Eating Animals

Followers of this blog have noticed that lately there hasn't been much to follow. My last post is from January. I've gone through dry spots before, but at least this time I have an excuse: Twitter. It is just so much easier to send out a tweet than a blog post. If you're interested, you can follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/dosinga

I've always been a fan of vegetarianism. I'm not a fan of how the bio industry works. Animal welfare just isn't part of growing meat. Understandably maybe, but I think if we would play videos of the lifes of the animals next to the meat coolers where we sell their bodies, sales would depress rather markedly.

And it is not just the animals. Meat is a rather resource intensive food and we're getting to the point where we don't have enough planet to go around. Take Australia for example. Australia is in a draught and has been for 10 years. TV spots tell you to not have the water running while you brush your teath to save the continent. Wider discussions are going on about peak-water, the idea that the production of drinkable water has peaked and that the next wars will be about water, not about oil.

If you look at the numbers agrigulture is the big consumer here. 70-80% of all water is consumed by farmers. Showers, baths and drinking costs maybe a few hundred liters of water a day. Growing one kilo of meat costs 20 thousand liters of water. Australians eat about a third of a kilo a day. All in all you can probably reduce your water consumption by more than 50% when you become a vegetarian.

According to FAO (http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm), Meatproduction is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse effect gasses. Airtransport sits pretty around 3% (though admittedly more people eat meat than fly). Vegetarians probably eat slightly more vegetables, but not nearly enough to make up for that 18% gap.

Lastly, if we don't come up with something new, we'll run out of food. The world population is set to grow by another 3 billion. Yields in agriculture aren't going up much. Total amount of land used for agriculture is falling (more cities, more degraded land). Last years food panic shows what can happen when demand and supply get mismatched. Eating plants directly rather than feeding it to a cow and then eating the cow is obviously more efficient.

And yet. Steak just tastes really good. Saying to the world I am going to eat that anymore? Augustinus saying springs to mind: "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." Of course you can decide to eat less meat and lots of people seem to have done that, but it always sounds a bit hollow. Like a smoker saying I won't quit, I'll just smoke less.

So I have a new plan and an uggly word to go with it: Weekatarian. Week + Vegetarian, sounding a bit like a weak vegetarian, which it is. Weekatarians eat meat, but only one day a week. You get to pick the day so you can line it up with special occasians. You'll probably end up eating more meat that day than average, but quite a lot less than in an average week. You can keep eating the odd steak, don't have to say good bye to bacon in the morning and you'll reduce your water use by half, cut greenhouse gasses by maybe 10% and have less animals tortured in your name.

Predictions!

Why do I feel the urge to post predictions for 2009? Mostly because I enjoy reading them - the fact that the web let's people check back a year later is interesting. However, the ones that I read seem in general uninspired. Yeah, the economy won't be good in 2009, Obama will be president and the Internet will still be there. So here's my shot at 2009:

• Microsoft rebounds
  Just when people think there is no live after Bill. Windows 7 will turn out to be the best windows so far, making even Mac heads stop and wonder. The XBox will be turn out to be the winner of the console wars (but not by a lot) and Explorer 8 a decent browser.
  
  
• China takes the big hit, not the US
  2009 will be a bad year for the world economy, but things will start to look up again if you look closer. More over, the US will be hit less hard than China, which will might not actually shrink, but will do significanly less well than the now predicted 6% economic growth.
  
  
• Greenery will have peaked
  Global Warmings Mind share will go down.
  
  
• The EU will bail out a member country
  27 member states and an economic crisis not seen since the 30's, so this one seems not that unexpected. But it will be interesting, since it will make the EU assume yet another role normally reserved for a state. And the UK will actually support it, since their banking system won't be able to take the actual collapse of said country.
  
  
• Obamo more similar to Bush than the Europeans would like
  The Europeans will try to keep their love affair with Obama alive but they will start to realize that on things like Israel, Iran and the International Court of Justice, America is still America.

Meet the Meat!

When you walk around Sydney one thing that draws your attention are the signs outside pubs advertising for Steaks for 12, 10 or even 7 dollars. Mind you, these are Australian dollars, so that’s 3.5 to 6 Euros. If you talk to Sydneysiders they go, yeah, it has all changed. Back in the day, 5 dollars was all that it took.

As it turns out there still is a pub that still does 5 dollar steaks. I went there with a friend who insisted 5 dollars was the only way to go. It’s a 25 minute walk which on a sunny Friday afternoon means that you spend 10 dollars on beer in intermediate pubs, so count your blessings. But it is true. 5 dollars gets you fries, 300 gram of steak and mushroom sauce. And it is pretty good.

It’s not just the steak, there’s 5 dollar sushi lunch, 6 dollar bacon & egg breakfast with decent coffee and even cheaper Chinese food of course. It is quite a difference with the situation in Zurich where a packet of nuts tends to cost around that amount. I was talking to a friend of mine who is also a recent immigrant from Switzerland and he said, here a good steak is 7 dollars, in Zurich it is 25 franks (32 dollars).

I was about to nod in agreement, but then I started to wonder where do you get a steak for 25 franks in Zurich? I asked my friend. ‘ah, the supermarket’, he said.

Picasa Webalbums Face Recognition Rocks

Picasa's Webalbums has this newish feature to recognize faces and it is pretty awesome. You make it run over your photo's and then it lets you match up faces it found with your contacts. I only today used for the first time and I am impressed. Nice example of Clarke Third Law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

In the same vein I suppose that glitches in that sort of technology show that after all it is technology and not magic. If you can fool birds into believing a scare crow is a man, what can you make Picasa believe? I had the photo below in my web album, from last winter when me, my brother, our wives and their children build the best igloo ever in Switzerland.



The wind had picked up ice blocks from the Sihl See and put them all in one corner - excellent building material. With the left over material we build a snow man, because, well snow men is what you build in the Netherlands if there is snow.

Picasa Webalbums liked our snow man. Enough to offer it under the section of clearly recognized faces. Unfortunately I don't have a matching contact and fear the man has deceased since.

Broken Window Theory

When the movers came and brought our stuff to Sydney, they also brought my bicycle. Sydney isn’t the bike friendliest of places, but it isn’t that bad as long as you avoid the roads where cars will hunt you and stick to the pavements where you can hunt the pedestrians. Ah, but where to park?

We actually did get a parking space with our apartment, but then we wanted to rent that one out, so that didn’t seem like a long term solution. In Zurich we had a bike cellar, but then in Amsterdam we didn’t – I just parked outside and in the last 7 years there were no incidents, so why not try that. My wife said the bike would be stolen since there are no other bikes on the street in Sydney. I said that it wouldn’t since if there are no bikes, there won’t be bike thieves either. I was right. At first.

The first three weeks everything went fine. I didn’t use the a lot since I only live three minutes walk away from work, but in the morning it was there. Then one Sunday morning one break cable was torn. And there was a sticky note on it reading “I want to have sex with you, Google!” (there was a Google logo on the bike).

I removed the yellow note (no phone number) but a week later my saddle was stolen! I tried to unlock the bike now since it clearly wasn’t safe anymore, but the lock was stuck and I decided to that a little later with some oil. I didn’t of course. Two days later when I came home my saddle was gone. When I left the next morning for work, the wheels had been taken too!

Now what do I do? Go to a bike repair shop and ask them to fix my bike by supplying half the parts? Luckily I didn’t have to figure that one out, because when I came back home the whole bike was gone. And that’s what they call the broken window theory.

Death and Taxes. Correlated.

90% of creativity is misunderstanding, I sometimes think. Some the best ideas come when you hear something and think, wow, that's brilliant and later it turns out that they meant something else, but it was still a good idea. I think it works because your brain had been working on something similar and seeing it in print, it makes it go click, even if it is about something else.

Anyway, this isn't really brilliant, but still a nice example. I read the headline of this article Death & Taxes Poster. This is about a poster that shows the size of the expenditures of the US government on a poster. It doesn't show death at all

What I thought they had, was a poster that plotted life expectancy against the tax rate for various countries. The good news is that I can now make that poster. Me and the internet. So I quickly copy and pasted two tables of tax rates and life expectancy into a spreadsheet and had them correlated and then plotted the thing. You get this table:



And the graph below. Unfortunately the correlation isn't very strong. If I had had more time, I'm sure I could have massaged the numbers a little more, but I'll leave that to someone else. In general it seems that countries with higher taxes in general have higher life expectancies. Or really, the graph becomes more dense towards the higher taxes. In other words, it is possible to have low taxes and high life expectancy, but almost all countries with high taxes have also high life expectancy.



Make of it what you want. Oh the x-range is the (highest) income tax-rate. The y-range is the male life-expectancy.

In defense of colonialism

We’re just back from a quick trip to Hong Kong for a wedding. Hong Kong is an impressive city in many ways. Here you have this most unmerciful capitalistic society of all with lots of public green and excellent public transport. The world freest economy ruled by the communists in Beijing. Most of all I think Hong Kong shows the wonderful results of mixing two cultures, in this case British and Chinese. Not withstanding all the cruelty and unfairness of British rule, it shows that colonialism can have it good effects too, I think.

I think we should bring it back. Not the canon boat type of the nineteenth century, more something akin to the Greek colonies. A bunch of people go somewhere else, build a city in a country with a different culture and the exchange of ideas and customs makes everybody richer. Maybe a better way of describing this would be country franchises. The Netherlands would for example build a city in the United States, but as part of the Netherlands, just like an embassy.

Dutch companies or persons that want to operate close to the US, but not under US law for whatever reason, could settle there. If there is enough demand for something like that, then a Dutch colony in the US would clearly enrich the US. If not, well, then there is nothing special on offer.

Saudi Arabia could build a city in the Netherlands with Sharia law. If it turned out that that would really work much better it might inspire people in the Netherlands to do the same. People in the Netherlands that believe it works much better could try to move there. If it turns out that it doesn’t work so well, then that would be clearly visible too.

Something like that would make the exchange of ideas between countries much easier and allow citizens to vote with their feet without changing continents.