Earth Hour

Tonight at 8:30 pm (local time) is the 2010 celebration of Earth Hour.

It's easy to participate, just turn your non-essential lights off for 60 minutes starting at 8:30 pm.

Although probably not as noticeable in non-urban areas, if you happen to live in a city, take a look out your window - the impact is pretty amazing.

On Earth Hour, hundreds of millions of people around the world will come together to call for action on climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations...

Earth Hour is the largest climate event in history. In 2009, more than 4,000 cities in 87 countries went dark. Here in the United States, an estimated 80 million Americans participated, along with 318 cities and 8 US states.
~ EarthHour.org

The first Earth hour took place in Sydney Australia in 2007 and was conceived by WWF (World Wildlife Fund) and The Sydney Morning Herald - 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights in this inaugural event, the world joined in the following year.

Join the rest of the world - be a part of Earth Hour 2010!

This video of participating cities from 2009 is pretty amazing -


And check out this series of photos from the Boston Globe of the impact on some iconic monuments from last year's Earth Hour post on the White House blog.

Things I Like - Sciences

Earth Day 2009 is coming up - the official day is Wednesday April 22nd but Chicago is kicking things off tomorrow with a weekend-long Grant Park cleanup event.

Volunteers can help get the park in shape for the coming year (good weather has to be on the way) from 9:00 to noon on Saturday and Sunday. Meet at Hutchinson field (the southeast corner of Balboa and Columbus).

Or get your hands dirty the following Saturday (4/25) at the North Pond Nature Sanctuary in Lincoln Park. From 9:00 to 11:00 am, the Lincoln Park Conservancy will be looking for help with planting wildflowers and restoring a nature trail.

Check here for more opportunities to be Green in Chicago:
http://chicago.about.com/od/parksnature/tp/Chicago-Earth-Day-Events.htm

And let's not forget one of my favorite day on the calendar - Arbor Day! Founded by J. Sterling Morton in 1872 and falling on the last Friday in April, this day is set aside for the planting and care of trees. This year, Arbor day is the 24th and there are plenty of ways to celebrate trees.

Admission to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle is free on Arbor Day, enjoy the tree planting ceremony at 11:00 and then wander the grounds for signs of Spring. Or attend the free Green and Growing Fair at the Garfield Park Conservatory - there will be demonstrations, workshops, a farmers market and entertainment. This April 16th article in the Chicago Tribune has more Arbor Day events in the Chicago area.

btw, where were you for Earth Hour – March 28th? If you missed it, see some great before/after photos from around the world at the Boston Globe. The following photo is the Taipei 101 building before and during Earth Hour. The other photos on the site go from lit to dark when you click on the image.

I think your cat is broken...

This made me laugh so hard I cried.




And don't forget - Earth Hour is tomorrow at 8:30 pm local time. Lights out!

Viewing Terror Dispassionately

TW: Certainly terrorism retains symbolic impacts challenging to define by cold hard numbers. But at some point I would hope Americans could, unlike its MSM media, foil terrorism by not fixating and obsessing about it. This weekend's coverage has been ridiculously overwrought and self-absorbed...as usual. No doubt the coming week will add the spice of partisan demagougery.

From Nate Silver at 538.com:
"...Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

...Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning..."
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html