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Written for English, but it's a topic I wanted to write about anyway. Cross-posted from here.

It's an admirable idea. To get everyone to consume less electricity for an hour. That was the stated aim of Earth Hour, a global effort by the WWF (that's this lot, not these guys) to try to get as many people as possible to switch their lights off for an hour. Now was it a success? It depends on how you define "success". I think that the participation in Earth Hour was quite overwhelming - millions of people worldwide did indeed turn their lights or electricity off, news stations did their broadcasts in the dark, and even Google made a token effort by turning black (which has nothing to do with saving power but rather saving white pixels). But, as someone who cares about the environment, after an hour of living in relative darkness, I was disappointed to find out: the planet isn't saved yet.

Why not? It's because we don't care enough. I'm including myself in that category - I'm all for alternative energy and for preventing global warming, but I, like many people around the world, don't do a thing about it. Most of us felt like we were really making a difference during Earth Hour by turning off our lights. We felt like we were saving the planet. But if we were serious we'd get out there and protest, pour money into alternative energy, try and get into politics to make a difference. But I, like most others, simply only do what's convenient. It's easy enough to turn your lights off for an hour. I could have saved even more energy by unplugging my laptop, but I didn't. Cause I was using it - simple as that. I didn't want to slightly inconvenience myself. And I feel awful for having that attitude, but the truth is that it's the way that most people think. And simply put, the planet will not be saved until we get over ourselves. The same goes for any issue - to help poverty, for example, I could be donating to these guys, but the closest I've come to "making poverty history" is by playing this (which is fun, don't get me wrong.)

But that's not to say that Earth Hour didn't bring about an amazing community spirit. The blogosphere was a-Twitter about the issue, and people were posting pictures of their dark streets on Flickr left right and centre (here's mine). It was quite eerie to walk out on to the street at nine o'clock pm and have it feel like midnight, or like the same city years ago, before electricity and before all the conveniences of modern life. The only lights I could see around me belonged to the people across the road, who I doubt care at all about the environment due to the "No Greens" sticker on their four-wheel-drive. But apart from the odd household, nearly everyone got behind Earth Hour, and made the event in some ways a success.

But like with any issue, this problem of depleting resources and global warming won't go away until we do something about it - a little more than a token effort of just turning off our lights. Our intentions were good with Earth Hour, but we need to go just a few steps further if we really want to make a difference.

See what happened when I innocently tried to access my dA page in digital art today?


I'll try and see who I can talk to about this...

Tim

EDIT: After talking to the IT guys, they're going to contact the DoE to see what they can do about unblocking dA. And I've just discovered www.thesun.co.uk is blocked as well (under the category Nudity). This is getting a little out of hand.

EDIT (9/4): Common sense seems to have prevailed, and it's unblocked.

Ubuntu 8.10 - controls are Industrial, window border is Dust (from gnome-look.org).


Tim

Because the idea came to me when I was in bed last night, I've decided to revolutionise the time. Our current system of telling time seems rather silly, with all the 24s, and 60s, so here's my attempt at making it metric.

One day would not contain hours, but rather 1000 minutes (which could be thought of in groups of 100). This is not too different - there are currently 1440 minutes in a day, so one "new minute" would be roughly equal to 1 "old minute" and 26 seconds. The number of minutes would just simply be said as a number: 0 would be midnight, 200 would be equal to 4:48am, 500 would be midday, 750 would be 6pm, and after 999 (midnight the next day), it would reset to 0 again.

Each minute would be divided into 100 seconds (making 100,000 "new seconds" a day, each one roughly equal to 0.86 "old seconds"). The seconds would just be written after the number of minutes and a colon - for example, 443:72.

God, I'm a nerd for even thinking about that.

Tim

I have a blog for my English writing class, which can be found here. Why not check it out? There's not much on there, but updates will follow (and I may cross-post some stuff from here, if it seems necessary).

Tim

See here.

Some higlights:

Redtube, xtube, and a slew of well-known porn sites, both legal and not.

Lemonparty, 2girls1cup, etc.

Encyclopedia Dramatica.

The whole of /b/.

Several Wikipedia pages, including user pages.

Online poker sites.

YouTube pages.

This has to stop. March in March is this Saturday, in Canberra. Be there if you can.

Tim

Reading this article is scary indeed. Two posts ago, I blogged about the Australian government's plan for a nationwide internet filter, and how it had apparently been shot down due to opposition in the Senate. That may still be true, but the government is now taking a different course of action - fining websites that link to banned sites, up to $11,000 a day, apparently. Whirlpool was threatened with the fine after the controversial anti-abortion link (featuring pictures of aborted fetuses) was posted to their discussion forum.

And now apparently Wikileaks is on the list of sites that it is illegal to link to. Yes, I'm linking to it, but 1) I doubt the government, let alone anyone, reads my blog, and 2) my site isn't hosted in Australia. So I think it's all good. But if there was any doubt about the Rudd government's intentions with its filtering scheme, the banning of Wikileaks all but confirms it - this is not about protecting the children, or stopping terrorism, or whatever other reason we're given - it's to quash political dissent.

The fight against censorship is definitely not over. This Saturday, the 21st of March, the Digital Liberty Coalition are hosting March in March, an event in Canberra designed to show their opposition to the internet filtering. Unfortunately I can't make it due to time and monetary constraints, but if you're anywhere near the ACT on that day, I urge you to turn up. Maybe we can finally make a difference. If not, it'll be a great day anyway from what I've heard. The DLC are a fantastic, non-profit, grassroots organisation, and I can't say enough to encourage you to support them.

Tim

As any Australians would probably know by now, there was a small earthquake in Melbourne last night. It lasted for only a few seconds and there was barely no damage. But what has amazed me about this incident is how quickly the internet (namely Twitter) let me know.


The first notice that I got was from @BreakingNewsOn, a fantastic service on Twitter that alerts you of any news that it deems "breaking". (Sure, there are several updates an hour, so you may have to sort through the updates for anything that really affects you) But it's a Twitter account that I recommend everyone follows, if you're the slightest bit interested in your world's happenings.

Thanks to Twitter's search function, I was able to find several references to "melbourne earthquake" a second. It was only a day or two ago that Twitter added the search functionality to their main page, and it's very handy for checking out trends. (Previously, it wasn't accessible from twitter.com but instead simply lived at search.twitter.com). I would have grabbed a screenshot for this post, but it seems to be broken at the moment. Oh well.

Reddit, one of my favourite websites and definitely favourite social news site, was abuzz with the news nearly as soon as it happened. Self posts and news articles, particularly on the Australia subreddit, were everywhere.

My point with this post was that the internet told me nearly as soon as this earthquake happened, within nearly a minute or so. It was at least ten minutes before Sky News decided to tell me. The internet is truly a great tool, and delivering breaking news is just one of the amazing services it can offer. We should be thankful to live in times like this.

Tim