THANK. GOD!

Coffee to the rescue

As a connoisseur of ye olde vino and an equal hypochondriac, I am permanently on war-and-peace negotiations with my liver. Some days we speak, some days we defy each other, sometimes there is severe abuse (I go on a booze binge with my friends, and in turn my liver screws me over by shutting down my fat processing, which is why I may have ballooned a little over the past two years). As I am a girl and paranoid about my body fat percentage, I usually get a massive guilt trip and then drink nothing but cranberry juice and munch Milk thistle pills for days after. And one likes to think long term, cos one would not like one’s liver to pack it in entirely one day. Sadly, the call of Bacchus is way too strong sometimes. Be it for the fun factor, the social lubrication (how wrong does that sound?!), the de-stress factor or the hug replacement.

Now we got this new book in the shop, called “101 Foods that could save your life” by David Grotto (note the use of “could” instead of “will” – someone is saving their ass!)

And I kid you not, this is what it says about coffee:

“In a study of more than 125,000 people, one cup of coffee per day cut the risk of alcoholic cirrhosis by 20 per cent. Four cups per day reduced the risk by 80 per cent.” (p107)

Said study is listed in the appendix as Klatsky, AL, Morton C, Udaltsova N, Friedman GD. Coffee, cirrhosis, and transaminase enzymes. Arch Intern Med 2006 Jun12; 166(11):1190-1195.

So in other words, I can drink myself into a coma on a daily basis if only I have five cups of coffee the day after, and my liver will be fine and dandy? The countrywide problem of alcohol-related liver disease can be solved, as long as the alcohol binge is followed by a coffee binge?

I’d be more than happy to believe that, but unfortunately, it just sounds too good to be true. And if it is true, why hasn’t it hit the newspaper headlines on a grand scale yet?

Potter and Priorities

Security tightens as Potter release nears
09.07.07
The release of J K Rowling’s last outing with her creation at one minute past midnight on Saturday, 21st July, will be the culmination of the most fraught operation in publishing history, reports the Times. "Boxes have been chained shut, barbed wire has been uncoiled and satellite tracking systems for delivery vans have been double-checked."

Bloomsbury is using padlocks and confidentiality contracts to ensure that the plot twists remain a secret. In the words of Scholastic, the American publisher, it is all about the "magic moment" when readers open Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the first time. Only a few people have been allowed to read the book.

Bloomsbury refused to send the manuscript to Scholastic electronically because it feared that it would be intercepted, reports the newspaper. Instead, Mark Seidenfeld, the American publisher’s lawyer, travelled to Britain to pick it up and, on his return journey, protected it from prying eyes by sitting on it.

The Times

Oh man. Barbed wire? Am I the only one who finds it a bit disturbing that essentially a pile of paper gets more protection than the average citizen?

Good and bad ways to spend money

I'm not really one to talk, considering that the first tenner I got out on payday was spent on booze last night and a fry-up this morning, but my mate Roman wrote this excellent blog entry which I will copy over here instead of just link, because I know you guys are lazy bastards and I want you to read this, dammit.

So here it goes:

cost of the war in Iraq

I've been doing a bit of research on the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The consensus amongst scholarly studies such as this and this is that a CONSERVATIVE estimate of the cost of the war is thus:

The money already spent or allocated for Iraq alone is being spent at a rate of approximately $11 million per hour and $255 million per day.


From Wikipedia:
In economics, opportunity cost, or economic cost, is the cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone (and the benefits that could be received from that opportunity), or the most valuable forgone alternative (or highest-valued option forgone), i.e. the second best alternative.


So, I guess that my idea to cover the Sahara desert with solar panels so as to cater for the entire planet's energy needs doesn't appear so outrageous or indeed expensive in comparison.

In other news, Australia has really impressed me because they have just banned the conventional lightbulb.

Q. How many Australians does it take to change all the light bulbs?

A. One - Prime Minister John Howard, who banned incandescent light bulbs yesterday, making Australia the first country to take such direct action to stop global warming

By Cahal Milmo

Published: 21 February 2007, in The Independent

After almost a decade as a pariah in the battle against global warming because of its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, Australia scored an environmental first yesterday by becoming the only large economy to ban the traditional incandescent lightbulb.

In a move that environmentalists hope will spark a similar move in Britain, the government Down Under said the sale of all incandescent bulbs will be phased out by 2010 and replaced with low-energy versions to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The enforced switch to new high-efficiency fluorescent bulbs will cut Australia's carbon emissions by four million tons by 2012 and reduce domestic power bills by up to two-thirds, the Environment Minister, Bill Turnbull, claimed. Mr Turnbull, whose right-of-centre government is a recent convert to action on global warming, said: "It's a little thing but it's a massive change. If the whole world switches to these bulbs today we would reduce our consumption of electricity by an amount equal to five times Australia's annual consumption of electricity."

The initiative follows a study by the International Energy Agency last year which found that a global switch to fluorescent bulbs would prevent 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the world's atmosphere over the next 25 years. It would also save £1,300bn in energy costs.

Traditional incandescent bulbs, based on the 19th-century designs of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, produce light by passing electricity through a thin wire filament. They are inefficient because up to 90 per cent of the energy is wasted in the form of heat. The new generation of compact fluorescent bulbs are more expensive that the incandescent version but use only 20 per cent of the power to produce the same amount of light. Manufacturers say economies of scale mean they will soon be comparable in price to traditional bulbs and last much longer.

Artificial light accounts for almost 20 per cent of world's electricity consumption, significantly more than the output of all nuclear power stations in the world. Overall, lighting generates 1.9 billion tons of carbon a year, about three-quarters of the amount produced by all cars on the planet.

Australia is the first major economy to ban incandescent bulbs, although the American state of California is also considering a similar move.

But it is not first time a country has made an enforced switch to energy-efficient lighting: Cuba launched a similar scheme two years ago.

In Britain, the Government has yet to move far beyond a symbolic gesture to low-energy lighting by Tony Blair when he ordered the bulb in the lamp outside Number 10 to be changed to a fluorescent one. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was working within a European Union scheme to promote the use of low-energy products within the home.

The reductions in greenhouse emissions from moving to low-energy bulbs are nonetheless small. The four million tons of CO2 that the Australian government expects to save must be compared with the 565 million tons that it produces annually.

Despite the recent conversion of the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to environmental issues, he has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Mr Howard said the deal would do too much damage to Australia's coal-based energy production.

But campaigners welcomed the ban on incandescent bulbs as one of a number of concrete measures which all countries, including Britain, should be taking as part of their response to global warming.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) said a wholesale conversion to fluorescent bulbs would cut UK electricity consumption by 2 per cent - equivalent to a large power station. Nick Rau, FoE's energy campaigner, said: "We would certainly like to see Britain follow the Australian example. There is no magic bullet for global warming and switching to low-energy bulbs is one significant step among many that we would like to see the Government take."

The failure to achieve a global swap from incandescent to fluorescent bulbs has been a source of frustration and bemusement to experts and campaigners.

The Lighting Industry Federation in Britain estimates that the majority of lights in this country still use inefficient bulbs despite an average reduction of 30 per cent in electricity bills from using low-energy bulbs.

Rebuilding the Berlin Wall

I was talking to one of my course mates yesterday, who is from Berlin as well.
"Have you heard?", he said. "They wanna rebuild part of the Berlin Wall."
"WHAT THE FUCK?", I said.

It's true, though. And seeing the controversy is easy. But honestly, I can't find any justification for it.
Alexandra Hildebrandt, who runs the Checkpoint Charlie museum (which is well worth a visit, mind you!), fears that the youth will forget about the Berlin Wall if they don't build a memorial.
But I seriously wonder, are memorials really the key to remembrance? Will that really make a difference?

We have shitloads of memorials in Berlin, and you can ask the kids... most of them will not know what they stand for. Memorials are useless if parents and schools don't tell the kids, if kids show no bloody interest.

The other thing is, we DO have several wall memorials. By the Reichstag building, there is a fence hung with crosses bearing the names of a few of those who got killed trying to cross.
There is a segment of the wall at Postdamer Platz.
There is the frickin East Side Gallery.
There is the uber-frickin Checkpoint Charlie Museum, Miss Hildebrandt, which couldn't be a better memorial, so what else do you want?
And these are just a few.

The other thing about memorials like this is: You don't build them. You leave them. If you want a memorial, you just never tear them down in the first place. I mean, if they had torn down the ruin of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche instead of leaving it as it was , would it sound like a good idea to actually rebuild the ruin?
Or the concentration camps. Our kids need to be reminded of the murder that has taken place there? (Ignore the fact that some still exist as memorials.)
Oh, lets just re-build the barracks and warehouses and dump them full of human hair and baby shoes and gold teeth and the dolls of gassed children, designed for the occasion. Charming.
And don't forget the fuckin gift shop.

I don't usually agree with politicians much, but I had to agree on this:

Rebuilding the Berlin Wall to make it look like the real thing, as a fuckin tourist attraction, is sick.
It is “a trivialisation of history — pure Disneyland”.