More Than Living

Collecting rain in water butts

They say make hay while the sun shines, but there hasn’t been much of it about this summer. Last winter’s wet­test five months since 1914 had already guar­an­teed that there wouldn’t be a repeat of last summer’s hosepipe ban. After two peri­ods of severe flood­ing caus­ing bil­lions of pounds of damage, it’s now dis­tant, almost sur­real memory.

Fig­ures from the Met Office show that by 22 July, the three months from May to July were already the wet­test in Eng­land and Wales since records began in 1766. While a grim har­vest update from the National Farm­ers’ Union con­firms that it’s unlikely to be a bumper year for hay, the pro­longed above-​​average rain­fall means that most of the country’s reser­voirs are at least above their normal level.

This BBC News art­icle points out the poten­tial role of rain­wa­ter stor­age in redu­cing ground­wa­ter flood­ing, and in eking out the most from the rain that falls. The simplest domestic sys­tems can store enough of the water gathered by your home’s gut­ter­ing for car wash­ing and water­ing the garden. Larger, more soph­ist­ic­ated sys­tems can col­lect water from drive­ways and other paved areas, and can even supply rain­wa­ter for flush­ing toi­lets or doing the washing.

Although in some drier parts of the world you can get a grant to install rain­wa­ter har­vest­ing, we couldn’t find one avail­able in the UK. We asked DEFRA, who told us: “There are no grants for house­hold­ers, but busi­nesses can get enhanced cap­ital allow­ances for water effi­cient technology.”

The Envir­on­ment Agency says that some rivers and reser­voirs are still only at their aver­age level or lower, but the Met Office is fore­cast­ing above-​​average rain for the next couple of weeks. Anyone wor­ried about fur­ther severe weather this summer can sub­scribe to their useful news feed.

IMAGE

by Flickr user gluemoon

Ori­gin­ally posted 2007-​​07-​​27 13:49:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Terminal 5: sky’s the limit or takes the biscuit?

Today is Pi Day – a cel­eb­ra­tion of math­em­at­ics’ most com­pel­ling number.

to 628 places) would have trouble work­ing out how much is enough when it comes to air travel.

For today the Queen opened Heathrow’s long-​​awaited (and long-​​fought) fifth ter­minal – to the delight of some and the des­pair of others.

Sev­eral industry fig­ures have seized the oppor­tun­ity to attack the “absurdly pro­trac­ted” plan­ning laws, which meant that it took 15 years for the ter­minal to be built.

“Ter­minal 5 has taken far too long to come to fruition,” said Gareth Elli­ott of the Brit­ish Cham­bers of Com­merce. “This cannot be allowed to happen again.”

Others, how­ever, see the com­ple­tion of the build­ing as a capit­u­la­tion by the gov­ern­ment in the face of cli­mate change.

Green­peace trans­port cam­paigner Anita Gold­smith blas­ted Ter­minal 5 as a “monu­ment to the binge-​​flying cul­ture this gov­ern­ment has done so much to encourage”.

We wonder what the Queen, who described the ter­minal in glow­ing terms today, makes of the controversy.

Just four days ago, she urged action to back up rhet­oric on cli­mate change:

In the Com­mon­wealth, gov­ern­ments, busi­nesses, com­munit­ies and indi­vidu­als should each strive to match words and good inten­tions with deeds.

IMAGE by Flickr user emdot

Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​03-​​14 09:43:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

TV this January.">A guide to the top five sporting events on TV this January.

It’s Janu­ary, it’s cold out­side – no, in fact it’s very cold out­side. You may have made a New Year’s res­ol­u­tion to get fit, but unless you’re going to bundle your­self into your car and bundle your­self out at your local heated gym (prefer­ably with a Jac­uzzi and sauna for that summer hol­i­day effect) I’d argue that now isn’t really the time.

It’s just too cold and dark to ven­ture out in the even­ing. Okay, I may be making excuses here. And my New Year’s res­ol­u­tion was not to get fit but to give up smoking (seven days and count­ing) so I don’t have any­thing to live up to. But far more enjoy­able than don­ning your jog­ging gear and brav­ing the ice on a cold Janu­ary week­end, I feel, is watch­ing others get phys­ical from the com­fort of your settee.

Yes, believe it or not, Janu­ary isn’t an entirely dry month in the world of tele­vised sport. There are, in fact, a fair few events to get excited about. Here’s my top five.

Tennis – The Aus­tralian Open: 19 Jan – 1 Feb

The first of the year’s Grand Slam tour­na­ments opens at Mel­bourne Park this month, with the Women’s Singles Finals to be held on 31 Jan and the men fin­ish­ing things off on 1 Feb. In 2008, Maria Shara­pova of Russia beat Ser­bian Ana Ivan­ovic to the title, while fellow Ser­bian and third seed Novak Djokovic defeated unseeded Jo-​​WiFried Tsonga of France to take the Men’s Singles medal. This year, the singles win­ners can expect to take away AUS$1,370,000 prize money after beat­ing the top-​​ranked play­ers in world tennis.

Snooker – The Mas­ters: 11 Jan – 18 Jan

Since moving from Wemb­ley Con­fer­ence Centre to Wemb­ley Arena in 2007, The Mas­ters has attrac­ted ever bigger crowds and last year saw Mark Selby win his first major snooker cham­pi­on­ship when he beat Stephen Lee 10–3 to the title. This year, the event will fea­ture all of snooker’s top 16 play­ers plus two ‘wild card’ com­pet­it­ors – Ricky Walden and teen­ager Judd Trump – who won their place via qual­i­fy­ing tour­na­ments at the end of last year. Trump will face either Mark King or former World Ama­teur Cham­pion Mark Allen.

Motor Racing – World Rally Cham­pi­on­ship Rally Ire­land: 30 Jan – 1 Feb

Voted the second best rally in the World Rally Cham­pi­on­ship (WRC) 2007, and attract­ing the largest tele­vi­sion audi­ence of the series that year, Rally Ire­land has been rewar­ded with the honour of open­ing the WRC 2009. The event has replaced the tra­di­tional Monte Carlo Rally and will span eight counties both north and south of the border. With many drivers facing roads they’ve never seen before, it’s bound to be an excit­ing ride, and con­cludes on Sunday with a ’super spe­cial stage’ in Donegal.

Cyc­ling – UCI Pro Tour – Tour Down Under: 20 Jan – 25 Jan

The Tour Down Under gives inter­na­tional riders the per­fect oppor­tun­ity to pre­pare for the European season and last year became the first cyc­ling event out­side of Europe to be included in the pres­ti­gi­ous Pro­Tour cir­cuit. Styled on major races such as the Tour de France, the Tour Down Under con­sists of six stages run­ning through South Aus­tralia. The high­light of a lean month in the cyc­ling world, one Brit­ish cyc­ling fan­atic says of the tour: “It reminds us frozen cyc­lists what riding in hot sunny con­di­tions is like and you get a reas­on­able sprink­ling of the top riders.”

Swim­ming – FINA 10KM Mara­thon Swim­ming World Cup: 24 Jan
Open water swim­ming enjoyed its first year as an Olympic sport in Beijing last summer, and has con­sequently won some new fans. Even more so because it seems that we Brits are quite good at it – team GB’s Keri-​​Anne Payne and Cassie Patten took the silver and bronze medals in the Olympic 10km open water swim­ming event. Janu­ary sees the first event of the year-​​round global FINA 10km Mara­thon Swim­ming series kick off in Santos, Brazil.

For more TV sport to settle down to this Janu­ary, check out the BBC’s sport cal­en­dar.

IMAGES by Flickr users

Kevinzim, aloshbennett and fffriendly.

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​01-​​07 09:06:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Online swap shops for unwanted goods

If our post about Planet Relief got us think­ing about Why Don’t You? and kid’s TV in gen­eral, this BBC News story reminded us of the Multi-​​Coloured Swap Shop.

For those of you who don’t remem­ber Sat­urday morn­ings with Noël, Maggie, John and Cheg­gers, the hap­less Keith would be dis­patched to out­side broad­casts in town parks across the coun­try, trying to match up kids who wanted to swap toys. As often as not, it was raining.

It’s easy for the Swap Shop gen­er­a­tion to suc­cumb to misty-​​eyed nos­tal­gia, but the idea of swap­ping vari­ous things is still going strong, par­tic­u­larly online. Here are a few sites that aim to match up people with time, skills or belong­ings to exchange.

Free­cycle

Prob­ably the best known com­munity recyc­ling site, Free­cycle star­ted four years ago in Tucson, Ari­zona, and has spread to 75 coun­tries. Like all good ideas, this one is simple: anyone with a useful item they no longer need can offer it to their local Free­cycle group. Anyone who wants it can have it for free, but they’ll gen­er­ally need to col­lect it.

The group says that each day across the world it keeps more than 300 tons of per­fectly good items out of land­fill sites. As the name sug­gests, it’s free to use.

TeamU​pHere​.com

Say you’re happy get­ting stuck in to a bit of garden­ing, but you’re hope­less on a com­puter. Some­where over the other side of town there may be an IT wizard with a jungle out­side their back door. Wait, we think we see a way out of this!

TeamU​pHere​.com is a free site that lets people get together to exchange their skills. You don’t have to be a pro­fes­sional to offer a skill, but you need to be honest about your level of expert­ise. It’s up to both users to agree a fair trade, but the site sug­gests that an equal amount of time from each party “might suit everyone”.

Swap­Shop

No Cheg­gers, we’re afraid, but this Swap­Shop does a sim­ilar job for people with items small enough to be sent by post. Once you’ve registered, you tell it about all the items you’d like to swap, and it gives each a value in Swap Points. If another member con­tacts you to request one of your items, you stick it in the post. When it arrives with them, Swap­Shop cred­its you with the Swap Points you asked for.

Points don’t make prizes, but they can be exchanged for other users’ items. Using the site is free, but if you don’t have enough points for the Matt Bianco box set you can buy more for ?

Ori­gin­ally posted 2007-​​09-​​11 01:02:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

What is this carbon dioxide stuff anyway?

While writ­ing our earlier Lotus post, it occurred to us that every­body does a lot of talk­ing about carbon diox­ide, without ever really remind­ing us what the stuff is. So, for anyone who was having a quiet doze during school chem­istry les­sons, here’s a quick refresher.

Carbon diox­ide is a col­our­less, odour­less gas that’s present in the air we breathe, although it makes up just a tiny frac­tion of it. There’s rather more of it dis­solved into a fizzy drink – it’s what unruly chil­dren burp up if they drink too much pop.

Most organic matter (and the fuels derived from it) con­tains large quant­it­ies of carbon, and when it burns this gets com­bined with oxygen to pro­duce a lot of CO2. The gas’ moniker comes from the fact that each of its molecules is made up from one carbon © atom, bonded to two oxygen (O) atoms. It’s not to be con­fused with toxic carbon monox­ide which is pro­duced when there’s not enough oxygen around – its molecules con­tain only one oxygen atom.

Carbon diox­ide is also released as waste when living things extract energy from their food, which is why we breath the stuff out in higher con­cen­tra­tions than we breath it in. With so many of us belch­ing it out, levels would quickly build up, but plants use the gas as a build­ing block for the sugars they pro­duce during pho­to­syn­thesis, remov­ing it from the atmo­sphere almost as quickly as it’s produced.

Still with us?

CO2 also has a couple of unusual prop­er­ties. Unlike most other gases, it’s never found as a liquid at normal pres­sures. Dry ice – beloved back­drop to 80s photo shoots – is frozen carbon diox­ide. The groovy vapour is pro­duced as it heats up and turns dir­ectly into a gas – a pro­cess known as sublimation.

In the atmo­sphere it’s also a green­house gas; absorb­ing heat from the sun that bounces back off the earth’s sur­face, and reflect­ing some of it back down­wards. Without this effect, the earth would be too cool for us to live on, but CO2 levels have increased markedly since the indus­trial revolu­tion, increas­ing the amount of heat that gets trapped by the atmo­sphere – it’s one of the main factors thought to cause global warming.

IMAGES

While look­ing for pic­tures to illus­trate this post, we happened on these amaz­ing shots by Flickr user jur­vet­son. They’re pic­tures of an art-​​come-​​science exhibit by Shawn Lani that pitched chips of dry ice into a bowl of water. There’s some stun­ning video of Icy Bodies on the Shawn Lani Stu­dios website.

Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​03-​​20 11:02:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Sleeping satellites — Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 collide

There are more than enough bits of space junk in orbit around our planet, ran­ging from defunct satel­lites to, at one point last Novem­ber, a NASA astronaut’s toolkit. For the most part they’re no threat to us down here on the sur­face, as all but the largest tend to dis­in­teg­rate on re-​​entry into the earth’s atmo­sphere, but they are some­thing of a risk to space sta­tions and vehicles like the shuttle.

The good news is, then, that since Tues­day there have been two fewer large orbit­ing objects – a result of a high-​​speed col­li­sion between two com­mu­nic­a­tion satel­lites. The bad news is that said two objects have been reduced to sev­eral hun­dred smal­ler ones, the number and path of which nobody is yet able to predict.

The explos­ive smash happened 485 miles above the earth’s sur­face, when a live US satel­lite and a decom­mis­sioned Rus­sian one crossed paths over Siberia.

It’s hard to grasp just how unlikely such a col­li­sion is, and how hard the two must have hit each other. Satel­lites in a low-​​earth orbit (LEO), as both Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 were, are sub­ject to almost the same grav­ity as they would be on the planet’s sur­face, so they need to travel at huge speeds to avoid simply being claimed by the earth.

Really huge speeds: a typ­ical LEO orbital velo­city is above 17,000 miles per hour, or more than 30 times the speed of an air­liner. While the two satel­lites might not have hit each other head on, even the most gentle of nudges would have seen them close on each other at a daunt­ing rate. A head-​​on smash would have brought them together at more than nine miles per second.

Trying to work out the amount of energy involved in that kind of crash makes me want to lie down in a dark room. The BBC says that Iridium 33 weighed 560kg and that Kosmos 2251 tipped the scales at 950kg. Some rough cal­cu­la­tions tell me that smash­ing the two satel­lites together could release as much energy as explod­ing 22 tonnes of TNT.

Which makes the BBC’s anim­ated recon­struc­tion seem just a little quaint.

IMAGE by Flickr user Mulad

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​12 17:24:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Young drivers: the sobering statistics

Stat­ist­ics – we’re sur­roun­ded by them these days. Num­bers, per­cent­ages, sur­veys… I often find them rather meaningless.

But a couple of days ago I read a stat­istic that trans­por­ted me. It made me shud­der. It took me back to a warm summer night in 1986. I was 17. I was at the wheel of a third-​​hand blue Vaux­hall Chevette having passed my driv­ing test a month or two back. In the car with me, my best mate in the pas­sen­ger seat. And three girls – one of whom I secretly fan­cied – wedged into the back, chat­ter­ing and laugh­ing. No rear seat­belts in those days. We’d been to a barn dance and we’d had fun. As one of the oldest in my year group I was one of the first to pass my test. And driv­ing home was my chance to show off a little. I like to think I was a fairly respons­ible teen­ager. But there I was hurt­ling round bends on narrow coun­try roads in the dark, gun­ning the engine, break­ing late, chan­ging down the gears… driv­ing like a lun­atic… just wait­ing for one of the girls to ask me to slow down. But they didn’t.

So I drove faster.

And then there was the blind bend. I had one of those ‘life flash­ing before the eyes’ moments, hit the break peddle as hard as I could, briefly aware that no one else in the car real­ised quite how much danger we were in, amazed at how much longer it took for the car to slow down, fully loaded with pas­sen­gers. Some­how we came to a halt a couple of feet from a high brick wall on the wrong side of the road. If there had been a car coming the other way, we’d have been ser­i­ously hurt. I dread to think what would have happened to the girls without seat­belts on.

The Asso­ci­ation of Brit­ish Insurers (ABI) pub­lished the stat­istic that took me back to that night over 20 years ago.

The risk of a fatal col­li­sion is almost three times greater for a young driver with three or more pas­sen­gers than for one driv­ing alone.

The ABI was quot­ing from a wide-​​ranging gov­ern­ment con­sulta­tion paper about learn­ing to drive.

A couple more num­bers from this paper make the mes­sage even clearer:

- 500,000 people under the age of 25 pass their driv­ing test each year. A fifth of them have an acci­dent within 6 months of qualifying.

- Whilst the over­all fig­ures for deaths on the road in the UK have fallen con­sist­ently since the mid-​​1990s, around 16% MORE young drivers (aged 16 to 19) are killed today than 15 years ago.

The con­sulta­tion period for the Learn­ing to Drive paper closed last week. Along with pro­pos­als for chan­ging the way the driv­ing test works there are also sug­ges­tions about lim­it­ing the number of pas­sen­gers newly qual­i­fied drivers can carry, not allow­ing new drivers to drive at night, intro­du­cing lower alco­hol limits for new drivers.

For me – as someone who nearly became one of these stast­ics – the bit about car­ry­ing pas­sen­gers remains par­tic­u­larly strik­ing. Whilst drink­ing and driv­ing, and driv­ing in the dark seem like obvi­ous things that could increase the risk of an acci­dent, having friends in the car just wouldn’t have crossed my mind as present­ing greater risk.

Get­ting new, young drivers to under­stand just how respons­ible they are for the safety of the people they are car­ry­ing in their cars seems like some­thing to be doing right now. In par­tic­u­lar making young males keep cool heads des­pite the surge of testosterone-​​fueled excite­ment about being behind the wheel with a bunch of mates in the car… And telling girls not to be afraid to shout ‘Slow down!’ if they feel unsafe as pas­sen­gers has to be part of that as well.

Peer pres­sure can be a power­ful thing.

IMAGE by Flickr users

carbonNYC, miqul and holisticmonkey

Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​10-​​10 16:09:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Find out about music with Spotify

Inter­net music. To my ear, it never sounds quite right. Oxy­mor­onic, even.

But then I’m someone who didn’t even embrace CDs until the mid 1990s, at the point when every­one else had moved on to hurl­ing min­idiscs out of sky­scrapers to demon­strate the incor­rupt­ib­il­ity of the future.

So, as a glee­ful tech­no­lo­gical Lud­dite, not to men­tion a mean-​​spirited musical misery-​​guts, I was a good test sub­ject to try out the won­ders of Spo­tify, the newest way to enjoy music instantly – and leg­ally free – online (no downloads).

It prom­ises “A world of music”, though after watch­ing the intro­duct­ory video, fea­tur­ing a user adding a song to a “dinner party” playl­ist which was headed up by a five track Cold­play blitz, I wasn’t sure it was a world in which I wanted to live. Was I too hasty?

What manner of beast?

So what does Spo­tify do? Well, as a new user to inter­net radio sites, I was happy that I was able to get my head around it fairly quickly.

I was lucky enough to get an instant invite from a friend. Early users are gran­ted imme­di­ate access – oth­er­wise you may have to register your email with Spo­tify to wait for a free invitation.

At its core is a user-​​friendly ‘radio sta­tion’ which cranks out music based on your spe­cific­a­tions. You select from a range of 18 music genres in decade-​​long time frames, ran­ging from pre-​​1950 to 21^st Century.

For instance, if you har­bour a par­tic­u­lar love of 90s altern­at­ive music, you can con­tent your­self with the ran­dom­ised selec­tion which Spo­tify will pump forth from those narrow criteria.

How­ever, if you wanted to explore beyond this, you can try expand­ing the time frame from the 80s to the present day, or throw an inter­est­ing coun­ter­point of coun­try or hip hop into the mix.

And this is where it becomes clever. As well as nat­ur­ally alert­ing you to albums and artists you have never heard of within your par­tic­u­lar interests, by throw­ing vari­ous genres and time frames into the melt­ing pot you can sit back and exper­i­ence a genu­ine musical education.

In addi­tion there is a fea­ture which takes any artist and sug­gests sim­ilar bands, allow­ing you to play a ‘radio sta­tion’ ded­ic­ated to the spirit of your favour­ite singer.

It doesn’t go any­thing like as far as Last​.fm (explored recently by Jo) in terms of the over­all pack­age it offers, but for some people this could be part of the attrac­tion. I have a faint horror of an algorithm telling me what I may?

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​11 16:17:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

BBC">In the dog house — no Crufts on the BBC

Crufts has star­ted, but if you were wait­ing for the TV cov­er­age you might not have real­ised. The BBC has sus­pen­ded its cov­er­age fol­low­ing con­tro­versy over the dangers of ped­i­gree in-​​breeding.

Last year, the Beeb screened a doc­u­ment­ary about the deform­a­tion and disease-​​prone nature of some ped­i­gree dogs cel­eb­rated at Crufts.

The pro­gramme high­lighted the many health prob­lems caused by in-​​breeding, which has made Boxers more prone to heart dis­ease and epi­lepsy, put Dal­ma­tians at greater risk of deaf­ness and given Golden Retriev­ers a propensity for cancer.

So as Crufts events begin today, dog-​​lovers will have to go online to watch the action rather than set­tling down in front of their TV sets. Crufts organ­isers the Kennel Club will stream the four days of events at www​.cruftslive​.tv, with high­lights avail­able from ?

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​03-​​05 11:29:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Signs of springFlickr photos to lift the spirits

Even with much of this weekend’s atten­tion on Robert Webb’s rubber leo­tard, it was impossible to miss nature’s own inter­pret­a­tion of ‘What a Feel­ing’, as spring burst forth.

Sud­denly there were but­ter­flies – I coun­ted four this week­end, a couple of whites of some descrip­tion, and two pristine lemon-​​coloured Brim­stones, rather like this one.

BRIMSTONE IMAGE by Flickr user Strange Ones

There were two-​​tone Chiffchaffs singing away in a couple of places. And every­where there were over­size bumble­bees, crash­ing around madly as if drunk on the sun.

I had my camera out for much of the week­end, but I think the warm air must have gone to my head too, because I failed to get any great shots to remem­ber it by.

Hap­pily, the ever-​​impressive com­munity at Flickr have done the job: here are a couple of our favourites.

IMAGE by Flickr user nagillum

IMAGE by Flickr user cornish celt

HEADER IMAGE by Flickr user russelljsmith

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​03-​​16 10:49:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter