Carbon rationing for consumers

October 18, 2006 at 9:36 pm · Filed under Energy

I stumbled across an interesting story while scanning my bloglines feeds. One of the blogs I read pretty infrequently, A Networked World, is written by a guy down under name Earl Mardle. I find his posts interesting and informative and this one was no exception. The idea, from this Sydney Morning Herald article is that individuals in the UK will be given a yearly allotment of carbon credit with which to purchase goods (e.g. fuel, groceries, electricity) and services. At the end of the year individuals will be either charged for more carbon credits or given the opportunity to sell their credit to others.

[Sidebar: When I followed the link to the SMH article smack dab on the middle of the articles was an ad for the new BMW 3series coupe (an amazing car BTW, but not headed for the top 10 fuel efficient list any time soon) AND to the right of the articles was a link advertisment to win $10k in free petrol (gas)!]

The idea of individuals being given carbon credits sounds like a reasonable approach to putting reponsibility where it should be. I imagine it will be very difficult to get buy-in from the average person who cannot be bothered to think about environmental footprint.

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Branson makes $3bn climate pledge

September 21, 2006 at 9:06 pm · Filed under Energy

This just in. From my BBC RSS feed it was announced that the UK billionaire Sir Richard Branson would donate all profits from his Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains to renewable energy development. This is a very interesting pledge considering that train travel in the UK and air travel between Britain and the US are huge contributors to greenhouse gases - a majority of which is caused by the burning of coal and jet fuel (oil) respectively.

Today, Bill Lockyer, attorney general of California announced the state is suing 6 carmakers over their contributions to greenhouse gases. The lawsuit says, “Right now, global warming is harming California.” Lockyer said, “Global warming is causing significant harm to California’s environment, economy, agriculture and public health.”

How might these two events be related?

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Energysavers

January 27, 2006 at 1:03 am · Filed under Energy

I recently set up a mailing list for Wayne Co. Indiana folks interested in alternative energy solutions. The public web page is at:

Go there to find out more about the list and join if you wish.

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Angleworms L. Chinchilla

January 20, 2006 at 8:49 am · Filed under Friction

I got this phishing message today from Angleworms wanting me to verify my bank account with Armed Forces Bank, N.A. I wonder what the “L” stands for?

Here are some of my other favorite SPAM email addresses:

Halves S. Flatfooting
Watt D. Paperweight
Topaz Stengel
Philadelphia Vanvalkenburg
Adder D. Pencils
Inviolability L. Pumping
Burials I. Infinitive
Mule F. Recognizable
Insecticides O. Cumuli
Claudius Butts
Flycatchers H. Limpet
Blunted K. Port
Afghan S. Piggybacked
Prorating A. Ennoblement
Vocabularies V. Flaking
Troopships H. Programmables
Dramatic O. Geophysical
Bloodless H. Vitamins [Added 8/30/07]
Polka T. Mineralogist [Added 9/26/07]

Anyone else get a kick out of these?

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January 12, 2006 at 6:54 pm · Filed under Home

After a few weeks of post-holiday activity I’m trying to get back to organizing things here so that I can use this site as a template to get some others up and runnning.

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New Theme and FAlbum plugin

December 28, 2005 at 10:24 am · Filed under Tech

Tonight I added the Steam theme and the FAlbum Flickr photo plugin. I think it looks better and I’ll appreciate the integration with Flickr for sure.

I also added a link to one of my Squidoo lenses called Mobi. In the Meta section of the side bar. Squidoo is kind of like an all-in-one aggregator of popular web usage models, including RSS, Flickr, tagging, Adsense, linking, ranking. The idea is to create a “Lens” using these various technologies to focus on something that you are an expert in.

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Oh Chemistry

December 24, 2005 at 1:55 am · Filed under Bode

Bode sings the famous Xmas tune, “Oh Christmas Tree” by saying, “Oh Chemistry.” This is pretty funny considering my aptitude for chemistry…

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Begin the Begin

December 5, 2005 at 7:20 am · Filed under Home

After a few years hiatus, the web site has a new home (at Micfo.com). More than a few years really. This site used to be tailrace.org. We’ve since moved from the farm in Hagerstown to Richmond so I registered retherford.org. I’m happy with this hosting service thus far and find that the combination of Tomcat/JSP, PostgreSQL and MySQL capabilities gives me great flexibility.

If your stumble across this site and are a relation or friend, send me email paul at retherford.org. I’d be happy to host your site or WordPress blog.

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Mutual Story

November 11, 2004 at 10:32 pm · Filed under Mobile

[This is a repost of Nov. 11th ,2004 piece from a blog which is going away]
After reading Russell Beattie’s comments on Communicontent I wanted to add my piece. With widespread use of mobile devices capable of voice/video/networking I think one extension of the communicontent theme will be the recording of shared experience by multiple people and the automatic organization of those experiences in a persistant store. I’ll call it Mutual Story.

Let’s say you are at a sporting event with 100 other folks. Each of you “records” the event in one of many interesting ways 1) text 2) moblog/pictures 3) video 4) speech and 5) combinations of 1-4. In real time your version of the event’s story is published along with the others. Time stamps, geolocation, and other meta information is used to sort and organize the story. After the game you might call your friend on the phone and tell her about it. At the same time or afterwards she can click to the mutual story for extra flavor.

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