Cards for Charity

My annual rant - most so-called "charity cards" give virtually nothing to the charities they're meant to be helping, especially the ones from supermarkets. If you're going to give charity cards, go to Cards for Good Causes where 80p in every pound goes to the charity in question.

Go on, you know you want to.

You Tube...

Maybe I’m a late developer but I’ve only really just discovered You Tube. After a pleasant hour last night of searching out old Beatles videos, I came across some clips from the wonderful film Baraka. Baraka as a film is difficult to categorise: a feature length meditation on the beauty and tragedy of the world set to music. It’s uplifting and thought-provoking in equal measure – the photography is breathtaking and the music haunting.

The clip on You Tube is from the band Dead Can Dance and is a central set piece in the film. I first saw it on MTV back in 1994 and went straight out and bought the video.

The piece is called The Host of the Seraphim, and I challenge anyone to watch the video and not be moved.

Slow News Day

It’s a slow news day at work and there were no announcements about anything on the company intranet, so a couple of interesting facts for the team at the morning huddle:

It’s Buddha’s birthday today (in Hong Kong & South Korea).

On this day in 1626 a Dutch explorer called Peter Minuit allegedly bought Manhattan for 60 guilders, which works out at about £20. When you think that the average weekly pay for financial sector in Manhattan in 2006 was just under 8½ grand, that’s quite an investment.
(Thanks Wikipedia for those!)

And as it had been a while since I had a "hippy" huddle…

A group of UK charities are launching an appeal today for the humanitarian crisis in Sudan and Chad – one of the first times that so many charities are acting together to tackle a humanitarian crisis. So it’s well worth having a look at the background behind it and donate if you wish.

However, applying Problem Management thinking, it’s worth looking to tackle some of the underlying causes of the conflict, otherwise things will never get better. One of the best ways is to put pressure on your MP & businesses to intervene in Sudan. Intervention can mean many things, but if you’re interested, you can contact your MP through www.parliament.uk and you can apply pressure on other areas through a number of websites such as www.pressureworks.com or www.Oxfam.com etc.

Strange Creatures

A type of turtle previously thought extinct has appeared in Cambodia, according to the BBC. It's a strange looking creature, with a rubbery shell and I can't help thinking it looks like it's been run over by a truck! It's more good news though, to balance out the seemingly constant news of species dying off all over the place.

Banker to the World

Banker to the Poor, the book by Nobel prize winner Muhammed Yunas, brought the concept of microcredit to the wider world. Now ordinary people can get involved through the Kiva.org website - lending small amounts of money to people in need. Each potential borrower posts their story on the website and lenders choose which entrepreneur to sponsor with their cash! Internet magic!

Vulture Update

Excellent news - Oxfam's campaign to stop company Donegal from demanding payment of debt from Zambia including interest and costs amounting to $40 million has been successful.

Read the full story here.

Forest Preserve

Excellent news from Indonesia where the government has agreed to preserve a 250,000 acre stretch of forest

Bad Joke

You'd think it was an April Fool's joke, the idea of companies buying up bad debt and then taking the country to court to screw the money out of them. Here's Oxfam's take on the subject:

Commercial companies called 'vulture funds' are making rich pickings from desperately poor countries by buying up bad debt. One of them has been suing Zambia for a staggering $55 million off the back of $3.3 million of ‘bad’ debt!

Take Oxfam's online action to stop vulture funds preying on poor countries.

There's no possible positive spin on this - for the full story, go to Oxfam's Vulture Fund website.

Darkness

According to the BBC, Sydney did fall into darkness for Earth Hour today. Disappointingly the Earth Hour website was not updated, though it looks like it was a worthwhile exercise. I'll be keeping my eye on progress to see if the UK feels like doing something similar in the autumn.

BBC Climate Discussion

Fascinating discussion on the BBC's news site on whether there's enough political will to tackle climate change.

Much of the debate is around whether or not climate change is caused by us or by other factors and whose job it is to clear it up.

There is a clear body of evidence to suggest that we are to blame, at least in part. There is also evidence to suggest that it's part of natural cycles. The debate must be evidence based and transparent - that's how good science is carried out. No-one should be shouted down just because others disagree, no matter how unpalatable the opinion. However, the so-called "minority" views on solar radiation, volcanoes etc should be prepared to submit their evidence for review and if the evidence is invalid, that should be accepted. But the only way to achieve that is to have the debate out in the open - it's no use trying to silence dissenters.

In the meantime, there's also an argument to say while we're having that debate, we should be focussing on doing the kinds of things suggested by those who believe in man-made climate change. Environmental issues disproportionately affect those in the poorer and/or less developed countries, whether those issues are caused by us in the west or the people in those countries. We learnt a great deal about pollution and environmental impact during the industrial revolution and the 20th Century in general. There's an imbalance - what we do adversely affects those who get none of the benefit of our actions. It's time we started thinking of those in other countries as our neighbours, not simply as "others" and treating them with the dignity and respect we'd expect for ourselves.

Earth from the Air

The wonderful Earth from the Air exhibition has come to Norwich.

It's incredible how a different perspective can change your whole impression of something. One that's stuck in my mind is the "tank graveyard" - Iraqi tanks destroyed during the first Gulf War. It's like that other picture (not an Earth from the Air one) of the aeroplane graveyard somewhere in New Mexico (I think) - hundreds and hundreds of planes all lined up wing to wing and tail to tail, rusting away to nothing. Makes you think about our massive consumption of things that eventually just get discarded.

On the other hand, the one I like the most is of a mud village next to the River Niger. You can't quite work out what the picture is until you get close and then you realise. The village is totally isolated, there are no roads, no electricity pylons or any other signs of modernity.

A wonderful picture and a wonderful exhibition.

British Summer Time

Realised that of course, at 7.30pm on the 31st March in the UK, it'll be light and bright. So there won't be much to see if everyone turns their lights off for Earth Hour.

Damn!

Still, I guess it'll save me an hour's worth of electricity.

Bird Brain

There's a family of great tits (I think) nesting in a hole in our wall, where a water pipe used to come out of what was the bathroom. It's at perfect eye-level height for my daughter, A, who, despite being two and a bit, can correctly identify more birds than I can.

BBC Radio Norfolk was out in force on Sunday and were giving out free birdboxes as part of a initiative to get more places for birds to nest. You register the box on the web and then update your registration when birds start to make it their home.

We put it together; I'm just waiting to get round to nailing it up.

Then I'm going to have to rely on A to identify which birds have moved in!

Earth Hour

Morag mailed me from Australia to tell me about earthhour.org. The idea behind Earth Hour is for everyone in Sydney to turn off their lights for one hourat 7.30pm (Australia time!) on 31st March . It's the beginning of a campaign by WWF-Australia and The Sydney Morning Herald to reduce Sydney's greenhouse emissions by 5% in 2007. And, if it's successful in Sydney, it could be the beginning of something worldwide.

There are a few things about this that strike me. First of all, it seems like a lot of fun to be part of, and yes, from that point of view, I guess it is a publicity stunt. But at the same time, even turning off lights for just one hour would save a huge amount of electricity if enough people took it up. You can imagine how impressive it would be to stand somewhere with a good view over the city, or even just the harbour, and watch as the lights suddenly all go out .

It's also an important reminder of just how our modern society is dependent on electricity and lighting, heating etc to function, and that alone should make us think.

And finally, if you ever look at those maps of light pollution (eg at www.lightpollution.it), you can see just how much we're affected by light pollution. When I was a kid, we used to live in Nigeria, in a house in the middle of nowhere. Quite often we'd just sit out on the verandah and look up at the most amazing stars. Living on a street in the UK, with streetlamps on all night, I miss that panoramic view of the stars. It makes you feel awed and humble at the same time - it reminds you just how beautiful the universe can be, and just how precious our planet is.

So, for all of these reasons, there'll be at least one small part of England where the lights will go out at 7.30pm on the 31st March. And I'll look forward to seeing how Earth Hour goes in Sydney.

St Patrick

Happy St Patrick's Day to everyone from Ireland!

This includes the vast majority of my relatives and relatives-in-law. I consider myself to be well and truly English, even though my relatives and ancestors are nearly all Irish, but I still think St Pat's Day is great. Even though I don't like Guinness (!), I think it's great to have a day celebrating all things Irish.

Saint's Days get a bad press (mainly the annual media "controversy" around St George's Day) but I think they're all great - Sts David, Andrew, Patrick & George. They're a good excuse to think about where we come from, what makes us different, and what makes us all, regardless of background, essentially the same.

Flower Furore

Looks like I haven't been alone in wondering what best to do with my Mother's Day pounds! The Independent this morning had a full page advert from War on Want, citing pesitcide poisoning of flower workers, long hours and harrassment. Bit late to start warning people now, I would have thought, given that earlier in the week virtually no-one would send out flowers as all their delivery slots seemed to have gone. However, WoW are running a campaign to try and make British companies accountable for their suppliers' actions overseas. Will look into that one a bit more...

On a brighter note, it's Red Nose Day today; apparently it's 25 years since the first one. Amazingly, Lennie Henry doesn't seem to have aged at all in the intervening period! As I spent a good deal of the day on the train, didn't get to see too many people with red noses. There was a distinct lack of cheeriness on the train as it was delayed and a lot of people missed connections. The lady behind me gave the guard a really hard time over incorrect information she'd been given before boarding the train. Seems unfair to give the guy on the front line a battering for things entirely out of his control, however she did have the good grace to apologise to him the next time he walked by.

Grid-Locked

Received a mail from World Community Grid, one of my longstanding favourite sites. I first signed up to this one when it was run by United Devices a few years back and feel that it's one of those positive actions that people can take that it seems wrong that everyone isn't doing it.

The idea is incredibly simple - you sign up and download a program that uses your computer's idle time to crunch data related to complex problems as part of a wider research study. When the data has been "crunched", the results are sent back and another batch of data is sent to you. In return, you get a pretty screensaver (!) and the knowledge that you're part of something that helps the rest of the world. So far, my computer's idle time has been given to searching for cures for HIV/Aids, SARS & Muscular Dystrophy as well as simulating the folding of human proteins. The idea is that if enough computers are doing this sumultaneously, it effectively acts as one enormous supercomputer - currently equivalent to ranking amongst the top five supercomputers currently available. What would take many many years of computer time can be done in months.

It's a really exciting concept and you can choose the kind of research you want to take part in. Then, every so often, World Community Grid sends you an email with the latest news and, from the comfort of your living room, you can feel like you're part of an enormous research community at the cutting edge of scientific study.

Flowers

As it's Mother's Day on Sunday, thought I'd look for some flowers to send. So I googled Fairtrade Flowers as I figured I may as well do the right thing while I'm at it. What did I get? Virtually nothing! Tesco & Sainsbury's did some Fairtrade roses, but that was about it. What was interesting was an interesting article "Why I won't be giving my mother Fairtrade flowers" by Felicity Lawrence for the Guardian. In it, she argues that the additional cost burden of buying fairtrade flowers falls on the consumer rather than the supermarket and that encourages the supermarkets to increase keep their margins high rather than genuinely supporting the fairtrade idea. Felicity Lawrence certainly knows her stuff when it comes to the power of supermarkets. Her book "Not on the Label" exposes a whole range of underhand tactics employed by supermarkets in general to squeeze the most out of the products they sell. As the fairtrade movement moves into the mainstream, she suggests, they will be forced to deal with supermarkets in a Faustian pact for the greater good and that that may damage the ideals by forcing them to sign up to the supermarkets' production methods.

So a simple task (buying flowers) took over an hour as I was sidetracked into the fairtrade debate. It made for fascinating reading and I still can't decide whether fairtrade is "better", whatever the downside or whether there's an active choice to be made on each product's merits.

So, what did I do? Well, in the end, I figured roses, fairtrade or otherwise, wasn't quite the thing I was looking for. In the end, M&S's "spring bouquet" hit the spot, so that's what's gonna arrive on the maternal doormat this weekend.