Archive for May, 2007
The Human Footprint (5)
May 18th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The vocabulary of the average UK citizen is just 25,000 words, only 4% of the 616,000 words in the English Oxford Dictionary. We speak on average 4,300 words a day – more for women (6,400-8,000), less for men (2,000-4,000). That’s 123,205,750 words in a lifetime. Over a lifetime we will know 1,700 people . We […]
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
Welcome to Twitter
May 17th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Heard of Twitter? Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website or 3rd party applications. I recently wrote an article about these kinds of technique for being connected and I’ve just been persuaded by my Dutch friend and IT guru Oskar van […]
Posted in Internet | Comments (1)
Are we seeing the death of the plastic bag?
May 17th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Now that would be wonderful. The world uses more than 1.2 trillion plastic bags a year – an average of about 300 bags for every adult, or 1m bags used per minute. On average, we use each plastic bag for 12 minutes before discarding it. It then can last in the environment for decades. Plastic […]
Posted in Environment | Comments (2)
The Human Footprint (4)
May 17th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The average person in their lifetime will have 7,163 baths using 1 million litres of water. You will also use 656 bars of soap, 198 bottles of shampoo, 272 bottles of deodorants, 276 tubes of toothpastes, 78 toothbrushes, 411 skin care products, 37 perfumes, 35 tubes of styling gel, 25 bottles of nail polish, 21 […]
Posted in Environment | Comments (1)
Have we found dark matter?
May 16th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The planets, stars and giant clouds of dust and gas that astronomers can see with telescopes account for only 4% of the mass of the universe. The majority of the cosmos is made up of an invisible form of mass called dark matter. No one knows what dark matter is made of, but astronomers believe […]
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Computers4Africa
May 16th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
There is a good cause here.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
The Human Footprint (3)
May 16th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
In an average lifetime, one gets through 8 cars, 3.5 washing machines, 3.4 fridges, 3.2 microwaves, 4.8 televisions, 9.8 DVD players, 15 computers…. 240 kg of fossil fuels, 22 kg of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water are needed to produce a home computer. £920 is spent per person on the average Christmas. Over a […]
Posted in Environment | Comments (4)
Checking the Czech flag
May 15th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
… or not. as was the case when the Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek recently visited Islamabad in Pakistan. No wonder they can’t catch Osama bin Laden. They’re probably using a picture of Bush.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The Human Footprint (2)
May 15th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
In an average lifetime, you will expel wind 12-25 times a day representing 1-1.5 litres of gas a day or 35,815 litres altogether. You will use 4,239 toilet rolls to cope with 2,865 kg of faeces. Sewage is created at the rate of 150 litres per day per person, but also disposed of across the […]
Posted in Environment | Comments (2)
Ever heard of the axolotl?
May 14th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
No, neither had I – until someone called me this evening and suggested that I look at this poem. My caller must me playing with me – she knows that I find modern poetry inaccessible and this one is an exceptionally hard one to understand (although Frieda Hughes is on hand to help). If you […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)