Philobiblon

At home with the flu, feeling blah, but reading some interesting stuff so I don’t sleep the day away and then wake the night away…

• Profligate use of carbon: the average Briton by the end of the day will have produced 0.21 tonnes of carbon dioxide since the start of the year – that’s the average used by people in the poorest countries such as Zambia. By Feburary 10, Britons will each on average have passed the output of carbon dioxide that they could emit for the year without increasing global warming.
  

  The report also says that strong economic growth in China and India means they are often wrongly labelled as the main culprits. While India has 16.8% of the world’s population it emits just 4.1% of the world’s carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, China is the world’s leader in solar power.

• Children say divorce is better than arguing – one of those “well I’ve got a study that says the opposite” areas – but here’s one for this side of the argument.
  

  A poll of 2,000 adults and 350 children published today found that 80 per cent of 10 to 15-year-olds were “quite happy” or “very happy” with their family life. The same proportion said that things were “just as good” or “better” since the separation.
  Less than a third of the children (28 per cent) longed for their parents to get back together. An “end to the arguments” was cited as the greatest benefit of divorce by far.

• Endangered Tower of London – Unesco is threatening to declare the world heritage site endangered because of all of the skyscrapers planned for the vicinity. (And that’s without mentioning the truly hideous glass curtain-walled monstrosity recently built directly opposite it!)
  

  These include the 306-metre-high “Shard of Glass” tower planned for London Bridge, which will be Britain’s tallest building. Although plans for a second tower, the 200-metre Minerva building, have been scaled down, two other proposed buildings, a 324-metre high Bishopsgate tower and a 209-metre building at 20 Fenchurch Street, have also raised alarm at Unesco.

• “Killer probe” – a Nasa probe to Mars might have killed the life that it was looking for – hasn’t science fiction been here already?
  

  Prof Schulze-Makuch says that, given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved with the internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide.
  The Viking experiments of the 1970s would not have noticed alien hydrogen peroxide-based life and would have killed it by drowning and overheating the microbes, he claimed.