Archive for the ‘Water’ Category

Solving the mystery of my doubled water bill would’ve been easier if I had a way to monitor my usage. I smell a conspiracy….

The nation is up in arms over the Gulf oil spill, but is there an even greater environmental catastrophe on the other side of the world and at the end of oil’s life cycle?

We’ve top-hatted, top-killed, used robots, hair, floating booms, and tried to stuff the well head with garbage, golf balls, sludge, cement, and Kevin Costner. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

You’ve spilled some food, and don’t know whether it’s better to clean the mess with paper towels or a kitchen sponge. The embodied energy of simple decisions may surprise you.

Today, a juxtaposition of two very related, but conflicting “strategies” regarding our attempts to extract oil from under the ocean. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ll know that an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on April 20th, killing 11 people before sinking into the ocean.  Now, the [...]

I promise: someday I’ll stop with the sarcastic post titles. But today is not that day. It’s just that I get so frustrated with our national case of germophobia. We’ve put antibiotics into sponges, soaps, clothing, cosmetics, toys, and our bodies, even when the threat isn’t from a bacterial pathogen.  So, in the spirit of [...]

In belated honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re going to go ahead and answer the age-old jazz question: “How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie; How deep is the ocean?  How high is the sky?” Well I’m glad she asked. Turns out, the ocean is pretty darn deep.  That’s a whole lotta [...]

We recently had some heavy rain, and the wooded path behind my house showed sinuous trails where the water carved its way between the leaves.  Thankfully, this path is not normally a river bed, but water is a powerful if fleeting force of nature. All that water ran down the path, into the stream, and [...]

Lots of good infographics to be found across the web, intending to explain complex issues bite-sized visual chunks. We start with “Global Warming Skeptics vs The Scientific Consensus” from the Information is Beautiful blog.  Despite the clear agenda by the designer, it does a nice job of introducing the various debates surrounding man’s impact on [...]

In a rare bit of ecological good-news, a study published by the US Geological Survey found that even though population of the US has increased 30% since 1980, our water consumption decreased by 5%!  That’s not even a per capita number, it’s an overall reduction due to conservation.  Take a look: I took the liberty [...]