Back in college, I remember my Geography professor saying that potable water (water that is safe for drinking) is the most valuable resource humans have. That if you wanted to make a billion dollars and save the world, solve Earth’s water problems. Today is a day to reflect on that.
Of all the water on the Earth, only 2.5% of it is suitable for drinking and less than 1% of that water is readily accessible to humans. This means that approximately 1 in 8 people don’t have access to clean drinking water. Here are some disheartening facts about water:
More people have access to cell phones than to toilets. As a result, tons of untreated human waste make their way to water sources causing a litany of diseases, and even death.
The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.
17% of the world’s population lack access to clean drinking water. This is improved from 22% in 1990.
Water shortages near water bottling plants have been reported all over, including Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Florida and Texas.
Countries that have made decisions to not permit the privitization of water include Uruguay, Malaysia and India.
The NRDC tested 103 bottled waters and found over 25% were simply tap water Several tested failed the bacteria test.
1.5 million barrels of crude oil are used annually to produce the plastic used to bottle water.
90% of the cost of a bottle of water is for label, cap and bottle.
The Diaspora Team made available the first public release of the new Diaspora open source social networking platform. I spent a couple hours tonight installing and playing around with it. So far, it looks pretty good. It’s very usable though not without its bugs. Since it’s a developer release, bugs are expected, right?
Blargh. I just finished the redesign of the site and the WordPress team goes and releases 3.0! What bastards! Why did they have to include all kinds of awesome features, like:
custom backgrounds and headers
shortlinks
menus (no more file editing)
post types
taxonomies
long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress
It also includes a new default theme called Twenty Ten. It looks pretty sexy.
Sadly, Fedora Core 8 doesn’t ship a packaged version of Thunderbird (2.0.0.9 as of this writing) that includes movemail capabilities. Movemail is the account type (in Thunderbird) that allows you to read mail from your local system (in /var/spool/mail/[username]). If you run cron jobs, you should be getting emails about the status of those jobs in your local mail directory. Instead of having to read them through the command line, I wanted to read them through Thunderbird. Here’s a step-by-step on how to get it working:
Download movemail.rdf from the Mozilla repository. This includes the account type ‘Movemail’.
Save a copy of movemail.rdf to /usr/lib[64]/thunderbird-2.0.0.9/isp
Run the following: chmod 777 /var/spool/mail
Restart Thunderbird
In Thunderbird when adding a new account, select Movemail as the type, and follow the directions as usual.
All done! Hopefully, future versions of the Thunderbird package in Fedora’s repo. will be updated to include movemail, but until then, this works.
What do you get when you mix a hippie with Andre 3000 in the desert? A great cover of Outkast’s Hey Ya. We’ve been checking out the best of the best for our new Southern Arizona guide that should be out later this week and came across this amazing video of Mat Weddle from the local band Obadiah Parker playing in Tempe, Arizona. Enjoy.
