Today was fairly mad at work, relentless! Still, could have been worse - the Beijing Olympics began today (8th of the 8th, 2008!) as 8 is a lucky number for the Chinese. Not so lucky if you happen to live in Georgia (Russia, not Alabama!) as Russia invaded today. Nightmare; according to the BBC they reckon it'll develop into a full-scale war. Not what anyone needs right now (except perhaps the various companies supplying arms and possibly post-war services!) Or am I just getting way too cynical. I've ordered a couple of books from the library by George Monbiot, who's a famous (originally) anti-globalisation guru, but seems to have got to grips with the global-warming thing - he's apparently a great polemicist, so I'm looking forward to reading that.
Was watching the Extras disc from Planet Earth yesterday and crikey, it was bleak stuff - all about species extinction. There was one comment, by, I think James Lovelock (of Gaia fame) who suggested that after one and a half centuries of unrivalled growth, what we actually need is to go backwards! Actually contract our lifestyles. There was also quite a bit of discussion about the role of poverty relief - ie that it's no use talking to desperately poor people in the third world about saving species when all they're concerned about, quite rightly, is saving themselves. Goes back to my idea a while back about the value of providing pensions for people in poor countries so that they didn't have to struggle so desperately as they got older, and also didn't feel they had to have ten kids each (unless I guess they actually wanted ten kids!) in order to support themselves when they couldn't work any more. Might have to come back to that one sometime.
Oh and possibly the end of the world will come tomorrow as CERN will be turning on the Large Hadron Collider tomorrow sometime! In theory (well, nutter-theory, apparently) it could create a black hole that will implode the earth and destroy everything in the solar system. I don't suppose any of us will actually experience it as, should it happen, I guess it'll be instantaneous! See you tomorrow!
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