by

Ten reasons to go vegetarian

Not that I had any idea it was ‘world vegetarian week’… Top Ten Reasons to Go Veggie During World Vegetarian Week includes:

“While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat.”
” A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.””

I never thought I’d quote Paul McCartney, but there you go:

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

by

Future geek chicks?

From the BBC on Microsoft’s survival strategy (innovation and research):

Boku is a video game which is basically aimed at creating the computer programmers of tomorrow.
Principal programme manager Matt MacLaurin, a father of a three and three-quarter year-old daughter, designed Boku “as a tool so that kids can make their own games and its secretly a tool to teach kids what programming is like without getting too bogged down in the detail”.
…
Mr MacLaurin says Boku’s marriage of creativity and education is a clever way to hook children into this world.
He noted that girls took just two hours to become completely conversant with Boku while he fudged on how long the boys took.

Other interesting ideas include ‘E-Science in the cloud’:

In the carbon project known as Fluxdata, a group of 400 scientists from across the world are looking at how vegetation is being affected by carbon emissions.
In the past they might well have worked in isolation and only exchanged information via email assuming they would know who else was conducting complementary research.

In other news, yay Eurovision!

by

Andalucia goes OS

Biggest ever Spanish open source agreement signed

The Spanish government received praise for its continuing commitment to business innovation based on open standards.
Last week, Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth told the BBC that the public was now turning to open source to improve their computing experiences.
Mr Shuttleworth said he had seen a real shift over the last six months, from people seeing open source as either a super-specialist tool for people who run data centres or something only an enthusiast would be interested in, to something which is increasingly popular with the commercial PC industry.

by

Zoe Williams on Boris, the blond buffoon

I guess at least I don’t have Howard in Australia and Boris in London – that would be too much to deal with. But look what we have now as the Mayor of London. Zoe Williams writes in the Guardian:

Two mistakes we make about Boris: the first is that, because he says “unacceptable” things, then he must be honest; he must be outside the airless bubble of PC. This is bilge. He is no more honest than any other philanderer before him. He has lied flagrantly, flamboyantly, to save his marriage, and given how little else he’s prepared to do for it, one must conclude that he doesn’t put a very great premium on telling the truth. So if he gives out these apparently harsh truths about gay people or Liverpudlians or the people of Congo, it is not because the fire of truth burns so brightly within him that he can’t snuff it out. It is because he genuinely despises these people. He despises gays and he despises provincials (you are all right with Boris if you come from Liverpool but don’t sound like a Liverpudlian. Once you’ve been to public school, then you are from postcode POSH), and he despises Africans. He despises them, and he despises those of us who would hold
such judgments to be bigoted and inhuman.
…
It ought to beggar belief, oughtn’t it? Not that this self-satisfied creature of privilege should hold such views, but that he should be able to spout them and then have us all instantly forget about it. What are we, idiots?

Sadly enough people in London are idiots. I guess (John Howard’s own) Lynton Crosby’s dog whistle worked on the poor neglected fools in the outer suburbs of London.

by

Why do I live in the UK? ‘The vendetta waged against vegetarians’

From the Independent in December last year: Raw deal! The vendetta waged against vegetarians

A new survey reveals that diners who don’t eat meat are dished up a poor choice by high street restaurants. But it’s all too true, says Martin Hickman, our consumer affairs correspondent, who became a vegetarian 18 years ago and is fed up with being offered boring cheese bakes…
A lack of effort and imagination characterises the failing of vegetarian food in Britain.
It isn’t a problem of availability, generally. Apart from the countryside, pubs, or an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, you can almost always find something a vegetarian can eat.
No, the problem is that the lone, sad “vegetarian option” is there because the restaurant is expecting to serve a lone, sad vegetarian. It is not meant to be delicious; it is perfunctory it ticks the box.
…
But, as Ethical Consumer magazine has found in a new survey, most high street restaurants are emphatically unimpressive when it comes to vegetarian food. The author, Sarah Irving, writes in the January edition: “Vegetarianism is a fairly mainstream dietary choice nowadays… so it is surprising and depressing how poorly vegetarians and especially vegans are served in chain restaurants.”

My emphasis above. I guess I’ll never really understand it – it’s as if chefs in the UK have a huge blind spot when it comes to vegetarian food. So many places don’t go beyond ‘take the meat out and serve what’s left, which is a real shame because other countries manage to produce amazing vegetarian food. If Montreal can combine a French and English heritage with an open imagination to come up with tasty veggie meals, why can’t they manage it here?
Anyway. It’s not like food is generally amazing here anyway, though it gets better all the time, and in the meantime, check out The New Vegetarian column in the Guardian (and go to Ottolenghi’s for properly amazing salads when you’re in London).

by

Montreal and London

Montreal was really quite cool. Lots of restaurants, cafes, bars… good museums, live music. I met some ace people, and had too many late nights. The nicest (i.e. shabbiest) cafes are the ones with free wifi, and I basically spent my first two days there soaking up the sun. Later the weather turned cold but that sun was worth it.
I’ve come back to lots of grey London skies that are barely distinguishable from the grey buildings, and news of the mole man. At different times that place has been on my route home, and I always hate walking past that house. Not because I think the footpath is going to cave in, but there’s something about the intensity of his life that hurries my steps.
Walking home one night this week, I saw three homeless men on a bench. The one at the edge was cradling a man sitting on the ground like a pieta with added Red Stripe.

by

Rudd says, go home

I missed this cos I was away but it would have been ace to go and bear witness to his Ruddness. OTOH, fat chance I’m going home any time soon.
Go home, Rudd tells expats in London

What was one of the hottest gigs in London this week? Kevin Rudd’s lecture at the London School of Economics on Monday.
A thousand people, largely expatriates, attended and all tickets were snapped up within 15 minutes. Another 300 people queued outside, hoping for a spot.
Mr Rudd, half in jest, urged the 200,000 Australians living in London to think of returning home, or at least contribute ideas, via the internet, for the 2020 summit the weekend after next.
Time overseas was “time well spent”, he said. “I know it’s great being here but we need you back home, too: there’s a lot of things to do, big challenges. If you choose to stay here, I’ll be speaking to [the British Prime Minister] Gordon [Brown] to make sure some of your visas are revoked.”

(I’d laugh at the last bit if Gordon Brown didn’t already seem so keen to make it harder for evil foreigners to stay in the UK.)
They really were taking submissions for Australia 2020, which is cool.