, or are alive today, you should.
Thus far, the presidential candidate debates have been sidestepping the environmental and energy-related issues. Not to say that the war in Iraq, health care, and the economy aren’t important, but everything’s related, so we should give consideration to other things. This handy-dandy chart from Grist compactly compares the candidates’ viewpoints on greenhouse emissions caps, fuel economy standards, renewable energy, biofuels, coal, and nuclear energy. Since few people in the mass media are talking about these things in the primaries, you might want to research it yourself before picking a candidate.
Everyone’s been talking the past year or so about global warming, going green, etc. In terms of housing, green construction standards (such as the US Green Building Council’s LEED) have been a hot topic in the U.S. and in other parts of the world (India’s wealthiest resident is building a 60-story “green” home in Mumbai). It’s all well and good that wealthy people like Al Gore are going green with their mansions, but what about the estimated 1/3 of the population that will be living in slums by 2030?
Architect Cameron Sinclair might tell you with a straight face that those people will make decent homes out of wealthier people’s “green” refuse. Sinclair, winner of 2006’s TED prize, started the Open Architecture Network to spread affordable housing throughout the world — a rather impressive goal. The projects in the network are rather interesting, to say the least. According to Sinclair, “Someone’s working on a $700 house. The Now House is a World War II retrofitted home that’s carbon-neutral… There’s a spinach-powered house, there’s a grow-your-own clinic, a clinic you eat. All of these projects have to be sustainable.” So even though the gap between rich and poor isn’t shrinking, it’s good to know that people like Cameron Sinclair are planning a future that’s better for everyone.
Having trouble figuring out which U.S. presidential candidate to root for? The USA Today “candidate match game” is an interesting way to resolve your candidate conundrum. Through a series of 11 questions, the game shows you the top three candidates for the next presidential election that best match your ideas and values. As you answer each question, colored bars change size to show which candidates match your position on key issues ranging from health care to the environment to the war in Iraq. At the end of the 11-question series, you’re given the opportunity to weigh each category on how important it is to you compared to the others. This might be the most interesting part: adding substantial weight to certain categories significantly changed some of my top contenders.
Unfortunately, none of the top three the game referred me to are even remotely considered true contenders in this tight race. Does this mean I’m vastly different from the average American voter/”caucus-goer”? Or does it mean that taking online polls isn’t a great way to find answers to extremely important dilemmas?
I’ve written a few times about this season’s whale hunt by the Japanese, but have realized that the BBC’s Jonah Fisher is a much better source for it. He’s aboard Greenpeace ship Esperanza and is also keeping a journal of the events, so I’ll just link to his diary. Rather than me regurgitating what I’ve read elsewhere, you can go straight to the source.
That’s my problem with blogs: most of them are used simply for regurgitation of info that can almost always be found more easily and with better information elsewhere. This whole “news aggregator” phenomenon of Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, etc., etc., etc. often leads viewers/readers to blogs with summaries of other stories, so what’s the point? I guess blogs are good for diary-like entries; they’re good for friends and family to check out and stay updated; they’re good for illegally posting copyrighted content. But what else are they good for? My guess is absolutely nothing (UNHH - say it again!) Oh wait, they are good for one more thing: wasting time.
A quick update on my post about Japanese whaling last year: According to the BBC, Australia has sent a large customs ship, as well as an Airbus plane, to monitor Japanese whaling activities and collect photos and video surveillance in preparation for a possible legal battle against Japan’s whaling practices. Go Aussies!
According to this Wired.com article, global warming might not only be causing extinctions, water shortages, and hotter days: it might also be causing depression. According to philosopher Glenn Albrecht, his fellow Australians have shown increased symptoms of depression as their country has changed for the worse due to global warming. Albrecht calls this “solastalgia”: a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.
The article mentions that though many of us are modern globe-hoppers with all kinds of gadgets to keep us in touch with our family and friends at home, we’re still closely tied to where we live — we haven’t evolved that much.
I can see the effects of global warming, or at least its causes, where I live: polluted waters, warmer days, dirtier skies. And I know for a fact that these things don’t make me happy.
For anyone that doesn’t believe killing whales is cruel and that the Japanese have a cultural right to do so, Tony Long at Wired has a good editorial you should check out. The barbaric practice is far from being relevant today, and Long makes some good points. An exerpt:
“This isn’t about culture. Like almost everything else in the world that stains the human spirit, this is about greed.
Whaling, as practiced by the nation-states, has always been a purely commercial venture. In the Age of Sail the industry grew out of economic necessity. When a whale was killed all of it was used — as food, as lamp oil, as lubricant. Whalebone was used to make corset stays and scrimshaw. Blubber was used to make soap and cosmetics. A single whale — remember, we’re talking about the largest animal on earth — could produce a lot of stuff and that meant a lot of money. Continue reading ‘Japanese use “culture” as lame excuse for barbaric whale hunting’
