Culture articles 36/36

Christmas is a time for family, tradition, good food and coming together to remember what is important in life. Right? Wrong! Christmas has been hijacked by the Dark Side and now is ‘the retail event of the year’ or, put another way, the peak of the annual consumption calendar, or, put another way, exactly what is killing the biosphere.

Shocking news just in: nations of the world are sending their wankiest people to Cancun after word got out that it is just going to be a giant international circle-jerk.

On the last Friday of every month something strange, spontaneous and spectacular happens on the streets of central London.

By being the only political party that backs a 3rd runway at Heathrow Labour stands out with a special kind of stupid. The rational for inflicting this fresh monstrous wound on our once green and pleasant land is ‘the economy’.

These belching behemoths are cooling towers. In the UK's creaking, outdated power stations coal is burnt to heat water to steam. The steam is sent through turbines at high speed generating electricity. Once through the turbine a huge amount of energy remains in the hot water. For some reason the geniuses who designed these power plants decided that instead of using this heat for something useful like... er... heating they would call it 'waste heat' and fart it into the sky. Some power stations also fart the heat into rivers killing fish. Great move guys!

Technology is presented as the solution to environmental problems but wasn't it technology that got us into this mess in the first place?

The atmosphere and oceans are so small in comparison to the overall earth it is comparable to a film of water on a billiard ball. Even all the mighty oceans only make up 1/4000 of the earth's total mass. The scale height of the atmosphere is about 8.5 km.[8] Whereas the radius of the earth is 6,371.0km[3] in other words the earth is more than 1000 times bigger than the atmosphere. The third rock from the sun contains around it a thin layer of water, gases and vapour at a temperature of between 89°C to 57.7 °C (mean = 14°C). Within this exists all of the known life in the universe and all that most of us holds dear.

Transparency, interdependency and interconnectedness are defining characteristics of both the evolving internet and the coming ecological age.

Cyclists are safer to carefully go ahead of traffic and jump reds because this makes them more visible to cars.

Film review of There Will Be Blood: this visceral, poignant, haunting behemoth of a movie takes no prisoners. It is simultaneously an unrelenting portrait of an evil man and the documenting of a period of history in which the world changed forever.

Review of a self-help book by Dr Chris Johnstone.

There is an emergency on planet earth and these dudes have made a whole album about it!